Alliance Voices

CONTENTS : ALLIANCE VOICES - VOLUME 12, NO 6 January 2012

2012-01-19T20:40:00.000+10:00

Australian politics report

Create a change coalition

What we do right now matters

The transitional method

Socialist Alliance and organising

Proposal for an annual socialist summer school

Proposed amendment to Towards a Socialist Australia : Disability and Poverty

The development of cadre

Atlargeness: transitional engineering

Our work in Left Unity

Proposed amendment to the draft Towards a Socialist Australia: Economic Crisis

Rationale for the Towards a Socialist Australia document

Australian politics report

2012-01-19T11:20:00.001+10:00

By Paul Benedek, Sydney Central

[The report on Australian politics to be given to the SA National Conference will be based on the written draft. It is submitted to Alliance Voices to give comrades a chance to read it beforehand. As at previous conferences, delegates will not be asked to vote on this report, only the political perspectives resolutions.]

While the global economic meltdown is yet to hit Australia hard, the turbulent international political situation still reverberates in this relatively sheltered, wealthy country.

The year began with the Wikileaks cables revealing war crimes and treachery, and rallies for Australian citizen Julian Assange - who faced arrest without charge, and has now been detained for over a year, with serious fears of extradition to the US. Despite the Gillard Government condemning Wikileaks, public action has been overwhelmingly on Assange and Wikileaks' side, with thousands attending rallies and forums such as the 2500-strong Sydney Town Hall event with John Pilger, Andrew Wilkie, and Julian Burnside, which SA played a strong role in organising. On the opposite end of the media, the Murdoch empire has been publically shamed over revelations of telephone hacking, police bribery and political deal making - exposing the depths to which the mainstream media stoops.

Australian's rallied in solidarity with the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and across the Arab world - and to oppose the West's ongoing support for the region's dictators, such as Hosni Mubarak. The inspiration that people power can topple decades-long dictatorships continues to echo even this far across the globe! But they also come with a warning, as we see the West attempting to intervene.

As the draft Perspectives Resolution points argues: (Point 1, c) While we commit to building solidarity with all revolts against tyranny and exploitation....we also recognise that the governments of the richest and most powerful capitalist states are seeking to intervene in the “Arab Spring” revolts to further their own imperialist aims. The Socialist Alliance opposes such interventions.

The resolution also points out the insanity of war, noting that: (Rationale, 4) “the richest capitalist states now wage permanent imperialist wars in order to carry on business amidst the unprecedented global inequality.”

This describes the horrific ongoing war on Afghanistan which has reached 10 years, with Australia's continued involvement. Last year we helped organise Afghan anti-war and feminist activist Malalai Joya's tour, which inspired hundreds with her troops out message. Months later, anti-war activists headed to Canberra to confront US President Obama as he outlined plans to build a US military base in Darwin. With moves for increasing US-Australia military links in 2012, we need to help organise the anti-war movement in 2012. While the movement is currently small, we need to remember that a huge, passive sentiment against the war persists, sentiment that could quickly become active as circumstances change.

Palestine will also continue as a solidarity campaign focus. Another brave Gaza Flotilla took place in 2011, and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign is gaining profile in the face of relentless attacks. In a similar vein, there is currently an attack on SBS for showing the drama The Promise that is sympathetic to the Palestinian plight.

Yet perhaps the story of 2011 occurred near the year's conclusion, with the birth of the global Occupy movement. Occupy not only smashed the illusion that revolt couldn't happen in the US, but also exploded the idea that today's youth have simply submitted to the dominant consumerist, individualist culture.

But isn't Australia immune?

The draft Perspectives Resolution (Rationale, 2) states: While Australia has not so far experienced the high levels of unemployment and deprivation that have hit the United States, Europe and many other countries, significant sections of its population are struggling to keep up with rising living costs and facing high levels of job insecurity.

This is why the Occupy movement resonated widely, even in Australia. Ultimately it wasn't able to draw in large numbers actively, allowing the state to turn Occupy into running battles to survive. But Occupy is still, in whatever limited form, ongoing in various cities - and of course globally is still a phenomena.

The draft Perspectives Resolution (Part 1, b) commits us to “building the Occupy movement and all other mass democratic expressions of the new wave of struggle and [to] work consistently to broaden the base of these movements and deepen its democracy and unity in action.” What Occupy needs in Australia, and what has seen it at its best is to find a focus - e.g. the Baiada strike in Victoria, or the support for the Clean Start campaign in Sydney, was when Occupy was at its best.

Australia, as a whole, is not immune from the economic crisis. The mining boom has papered over a 2, or more, speed economy - where mining makes super profits, yet many other economic areas are in decline. Inequality is high and growing in Australia (the poorest 20% own just 1% of the wealth), and the draft Towards a Socialist Australia points out: Two million people live in poverty ... at least 100,000 are homeless on any given night ... Pensions and unemployment benefits are far below poverty levels ... Millions fall into the categories of “underemployed' and “working poor”.

With the highly globalised world economy, it is hard to see Europe and the US going into recession without the rest of the world being hit hard also.

In Australia's case, China plays a crucial role. As Europe and the US face recession, demand for China's exports fall, hitting China's need for Australian resources. However, the situation is not clear cut. Around half China's trade is with the so-called developing world, and with China still having a relatively more centralised economy, it may be able to lessen impacts from the crisis.

Overall, however, Australia won't be able to remain immune from the economic crisis for long. And we can see what the capitalist's approach to the crisis in their system is - try to make the workers' pay. We can expect and are already seeing attacks on wages, conditions, on ability to struggle, further privatisations, and cuts to services.

The question for Socialist Alliance is: how can we best organise resistance to such attacks?

Trade Unions: still stifled by the ALP

The Labor government has proved to be thoroughly anti-worker. It has maintained anti-union laws, with Fair Work Australia including severe restrictions on the right to take industrial action. The Australian Building and Construction Commission still exists, and while legislation has been tabled to abolish the ABCC, its functions are to be incorporated into the FWA act, and coercive powers - such that saw Ark Tribe staring down 6 months jail - are to be maintained.

In a recent example of the pro-boss nature of Fair Work Australia, Qantas CEO Alan Joyce was able to utilise the act to terminate legal, protected industrial action that the union had voted for. While Joyce was able to stage his lockout without warning, unions must give one month's notice before taking industrial action - giving bosses plenty of time to prepare lockouts or organise scabs. Fair Work Australia was also used by the Victorian Baillieu government to order nurses to lift industrial action being used to defend nurse patient ratios. Yet despite FWA being Work Choices lite, bosses are still calling for even its minor reforms to be weakened.

The ALP remains in crisis as a party - from historical highs of 150,000 members, it dropped to 50,000 members in the 1990s, and is now down to 31000 members. Of that shrunken figure, in the recent vote for president - which last time saw 55% vote, only 11000 or 37% voted (31000 ballots went out).

There is simultaneous strain on the ALP's relationship with the unions, and some desperate attempts for “renewal”, such as the Faulkner review, along with attempts to bring unions back into the fold. Former AWU head Bill Shorten was made Industrial relations minister, and immediately intervened to resolve the POAG waterfront dispute, trying to win some credit with the union movement.

Unions have won some limited concessions over the last year. After a decades long struggle for equal pay, in late 2011 the Government announced it would endorse the Australian Services Union's case for equal pay.

The picket line victory of the Baiada poultry workers in Victoria was inspiring. Workers took action after facing deplorable factory conditions, below minimum wages, bullying, and finally a horrific workplace decapitation death, after management refused to shut down a chicken packing machine while the worker clean it. After 13 days on the picket line, supported by a range of community groups, workers won an 8% wage rise, increased injury pay, casual labour to be paid no less than permanent employees, and increased union organising rights.

However, militant action has been limited. Despite the anti-union policies of the ALP, it still has huge institutional weight and it remains difficult to build a militant current politically independent of Labor.

One important event in 2012 to help rebuild the militant wing of the labour movement is the planned national gathering of unionists and activists supporting the Right to Strike, in Sydney on May 14.

The Perspectives Resolution (Part 4, b) states that SA “welcomes and endorses the national Right To Strike Campaign” and we welcome and build the national gathering which will be on the eve of the ACTU Congress (May 15-17 in Sydney).

At the same time as committing to building this event and the RTS campaign as a whole, SA needs to be actively engaged in all of these picket line struggles as with Baiada, linking arms with the workers, building community support and networks, developing solidarity, reporting in GLW. We need to expand SA members' involvement in their unions, and step up our organisation in this area to put us in the best position to defend working class interests.

In concluding the section on union struggle, it is worth reflecting on the importance of workers' struggles in Egypt and Tunisia's revolutions. Far more important than the greatly heralded Facebook and Twitter effects, was the 'old fashioned' working class, which enabled the revolutions to flourish. In Egypt, starting in the clothing and textile sector, and moving on to building workers, transport and food workers, over 1900 strikes took place in the 4 years leading up to the revolution, involving 1.7 million workers and huge demonstrations. These strikes occurred in the face of the official (state controlled) union's opposition. Similarly in Tunisia, a pivotal battle was the 6 month strike at a phosphate plant that inspired young unemployed workers to action.

Racism, refugees and Aboriginal rights

Part 5 of the Perspectives Resolution states that: “If the exploited majority does not collectively resist [the capitalist's] attack, the capitalists can deflect the blame for the pain on to oppressed minorities who it scapegoats, exploiting racist and other reactionary prejudices.

So the 1% try to make the 99% wear the pain, and deflect the growing anger on to scapegoats - in Australia, refugees and Aboriginal people bear the brunt of such attacks.

The few thousand asylum seekers arriving annually by boat, fleeing war zones Australia has helped create, account for just a couple of percent of Australia's annual immigration intake. Yet such "boat people" are a daily political and media punching bag. As the ALP and the Coalition engage in a race to the bottom on anti-refugee rhetoric and policy, the refugee rights movement has re-emerged.

The crisis around refugees could hardly be worse - suicides and self-harm are regular occurrences in what mental health expert Pat McGorry described as 'factories for mental illness', run by private profiteers Serco; new detention centres are being built and old ones expanded as detention numbers increase; mass deportations to danger are threatened including Hazaras to Afghanistan and Tamils to Sri Lanka; and the 'solutions' are to dump refugees in Malaysia or Nauru.

But as the horror grows, so does the grassroots opposition. Refugee advocates that hoped the election of a Labor Government would bring refugee rights, have realised the struggle continues, and restarted their networks. Last month's national refugee consultation, which SA played a key role in initiating, brought together 70 activists from 8 cities across the country to plan 2012 campaigns. SA members need to be organising to implement the key decisions from the consultation, including:

supporting the Easter refugee rights convergence in Darwin (plus local actions during Easter);
helping organise large rallies to mark "20 years of mandatory detention" around World Refugee Day (the weekend of June 23-24);
to organise a national gathering of refugee rights campaign groups in the second half of 2012;
to hold nationally coordinated action around the ASIO security rejections some time in 2012; and
to get involved in the new national working groups for the Easter convergence, fighting deportations, ASIO/security, unions and the National gathering.

The situation for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people is just as horrendous. Labor has expanded the racist NT Intervention, despite figures showing the punitive, disempowering policies have seen Indigenous incarceration go up, school attendance drop, and suicide increase. Government policies have also seen bilingual education banned, and the withdrawal of support for homelands, centralising services in a small number of “hub towns”, further undermining self-determination and land rights. Now the paternalistic welfare measures will see welfare linked to school attendance, and are being extended to other parts of the country, particularly areas with large migrant and Aboriginal populations.

Meanwhile Black Deaths in Custody also continue, while the Government plans toxic waste dumps and uranium mining on Aboriginal land.

Yet Aboriginal people and supporters continue to struggle. In a few days time, one of the most significant gatherings of Aboriginal People in years will take place at the 40th anniversary of the tent embassy in Canberra - SA members who can make it should attend. Indeed the tent embassy was described internationally as the first Occupy event - now tent protests are occurring globally! The Our Generation film, which outlines the injustice of the intervention, has screened hundreds of times to tens of thousands of people, and is something that SA branches can promote; Aboriginal activists from Muckaty to the Kimberleys have toured Australia and we need to support such tours; and of course we need to be involved in rallies against the Intervention and Deaths in Custody.

Equal marriage rights

One of the largest consistently mobilising campaigns of recent times has been for equal marriage rights, culminating in the December 3 march of 10,000 people to the ALP's National Conference. Years of campaigning, much of which was initiated and pushed by Socialist Alliance comrades, has seen equal marriage opponents flip into becoming supporters, the emergence of a broad and youthful equal marriage movement, and a consistently large majority of the population in support of equality. The development of the movement can be traced in our excellent new Rainbow Liberation pamphlet.

The ALP Conference passed a concession motion, on the one hand adopting marriage equality in the ALP platform, but immediately rendering that position ineffective by allowing a conscience vote, which currently means legislation for equal marriage would fail in parliament.

Yet the change in ALP platform is a victory for the movement - and this year we need to show that the campaign won't stop, and intends to drive home this partial victory with the passing of equal marriage into law. The more conservative sections of the movement are turning towards lobbying of the Coalition to have a conscience vote, but we need to keep a focus on mobilising the majority support for equality. The first step will be when equal marriage campaigners rally in Canberra on February 7, the first day of Federal Parliament, to demand equality.

Coal seam gas and the climate movement

The last year has seen an explosion in the growth of the anti-Coal Seam Gas (CSG) campaign. The Lock the Gate Alliance now groups 133 community organisations fighting CSG, in Queensland, NSW, Victoria and Western Australia.

The breadth of the campaign is impressive, involving country and city, farmers and socialists, celebrities and greenies. In NSW, the entire campaign came behind demands the Socialist Alliance put forward, with more than 20,000 people signing a petition for a Royal Commission into all effects of CSG activity, a moratorium on all CSG activity, and an immediate ban on fracking. These demands, which effectively would halt CSG completely, have been broad enough to enable the biggest mobilisations possible. Tens of thousands have rallied, with Illawarra holding the 2 largest environment rallies ever in that area. Small towns have had protests involving almost the entire community.

As the movement grows and broadens, governments are on the back foot on CSG. In Queensland the Bligh Government banned CSG activity within 2km of housing; in NSW the O'Farrell Government submitted to pressure by putting a temporary moratorium, since extended, on fracking, while the Labor Opposition, having approved many CSG mines, has back flipped in opposition to supporting a CSG moratorium.

However, the hard work of the campaign is ahead. Queensland already has over 1800 CSG wells, more than 4,000 approved, and could have 40,000 wells by 2030. In 2012 the movement will need to grow so strong that allowing CSG will be poison for any government. Socialist Alliance has a vital role to play in building the movement in the cities as well as the country, and organising forces to join farmers on the blockades.

The campaign also has an important role to play in inspiring the broader climate movement, as the global climate change emergency reaches critical “tipping points”. The narrow debate around the Gillard Government's carbon pricing plan disoriented the climate movement. However, many of the tens of thousands who are coming out against CSG see the need for a rapid transition to real climate solutions, especially mass investment in renewable energy.

On April 28 and 29 the next Climate Summit will be held in Western Sydney - a good opportunity to bring the CSG campaign and the broader climate movement strategies together.

Another environment challenge for 2012 will be taking on the ALP's recent decision to authorise uranium sales to India, further putting profit before the planet.

The Greens and left unity

The Perspectives Resolution (Part 3, b) notes that: The increasing gap between the expectations of working people and the real action delivered by Labor governments continues to open political space to Labour's left. The Socialist Alliance recognises that the largest part of the electoral space to the left of Labor is being filled by the Greens.

The electoral rise of the Greens continues unabated, as anger grows at the bipartisan conservatism of Labor and the Coalition. The Greens are polling 13% nationally, and now have more elected federal, state and council representatives than ever, a situation the Socialist Alliance welcomes as encouraging for the left as a whole.

But with the rise of the Greens come greater pressures for them. In the face of growing corporate attacks, will the Greens stay true to their progressive principles, or adapt to the more 'acceptable' role demanded from the establishment?

The Resolution continues: The Socialist Alliance seeks the greatest possible political collaboration with the Greens, but also understands that it has an important responsibility to present a socialist perspective at elections and to present clear alternative policies.

In Tasmania, the Greens are in formal coalition with Labor, have taken ministerial positions, and have helped administer a government and budget that has cut public sector workers' rights, savaged the state's health services, and attacked the housing department. In NSW, Israel supporters and the media led a vicious campaign against the Greens' Fiona Byrne, for her support as Marrickville mayor for the peaceful Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign targeting Israel's occupation of Palestine. Byrne and other Green BDS supporters also came under attack from more conservative Green leaders, including Federal Leader Bob Brown, with the NSW Greens ultimately retreating to a compromise position on BDS.

The challenges for the Greens, and the tensions between left and right Greens, are likely to develop further this year. The Perspectives (Part 3, c) also makes clear that while we seek the strongest “red/green” unity, including the greatest possible collaboration with the Greens, we also recognise the need to keep alive an independent socialist voice and a mass movement, not a narrow parliamentary, approach to politics.

The draft resolution also outlines our ongoing pro-unity approach, seeking to organise a broad socialist party, and trying to work in progressive alliances

A left unity and community democracy project for Socialist Alliance in Illawarra in 2011 was our involvement in Community Voice (CV). This experience, initiated with broad support in various community sectors and bolstered by local activism, particularly the stop CSG campaign, got off to a great start. The open, democratic preselection meeting with over 100 CV members was a real high point.

But despite most Greens members supporting CV, the local Greens branch couldn't find consensus on participating in CV, so pulled out of the process running under their own banner. The "red rev", Gordon Bradbery, also decided he was more electorally viable running alone so pulled out of the process too (he was subsequently elected mayor).

In the context of these departures CV did really well. The campaign's initial momentum meant other candidates adopted parts of CV's platform which has influenced the new council - an example is 'red rev' Mayor's strong opposition to CSG.

Conclusion

The Australian political landscape for 2012 remains heavily dependent on global developments - the ongoing economic and environmental meltdowns, further uprisings in the Middle East, Wikileaks, the Occupy movement, threats to Iran - and our solidarity work with these. In Australia, key campaigns involve moral outrage at clear injustices - refugee treatment, ongoing Aboriginal oppression, and marriage inequality. In terms of community-based campaigns, the movement to stop CSG is a standout for 2012, a broad movement capable of growing into a powerful force for change.

It is impossible to predict the exact breakouts that will occur, just as no one predicted the Occupy movement. But the last year is a clear indication that as capitalism flounders economically, environmentally and socially, existing revolts and campaigns will continue and deepen, and new campaigns emerge at both the global and national levels.

While we will have a separate discussion to focus on SA building work, it is worth underlining the unparralled role of Green Left Weekly, as the Resolution notes (Part 5, g): a broad paper for the socialist and progressive movements. To help strengthen these movements, we need to write for the paper, help distribute it, help fundraise for it.

Finally it is worth making clear that not only do we commit to actively building a wide range of these movements, and involving the largest numbers of people in campaigns for progressive change; but we also need to be raising the need for system change. Winning more people to a broader socialist viewpoint will boost our impact on campaigns, and bring closer a world that puts people and the planet before profits.

Create a change coalition

2012-01-19T08:55:00.000+10:00

By Bozena Sawa, Sydney West

The time of a new election is coming quickly. And what choice do we have? Do we really have a choice? I do not see it.

The two major parties have just minor differences at the edges: that is all. They are not interested in a real change that is needed - the real change that will make our lives just, sustainable and fulfilling.

As Simon Butler said at a forum discussing the carbon tax in Parramatta, “We are heading towards a brick wall at a speed of 100 km/h and the actions taken by the government are like they are saying 'Do not worry, we will lower the speed to 95km/h'.”

We need real change, but how to achieve it?

My proposal is to create a change coalition (or alliance, group whatever you want to call it). This coalition would be formed for just the three-year term (just one term in the government) and of course could be prolonged if agreed by the parties. There could also be some changes in the coalition partners over this time.

The objective would be to implement the required changes, or rather the changes that were agreed on. The coalition would come to the elections with a program it wants to implement. This would be the focus of the government. It is important to agree that the parties in the coalition do not need to agree on all of their policies: but they have to agree on what they want to achieve in the next three years.

After all, real democracy is not about agreeing on everything, but working together for common good - despite differences and embracing the diversity of thought and approaches. We are all one.

Here's an example of how this can work. I witnessed at the Bolivian Climate change and Mother Earth Rights conference while participating in the “Living in Harmony with Nature” workgroup.

It was a workgroup of about 100 people from many different countries and backgrounds (including some business owners). The discussions were heated, but having a common aim (blueprint for a new system that will support living in harmony with nature) we managed to agree on the document. There were many times when the workshop leader had to remind us about our group task: that to live in harmony with Nature we need to start by living in harmony with each other.

How to create such coalition?

First parties, organisations and community groups need to get clear on what is most important to them, what do they believe is the most vital change that's needed. Once their aims are identified, they also need to establish what they want to do about it; what their approach to solving issues is (For instance, if the identified problem is safety, one way of addressing the issue may be through increased police powers. But another way is through improved social services. These are two very different ways of addressing the issue.)

The identified issues would need to be collated to identify the common ones on which the change coalition could be built. (I am not sure the word “coalition” is the best one, but I could not come up with a better one.)

The coalition would agree on the issues and policies to be implemented over the next term, and go to the election with this. The Change Coalition would build on the principle of democracy - which we do not need to agree on everything, to work together on the things we do agree on.

Democracy is the ability to compromise. This does not mean you give up on your principles. It is looking at the greater good - as perceived by most - and also looking at what can be achieved now. This is the most pressing issue for most of us. We need to resolve it and then going back to what else is important to us.

What we do right now matters

2012-01-19T08:52:00.001+10:00

By Jess Moore, Illawarra

Not only are we talking about taking back our government -- taking back a democracy and making it a democracy -- but we're here because we're talking about taking back our humanity. Taking back our humanity, right now here. That's why we're here.
We have a crisis here. But in a crisis there are challenges and opportunities. We're here because we are taking up the challenge and the opportunity…
Let's transform it into what our dear, beloved brother Dr King called “the beloved community”. Let's transform it so people matter more than things. - Danny Glover, speaking at Occupy Oakland

We live in a time of unprecedented inequality and destruction of the environment on which all life depends. It is also a time of extraordinary alienation - for most - from the decisions that affect our lives. In fact, most people can sooner see the end of the world than an alternative system of social organisation.

Yet the organised anti-capitalist movement in Australia is very weak.

This is not going to change simply because things are bad and getting worse. What those of us in the movement do right now - how we develop socialist practice - matters.

I think the Socialist Alliance has taken some positive steps in recent years. In particular, I mean the view to building a pluralist organisation that seeks to unite socialists and influence politics, that finds the way forward in and though the practice of struggle. That said, I think we have - and will always have - work to do on figuring out how to do this to maximum effect.

In this context I want to talk about some very practical lessons I learned in 2011 through positive experiences in the Illawarra. Some were new, and others I was simply reminded of, or came to understand better.

This is also, in part, an argument against routinism and socialist identity politics.

Illawarra branch in 2011

Two campaigns were priorities for Illawarra branch last year: the campaign to stop coal seam gas mining and Community Voice, a left unity and community democracy project that contested the Wollongong local government elections.

Socialist Alliance members initiated, worked with others in the local community and took real responsibility in both of these ambitious campaigns, which involved many new people in activity. They were also effective, shifting policy and deepening democracy in Wollongong and - together with other campaigns to stop CSG across the state - New South Wales.

The content of this prioritisation

To be clear, the branch voted to prioritise these campaigns in terms of our limited resources, necessarily reducing activity in other areas. Moreover, we worked as a team around these goals. We also had a division of labour among active branch members that was real - reflecting people's actual activity and our capacity as a branch, not what we hoped members would do.

In general, we challenged routines as things we simply had to do, instead weighing their value against other possibilities. Importantly, this required deciding what was more and less important. We ditched being part of every left action, event and campaign, in order carry out our priorities well.

This meant we avoided over-projecting, while consolidating our efforts to great effect. I also think the content of this approach recognised that social change is not a program, identity or routine that we simply have to work harder at, but a dynamic process of ideas, application and evaluation at the collective level - a collective that in the Illawarra is much broader than the current membership of the Socialist Alliance.

Furthermore, the impact of both the Stop CSG Illawarra and Community Voice campaigns shows that even a small team can initiate and do a few things well.

This wasn't an organisational fix that meant we didn't have to work hard. In fact, our leadership worked harder. It also wasn't a substitute for making political assessments. After all, if we prioritised the wrong campaigns, no amount of hard work was going to mobilise lots of people. Prioritisation was simply a means to really give these campaigns a go.

Effective campaigns

The aims of Stop CSG Illawarra and Community Voice - stopping coal seam gas mining and deepening community democracy - outlined the basis for involvement in each campaign. In both cases these aims spoke to immediately addressing a problem, while maximising participation. Moreover, the group's organisational approaches flowed from productively involving all who wanted to struggle to win the campaign aims.

Putting the time and energy that was needed to drive these two campaigns forward gave them a chance to be effective. This was vital to their growth, as people are not going to throw themselves into a movement simply because they think the politics are right; it needs to be a good use of their time (i.e. have a chance of winning), and not waste resources on activity that does not further growth in size or influence.

The initial effectiveness of both Stop CSG Illawarra and Community Voice motivated deeper activity from members, as well as broader involvement, growing overall capacity of the campaigns.

Moreover, the effectiveness of these campaigns mark an effective period for the Socialist Alliance. In 2011 the Illawarra branch got good stuff done, working with others to: influence politics; increase political engagement, awareness and activity; and deepen community collaboration and democracy.

The transitional method

2012-01-19T08:00:00.003+10:00

By Pip Hinman, Sydney

The richness of the discussion in Alliance Voices about our work over this last hectic year, and the many thoughtful contributions to the draft resolutions going to conference, should give members some confidence about the projected political perspectives for 2012.

We can be reasonably sure that the political upheaval throughout Middle East and Europe last year will continue to have an impact this year. In addition, the shock waves from the global recession are and will increasingly be felt in this country.

While we cannot predict exactly how the neo-liberal attacks overseas will impact on our class here in Australia, we have to be ready to engage with those who are coming to radical conclusions and are getting active in campaigns to defend and extend our rights.

It is definitely an exciting period to be a socialist today.

I think the conclusions being drawn by comrade Adam Baker are unduly pessimistic. Perhaps that explains why his contributions to this pre-conference discussion have been so persistently negative. Yet, he seems very conflicted: he acknowledges that some good work has been done, but then seems to also say that it's not good enough because it's being done in the framework of the “broad party” - to which he is opposed.

Adam has concluded that Socialist Alliance is not up to the challenge of involving people - in an ongoing way - in an explicitly socialist party: he's criticised SA for “atrophying” cadre; he doesn't believe that SA is introducing its members to, or educating them in, Marxism because SA is not an explicitly Marxist party. He's also criticised Green Left Weekly for its alleged liberalness.

The conclusions Adam has drawn are similar to those of some former members of the Democratic Socialist Perspective who, after three years of not being able to convince that organisation of their views, walked out and set up their own - the Revolutionary Socialist Party.

Adam hasn't provided a single proposal to strengthen the Socialist Alliance - beyond implying that the Democratic Socialist Perspective should withdraw from Socialist Alliance and go back to doing what it was doing before it merged into the Socialist Alliance.

Given Adam's references to Marxism, and his obvious concern for Socialist Alliance's direction, It is disconcerting to read his categorical dismissal of the transitional method - which we are seeking to apply.

Socialist Alliance today is not the same as a few years ago, or even when it was launched in 2001. It's developing its policies organically, involving members from a diverse set of political backgrounds and is taking a lead in some important social movements of the day. Sure, it has its problems - and delegates will discuss a set of proposals to help remedy some of these at the 8th national conference conference.

But the reality is that Socialist Alliance today involves many more socialist and Marxist activists than those who came in from the former DSP, and it's richer as a result.

SA includes leaders of social movements - including from the union movement - and some former members of the ALP and the Greens. Importantly too, a growing number of young people are joining SA - many after having first investigated the political differences among the gamut of far-left parties involved in the Occupy movement.

For left wingers and socialists who understand the need for an anti-capitalist organisation in Australia - not just a radical alternative to the Greens - the small steps Socialist Alliance has made in its 11 years is undeniably a good thing.

In membership terms, SA is the largest of the far-left organisations partly because it is easy to join. Members receive a weekly national newsletter outlining SA's activities, and about half of the membership have a subscription to Green Left Weekly. Members are encouraged to take part in regular branch meetings, work-related meetings, planning meetings, forums, Marxist schools and seminars, and international conferences (with keynote Marxist speakers and others).

Strangely, Adam implies that it's a bad thing for SA to influence social movements that are kicking a few goals today - the campaign to stop coal seam gas mining and for marriage equality. These two campaigns have made progress largely because so many of the activists are keen to deploy the mass action tactic and not rely on purely a lobbyist approach to achieve their aims.

Adam implies that those members who help lead these movements will as a matter of course sell out because they are immersed in campaign groups with non-socialist activists. Of course that could happen, but it's much less likely to if members use the democratic structures the party has to discuss our work and orientation.

Adam comes to the Socialist Alliance from the DSP, as do I. In the struggle to build a broader socialist party with left-ward moving and socialist forces - an orientation the DSP began in the 1980s - we always emphasised content over form, flexibility over rigidity. That DSP tradition held that revolutionaries had a duty to relate to any, and every, working class struggle and to help develop it in a radical direction.

This meant going through the experiences and drawing the conclusions that come when workers realise that reforms alone will never be enough to guarantee real democratic rights and freedoms.

Adam's contributions seem to totally downplay the transitional method. Marx, Engels and Lenin took pains to emphasise that there can be no substitute for the working class going through its own experience of struggle, and in that process learning its own lessons. No amount of program substituted for this experience. The working class would only become a class for itself - i.e. understand and realise its revolutionary potential and then act in its own interests - if and when it had acquired a political consciousness that went beyond immediate struggles.

As an aside, I'm reading Peter Camejo's memoirs (North Star - A Memoir, Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2010) which covers the 60's radicalisation of an entire generation in the US around basic democratic ideas - including for same sex rights and against the Vietnam war. It's a reminder of just how important the transitional approach is. The US Socialist Workers Party at that time, applied this non-sectarian and non-dogmatic approach and, as result, recruited heaps of youth and workers. (Peter, who was a leader of the SWP, later broke with it when it sent off the rails. He remained a socialist, even while joining the US Greens and running for vice-president with Ralph Nader as the Presidential candidate.)

SA's policies - which Adam complains are not revolutionary - are transitional demands. They are aimed at engaging with radicalising, and radical, people around the issues that concern them. They are not the end of the conversation, however, because we don't see the struggle for immediate and democratic demands as ends in themselves. This doesn't mean that they are unimportant in their own right; they are.

Adam's latest contribution displays a slight cynicism that perhaps comes from a certain impatience. We should all be a bit impatient, of course, but to draw the conclusion that SA is not radical or revolutionary or, even, that Marxists within the Socialist Alliance will become reformists simply by virtue of the fact that they in a party with non-Marxists is unscientific, non-Marxist and simply wrong. I hope Adam will allow himself to be convinced that SA is an important part of the class struggle in Australia, and that party building problems can be solved.

Engagement in working class politics and an understanding of how fundamental social change comes about - historically and today - is the only thing that will convince members to stay in the struggle for the long haul. Disengagement is a recipe for demoralisation and cynicism.

Socialist Alliance and organising

2012-01-18T09:12:00.002+10:00

By Ben Petersen, Sydney

It's been really great for me to see some really robust and interesting debate come up in Alliance Voices in the lead up to the Socialist Alliance national conference in January. Good work comrades!

But for me, I think, it would be remiss of us to not have a bit of a discussion of the politics and practice of organising. Organisational questions are something that I think is being discussed nationally (it has been in my experience in the last couple of years organising in Sydney/Perth and is reflected in PCD submissions so far as well). This contribution is not as comprehensive as I first hoped (for I've run out of time) and it leaves out big sections of our organisational practice, such as education, but I hope this can still be a contribution to our organisational practice.

The Socialist Alliance as an organisation has been around about decade, which is a comparatively short time. However, there is an enormous amount of experience that we already have to digest and to synthesise around how we go forward from here. SA has gone through different stages, from an electoral focused alliance of existing socialist groups, to a broader party with tendencies that still organised separately. Now we don't so much have tendencies, and are building SA as a party in its own right (although in a new way). The role of SA and how it has organised has differed and evolved over time, and we need to take stock of that and build on it.

Today we are seeking to build the Socialist Alliance into a campaigning organisation - and this is the road we need to continue down. Without the tendencies and organised affiliates that had previously existed, there aren't existing or outside organisational structures that we can fall back on. Even if we could, it wouldn't be desirable to do so, as SA will need to stand on its own two feet in the tests of the future if we are serious about the party being a vehicle for social change in Australia.

We are trying to do this in a new way. We are not trying to bring people around a narrow program, but build an organisation of activists around the ideals of socialism, and together build a force that is capable of engineering change in Australia.

In doing so, we need to be consciously looking at the way we are organising, and how we are building our organisation. A lot of us come from a political back ground of being in the Democratic Socialist Party, which was nominally a very tight political unit. In the beginning the SA project was a very loose grouping. Neither will fit for our ongoing project today.

Organising

Our organisation naturally flows from our politics. Our political project in Socialist Alliance is very important, and very different to projects of the past.

Socialist Alliance is not an ideologically-bound organisation: we have made a conscious effort to try to make an organisation where political differences can be tolerated, especially if they can be accommodated within our practical work on the ground in movements, unions and communities.

We are attempting to begin to draw the line under the splits and divisions that have haunted the modern left, and provide a home for people who instead of far left polemics, are more interested in building an organisation to fight for an anti-capitalist Australia, and seek to lead those struggles.

In being a broader and more open organisation, we will (and do) attract a wide range of people, from workers, students, unionists, unemployed inner-city latte sippers and suburban mums. This diversity cannot and will not be easy to bring under the umbrella of one organisation.

A healthy branch in SA is thus unlikely to fit to a formula. There will be movement/union fractions and branch meetings. There may be local committees etc. The challenge will be to make use of all the people we do have around, and get their input into our politics. We can't limit ourselves ourselves to certain campuses, or move comrades around to fit our political projections as much as we did in the past.

Instead, the challenge will be to engage with all those willing in the best ways we can. Here are some ideas about how best to achieve this:

Meetings

Meetings of members need to be the basic unit of our organisational structure.

Meetings need to be accessible, at a time and place convenient to members, but also with content that's relevant, engaging and understandable.

Meeting content should include something educational (possibly on a topical political issue, but not necessarily).

Importantly, branch meetings should discuss and guide the political work of the branch. Issues that we are working on should be discussed by the membership wherever possible, and should use that input to set our tasks and perspectives. Organisers and fractions should report in (where possible) to get input from others in the branch. People should come away from a branch meeting feeling like they've had input and have ownership over our political work.

A big problem for SA today is engaging with members who can't make it to branch meetings. We should still try and engage these members. We need to try and find ways to involve these people in our political project.

What other ways can we engage this broader membership? Can we make better use of fractions for people? Could we organise a suburban/local committee to involve people that can't easily make the branch meetings? Can we make skype available for meetings (although this could be a dangerous game)? Can we make better use of branch newsletters? Could more regular branch conferences be held? Can your branch circulate minutes via email, or encourage members who can't easily make meetings to submit motions or written reports in advance?

Caucus/fractions/working groups

A caucus, fractions, working groups etc are important parts of our political work and organisation. Bringing comrades together who share areas of work (such as union work, environmental or anti-war). Caucusing strengthens our organisation and our members in several ways. It allows us to bring together everyone's experience and ideas, and to co-ordinate our response to debates in a movement. It also allows us to make sure that we are all aware of things that may become an issue in a meeting or a group, or that we are all conscious of ensuring that certain concrete proposals get through or get discussed.

This doesn't mean that we try to stitch up meetings before they happen. We don't seek to artificially lay out a line and tie our members to that position it in a meeting. We rightly disagree with other groups that caucus to an extreme, and it looks horrible when people from a group get up, use the same sound grabs, and vote en block at the beck and call of a “leader”.

If we over caucus, it can be alienating for independents (and potential recruits) if the decisions for a meeting is all figured out before hand, and thus limits their input.

What we seek to do is make sure all our members are informed of what we are doing. If we are all informed and have heard people's ideas for taking the movement forward, then in general we will come to an agreement. If we keep our members informed that give them the ability to engage in the debate as it evolves, not need to take the lead from another individual.

When our caucus is about sharing information to work out a common approach on those areas it is useful to do so, we give our members the tools they need to engage with and build a movement and our organisation.

Involving our membership

We are only as strong as our membership, and everything we do we should be geared towards involving our membership as much as possible. It is important that this isn't done in tokenistic ways, but involve our members in real ways where they have input into not just our activities but setting our political direction.

In organising and involving people, we cannot be proscriptive. There is not a one size fits all policy for involving people. We will be joining different people, with different levels of political experience and understanding, different constraints and limitations on their time. We need to be conscious of this and tailor our involvement for people to suit them, so as we get the most out of the members of our organisation, and they get the most out of us.

A really good example of finding ways to fit our organisation to our people was the Socialist Parents group that Perth branch was experimenting with when I was in WA. Comrades with small children, for obvious reasons, have real limitations to what they can make it too and the ways they can be involved, branch meetings at night are a difficult for those with kids to regularly attend. A parents group was a really good way of engaging some of our members and periphery in a regular political discussion, and we were able to involve more people as a result.

What we need to be doing is adjusting our organising to our people where they are at. Some people we join will be able to immediately fall into organising roles, but the overwhelming majority won't (even if they would like too, people need to be trained up into these roles - no one is born a bolshie). Sometimes, particularly in branches in big cities where we are under enormous pressure to cover events and relate to everything, we can slip into a mechanical form of organising where we overload and overwhelm new keen members, and end up losing them when the pressure becomes too much.

We can't continue to do this. It is infinitely more important to train and educate someone properly, and give them the skills to become a free thinking and lifelong revolutionary then it is to hit the special spot for the paper.

Role of organisers

The role of the organiser thus is to facilitate the many threads and facets of our organisation.

An organiser must of course be pretty politically cluey, and be informed of various happenings in politics locally/nationally/internationally, but the organisers' role is not to provide the political line or do the thinking through for a branch. Of course an organiser as a full time revolutionary has more time to devote to thinking through these questions, and plays an important role in helping inform a branch with all the information needed to make a call on where the branch should prioritise.

As much as possible, we should seek to involve as many members as possible in setting our political task and directions. If we are not doing so, we are robbing ourselves of further input which strengthens our political positions.

If we are not engaging our broader membership within a branch in meaningful ways, then this can have real negative consequences for a branch. As well as leading to weaker politics, this can undermine the activist culture in a branch, as people are less likely to be involved in projects that they don't feel consulted on or don't feel ownership over them. If an organiser takes too much initiative under their own authority, this robs branch meetings of a decision-making function. This can take the life out of meetings which makes for less engaging meetings.

Where possible it might be worth looking into having organisers reports occasionally at branch meetings - or specifically electing our organisers as part of our branch committee elections.

Youth organising

Youth work is a very important part of our political work in Socialist Alliance. Especially now with the proposed changes to streamline some organisational overlap between Resistance and Socialist Alliance, we have to be consciously thinking through how it is we are organising young people.

In this new organisational reality we will need to be even more vigilant in the way we organise youth, and specifically in making sure we create and foster independent spaces for young people to be organising within our organisation.

We need to create spaces where young people have the opportunity to take initiatives and engage in revolutionary politics in a real sense. This is change depending on branch, in some places Resistance will be able to constitute separate meetings and educationals, and might take responsibility for an area of movement work. In other places, Resistance members might meet as part of SA meetings, and take responsibility for a specific task in the branch - say film screenings or organising a fund raiser. (Being frank, and saying this in a comradely way, there can be a tendency from some of our older members to override ideas by Resistance members or to give them tasks that are menial and limiting and don't give much space for people to engage politically.)

Youth members will welcome and benefit from the experience of older comrades, but we have to be conscious of the way that we offer that advice. We need to make sure that we are giving youth members tasks that give them the space to be able to creatively engage with politics and be learning their own lessons in collaboration with comrades.

If you disagree with a decision that a younger comrade has come too, maybe ask them how they came to that decision. That way you'll understand what their thinking, and then you can help feed in ideas in a more informed way. Inform comrades of things you've experienced, and let them weigh it up. Don't just try and override young comrades - even if you think your idea is better. Be prepared to let Resistance members make their own minds and take their own initiatives, even when it differs from your own ideas, unless it's something of critical importance, or could have serious negative consequences.

Theory and reality

A lot of what has been said here won't be new, and be things that a lot of people would in theory agree with. I would like to say however that it is important that we are actually practising what we preach. It is imperative that organisers are constantly assessing themselves, and the organising team around the branch, to look for ways in which we can make ourselves stronger. Likewise branch members should make sure they are trying to be involved in the life of the branch if they can.

We all have the privilege of being part of this organisation, but it comes with the responsibility to make sure that it is the best that it can be.

Proposal for an annual socialist summer school

2012-01-18T09:07:00.001+10:00

By Nick Fredman, Melbourne

I have read the discussion on the general direction and nature of Socialist Alliance with interest. While I have not had time to study all the contributions and or to make a detailed response, some general thoughts will serve as a background to this proposal.

Comrade Adam Baker makes some serious charges about the organization. I think I understand his concerns and think they relate to issues which need to be taken and responded to seriously even if Adam is not correct in his analysis or prescriptions.

Many of us involved in the DSP for some time before its merger into Socialist Alliance, apart from accepting that the DSP had the best politics on offer in the crowded socialist marketplace, strongly valued the sense of unity and purpose, the esprit de corps, the remarkable organisational firepower for such a small group. This was so even when we called for and strove for a party on a broader basis than the detailed program that the DSP held, with its strictures on historical and theoretical questions and all the rest. We correctly saw that a larger organisation would inevitably be a broader basis, but also that unity would have to start somewhere rather than expecting an instant mass party. We also recognised that any such broader organisation would have different methods and “norms” than a tight-knit revolutionary group build on a very specific model, as such a model, as well as a very detailed program, is a barrier to the involvement of many.

Given all that it's right then to question and objectively assess whether in the merger some of the positive features of the DSP might be lost or diluted, whatever the advantages of the merger.

Given my level of participation in recent years I'm not in a good position to definitively judge this, particularly on a national level. I've noted, been at and occasionally played a modest role in a number of good successes nationally and here in Melbourne, however better organised things might have been, and I agree with other comrades who have noted that Adam's criticisms seem on the whole highly extravagant and based on very flimsy evidence.

However, the rational kernel in Adam's arguments is that, as I gather from my impression and from contributions here, Socialist Alliance could do with more coherence and more attention to the recruitment and training of activists. In this regard the Towards a Socialist Australia document and the discussion around it seems very timely, and Adam and other comrades of similar mind might do better making concrete suggestions for a better overall platform and specific proposals for action for the organisation.

In regard to the document itself I think it strikes a good balance between broadness and a coherent framework clearly informed by Marxism, as in my opinion the only coherent alternative to social democracy in the workers' movement, and a revolutionary perspective -- and calling for a new social system to be won by class struggle means is the meaningful content of a revolutionary perspective.

In my opinion, by the way, it wouldn't hurt to explicitly call ourselves revolutionaries (are there any current members or those who we want to attract who don't want to\p be revolutionaries) and, if asked, I think we should respond by saying we are and explain what that means as outlined in this document. I think this would be a good thing in attracting people inspired by for example explicitly revolutionary movements in Latin America and the Arab world. But as, for example, Hillary Clinton has been effusive in support of the “Egyptian revolution”, a coherent revolutionary perspective is more important than explicit written adherence to any particular word.

Another area I think is important in terms of coherence and the recruitment and training of activists is in education in, discussion of and debate around Marxist and socialist ideas. I think there has been a number of good events and conferences of varied forms in recent years, but given our great needs and limited resources we might want to think of cohering our efforts and perhaps creating a new and much-needed institution on the left by organising a regular educational and discussion conference at the same time each year.

I agree with Chris Slee's summary of the strengths and weaknesses of Socialist Alternative. While comrades in this group and the International Socialist tradition from which it sprang have a tendency to simplification and schematic thinking and practice (leaving aside sectarianism), their Marxism conferences appears to have become a useful institution for the left. Barring unity with them in the foreseeable future, I think both us and the broader movement would benefit from our forging of a better institution, better because of our generally better politics and specifically because of our long-standing and serious engagement with environment questions which SAlt quite outrageously abstain from.

This could help serve the needs that both we and the broader movement have for serious ongoing education, discussion and debate. It could also efficiently serve our needs for annual or bi-annual broad national meetings by tacking on a day or more of decision making conference as necessary after two or three days of more public and discussion-oriented sessions.

I think something of an annual formula, without being too formulaic, could serve our needs perhaps better than the “big bang” conferences every two or more years, which have been excellent but perhaps fail to maintain momentum after a big effort and perhaps involve some wheel-reinvention each time. An annual conference should I think aim to have a few “big names” and international guests and a good range of speakers from among ourselves and others from across the left, without needed to cover all bases as some things could wait until the following year. As just one of the uses of such a conference series, those in the academic game such as myself should see this as a opportunity to better cohere the scattered forces of Marxism and socialism operating in this arena.

The “socialist summer school” tag seems good as, I understand, a previous institution of the Communist Party of Australia, and as a proposal to Socialist Alliance by the DSP in 2003 which unfortunately wasn't followed through, as other proposals at the time such as a general book on socialism weren't.

Of course it needn't be in summer, but time slots are difficult, and one of the better one, Easter, would mean going head-to-head with SAlt's Marxism, which I don't think is generally the best thing to do (we should aim to attend it in a comradely spirit, for one thing). Apart from the pleasing alliteration of the name and its history, January, when educational institutional are mostly closed and many workers find it easier to take holidays, is probably best.

So I propose that the incoming national executive makes a serious examination of the possibility of holding a Socialist Summer School in January 2013 as the next major focus for our educational, discussion and outreach work, with a view to this becoming an annual event.

Proposed amendment to Towards a Socialist Australia : Disability and Poverty

2012-01-18T08:59:00.001+10:00

By Janet Parker, Walyalup/Fremantle

Under the subhead, “Economic Crisis Already Here - with worse to come” add the sentence in bold.

The richest 20% of the population now own 61% of total household wealth, while the poorest 20% own just 1%. Two million people live in poverty, and at least 100,000 are homeless on any given night. Public health care is under-funded, and quality education is increasingly for children whose parents can pay. Pensions and unemployment benefits are far below poverty levels. Australians living with disability have the worst quality of life in the developed world with one in two living in poverty.

The rationale for this is as follows:

A report issued by Price Waterhouse Coopers in November 2011 indicated that out of 27 OECD countries, Australia ranked last with people with disability 2.7 times more at risk of poverty.

On employment opportunities for people with disability, Australia listed 21 of 29 OECD countries in that category. The current employment rate of people with disabilities sits at 39.8% as compared with 79.4% for those without a disability - and those figures would dramatically understate the real weight of the problem as many of those in receipt of a Disability Support Pension are not formally registered as job seekers.

I think Socialist Alliance needs to name this outrage, scandalise and politicise it! We need to raise disability rights in a way we've not before and, over the coming months and years, insert ourselves in the debate around the National Disability Insurance Scheme and champion the rights of this sector that goes largely unrecognised.

Over recent years, there has been criticism from some quarters that Socialist Alliance does not take up this question. I think it's time we name it in our formal political resolution and seek to support and be part of campaigns by disability rights activists.

The development of cadre

2012-01-18T08:54:00.001+10:00

By Patrick Harrison, Sydney

There are many factors which determine whether a revolutionary organisation will grow and build cadre. In my mind, the biggest one is whether the party's ideas and theories about how the working class should go about exercising our collective power to challenge and ultimately overthrow the domination of capital have been concretely tested in practice.

As such, I find it perplexing that Adam Baker has written a contribution to Alliance Voices questioning the growing role Socialist Alliance activists are playing in social movements at a time when those movements have begun to, or are on the verge of, winning major victories through mass action.

Adam wrote: “Anyone can participate in building campaigns, and anyone can lead campaigns, irrespective of what politics you have. A socialist building a campaign, however, also seeks to link the campaign to other aspects of capitalist injustice, seeks to join others in that campaign to a socialist party, seeks to win people to socialist (and therefore Marxist) ideology. Socialist Alliance campaign builders, on the other hand, are not permitted to do this, because to do so would undermine the broad party project.”

The point that Adam misses here is that not anyone can lead campaigns to victory.

Activists with a parliamentary-organisational method, such as those affiliated to the Greens or ALP, identified by Adam, will struggle to win any real victories for social movements, as they either don't identify or deliberately wish to obscure the hollow nature of “democracy” under capitalism.

This has been demonstrably true in the case of the climate movement, for example, in which radical voices arguing for real solutions including ourselves, and others, have been sidelined by such elements, the result being the ALP-Greens carbon trading scheme which doesn't even satisfy the basic demand of climate activists to reduce real emissions.

Why is it important for social movements to win? It's not just about these campaigns winning for their own sake, because we believe in the morality of the cause. It's actually about breaking the decades-old lethargy of the working classes in Australia, where mass movements have occasionally sprung to the surface, but none have delivered real lasting victories.

As was the case in the 1960s when victories for the civil rights movement in the US and the Indigenous rights movement in Australia inspired millions of workers and students to mobilise, a strong victory for a social movement on the basis of a mass action-oriented campaign would be of benefit to the class struggle in Australia as a whole, regardless of the fact that future capitalist parliaments and corporations would inevitably attempt to undermine or repeal such victories.

It is hardly arguable that “if equal marriage rights were attained, the movement would wind up and activists could go home”. This is blindly ignoring the real history of working class struggle in Australia and similar Western imperialist nations of the last 100 years, against the spirit of Marxist thought which is always open-minded and grounded in real observations.

Despite Adam's assertions, the fact that several of our leading comrades have been throwing themselves into the struggle and playing leading roles in the social movements of today is an affirmation of our revolutionary politics.

I will admit that party-building activities do come under pressure in branches where many activists are playing leading roles in such campaigns. But in my experience as a Socialist Alliance activist none of the comrades named by Adam have lost their commitment to party-building, or their willingness to engage in such tasks.

In no way does the organisational method or tactics used by Socialist Alliance activists in our involvement in movements “not permit” us to win people to Marxist ideology or seek to join them to our party. I can think of no evidence which possibly substantiates Adam's argument that Socialist Alliance's practices are not informed by Marxism, and I myself have never experienced any patronising comments or hostility when in meetings or on email lists for identifying as a Marxist. However, I have when expressing an opinion on political disagreements within the party, namely about the Libyan uprising.

Adam wrote: “Here we have one of the most senior members within the leadership of SA, openly describing an ultra-violent coup, composed of the most right wing forces within Libya, including pro-Western monarchists, the most reactionary of Islamic fundamentalists, US flag waving pro-imperialists and more, as a 'democracy movement' !! It beggars belief.”

Adam's assertion that because Chris Williams identified the movement for democracy in Libya as what it is, he no longer has Marxist credentials is seriously lacking in veracity.

A spanner is thrown into the works of Adam's argument that the movement against Colonel Gadaffi is not worth defending due to the fact that it has delivered to power a coalition of conservative pro-capitalist forces. When one looks to what is actually happening in Libya post-Gadaffi, and one can see that, despite the inevitable opening up of the oil market to the same partners Gadaffi was trading with, the democracy movement has continued, with ongoing protests in Benghazi demanding transparency and reforms to address inequality from the Transitional National Council (TNC).

Indeed, the “left-wing” movements in Tunisia and Egypt that Adam identified in his contribution to Alliance Voices as being ones that we should support have brought to power, through capitalist elections, some of the most socially conservative forces in Tunisia and Egypt's histories - Islamist governments in both countries.

Does this mean we should show no solidarity to the revolutionaries of those countries, who are now struggling to convince the massive layers of society which supported them in the struggles against Ben Ali and Mubarak that the Islamists represent the same injustice and indignity? Of course not. Yet the principle of showing solidarity to social movements struggling against imperialism doesn't seem to apply in Libya.

The thing that determines whether a party can build up a cadre of professional revolutionaries, or the measure of those cadre's revolutionary credentials, is not the amount that they can quote Lenin or James Cannon or other revolutionary Marxist thinkers. It's how well they've understood the lessons learned by those who have come before us, and can apply them to the struggle ahead of us.

With the watershed year of global revolt that we have just gone through, it's time for the working class in Australia to start putting some real runs on the board, and Socialist Alliance activists and the party as a whole should be doing everything we can to ensure the success of these struggles.

Atlargeness: transitional engineering

2012-01-18T08:39:00.006+10:00

By Dave Riley, Brisbane

Previously I tried to outline a conundrum of our existence. I called it “atlargeness” because our activity is ruled by branch life, and those members who may not be branch engaged are not being organised so well by the party.

I cannot claim to have any solutions but I’d nonetheless like to raise some ideas that could be considered to format our thinking on the subject.

Branch burden

Newslettering

Let’s assume that all branches actively relate to and liaise with their members, contacts and periphery. Weakness there surely are but I think we should try not to require branches do more than they currently do.

However, I think branches could be more organised in how they communicate with their milieu and the option of generating a regular locality newsletter - similar and supplementary to the national SA newsletter - makes a lot of reach out sense.

Being rained upon by ad hoc emails or phoned up out of the blue is not the same as a planned and routine engagement that, I should add, is more than a calendar of events.

The easiest way to engineer a newsletter is to post your news and calendar items to a blog and link back to the successive posts in the one email.

What I appreciate about generating newsletters is that everyone can be on the same page regardless of where they are located or what level of contact they may have with one another.

The act of creating the newsletter is a collective process of organising, planning activities, and arranging information while forcing the generators to look outward and project to an audience that they may not so often see.

Membership renewals

At the moment we rely on branches to chase membership renewals across each state.

We know that members will renew if asked, as most have no desire to stop being SA members.

I cannot see why we cannot encourage annual automatic deductions for membership fees.

Better still, why can’t we encourage members to pledge a regular deduction throughout each year to cover both their dues and an ongoing financial commitment to the work of the Alliance. If I can pledge x dollars per month to support the party’s work and know that my dues will also be taken out of that, I’m sweet, the party gets more money regularly and there are no administrative complications or phone ring-around hassles falling on the branch.

Member engagement

Online options

I don’t want to address the role of Green Left Weekly- along with stalls and standalone newspaper stumps -- as a collective organiser for the Alliance because I think we recognise that. But GLW has a major limitation: it’s not necessarily a two-way street.

The SA (and GLW) has tried to address this by establishing a series of online forums and any post on the national web site is now open for contributed comment.

While I don’t know of any other party that does that, comment, like so much of online chat, can often lead nowhere special.

Unfortunately, when we set up a succession of open campaign egroups we later shot ourselves in the foot and made them private. Maybe this was necessary to protect the confidentiality of some tactical discussions, but the consequence has been that these egroups are no longer accessible to the unsubscribed membership as their content and internal life are closed to scrutiny.

I don’t think they should necessarily be made public again because they may still serve an ongoing campaign function, but as a means to engage with at large members they are blunted instruments.

I think we need to reconsider these forums and my preference is that we explore other options in order to sponsor some ongoing online engagement.

Alliance Voices

One option we could consider is to make more use of Alliance Voices as an organising tool swapping experiences and requesting advice/support. We can also open AV articles up to moderated online commentary ( or selectively open AV articles as that also is an option) or set up and run a supplementary moderated online forum geared to membership issues. I prefer the first option because it leads discussion by offering something specific and managed - in the form of a contributed article - whereas online forums can lead to chat all over the place.

We will not be able to rule on who is and who is not a SA member but we will be able to format the content of the discussions. So in matters of security, libel, trolling, flaming, directing focus, etc we would be in editorial control especially as modern discussion moderating apps are very easily customised.

Atlargers organising atlargers

When I went over my experience with local community groups, drawing in and harnessing the labour and talents of volunteers, it struck me that we tend to insist on full on multi- skilling based only at the party office - the local or state’s Activist Centre.

If you cannot be branch life active it doesn’t follow that you cannot contribute to the work of the Socialist Alliance. From resourcing other members’ ongoing political needs, following up membership inquiries and ringing around for membership renewals I suspect there is a plethora of tasks that could be done no matter where those tasks are generated from.

Telemarketing today is often based offshore and the web is not region confined.

In fact, we could assign atlargers to deal with some of the administrative tasks we are often so weak at performing - and we could do that nationally rather than look to the branches themselves to do it.

Member resourcing

Online education

Despite all the resources we invest in education in the party we suffer from the handicap that formal education is so often enclosed, event specific and seems sentenced to hard copy. At a time when even university degrees can be had via cyber space isn't it about time we caught up and placed educational resources, text excerpts, syllabi, class guides, etc online so that any member can access them as an educational resource?

Tool boxing

Much as the national web site is easy to navigate and is user friendly; and much as Green Left Weekly has labelling (albeit shallow) of content, it is only in the pages of Links that there has been a conscious effort to pull together resources and package them.

What we lack in terms of servicing all members - not just atlargers - are aggregations of resources for ongoing campaigns. What I’m talking about is not only articles, commentaries and reports but also the placards, posters, flyers and the like that are generated by localities and not normally shared.

If I’m, say, in regional NSW and I’m keen to take on Santos over CSG, if I can rely on reserve of resources to help do that I’m going to value and depend on my association with the Socialist Alliance.

Where we could host these resources is a moot point. But it seems to me that we could straightaway aggregate resource listings/references, videos and upload (and link back to) useful files (such as placards) for such key areas as the Northern Territory Intervention, coal seam gas and electioneering.

What I’m arguing for are packages of information and resources that can act as campaign tool boxes.

What you have when you don’t have a branch

In my earlier contribution I discussed branch building.

Our formal approach unfortunately presumes that branches have an on/off switch: there is either a branch in a locale or there is not. Inside a branch you are supposedly organised.

Without being in one you’re not.

While this may seem a crude assessment I think it is nonetheless the approach that rules us.

The corollary is unfortunate: if you don’t plan to form a SA branch as an ASAP event – what’s the point of organising anything in the name of the Alliance?

Transitional engineering: twigging

I think we have to consider optional ways and means of engineering activities that may or may not lead to the formation of locality branches. But these need to be activities that have political and ongoing value in their own right.

I was searching my mind for a word to describe what I meant by this and the best I could come up with was twigging - as in tree : branch : twig.

How to twig

Rather than getting all formal about this and seeking to incorporate some constitutional ruling to govern the activity, I’m suggesting that what we say to any atlarge SA member - or any would be atlarge SA member - organise an event as easily as you can and invite your friends and/or local network along.

Hold a BBQ or house party in your own home or a picnic in the local park and draw on Alliance resources - see above - as hardware. Maybe you could invite a SA speaker in from the Big Smoke or show a short video. You could book a room in a local hall if you want - but there are these domestic and casual options that have proven very useful reach out means in other parties (such as the Cottage Lectures run by the Communist Party in the 1950s which I described before) and for other campaigns (such as the Ralph Nader/ Peter Camejo campaigns for US president which relied so much on “house parties”).

This is where backup matters - the sort of resource and hardware “backup” I was referring to above. I’m not calling on already existing branches to service these activities as tends to be where the responsibility falls now.

If folk come together under auspices of events like this they could decide to instigate something or join a local campaign. They could decide to come together again; hold discussions about socialism and the content of GLW or gather on a regular basis. Maybe they just want to come together a few times each year to link up and touch base … or proceed keenly to form a SA branch.

Whatever is decided upon, I think the main game is to resource these activities and not be schematic as to their outcome.

What politics do you do?

Nonetheless, any time you approach the reality of atlargeness the complication will so often arise of once active, what politics do you do?

We may have a national party focused on various key campaigns but it doesn't follow that that attention can be replicated at some distance from the CBD.

In fact when you step away from our spotlighted activities we are very weak. This is often presented as our shallow engagement with “local issues”. I think there may be some truth in that but our problem is a chicken and egg conundrum: to do local you have to be local.

While I don't think it is very useful to assume that all our activities must come from the same song sheet, I think there is a lot to be said for prioritizing x number of key campaigns that at-large members can cherry pick from and adapt locally. While I talked about resourcing these (see above) I think we should also invest in a few core bread-and-butter issues that may have broad resonance.

While these may vary from state to state, issues that come to mind are public housing, health services, education and transport; electricity and water charges (as they relate to neo- liberalism and privatisation).

Conclusion

I guess that the main challenge has to be about rethinking our approach to branch building, making it more nuanced and maybe learning to experiment. We have to turn outwards more by developing some flexible transitional engineering protocols and a greater accessibility.

Our habit of thinking small and being enclosed by the myopia that breeds, has to consider the prospect of what if we were a party of 3000 plus members: how would we get there and how would we get organised?

Our work in Left Unity

2012-01-17T22:05:00.002+10:00

By Gemma Weedall, Adelaide

The Left Unity project in South Australia celebrates its first anniversary this month. Over the last year it has been successful in bringing together progressive groups and individuals in Adelaide to campaign around shared goals and strive for increased co-operation and collaboration. Left Unity is a network comprising of groups including Socialist Alliance, Communist Party of Australia, Organise (Anarchist Collective), the Adelaide Anti-Capitalist Forum and the Eco-socialist Convergence, as well as current and ex-members of the Greens and non-aligned individuals.

Throughout 2011, Left Unity initiated successful events including a demonstration against the Defence Industry Expo and a forum with Malalai Joya on 10 years of the Afghanistan invasion. It was involved in a number of progressive campaigns and actions, including solidarity with Ikea workers, opposing the privatisation of TAFE, and an action against Harvey Norman’s support for the logging of old growth forests. It also jointly hosted a number of educational forums on a range of workers’ rights, environment and social justice issues.

An end-of-year review meeting, held in December, reflected a real sense of pride in the project’s demonstration of the ability of the Adelaide Left to work together in a very effective and comradely fashion. Very little real disputes have arisen and there has been a notable absence of damaging sectarianism within the network. I believe this is a strong achievement itself and shows that the we truly are greater than the sum of our parts and stronger united than divided!

At this meeting, the limitations and current weaknesses of the project thus far were also discussed. The main one was the struggle to attract new people to Left activism, and not just those already heavily involved in other groups and campaigns. There was a general feeling that we now need to move to a more structured formation, and to adopt a more strategic approach to growth and campaigning. It was decided we need to develop formal membership process and a structure, institute fund raising on a more serious level to possibly fund a part-time organiser in the mid to long-term future. We will have a strategic planning session in early 2012. Work has already begun on collaboratively developing a charter that outlines the organisation’s aims, membership/supporter structure, meeting procedure and organisational structure.

Left Unity recently passed a motion to support and applaud the Communist Party of Australia running a campaign in the Port Adelaide by-election, and to encourage all Left Unity members to actively support the CPA campaign. Preparations are now underway for door knocking, leafleting and a fund-raising gig as part of the election campaign, with a range of people from Left Unity, including Socialist Alliance comrades, getting actively involved.