Socialist Resistance joins with our comrades in the Fourth International in greeting the second congress of the Revolutionary Socialist Party. Over the past year and a half, we have seen an incredible acceleration of the pace of politics, which we see reflected around the world. Britain’s workers are not alone in increasingly protesting against corrupt politicians, choosing abstention and protest votes in elections and searching for new ways to struggle together.

In a series of challenging mobilisations against the English Defence League, anti-racists are learning how to countermobilise against Islamophobia. In Unite, our largest union, a revolutionary Marxist candidate came second in the election for general secretary. This month, in a significant common mobilisation, a huge demonstration called jointly by the students and education workers broke through the wall of media silence concealing the growing struggles against our new Coalition government. As a class, we are in movement after decades of defeat; the most organised now have a taste of their power.

The parties opposed to neoliberalism, like the Scottish Socialist Party, Respect, the Green Party and Plaid Cymru, have started to loosen the working class’s ties to labour. While the English left has been unable to build a nation-wide, grassroots party, the different forces of the left were still able to stand socialist candidates in over 100 constituencies.

Those campaigns laid foundations, good and bad, for the immense wave of mobilisations against the coalition government’s cuts. Positive and dynamic resistance is being organised by the Coalition of Resistance, the Peoples’ Charter, the National Shop Stewards Movement and the Right to Work Campaign, but the challenge remains to coordinate that work at the base.

Small socialist groups like ours must accept the challenge of the new period, and bring all our efforts to bear to meet our fundamental goals: building our ability to offer leadership in the movement, and using our energy and experience to help the movement build its self-confidence and power.

These greetings were sent on behalf of the Socialist Resistance executive committee to the second congress of the Revolutionary Socialist Party in Australia.