BY JANET BURSTALL
While Workers Liberty welcomes the Democratic Socialist Party's intentions to put far more of its resources into the Socialist Alliance (SA), we believe that there other measures that the alliance itself needs to take, to become a working class socialist alternative.
We have from the start been critical of the International Socialist Organisation's insistence that the SA can only attract angry Labor voters with the best points of an old Labor reformist platform.
We disagree that the SA must be limited to being an explicitly non-revolutionary, electoral united front. But it is false to pose the issue as "reform versus revolution".
The Cunningham by-election result confirms our argument that the current dot point platform of the SA is not a reason to vote SA rather than Green. The SA needs to make being on the side of the working class the explicit defining basis of our politics.
The SA has put more effort into refugee and anti-war solidarity, than on solutions to the problems of working class people in Australia. For example, the Tampa crisis and the Ansett collapse were almost simultaneous — but what did the SA campaign on?
The SA's advocacy of refugee rights, and against the war should be explained in terms of working class solidarity.
Workers' Liberty advocates that the priority pledge, the core of what the SA advocates, should be "for a workers' government" and for a working class plan to rebuild jobs, services and environmental sustainability on the basis of public ownership and democratic control by workers and the community.
The working class should be the centre of our platform on all three fronts-economic, political and ideological. Then the question of reform versus revolution is really beside the point. It will only come to life when the working class in struggle confronts it directly.
I agree that the SA needs to do a lot more on the ground campaigning. The DSP's proposal seems to improve the possibilities for this. It will still need more agreement and resolution of differences to develop.
Workers Liberty has proposed an SA policy for trade union work.
The ISO has many more members and much more capacity than Workers Liberty to advocate positive proposals to take the SA forward. This would be of much greater significance than whether or not the DSP becomes the Democratic Socialist Tendency inside the SA.
It is up to the Little Red Socialist Alliance not to become a meal for the Green Left Wolf.
[Janet Burstall is a member of the Socialist Alliance national executive and of Workers Liberty, one of the eight organisations affiliated to the alliance.]
From Green Left Weekly, November 6, 2002.
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