BY SEAN HEALY 
The word is out. The Australian left is on a roll. Fresh from the
inspiration of S11, when tens of thousands confronted the world's power
brokers at Melbourne's Crown Casino, and with plans well underway for mass
blockades of stock exchanges and financial districts on May 1, eight radical
left organisations have united to form the Socialist Alliance, a combined
electoral front to contest this year's federal election.
Meeting in Sydney on February 17, the Democratic Socialist Party (DSP),
the International Socialist Organisation (ISO), the Freedom Socialist Party,
the Workers League, the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq (Australian branch),
Workers Power and Workers Liberty agreed to form the alliance. Socialist
Democracy has also agreed to join.
Others also are likely to get on board. The Melbourne branch of the
Progressive Labour Party has recommended to the rest of the party that
it too join the Socialist Alliance and leading PLP members in Canberra
and Sydney have expressed enthusiasm for doing so. The Communist Party
(formerly the SPA), Socialist Alternative and the Socialist Party (formerly
Militant) are discussing whether they will join the alliance.
`Exciting'
The Socialist Alliance is an unprecedented step forward for the Australian
socialist left — and enthusiasm for it is total.
“This is a tremendously exciting development”, the International Socialist
Organisation's Ian Rintoul told Green Left Weekly, summing up the
mood of all the alliance's participants.
Rintoul argues that the alliance couldn't come at a better time: “All
political indications from the Western Australian and Queensland elections
are that the Socialist Alliance will strike a chord with a large number
of people who are looking for an alternative to economic rationalism —
that was also the message of S11”.
The Democratic Socialist Party's Peter Boyle agrees. “The context for
this initiative is the revival of radicalism following Seattle”, he said,
referring to the massive protests against the World Trade Organisation
in the US west-coast city in November 1999, which kicked off the burgeoning
anti-corporate movement in the industrialised countries.
“That has brought a renewed confidence to the radical left, particularly
after S11, which was a very big mobilisation of the forces to the left
of Labor and which was organised by the left. There's a huge pent-up frustration
expressed in society against the almost-common neo-liberal agendas of the
major parties. S11 has given us the extra confidence to feel we can reach
that frustration and channel it leftward”.
Alison Thorne, of the Freedom Socialist Party, says the prospect of
more effectively challenging Labor is the alliance's biggest potential
strength.
“A lot of people are jubilant at the Coalition going down the gurgler,
and rightly so. But Labor provided no sharply defined alternative in WA,
did they? They continued to support mandatory sentencing, for example,
which is absolutely disgraceful. So it's critically important that we popularise
socialist ideas; it's crucial that socialists work to build an alternative
to the Labor Party”, she told Green Left Weekly.
`Hansonism phase two'
Thorne also raises another reason why she's keen on the Socialist Alliance,
a reason which weighs heavily on the minds of all the alliance partners:
“Hansonism phase two”, One Nation's attempt to “pose as an anti-globalisation
protest vote” and the “crucial need for the left to provide an alternative
movement to globalisation which is not economic nationalist”.
The way Boyle puts it is that while S11 has given the radical left the
confidence to form the Socialist Alliance, the re-emergence of One Nation
has provided the “urgency”, adding “If the left isn't able to present as
the radical opposition to the major party consensus, then some of that
dissent will go to the far right”.
Rintoul sees it similarly, but believes the alliance can be a very effective
counter to One Nation.
“Hanson does represent the danger of pulling the whole anti-globalisation
sentiment to the right”, he noted. “But the election results aren't so
much an indicator of that yet; they show rather that people are looking
to the left. In terms of a popular critique of economic rationalism and
globalisation, the Socialist Alliance can be tremendously important.”
Lisa Farrance, of Workers Power, also sees the WA and Queensland results
as a sign of a “significant shift leftwards” in the working class' views,
adding that “at the same time, people don't have full illusions that Labor
will deliver”.
“That frustration amongst working-class people is a big part of what's
forcing us to be unified, to provide the alternative that's needed”, she
said.
She believes the growing anti-corporate movement is an obvious part
of the alliance's core target audience. “The movement is a little more
left here than elsewhere and a lot more unified in a number of ways; it's
a lot less hostile to the idea of unity than in countries where more anarchist
forces are dominant. There's a huge political opportunity with the anti-corporate
movement for the alliance to draw towards it significant numbers of forces,
especially given the ALP is so hostile to the movement.”
But Farrance also thinks the Socialist Alliance can play a “key role”
in “joining forces from a number of areas, joining them into a common struggle”,
listing especially industrial disputes, such as that in Victoria's Yallourn
Valley, and indigenous struggles. “We could be the only political organisation
nationally that really campaigns for land rights”, she stated.
Positive pole of attraction
The Socialist Alliance provides a chance to do more than take advantage
of immediate opportunities, though, its participants say: it's also a chance
for the left to find some much-needed common ground and common purpose.
Socialist Democracy's John Tully told Green Left Weekly, “For
longer than any of us care to remember, the left has been split into a
plethora of small groups, and it hasn't been helpful.”
“We can't keep blaming `the objective situation' for our failure to
grow”, he said. “The objective situation surely must favour a genuine alternative
to the present system. There is a crying need for an organisation that
gets stuck in there and attacks everything that is wrong about this system.”
“The left's lack of unity has not helped. None of us have been innocent
of wanting hegemony for our own small group”, he said, adding, “We have
been hegemonists in our thinking when we should be pluralists”.
The Socialist Alliance provides an opportunity to change that for the
better, Tully believes. “The alliance should provide a positive pole of
attraction and enable us to intervene much more effectively in the political
process than we've been able to do before.”
Boyle believes that it is “very significant” that there is a “greater
degree of political unity of the forces coming into this alliance” than
in some other attempts at left regroupment in the past.
“For a start, these are all radical groups, they all have revolutionary
politics as their basic ideas”, he said. “Any differences are specific
to how to implement those ideas.”
In contrast, most past attempts to regroup the left have been “based
on a liberal, rather than a radical, opening, with unity with left-reformist
forces, like the Greens or the old Communist Party”, Boyle argued. “This
attempt is very different.”
“From the point of view of the DSP, the one factor which has made the
Socialist Alliance feasible is the willingness of the second major socialist
organisation, the ISO, to participate in it”, he added.
Ian Rintoul said that there were two major developments which led the
ISO to take a closer look at electoral openings and the possibility of
a left electoral alliance: “First, there was the whole development of the
anti-capitalist movement, which demonstrated that there's a whole layer
of people in Australia looking for a radical alternative.”
“Along with that, there's the tremendous crisis in social-democracy,
in reformism”, he added. “The Labor Party has moved rightwards and disaffected
many of the working-class people who in the past looked to it. We can appeal
to them now to support us.”
S11 legacy
Rintoul and Boyle both say that international efforts at socialist electoral
alliances, particularly in Western Europe, have had a big impact on their
respective organisation's thinking.
“The experience of Britain [where the ISO's sister party, the Socialist
Workers Party, is a leading force in a network of socialist alliances]
has been important, giving us another look at how electoral activity can
be used”, Rintoul said.
“Our experience, and that of the left, has been that elections are treated
primarily as propaganda exercises. The Socialist Alliance experience in
Britain has shown us that it's an opportunity for more, for building an
active membership organisation, which can mobilise on the issues and which
isn't about electoralism.”
Boyle adds the examples of Scotland, “where the regroupment of the radical
left has gone even further, into a new party, the Scottish Socialist Party”,
and that of France, where an electoral alliance between the two largest
socialist parties, the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire and Lutte Ouvriere,
won five seats in the 1999 European parliament, “an unprecedented electoral
victory for the radical left in a rich country”.
Boyle also believes that the decision to make the Socialist Alliance
a membership organisation, rather than just a pact between parties, is
an important one and a “recognition of the legacy of S11”.
“What S11 showed was that there are people coming to radical conclusions
in this country far greater in number than the collective organisational
reach of the existing left”, he said. “So there's a recognition now that
for us to get to that bigger community of radicals, we have to be united
— there's a common desire to break out of marginalisation.”
“The decision to make it a membership organisation shows an ambition
to grow”, Boyle stated.
The next steps for the alliance include discussion on a summary document
on its process, structure and politics and the consolidation of groups
in all major cities. The stage will then be set for big public launches
of the Socialist Alliance.
The upshot of the Socialist Alliance's formation is hard to underestimate:
the days of a weak, divided, ghettoised left appear to be ending, amid
a rise of massive, new protest movements and a new sense that revolutionary
socialists can unite to popularise their message and again become an important
force in Australian politics.
[Visit the DSP web site at http://www.dsp.org.au/]
