People power is key to our future

Socialist Alliance national convenor Peter Boyle gave the speech below at the recent Climate Change Social Change activist conference, held in Melbourne over September 30 to October 3.

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The idea of this session follows on from something Ian Angus mentioned this morning, where he said there are two things we should be going for in building a revolutionary ecosocialist movement — a movement to transform this society in a fundamental way.

He said we have to respect the best possible science and we have to learn from experience. I thought this was quite a profound statement because it sums up a non-dogmatic, practical and collaborative approach to building the kind of organisations and alliances that are necessary to transform society.

We hoped this session would be part of the sharing. Of course, the whole conference is this sharing — a sharing of experiences between representatives of a number of projects to build such a movement for change in a number of countries.

Groups that have been working together, collaborating, sharing experiences and staying in touch over a number of years. So it’s an ongoing conversation that we want to have in front of everybody and with the participation of everybody here.

One of the people on the panel, Arul from Malaysia, in his workshop earlier in the conference mentioned the famous four preconditions for a revolutionary situation that Lenin once brought up.

He said society has to be in a deep crisis. There has to be a widespread sense of helplessness and frustration with things.

Second, the working class has to be clear that it can’t stand going on in this way.

For the third [precondition], he says the ruling class can’t carry on in the same way, is beginning to lose confidence, and beginning to turn against each other: to quarrel and to split.

And fourth, we need the existence of a revolutionary party. And Arul said we don’t have one yet.

I thought that was a critical observation because I think if we’re all honest that’s what we’ve got to say. That’s got to be a starting point for an honest evaluation of where to go and what we’ve done to date.

This is a project that is in process. What we have gathered here today is a very small part of that process. Certainly, that’s the way I see it as someone from the Socialist Alliance. That’s how we see ourselves: we are just part of an ongoing process, very early in the piece, to build such an organisation.

Our whole concept, as it has come to today, if founded a very strong consensus around three points.

1. That a real transformation of society cannot possible be done by a small group of self-appointed “revolutionaries”.

2. It has to be based on a movement of the working class, broadly understood: the working people. It has to be grounded in the labour movement. Fundamental change is going to remain just a good idea if it doesn’t become transformed from an ideology into an actual movement, a mass movement of the labouring classes.

3. The process in which this develops is complicated. It’s full of unpredictable things. The path of uniting the necessary forces required to transform society and to concentrate and demonstrate real leadership in the working class is a complicated process.

So how are we going? I think the project in Australia, broadly conceived, has been shaped by two very important factors over the past period.

First, there was the change in government in 2007, when the Labor Party defeated the previous Howard Liberal-National government. In a sense it brought to an end quite a tremendous fight by the working class against Work Choices and anti-union laws, but also more generally against the whole of Howard’s attacks on social justice.

It was brought to an end in a sad way, because they successfully put the labour movement into a much more contained space. We’ve had to live with that and that’s one of the conditions we face in trying to build an alternative movement, a movement for real change.

I think it was essential that we did everything possible to build that struggle against the Howard government. It was critical to build the broad alliance of militants and progressives to win that fight. And if we hadn’t done it we’d be in a worse position today.

In the period since then, we’ve been searching for ways to try to keep alive some of those links, albeit in a context where there is no way that we can shake the awful domination and pull of the Labor government upon the labour movement.

People's Power and Winning the Battle for a Future from Jill Hickson.

The second major thing that has conditioned the development of building an alternative has been the rise of the Greens. We see this as part of the process, because the Greens in this country are the most significant political break away from the two party system.

The Greens are a mixed group: there is a right and a left. But generally, I would say the Australian Greens have taken quite strong left positions. It really does raise the question for anyone who is serious about building an alternative movement: should we not be in the Greens? Why have a separate organisation? And if you don’t think like that I don’t think you are thinking seriously about how to move forward.

For a number of reasons, the Socialist Alliance is not in the Greens and we constantly have to evaluate if this is a good or a bad thing.

It ties into how we see the future of a thing like the Socialist Alliance. It’s a thing that has taken us a certain distance and right now it serves to do a lot of work and gather togther a significant number of people who can pull off quite a few things.

But we have to see that the challenge of left unity is largely something ahead of us. In a modest way in which some unity has been achieved together in the Socialist Alliance, we’ve learned some very, very important lessons.

The thing that held us through this difficuly process though has been a commitment to do a number of things.

One, to remain engaged in the struggle. Second, to keep educating. Third, to constantly keep looking outwards: to reach out to every possible opportunity to unite and work with others. Complete agreement is not necessary to move forward.

New forms of organisation will come up in the future. And we have to be prepared to embrace them.

A newspaper article just a day ago said 78% of people here are completely satisfied with what they have got. It actually breaks down to 43% who are delighted and 34% who are mostly satisfied.

But the same survey by the Australian Bureau of Statistics also found that that over the past year there were 520,000 homeless people over the age of 18.

The same survey found one third of people are having difficulty getting access to doctors and telecommunications.

We are used to this asymmetric struggle in this country. But we also do know enough to predict that things are not always going to remain the same, even a country where 78% of people are supposedly satisfied.

Climate change will put and end to that. Economic crisis, which Australia seems temporarily insulted from, is just around the corner and nobody can safely predict that it won’t impact soon. Certainly the markets are not confident about this and are making this known.

All of these things will impact on a number of critical factors that are now shaping politics in this country. The refugee question will grow in scale. Attacks on the working class are starting up again.

So we will continue the project: we can’t predict any more. But we work with the confidence that we are not forever going to be in this position of relative stability for Australian capitalism. We are going into a period of turbulence. This is not the country of the permanent exception. And frankly, I look forward to that.