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What Can an Individual Do?
If you’re tired of working for someone else’s profits, if you’re fed up with relying on politicians you can’t trust, if you’ve had enough of sexism, racism and injustice, then you should become part of a movement that’s fighting to change it, fighting to pull down the rotten structure of capitalism and build a new and better society.
They say such change is hopeless. But it’s hopeless to think anything less could solve the mess the world is in. The only way to end war, racism and environmental devastation is to take power away from warmongers and profiteers, and give that power to working people. There’s no better way of finding hope than to get involved in positive, constructive and organised rebellion. That’s the point of being a socialist. To do this, you should join Resistance.
What is Resistance?
Resistance is an Australia-wide organisation of young people. We were formed in Sydney in 1967 by radical students who were involved in the movement against the Vietnam War, and who saw the need to organise collectively against all the injustices of capitalism. We aim to organise young people in mass movements against sexism, racism, environmental destruction, attacks on workers’ rights, attacks on students’ rights and every aspect of capitalist oppression. Through this process, we help build a mass socialist party that can unite all these struggles.
Resistance is made up of young workers, unemployed, students, women and young people involved in a huge range of campaigns and activities. We’re active on campus, in schools and in workplace and trade union campaigns. We organise our own campaigns on issues from sexuality to free speech. And we distribute information on all the issues.
Any young person (under 26) can join us. It’s easy. We organise meetings to plan our activities and campaigns. On a national level, we organise through our annual national conferences, and through elected councils that meet through the year to decide our general priorities. We act with the enthusiasm of knowing that we’re not submitting to the system, but working together with other young people to change it. If you want to act and speak out against the system, join Resistance.
Who are the Democratic Socialists?
Resistance recognises that to change the world, you need to do more than just build a youth organisation. We see the need to build a mass revolutionary socialist party in Australia, one which can lead a successful socialist revolution. For this reason Resistance supports and works in solidarity with the Democratic Socialist Perspective (DSP) - a revolutionary socialist party formed in 1972 by Resistance members - that works towards this goal.
The DSP is committed to creating a party that can mount a challenge to Labor and Liberal, that can draw masses of people into battles against the capitalist attacks on every front: on the job, at universities and schools, on the streets and in local communities. To this end the DSP helped form the Socialist Alliance in 2001, uniting a broad range of socialists from different traditions in one organisation. Resistance is also an affiliate of the Socialist Alliance. You can find out more about the Alliance at
www.socialist-alliance.org.
If you recognise the need for a revolutionary alternative and you want to build it, you should take the step of joining the DSP.
Reject the assumption that a few rich families are more fit to govern our lives than we are. Don’t accept a system that tries to prove that the more food is produced, the more people must starve. You could hope that companies wake up to environmental destruction and will start spending their profits on preventing it. Or you can join the DSP and start building a world that makes some sense.
You can find out more about the DSP by visiting its website,
www.dsp.org.au.
