BY LISA MACDONALD
With the recent rise of the Greens as a real force in electoral politics, the question is posed: why is the Socialist Alliance bothering to contest elections. The answer is simple.
The Socialist Alliance strongly supports the election of more Greens to state and federal parliaments. Their electoral success reflects, and reinforces, the growing understanding among working people that the major big business parties — the Coalition and the ALP — do not represent their interests. With Greens in parliament, Labor betrayals, like Premier Bob Carr's offensives against workers' compensation and, more recently, civil liberties, can be challenged in parliament and exposed more effectively.
However, while the Greens have generally taken a good position on the key issues for working people, and while they are getting more involved in building the progressive movements on the ground, the Greens' approach still tends to feed the great illusion of Australian politics — that social progress comes from getting the "right" people into parliament.
The Coalition and Labor parties are tools in the hands of Australia's corporate and financial elites and can, if necessary, be replaced by other tools, including right-wing Greens if they ever go down the German Greens' road. At the heart of the Socialist Alliance project is the task of shifting the left political framework to beyond parliament, rebuilding working-class organisation and representation from the ground up, in the unions and in the political arena.
More importantly, most Greens don't yet grasp the root cause of the social and environmental evils they denounce — the capitalist system, which is dominated by a tiny minority's pursuit of private profits. Most Greens think it is possible to make capitalism work equitably and sustainably. Socialist Alliance provides a clear, anti-system point of view and puts first the work of building an entirely new society based on people's needs, rather than private profits.
So in the March 22 NSW election: Vote 1 Socialist Alliance, then 2 Greens.
From Green Left Weekly, March 19, 2003.
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