BY DICK NICHOLS 
It was good to see two letters in last week's Green Left Weekly question whether the Socialist Alliance has a future. Paul Petit's and Lev Lafayette's doubts about the project invite us all to think about the conditions for its growth and survival as a new force in Australian politics.
Lafayette's letter represents a sharp change in tone from his original Left Links and Workers Online piece (Another Generation Lost? Doubts About Socialist Alliance), to which I replied in GLW #449. Superior cynicism towards socialist left organisations has been replaced by protestations that he wants the Socialist Alliance to succeed. However, says Lafayette, such hope must be tempered by genuine doubts, backed with historical experience and theoretical grounding.
So let's take Lafayette at his word and continue the discussion. What features, what genetic code, so to speak, will Socialist Alliance need to develop if it is to survive?
Obviously, if the Socialist Alliance never amounts to more than the sum of its eight component organisations, it can't be much more than a rather fancy non-aggression pact. But the Socialist Alliance is already more than that. With most state launches completed and local group meetings taking place across the country, it is already attracting many socialists and working class and movement activists who would never have joined the individual founding organisations. They value the alliance as a precious opportunity to build a more powerful voice for socialism and working people's rights.
Beyond this milieu lies a bigger broad left, including many ex-ALP members, who are looking on with interest, but also with scepticism. And, of course, to stimulate their doubts, they are being told by the ALP and its friends that Socialist Alliance is just the Trots (Trotskyists). They worry they've seen this sort of offering before, and they want more evidence that Socialist Alliance is not just another political billboard, piece of window-dressing or playing field dominated by the historical passions of the founding organisations.
This state of affairs means that the first critical condition for expanding the influence of the Socialist Alliance is that it should really belong to all its members. Democracy is the bottom line of its survival: any feeling that decisions are being railroaded through or deferred to superior bodies will be the kiss of death.
This goes well beyond the need to have a formally democratic constitution and meeting procedures. The culture and spirit of the Socialist Alliance has to entrench gut aversion to the staples of mainstream parliamentary politics manipulation, demagogy and wheeling out the paper membership on election day for vital votes.
As the alliance grows in a democratic spirit, existing differences will be set in a new context of cooperation. Discussion will take place before a bigger audience and against a background of new, shared experiences of joint work in movements and of building the alliance itself. That will be an important process for all of us, from whatever background, to undergo and reflect upon.
Orientation to parliament
The next most important aspect of the Socialist Alliance's genetic code will be its orientation to political action to helping build all the movements of resistance to the crimes of Coalition neo-liberalism and Labor social liberalism. This is the point that Lafayette and Petit, each in their own way, seem least to understand.Petit, recoiling from a contrast between their parliament and the parliament of the streets made in a recent article by Alison Dellit (GLW #449), states that this sort of anti-parliamentary cretinism, that has come to the fore in the Democratic Socialist Party's discussion of the Socialist Alliance, shows that the alliance is a continuation of the deep sectarianism of most left parties, not an end to it. The electoral strategy of the alliance is just not serious.
Petit then reminds us of the long and relatively stable history of parliamentarism in this country but is deeply silent about what sort of electoral strategy he thinks would be serious in this context. Does he think parliamentary elections should be the priority area of operations of the socialist movement?
Within the Socialist Alliance it has been clearly understood from day one that what most counts for the defence and extension of our social, environmental and democratic rights is changing the balance of forces in society at large work in parliament must be subordinate to that goal.
In other words, the Socialist Alliance must continue the age-old battle of the Australian socialist and communist movements persistently and patiently explaining that parliamentary saviours will not, on the questions that count, deliver. This is why, although the Socialist Alliance is beginning life as an electoral alliance, its main political work will be in building the extra-parliamentary movements of resistance.
That stance will mark the Socialist Alliance out from those parties, like the Greens, which frequently turn up to demonstrations that others build to seduce the voters and get their photos taken by the corporate media. By contrast, in voting for a Socialist Alliance candidate supporters will not just be voting for a more honest and dedicated sort of parliamentarian, but for a qualitatively different kind of politics.
First and foremost, Socialist Alliance candidates (who are pledged, by the way, to receive no more dollars than the average worker) would utilise parliament as a platform from which to champion the need for and viability of the socialist alternative to capitalist politics. It isn't too difficult to imagine what a competent and fiery Socialist Alliance MP could do with the HIH and One-Tel collapses. Nor what the political and social impact would be of having Socialist Alliance MPs touring far and wide in support of a popular campaign to abolish the GST and replace it with increased taxation of the rich.
Another point of difference from the existing parties will be that the parliamentarians won't be running the show, as is the case of all those parties for which parliament is the main game. It will take a lot of explaining to the obtuse Australian media, but the real leaders of the Socialist Alliance will be those elected by its democratic conferences.
Alliance program
All these points are related to the issue of the Socialist Alliance program, whose purpose Lafayette has difficulty in understanding. He claims that the Socialist Alliance draft program lacks even the basic criteria of being socialist, but doesn't bother to explain why. Yet for any organisation committed to the struggle for socialism the only program that counts is the one for which you agitate, fight and mobilise. The value of that program is measured by the real social and political dynamic that collective effort creates.That's why the Socialist Alliance program is rightly pitched at providing a direct, principled, working-class answer to the felt issues of the day in Australian politics unjust taxation, privatisation of public assets and services, destruction of union rights, rising sexism and racism, discrimination against indigenous Australians, greenhouse gas emissions and the appalling cruelty of this country's refugee policy.
Instead of lofty comment about the inadequately socialist nature of this stance, wouldn't it be more useful if Lafayette explained how this draft program could concretely be improved?
Some may think that the main condition for the success and survival of the Socialist Alliance is a decent vote in the forthcoming federal elections, maybe a figure like 4-5%. However, political realism counsels caution.
We know that the previously fragmented socialist left was in no condition to test out the real depth of support for the socialist cause at the ballot box, but it would be highly unwise, on analogy with very different countries like Scotland, Portugal, or France, to set specific thresholds of success and failure. While socialist candidates have scored up to 12% in recent by-elections, we simply can't yet say what the extent of the market for socialism is in Australia at the present time nor what result should please or disappoint.
In reality, irrespective of the result the Socialist Alliance achieves at its first electoral outing, the most important step has already been taken its founding. Now the task for all of us who call ourselves socialists is to build it to make it a reality in the suburbs, in the workplaces, on the campuses and in the high schools.
The Socialist Alliance welcomes all those who are in broad agreement with its aims and objectives. Its chances of success will be improved if those like Petit and Lafayette, professed socialists if I am not mistaken, join and participate.
No doubt they would continue to have their criticisms like many others. But like everyone else in the alliance, they would have their chance to have their say and to propose improvements. Most of all, they could be certain of being part of the only serious force in this country that is going to speak out boldly for socialism and struggle at the coming elections and beyond.
[Dick Nichols is an acting national convenor of the Socialist Alliance.]