revolutionary socialist organisations and individuals, whose political approach has been consistently socialist and Marxist.
The Alliance's founding platform is a series of immediate demands, but the responses it has made to the challenges of national and international politics have only been possible because of a much larger community of programme and outlook than that explicitly expressed in this platform.
If we ask ourselves who are the revolutionary socialists in Australia today?', the answer has to be 'the Socialist Alliance affiliates', but also, of course, organisations like Socialist Alternative and the Socialist Party who still lie outside the Alliance.
This is true, irrespective of the many differences of analysis and tactics that still inevitably prevail among us. This reality
As a result, when people ask us the old question, why can't the together?', are we really sure we can answer them con vincingly? his is not an easy adjustment to make. When we have spent, as so many of us have, decades trying to win people to our particular view of what revolutionary socialist politics should be, then the pressure to regard our differences as still the basic determinant of how we relate to each other remains very strong.
The second conclusion is that the growth potential for the left and socialist movement is not decided by our will or