Raven, Online
Comrade editor,
I am very grateful for John Blackford’s often wry account of the dissolution and reformation of Socialist Alliance, SAlt and associated entities. I have little knowledge of the attempts at left reformulation in the period following the CPA’s self dissolution in ’91, quite clearly with hindsight a significant failure of Marxist thinking, leaving many members to chart a course as independent, unattached but determined vagabond militants. The entire period of attempts to rebuild ended in not much at all. Until now.
The recent success of the Vic Socialists, and that they appeared to me to be pretty much the sort of self-organizing members of the working class I’ve always found both reliable, determined and honourable, prompted me to join the venture into NSW. That it is an idea whose time has come around again coincides with the objective evidence of capitalism’s ecocidal path arriving daily, in the form of weather, is no mere accident of history.
Some observations then. I was struck by Blackford’s noting that the point of differentiation between the two being apparently a matter of Alliance finding SAlt’s electoral focus too restrictive and somehow a limitation of socialist development. My view is that, when everyone is calling for unity, and there can be no grounds for disunity in fighting fascism, you can participate as an anti-fascist and develop into a socialist from any position along the long front of the liberation struggle.
Limiting socialism to electoralism will not build a party on its own. It never does. And Australian socialists are an unruly mob, unlikely to be constrained by such ideas.
Cheers,
Raven
PARTISAN! 