For the November 10 federal election, the Socialist Alliance is directing preferences to the Greens ahead of Labor in the Senate. Some affiliates and members of the alliance disagreed with this. Here, Democratic Socialist Party member and Socialist Alliance candidate for the seat of Reid, LISA MACDONALD, explains why the DSP members in the alliance voted to preference the Greens before Labor.
There is no question that the Australian Greens is an electoralist party. Unlike the Socialist Alliance and socialist parties, the Greens' basic approach to bringing about progressive change is to win seats in parliament and/or influence the major parties' policy decisions through lobbying and preference horse-trading.
For example, in both federal and state elections, the Greens have not hesitated to make preference deals which are based less on the political platform of other parties than on their capacity to deliver more votes to Green candidates (the Greens' decision last month to maintain their national policy of directing preferences to the Australian Democrats ahead of Labor in the November 10 election was openly justified in these terms).
And the Greens continue to use their electoral weight to lobby the major capitalist parties in the vain hope that this will bring lasting progressive results (as the Queensland Greens did in 1992 with their decision to direct preferences to the Nationals in some seats so as to "punish" the ALP for breaking promises on the environment).
It is the Greens' bottom-line parliamentarist approach that explains why it is at election times that they become most visible on the streets, that they devote more resources to public campaigning and mobilising their members than at any other time of the year. This reflects their refusal to recognise that the big decisions in capitalist society are not made in the parliaments; they are made in the corporate boardrooms, on the stock exchanges and in the top echelons of the government bureaucracy. The only way, therefore, to change these decisions is to mobilise sufficiently large sections of the population against them that political and social stability are threatened.
Despite their parliamentarism, however, the Greens, unlike the ALP, are not a party that seeks to subordinate the interests of working people to those of big business. The ALP is an openly pro-capitalist party, in large part funded by big business and which is regarded by the capitalist rulers as their alternative governing party.
The Greens, on the other hand, are a party which seeks to utilise the democratic institutions of the capitalist state to improve the lives of working people, particularly the middle-class elements among them. In the language of classical Marxism, the Greens are a modern-day "petty-bourgeois democratic party".
In every area, including industrial relations, the Greens' policies are to the left of those of the ALP. This can be clearly seen in the positions on the two key issues around which the November 10 election was launched: refugees and the war.
The Greens have come down clearly on the side of the oppressed: for refugee rights and against the US war on Afghanistan. The Labor Party, in contrast, has adopted positions which are no better, even in degree, than the Coalition's. Labor's class nature — on the side of the capitalist oppressors — has become starkly evident, even to the most loyal ALP leftist, to the extent that those very few class-conscious workers who still remained in the party after the last 15 years of Labor attacks on working people are now withdrawing their support.
Those of us who are active in the anti-war and refugee rights movements would like to see many more Green activists and resources being devoted to building the movements than is being given at present. Unfortunately, the Greens' mass movement-building work is ultimately limited by the fact that it is electorally motivated.
However, this limitation, as serious as it is, is qualitatively different from the ALP's consistent "contain, co-opt and demobilise" approach toward all progressive movements, from the trade unions to the refugee rights movement.
The radical left's correct rejection of parliamentarism as the path to real social change should not blind it to the importance of using elections to send clear messages by voting for and preferencing parties that support our own demands for social justice for working people.
Regardless of how much the Labor Party postures as "the party of the workers", regardless of how much financial and political support it receives from the trade union officialdom, whose career fortunes are tied to Labor's electoral success, and regardless of the differences in degree with Coalition policy on certain issues which allow Labor to present as the "lesser evil", from a working-class perspective it is still a bosses' party and socialists have a responsibility to make that clear using every means possible, including in its allocation of preferences.
This is why DSP members have argued in the Socialist Alliance that it should call on voters to preference the Greens before Labor.