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Socialist Alternative (Australia)

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This article is about the activist organisation. For the similarly named political party, see Socialist Alliance (Australia).

Socialist Alternative
Founded1995; 29 years ago (1995)[1]
Split fromInternational Socialist Organisation
HeadquartersMelbourne, Victoria
NewspaperRed Flag
IdeologyTrotskyism
Anti-capitalism
Political positionFar-left
National affiliationVictorian Socialists
(Victorian branch)
International affiliationFourth International (permanent observer status)
Website
www.sa.org.au
Part of a series on
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Australia
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Socialist Alternative (commonly abbreviated as SA or SAlt) is a Trotskyist organisation in Australia. Founded in 1995[1] after its founding members were expelled from the former International Socialist Organisation.[2] The organisation has branches across Australia,[3] their membership operates within the trade union and student union movements, as well as grass roots campaigns.

The party participates within the Victorian Socialists electoral alliance in Victoria. On an international level, the Socialist Alternative is an observer of the Fourth International. They publish a fortnightly newspaper, Red Flag.

History

Socialist Alternative was established in 1995 by ex-members of the former International Socialist Organisation (ISO) in Melbourne. Following debates over the orientation of the ISO to the Australian political situation, the members were expelled for arguing the ISO held "overblown" expectations of the 1990s combined with "a super-inflated estimation" of their own capabilities.[4] This was part of the debate internationally within the International Socialist Tendency over the nature of the contemporary political situation and how socialists should respond, with the leading organisation in the Tendency, the British Socialist Workers Party arguing, the 1990s were like "the 1930s in slow motion".[5] Like in Australia, splits occurred within the IST in other countries, including New Zealand, Greece, Germany, Canada, South Africa and France. In addition to splits, the International Socialist Organization in the United States were expelled from the IST.[6]

Socialist Alternative has links with a number of other groups which were previously part of the IST, such as the ISO in America, the Internationalist Workers' Left in Greece, Socialisme International in France, and both Socialist Aotearoa and the International Socialist Organisation in New Zealand. Since 2013, Socialist Alternative has maintained permanent observer status within the International Committee meeting of the Fourth International, a worldwide organisation of revolutionary Marxists.[7]

Until 2003, Socialist Alternative was based primarily in Melbourne, until the organisation began to establish branches in other Australian cities following a surge of growth out of the S11 protests against the 2000 World Economic Forum meeting in Melbourne. Socialist Alternative now claims to have the largest active membership of any far-left organisation in the country.[8]

Socialist Alternative was invited to join the Socialist Alliance in 2001. The Alliance grouped together the Democratic Socialist Perspective, the ISO, and other Australian far-left groups and individuals. Socialist Alternative eventually declined to join[9] due to the Socialist Alliance's strong emphasis on running in parliamentary elections. This parliamentary emphasis in the flat political climate was seen by Socialist Alternative as a restriction to building activism on the ground and representing a turn towards reformist politics.[10] Socialist Alternative entered into unity discussions with the Revolutionary Socialist Party, who had split from the DSP, in 2012,[11] which prompted the Socialist Alliance to reopen unity discussions with Socialist Alternative.[12]

In March 2013, Socialist Alternative merged with the Revolutionary Socialist Party,[13] a small organisation which were expelled from the Democratic Socialist Perspective in 2008.[14] Notable members of the RSP include Van Thanh Rudd (the nephew of former Labor Party (ALP) Prime Minister Kevin Rudd).[15]

In 2018, the Socialist Alternative Victorian branch helped to establish the Victorian Socialists. Socialist Alternative initially represented the largest grouping within the Victorian Socialists.

Campaigns

Membership routine

Branches

The organisation has branches in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Canberra, Perth and Adelaide.[3] In Melbourne, Socialist Alternative are based at Victorian Trades Hall.[16] Branches hold meetings to discuss current political developments and Marxist history and theory.[17] Socialist Alternative advertise public meetings through leafleting on street stalls, campuses, at demonstrations and through bill posters.[18]

Student activism

Members of Socialist Alternative assisted in the construction of this effigy of former Prime Minister John Howard, made by the Victorian College of the Arts Student Union. The building in the background is RMIT University which was occupied during a demonstration against education cuts in 2005.

Socialist Alternative participates in campus student union elections and in the National Union of Students as a faction, and claims to be the largest to the left of the National Labor Students.[8] They are known for their criticism towards both the Liberal[19] and Labor parties.[20] They have come under attack from a range of factions in student politics, including Liberal students,[21][22] both Left[23] and Right Labor students[24][25][26] and claim to have been slandered by the Australasian Union of Jewish Students, for their strong opposition to the state of Israel.[21][22]

Students and student union activists form a large composition of Socialist Alternative's membership and their political work often emphasises university-based campaigns. According to National Executive member Mick Armstrong, Socialist Alternative's focus on student work is part of a perspective that the organisation has adopted for the political period, due to what they see as their limited size and influence in the working class movement and the lack of any substantial radicalisation in society.[27] Socialist Alternative's political orientation to students mirrors the development of the British Socialist Workers Party during the 1980s.[28]

Socialist Alternative members are active in student unions in universities such as Queensland University, Swinburne University of Technology, La Trobe University, University of Melbourne, RMIT, University of Western Sydney, University of Sydney, Charles Sturt University, Curtin University of Technology, University of New South Wales, and Victorian College of the Arts.[8][29][30] The membership of the organisation also includes secondary school students, active in their schools.[31][32]

Socialist Alternative was deregistered as a club at Monash University in September 2014. Matthew Lesh, Political Affairs Director of the pro-Israel Australasian Union of Jewish Students, claimed that members of the organisation refused entry to a group of Jewish students on the basis of their religion and assumed political beliefs.[33] Socialist Alternative denied this claim,[34] noting that the pro-Palestinian event's main speaker was Jewish, and the particular group of students were denied entry after they had refused to sign a petition condemning Israel's economic blockade of Gaza. Socialist Alternative is threatened with no longer receiving funds from the university and not being able to book university venues.[33]

Trade unionism

Members of Socialist Alternative who are employed are politically active within the trade union appropriate for their industry.[35][36] Socialist Alternative's members are active in trade unions including the National Tertiary Education Union, in which lecturer and Socialist Alternative member Liam Ward was elected to the RMIT University Branch Committee as part of a left-wing oppositional ticket that replaced the previously established union leadership in 2010.[37]

Socialist Alternative reject the practice of forming separate 'red unions' arguing that such projects isolate socialists from the organised working class and are premised on a top-down method of artificially substituting a radical union leadership for the rank and file, instead arguing for activists to rebuild rank and file organisation within existing unions irrespective of their conservative leadership. In 2010, Socialist Alternative member and Queensland Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association delegate Duncan Hart organised supporters of same-sex marriage within the union in a rank and file challenge against the socially conservative SDA leader Joe de Bruyn.[38][39]

Theory

Though one of Socialist Alternative's stated aims is to contribute towards building a revolutionary party that can intervene in – and lead – mass working-class struggles,[40] they do not consider themselves a political party at their current size and influence.[10] Originating in the political tradition of the International Socialist Tendency, Socialist Alternative defend the position that a socialist revolution can only come about through "workers taking control of their workplaces, dismantling existing state institutions (parliaments, courts, the armed forces and police) and replacing them with an entirely new state based on genuinely democratic control by the working class".[40] Describing itself as a "propaganda group" at its current size, Socialist Alternative attempts to relate to its audience primarily on the level of ideas, rather than seeing itself as a party that can be capable of leading mass struggles. While Socialist Alternative supports existing trade unions as essential components of workers' struggles, they believe that capitalism can only be successfully overthrown if a revolutionary party is built to challenge the hold of the ALP and the trade union bureaucracy over the working class, in conjunction with similar parties internationally.[10]

Socialist Alternative has over the years tried to establish unity talks with both Solidarity and its predecessor organisation, the International Socialist Organisation, (the group from which Socialist Alternative's founders were expelled) yet have remained unsuccessful.[8] This could be in part to do with Socialist Alternative's perspective of currently identifying as a propaganda group, which has been controversial within the Australian far left in general.[41][42][43]

In 2012 the Police Federation of Australia demanded that the Victorian Trades Hall Council cancel a Socialist Alternative public forum on "police racism and violence", as Trades Hall was where the meeting was to take place.[44] The Council complied with the Police Federation's request however the meeting went ahead after a number of people turned up for the meeting and occupied the Trades Hall foyer,[45] causing the Police Federation to split from the council.[46]

Socialist Alternative sees the October 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia as a genuine socialist revolution but assert the following "imperialist" attack on the country and the failure of the revolution to spread to Western Europe led to its ultimate defeat by Stalin's "counter-revolution".[47]

Australian parties

Socialist Alternative's red bloc contingent at an anti-WorkChoices demonstration in Melbourne, shortly before the federal election in 2007

SA are hostile to the conservative Liberal Party and are highly critical of the Labor Party (ALP) for its perceived rightward shift and acceptance of neo-liberalism. SA classifies the ALP as a "capitalist workers' party" – seeing it qualitatively different from the Liberal Party due to its organisational relationship with the trade union bureaucracy – that still governs in the interests of the capitalist class. Socialist Alternative are critical of the ALP's Fair Work Australia, which they see as a similar version of the Liberal's WorkChoices, alongside its maintenance of the Australian Building and Construction Commission.

Socialist Alternative moreover hold that the Greens are not a left alternative to Labor, and consider it a middle-class party[48] equally committed to the maintenance of Australian capitalism as the two major parties[49] and accuse them of "populist left nationalism".[50] Socialist Alternative reject reformism outright and defend Rosa Luxemburg's position in her work Social Reform or Revolution that reformism is "not the realisation of socialism, but the reform of capitalism".[51]

Elections

Socialist Alternative maintain the position that parliamentary elections are not the key to social change. However, they do not reject voting in elections outright and see elections reflecting the state of mass political consciousness. Therefore, the organisation promotes who they vote for and who they believe the left should support during election periods, for example calling for the left to unite around SYRIZA in the 2012 Greek legislative election.[52] They have also run members as candidates and supported Stephen Jolly for the Victorian Socialists political party in Victorian elections.[53]

In the 2018 Victorian state and 2019 federal elections Socialist Alternative campaigned alongside the Socialist Alliance to support the newly founded left-wing political party, the Victorian Socialists.[54]

Publications

From 2009 to 2011, members of the organisation edited the annual online theoretical journal, Marxist Interventions (MI).[55] The overall aim of MI was to make Australian Marxist writings more readily accessible to audiences.[56]

In 2010, the organisation launched a biannual theoretical journal, Marxist Left Review, edited by Sandra Bloodworth.[57] The journal aims to "engage with theoretical and political debates on the Australian and international left".[57]

Socialist Alternative also hosts an annual far-left political conference named Marxism, which is the largest conference of its kind in Australia.[58]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b http://www.reasoninrevolt.net.au/biogs/E000506b.htm
  2. ^ What's left of the left soldiers on The Age, 1 May 2002. Retrieved 10 June 2007.
  3. ^ a b Contact Socialist Alternative Socialist Alternative. Retrieved 9 February 2012.
  4. ^ The origins of Socialist Alternative: summing up the debate Marxist Left Review, 2010. Retrieved 28 November 2012.
  5. ^ Statement on Relations Between the SWP (GB) and the ISO (US): Socialist Workers Party Central committee, What Next? Marxist Discussion Journal, No. 19, 2001. Retrieved 18 August 2010.
  6. ^ International Trotskyist Tendencies Marxists Internet Archive. Retrieved 27 November 2008.
  7. ^ International meeting of socialists in Amsterdam Socialist Alternative, 25 March 2013. Retrieved 26 March 2013.
  8. ^ a b c d A defensiveness that hides a bad conscience: A response to Solidarity's slanders Socialist Alternative, 22 July 2010. Retrieved 30 July 2010.
  9. ^ Uniting the Socialist Left: the Australian Experience: An interview with Peter Boyle Socialist Voice, 6 June 2009. Retrieved 8 July 2009.
  10. ^ a b c Is there an easier road? From Little Things Big Things Grow, 14 December 2007. Retrieved 9 February 2012.
  11. ^ Conference votes to push forward with uniting revolutionary left Socialist Alternative, 15 December 2012. Retrieved 15 March 2013.
  12. ^ Australia’s biggest socialist groups begin unity talks Green Left Weekly. 6 November 2012. Retrieved 15 March 2013.
  13. ^ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 30 July 2013. Retrieved 28 July 2013.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  14. ^ Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) launched Archived 4 March 2011 at the Wayback Machine, Revolutionary Socialist Party, 28 May 2008. Accessed: 6 March 2010.
  15. ^ Rudd's nephew fined for 'inciting riot', ABC News, 26 January 2010. Accessed: 8 September 2010.
  16. ^ SA centre, Trades Hall Socialist Alternative. Retrieved 9 February 2012.
  17. ^ Upcoming events Socialist Alternative. Retrieved 22 November 2012.
  18. ^ Leaflet – Explaining the History of a Racist Nation, Socialist Alternative, Aug 2002 Archived 21 September 2013 at the Wayback Machine Museum Victoria. Retrieved 14 April 2012.
  19. ^ Liz Walsh Archived 11 June 2015 at the Wayback Machine George Negus Tonight (transcript), Episode 12 (2), Broadcast 25 September 2003. Retrieved 14 December 2008.
  20. ^ Young Liberals find their campus saviours: the ALP Crikey, 15 September 2009. Retrieved 9 February 2012.
  21. ^ a b An unholy alliance The Age, 4 September 2006. Retrieved 5 December 2008.
  22. ^ a b Critics of Israel are not racists Socialist Alternative, October 2006. Retrieved 9 February 2012.
  23. ^ Left on Left violence: Arab militant student radical fined by Socialist Left comrades for neglecting his job Archived 7 November 2010 at the Wayback Machine Vexnews, 2 April 2009. Retrieved 24 June 2010.
  24. ^ Outlaw flag burning, Anderson urges The Age, 5 November 2002. Retrieved 2 May 2010.
  25. ^ Reckoning for a divided union The Age, 26 July 2003.
  26. ^ Protesting globalisation Archived 13 November 2012 at the Wayback Machine Insiders, 17 November 2002.
  27. ^ The Nature and Tasks of a Socialist Propaganda Group From Little Things Big Things Grow. Retrieved 9 February 2012.
  28. ^ The Respect fiasco in Britain Socialist Alternative, 12 December 2007. Retrieved 9 February 2012.
  29. ^ Save the VCA! Socialist Alternative, 31 May 2009. Retrieved 9 February 2012.
  30. ^ Denying foreign students travel concessions 'racist' The Age, 3 March 2009. Retrieved 1 March 2010.
  31. ^ High school students stand up to homophobe teacher Socialist Alternative, 19 October 2009. Retrieved 9 February 2012.
  32. ^ Gillard challenged by student over school funding Socialist Alternative, 3 September 2012. Retrieved 22 November 2012.
  33. ^ a b Joshua Levi (2 September 2014). "Uni deregisters Socialist group" – The Australian Jewish News. Retrieved 4 September 2014.
  34. ^ Daniel Taylor (13 August 2014)
  35. ^ WA meatworkers' union defends workers from overseas Socialist Alternative, 23 August 2009. Retrieved 9 February 2012.
  36. ^ Geelong council workers show how to fight Socialist Alternative, 19 October 2009. Retrieved 9 February 2012.
  37. ^ RMIT Branch Committee National Tertiary Education Union RMIT Branch. Retrieved 26 December 2010.
  38. ^ Union revolt on same-sex marriage ban The Australian, 9 February 2011. Retrieved 9 February 2012.
  39. ^ "The System Has Failed Retail And Fast Food Workers, Says Coles Fair Work Winner". New Matilda. 18 September 2016. Retrieved 19 February 2020.
  40. ^ a b General principles Socialist Alternative. Retrieved 9 February 2012.
  41. ^ Whither the Propaganda Perspective Solidarity, 30 June 2004. Retrieved 31 July 2010.
  42. ^ "Socialist Alternative gets the balance wrong on propaganda and action" Links – International Journal of Socialist Renewal, 2007. Retrieved 31 July 2010.
  43. ^ "Report of debate between SP and SA" Socialist Party, 30 March 2008. Retrieved 31 July 2010.
  44. ^ Brutal treatment: union split after speakers 'put the boot' into police The Age, 4 July 2012. Retrieved 22 November 2012.
  45. ^ Good riddance: Police Assoc. splits from Trades Hall Socialist Alternative, 3 July 2012. Retrieved 22 November 2012.
  46. ^ Trades Hall ties cut by police association The Age, 45 July 2012. Retrieved 22 November 2012.
  47. ^ Sandra Bloodworth, "How Workers Took Power: The 1917 Russian Revolution", Socialist Alternative, Melbourne, 2008.
  48. ^ The Greens shifting to the right Socialist Alternative, 2 April 2010. Retrieved 9 February 2012.
  49. ^ Right-wing consensus makes for an election about nothing Socialist Alternative, 2 August 2010. Retrieved 9 February 2012.
  50. ^ A Marxist critique of the Australian Greens Marxist Left Review, Spring, 2010. Retrieved 9 November 2010.
  51. ^ Reform or Revolution Marxists Internet Archive, 1900. Retrieved 19 August 2010.
  52. ^ SYRIZA, the elections and class struggle in Greece Socialist Alternative, 28 May 2012. Retrieved 26 September 2012.
  53. ^ [1] Green Left Weekly, 6 February 2018. Retrieved 22 May 2018.
  54. ^ Who are the Victorian Socialists? Red Flag, 5 February 2018. Retrieved 22 May 2018.
  55. ^ "Marxist Interventions". Socialist Alternative. 28 April 2017. Retrieved 3 January 2020.
  56. ^ The case for Marxist interventions Marxist Interventions, 2009. Retrieved 17 November 2010.
  57. ^ a b "About". Marxist Left Review. Retrieved 3 January 2020.
  58. ^ Broad Marxism 2012 conference is a welcome step Green Left Weekly, 14 April 2012. Retrieved 15 April 2012.

External links

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Further reading

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