Letter to Green Left Weekly editors
Dear GLW editors,
In last weeks ‘Our Common Cause’ column Karl Miller wrote a letter to the ACT Greens congratulating them on behalf of the Socialist Alliance for recently winning four seats in the ACT Legislative Assembly.

The fact that ACT voters are looking beyond the two major capitalist parties and towards a more progressive alternative is indeed a welcome development. However, to “applaud” the Greens decision to support the ALP as the government of the ACT is going too far.

Miller says “An ALP government, with all its faults, makes progressive demands more likely to be won than a Liberal government, even as it reinforces the need to struggle for those demands by actively building community campaigns.”

While it is true that the main game is to struggle and build community campaigns, to say that it is more likely that we can win progressive demands under an ALP government is just wrong. To pose the situation like this incorrectly says to workers that the ALP are better than the Liberals. This seems to be a new position from the Socialist Alliance, when did this change?

There is no evidence to suggest that more progressive demands can be won under an ALP Government. In fact often the ALP has been able to go much further than the Liberals - witness the deregistration of the BLF in the 1980s for example.

In an economic downturn every capitalist government will be forced to make ordinary people pay. The decisive factor when it comes to resisting any attacks and winning ‘progressive demands’ is the preparedness of the working class to struggle, not which capitalist party is in power.

The Labor Party and the pro-Labor trade union leaders are in fact holding back struggle and the building of community campaigns. They tell workers that all we need to do is keep the Liberals out and Labor will save the day. This argument only stifles struggle and disarms the working class. Unfortunately your comments back up this argument and give undue credibility to Labor.

It is the responsibility of socialists to tell the truth. Pretending that Labor is some how a little bit better than the Liberals is not telling the truth and it makes a break from Labor much harder to achieve.

By being soft on Labor and uncritical of the Greens, the Socialist Alliance is only helping to create more confusion amongst a layer of young people and workers who are looking for an alternative to the major capitalist parties.

Comradely
Anthony Main
Socialist Party National Organiser

The article in Green Left Weekly appears online here