Party (DSP), the largest component of the Australian Socialist Alliance, has proposed the party wind up as a public organisation and commit all its resources - its paper, Green Left Weekly, full-time staff and offices - to the development of the Socialist Alliance.
The proposal is currently being debated within the Alliance and will be finalised at the DSP congress in January and the Alliance conference in March. This debate is not without relevance to the situation in Britain.
National Executive Committee member, Dick Nichols, outlines the DSP's thinking. W e believe our proposal
would strengthen Socialist Alliance as a site of left unity and as a stronger voice for socialism. Our experience of working together with other affiliates has reinforced our conviction that the Alliance's political core is an alliance of produces a number of unavoidable conclusions.
Firstly, we all have to revise any view of ! our own organisation as embodying the real revolutionaries'. What was absolute and perhaps justified a separate existence becomes relative, raising the question of whether our separate existence can still be justified.
This truth is well expressed by British the : SWP leader, Alex Callinicos, when he writes: "Rather than simply reiterate old arguments we need to judge, in the light of the demands of a new period, what differences, old and new, really matter
today." ocialist liance
then this very fact reweights our differences NO AILA of interest in socialism and it misunderstands how a program actually functions.
t's certainly true that a lot of disillusioned Labor voters long for a
return to 'true Labor', a return that is generally impossible in a world where capitalist politics are driven by the imperatives of global competitiveness. It follows that the Socialist Alliance should be alert and quick to pick up those planks on the 'old Labor' platform that the Australian Labor Party has abandoned, on the basis that all gains of the welfare state, however minimal, have to
But it does not follow liance Labor'
We are proposing that the Alliance adopt a socialist vision statement' resistance, it also becomes an instrument for creating socialists.
A second fear in circulation about the DSP proposal is that it's a 'DSP takeover'. This is despite the fact that the DSP is a small minority on the Alliance national executive.
This fear is unfounded. If the DSP congress votes for the proposal, one option we are discussing is that we negotiate with the Alliance an agreed form of representation on the Green Left Weekly editorial board, as well as for ways in which Alliance members as a whole might participate in the production and distribution of the paper.
DSP assets like ocialist Resistance centres could
become multi-tendency