As the Socialist Alliance's annual conference approaches (scheduled for June in Melbourne), members are debating the best way forward for the alliance. In the interests of furthering this discussion, Green Left Weekly presents contrasting views on the way forward from two of the alliance's co-convenors. David Glanz is a member of the International Socialist Organisation, the second-biggest affiliate to the alliance, and Lisa Macdonald is a member of the Democratic Socialist Perspective, SA's biggest affiliate.

Debate in the Socialist Alliance

David Glanz

The general outlines of the Socialist Alliance's success in the election for Moreland Council in Melbourne have been described elsewhere. Reports have been carried in at least three of the publications which support the Alliance: Socialist Worker, the Freedom Socialist Bulletin and Green Left Weekly. You can also find a report in the February issue of Seeing Red.

There are, however, some lessons to be drawn that are relevant to the continuing debate about how best to build the Socialist Alliance. The election success was the work of Wills branch. Wills branch is in many ways different from most other branches. It does not operate according to the formula that the Democratic Socialist Perspective says is the key to success. For example:

• It meets monthly, not fortnightly.

• It engages in local campaigns and citywide campaigns, but does not pretend to be the centre of all activity for Socialist Alliance members.

• It does not run weekly street stalls (organising stalls only for special events and campaigns) and it does not sell or fundraise for Green Left Weekly (or any other affiliate publication).

• It does not spend its funds on offices.

• It mails a monthly newsletter to members along with regular emails.

• It has contested six elections in four years, during which it has had noticeable success in fundraising and in mobilising members, and in recruitment.

It is, however, one of the largest branches in the country, with 98 members.

An important factor in Wills' success is that it has concentrated its resources on local activity and election campaigns. This is the complete opposite of the mistaken tactics being employed in the WA state elections, where the alliance is standing in upper house seats spread across a large geographical area.

The first approach, in Wills, flows from seeing the need to build the alliance as a practical, locally connected alternative to Labor, which links the big questions of politics to local concerns. The second approach is a passive propagandist one, that sees elections as an exercise in gaining support for socialist principles in the abstract, separated from sustained, practical engagement with the struggles or issues in the local area.

The second feature of the branch's success is that it has roots in the community, which pre-date the alliance and which are the work of both affiliates and individual members.

Alliance members have driven out the Nazis, run campaigns against factory closures and public sector staffing cuts, organised the local peace group, led the union in local workplaces, convinced the council to make Moreland a "Hanson-free zone", organised against the sexist Blackshirts, and much more. More recently, the branch organised a workday lunchtime rally of 50 workers and residents outside the local Centrelink over staffing shortages. It also organised the only protest over the closure of the Kodak plant.

Some DSP members of the Socialist Alliance national executive have tried to explain Wills' success in building roots in terms of regular stalls. Stalls can be useful to gain profile when they have a specific purpose — relating to a particular campaign or at election time — but building real roots in the local community requires much more. Any branch that thinks that setting up a card table on a Saturday morning is, by itself, going to bring success would be fooling itself. The alliance has to be relevant and useful to local residents who want real solutions and action around points of concern, not just good ideas. We need to prove that we are, within the limits of our size and resources, a practical as well as a political alternative for disaffected Labor and Greens supporters.

Interesting forums and stalls can play a part but involvement in the local community plays an even larger one. The success of the Socialist Party in Yarra Council in Melbourne, where Steve Jolly was elected in November, underlines the general point.

The DSP has put a lot of resources into the Socialist Alliance and I am sure it wants to see vibrant, campaigning branches which are rooted in the local community. Yet its current formula for building the alliance, which is very similar to the way the DSP used to build itself, has shown itself to be a less than satisfactory strategy.

These are sharp words and will not be welcomed by some alliance members. But it is necessary to speak honestly. Too many branches that have been run according to the DSP formula have stagnated or gone backward: Melbourne North-East, Melbourne Central, Sydney Northside, Sydney Central and Sydney Eastern Suburbs, to name just five. Wills has not.

I know that many non-aligned and DSP members understand the need to be engaged in building roots in the local community. DSP members have played an excellent role in responding to events surrounding the riot in Redfern and the death of TJ Hickey. The Bankstown branch has done great work in building the local peace group and relating to the Free Hicks and Habib campaign. We need to generalise these success stories. Yet the DSP's formula does not prioritise this essential local work.

I do not pretend to have all the answers. How the alliance grows during the Liberals' fourth term is something we must work out through collective discussion and experience. But clearly the success of Wills branch holds many valuable lessons in how to build vibrant and relevant branches. Let's learn from our experience.

Some lines in the sand

Lisa Macdonald

There is no "model" for building the Socialist Alliance successfully everywhere, neither a Wills "success" model, nor a "failed DSP formula". Branches around the country have experimented with ways of organising over the last 3.5 years, and all branches have strengths and weaknesses, reflecting the diversity of the membership, and differences in activist resources and local conditions.

Most branches have been very engaged in "local campaigns" — not just those branches David mentions — but also the "Save Our Rail" campaign in Newcastle, the Sandon Point campaign in Wollongong, the anti-police violence campaign in Melbourne West, the Northern Rivers branch's organisation of a progressive unionists' network, and Geelong branch's leadership of numerous community struggles. In every case, Democratic Socialist Perspective members have been centrally involved, side by side with non-aligned members of SA.

David's crude appeal to "local versus national" — "local campaigns" are often state and/or national concerns organised at the local level — along with his emphasis on electoralism and a minimalist approach to SA building, tells the real story: The International Socialist Organisation does not support, in theory or practice, the project supported by a large majority of delegates at the last two national conferences — building the SA as a united, democratic, active and effective multi-tendency socialist organisation. To the extent that the ISO and the DSP have different "models" of SA building, this is the fundamental difference.

Arguing for a minority view on what the alliance could and should become is the ISO's right, as it is the right of any SA affiliate to refuse to make SA the principal party they build. But it is disingenuous to argue that a model of branch building (Wills) that is premised on not throwing your all into SA is the best one for advancing the alliance.

If all SA branches and members around the country operated according to the "Wills model", what would the Socialist Alliance be today?

It is possible that it might have more members on paper, but it is more likely that there would simply be bigger but fewer branches, because the DSP would have 95% of its members in a single branch in each city. The SA would have little or no presence in many outer suburbs where the majority of the working class lives, and SA's local community campaigning would be significantly less than it has been with many branches working in diverse areas.

If all branches had "concentrated [their] resources on local activity and election campaigns", SA would have been unable take responsibility for, and some leadership in, crucial spheres of resistance against Howard's attacks on the working class.

SA's modest but undeniably important role in rebuilding a militant trade union network would not be a priority. In the face of the most vicious anti-union offensive in decades, SA would not, for example, have initiated the call — successful now in Victoria — for mass cross-union delegate meetings; nor launched a uniting, fightback sign-on statement; nor built a mass campaign to defend our comrade Craig Johnston; nor initiated the national trade union fight-back conference in June. These projects divert considerable SA energy from local issue work and council election campaigns, but they are essential to realise any hopes of stopping PM John Howard's attacks.

If the Wills model was generalised, SA would probably not have taken the national or citywide initiatives in the anti-war campaign that have kept the majority public opposition to Australia's involvement in the war on Iraq in the public eye. The SA would have given up its weekly column, "Our Common Cause" in Green Left Weekly. In fact, the alliance would have no special relationship with Green Left Weekly at all.

If the ISO model was generalised nationwide, SA would not have been able to produce Seeing Red, which is dependent on the hard work of a nationwide editorial board, and enabled by the almost full-time administrative load taken by a DSP-provided managing editor.

If Wills branch practice was generalised nationwide, the alliance would not have been able to fund the telephone hook-ups of the various national coordination and elected leadership bodies, nor produced Alliance Voices or Socialist Campaigner, nor maintained its website. Despite quite a few Wills branch members being on national decision-making bodies as affiliate representatives, Wills has not contributed a cent to the national pledge system, which covers national operating costs.

Local issue and election campaigning is valuable work for the SA. But the national work of the alliance enables SA to influence broader class-struggle politics more than our present limited size, geographic spread and resources would otherwise allow.

The SA's national projects and networking are also vital to maximise members' ability to participate in SA's activities, discussions and direction. Many members, especially non-aligned members, find citywide, statewide or national networks, bodies and projects a more accessible and inspiring "entry point" than local branch meetings, for all sorts of reasons.

In this period of low class struggle, progressive mobilisation and organisation is pretty thin on the ground. Without the re-emergence of mass movements that reach into every sphere of social life, it will be impossible to build the SA and increase its influence, just (or largely) through local branches. If anything, the alliance — to use and deepen the left unity it has built — needs to become less locally focused, unifying our human and other resources more in city-, state- and nationwide caucuses, discussions and campaigns.

This does not preclude "building roots in the local community", but the alliance's substantive goal is to affect the balance of class forces in favour of the oppressed, and to put SA forward persuasively as a serious alternative in the process. Building bases in local communities can help, but it is not inherently the most effective sphere in which to strengthen socialists' political weight.

What is indispensable is a willingness to denounce the fake oppositions — principally the ALP — for their attacks on the working class and oppressed, alongside having a united front approach to maximise mass opposition to all attacks by the ruling class. This key content of our task, rather than the form, is crucial to get right to successfully build the Socialist Alliance.

Parliamentary and council elections are valuable arenas for socialist intervention, but not a truer path to building a united, multi-tendency socialist party in Australia today than non-electoral movement and campaign work. In fact, right now, elections are far from the most effective way to extend socialists' influence in Australian politics, largely because the electoral space to the left of Labor is overwhelmingly occupied by the Greens.

In that context, it is dead wrong to dismiss weekly SA street stalls and the distribution of Green Left Weekly (and other socialist publications) as mere passive propagandising and a liability to SA building. Regular stalls are an important public face of resistance. They are an ongoing small picket line, if you like, saying "No!" to neoliberalism, racism and other injustices, and they give confidence to others to also say "No!".

To the extent that any publication gives people the information they need to resist oppression, it is a valuable tool. Green Left Weekly, with its broad appeal and therefore its capacity to give socialists a larger audience, is especially valuable.

SA campaign stalls are also indispensable points of contact with local people, both to talk about SA and get a feel for public sentiment. There are regularly ISO/Socialist Worker stalls right opposite the SA campaign stalls in inner Sydney. What's good enough for the ISO, is good enough for SA.

So yes, let's have the collective discussion in the lead-up to our national conference about how to build SA and beat Howard. There's plenty of room in SA for debate, but Howard is drawing a line in the sand right now and the responsibility on socialists' shoulders to get clear what we are doing is urgent and weighty. That means that we have to draw a few lines in the sand ourselves — such as recognising that to beat Howard's agenda we also need to beat Beazley's, and that to get rid of neoliberalism we can't build just a different colour "Greens party" that strives for the balance of power in parliament and wins a few concessions.

To change this rotten system we have to be serious about socialist unity and building the most united, active, nationally effective force for fundamental change that we can.

[This is an abridged version of an article available at < http://www.socialist-alliance.org/resources/idb/av_vol5_no1.pdA HREF="mailto:f"><f>.]

From Green Left Weekly, March 16, 2005.
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