BY ALISON DELLIT
On May 1, tens of thousands of people will take to streets across Australia to protest against the sacrifice of human needs to rapacious corporate greed. The M1 stock exchange blockades will be the latest skirmishes in the battle that began outside the 1999 Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
Seattle should have been a pushover for the corporate controllers. They own the mass media, they direct the imperialist governments and most Third World regimes as well. Seattle should have been just another pantomime of participation to convince us that the world is run by something other than mega-capitalists. Another session where the multinationals "listen" to hand-picked Third World delegates and then calmly remove what powers they retain to protect their peoples' interests or environmental assets if it stands in the way of a quick buck.
But in just three days, some 50,000 protesters and hundreds of Third World delegates shattered that illusion. Locked in an impasse inside, embarrassed by the opposition outside, the talks ignominiously collapsed.
After more than a decade of being told that capitalism was "triumphant", that rampant corporate greed was unstoppable and that the worsening living standards, mass starvation and epidemics of preventable disease that accompany it were just "part of life", millions of people around the world felt new hope.
Seattle frightened the capitalist elite and the movement it inspired has kept them sweating. After Seattle came the mass protests in Washington, the S11 protests in Melbourne, Seoul, Prague, Davos and Quebec. All of these demonstrations were inspired by the Seattle hope: that we are powerful because we are the majority; more powerful than their media, governments, armies and their paid flunkies. As the chant goes: "The only power is the power of the people". This movement will not trust any one saviour.
Whitlam and the mass movement
When Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam rode into Canberra in 1972 on a wave of mass revolt against the imperialist Vietnam War, he took the hopes of thousands of activists with him. Many saw the election of Whitlam and the ALP as the final battle. "Our" pollies were in control, and they would set about making the world a utopia for the workers of the world.
But things didn't happen quite like that. Because the pollies of the ALP were not "ours", Whitlam's betrayals mounted. The most infamous was his government's conniving with the Indonesian military government's invasion of East Timor.
Whitlam failed to fulfill the expectations that the sixties' radicals had for him because he was a capitalist politician. He was elected with the same big business backing as every other Australian prime minister. Labor's strategy of placating trade unions and social movements instead of confronting them was different to previous Liberal-National coalition governments, but Whitlam's aim was the same — to secure the best possible environment for big business profit making.
The advances won by working people made during the Whitlam Labor government — free education, universal health care, land rights and an end to conscription — were not won through parliamentary wrangling but outside in mass street marches, university occupations, freedom rides and direct actions. They were concessions seized from, and grudgingly conceded by, big business in order to maintain the myth of democracy and to minimise the participation of people in the political protest and activity.
The increasing "conservatism" of the post-Whitlam ALP is not really a change at all. It was the inevitable result of the decline in mass political activism. When the pressure is off, the ALP more openly promotes the interests of its big business backers.
The S11 protests — and the M1 movement — has scared the pants off the ALP because it is led by people who will not repeat past mistakes. We will not cede our street power for the empty promises of parliamentarians. We don't want their parliament, we want ours — the parliament of the streets.
This does not mean that we reject parliament and elections as a site of struggle. Anti-corporate campaigners in the United States made use of Ralph Nader's Green Party campaign for the presidency to broaden their audience and to expose the undemocratic nature of US "democracy".
Like many Greens, Nader believes that you can challenge the power of big business without overturning a system that gives power to those who make the most profit. Nader believes that government can be independent of business and that if the right personalities are elected, corporate control will cease.
However, Nader ran on a high-profile platform of support for the demonstrators of Seattle. He argued against the increasing power of the World Trade Organisation and the International Monetary Fund. His campaign was a chance to explain the basic message of Seattle to tens of millions of US people.
The Nader campaign took considerable political courage in a country without a preferential voting system. If the votes that Nader garnered went to the Democratic Party's candidate Al Gore, Republican George W. Bush would not be in the White House. However, the truth is that most who voted for Nader would probably not have voted at all otherwise.
Pointing to the minuscule difference between Bush and Gore, Nader's anti-corporate supporters argued that it was more important to use the presidential election to build the anti-corporate campaign than to keep "Dubya" out. This implies that change cannot come through parliament alone. It is an argument that is more radical than Nader's beliefs.
Socialist Alliance and the Greens
A similar approach to elections lies behind the formation in Australia of the Socialist Alliance. At its Sydney launch on April 10, the Democratic Socialist Party's Lisa Macdonald explained, "The Socialist Alliance recognises the value of seats in parliament — the progressive movements could certainly do with the resources and media opportunities those positions bring — but it also knows that getting a few people elected to the corporate rulers' parliaments is not going to change much. The decisions about how society is run aren't made in parliaments, they're made in the boardrooms of the transnational corporations, on the floors of the stock exchanges and in the military's inner sanctums."
Macdonald explained the Socialist Alliance's intention to use the federal election campaign to publicise the demands of the anti-corporate campaign. The alliance was formed on the initiative of Australia's two largest revolutionary socialist organisations, the Democratic Socialist Party and the International Socialist Organisation. Both parties are in the leadership of the anti-corporate movement.
The Socialist Alliance's attitude to elections is in stark contrast to the approach of the Australian Greens. The Australian Greens have an impressive record of introducing progressive legislation in parliament. Senator Bob Brown's strong stands against mandatory sentencing, the Jabiluka uranium mine and in favour of tougher environmental regulations are far better than every other parliamentary party.
But the Australian Greens' inadequacy is not primarily its policies but its parliamentarist strategy. Brown articulated this clearly in an interview with the March 19 Sydney Morning Herald: "Debate last century was about centrally planned versus the market economy. This century [it is] going to be between the Parliament and the stock exchange ... I believe in free enterprise. But I think the job of Parliament is to regulate it so everybody gets a fair go."
Brown's fantasy that parliament can reform and regulate the worst aspects of global capitalism — "so everybody gets a fair go" — and that the system of private ownership of society's assets by a tiny handful of the mega-rich is not the fundamental problem underlies Green party strategy, in Australia and internationally.
This is confirmed by the rightward shift of Green parties when they are in government. In Germany and France, where Green Party MPs have the "influence" that comes with being part of coalition governments, they have supported, and implemented, policies such as cuts in public spending, NATO's bombing of Serbia and the shipment of nuclear waste from France to Germany.
Greens' Australian record
In Tasmania in 1989, Green independents elected to the state parliament signed an accord with ALP that allowed Labor to form a government. The Greens supported Labor's horror budget that included school closures in return for some small concessions on forest policy.
In the Australian Capital Territory in 1995, the Green MPs voted to support the formation of a Liberal government which implemented unprecedented cuts to the public service.
The Greens misunderstand where power in capitalist society really lies. Believing that parliament is the source of power, they are forced to make compromise after compromise just to keep a "toehold" in the system. Far from the being the "political voice" of the protest movements, the Greens see the movements as an adjunct to the "more important" game of winning parliamentary seats.
The most recent example of this was Brown's initial reluctance to publicly endorse the M1 blockades, despite expressing privately his personal support, in case it cost the Greens votes. Fortunately, Brown changed his mind and announced his support for the mass protests.
In contrast, the Socialist Alliance is less interested in votes than in building the only real alternative to corporate greed — a socialist movement committed to real democracy and the real transfer of power from the capitalist class to the working people. As Macdonald explained, "the Socialist Alliance's central aim is to strengthen those movements, to broaden and deepen the power of the 'parliament of the streets', not to be the most effective parliamentarists".
In most seats, the Socialist Alliance will be direct its preferences to the Greens before the ALP (and the ALP before the Liberals). The Socialist Alliance does not proscribe socialists who are members of other parties — including members of the Greens (unlike the Greens). The best way to maximise co-operation between radical Greens members and Socialist Alliance activists is within the anti-corporate and refugee rights campaigns. Such collaboration will strengthen our parliament — the power of the people.