Izquierda Marxista

Una dirección política para los movimientos sociales II

Autor: John Percy

Fecha: 28/3/2004

Traductor: Guillermo Crux, especial para PI

Fuente: Socialist Resistance, Gran Bretaña

John Percy (Democratic Socialist Perspective/ Australia)

I want to bring some information on what the left is like in Australia and Asia and what unity developments there have been.

Our current came out of the youth radicalisations and protests against the war in Vietnam. From the 1970s until 1985 we were a section of the Fourth International. But we also wanted to relate to other parties as well as parties coming from a Trotskyist tradition; parties in Latin America and especially parties in Asia.

In the 1980s in Australia we attempted to reach out and unite with other forces – with the Nuclear Disarmament Party which developed after the Hawke government was elected in 1983 and junked lots of its commitments including its policy on uranium mining, and with the Greens in New South Wales. We were also involved in building a trade union alliance against the Labour Party’s Accord, a social contract disastrous for the Australian working class.

We knew that building left unity and broader parties was needed but we didn’t have any real success. Then there was an additional blow with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The traditional left parties were getting weaker and the Labour Party was implementing more and more right wing policies.

In Asia new parties were emerging and some of the old Communist parties were in the process of change. In the early 90s we began assisting emerging revolutionary activists in Indonesia, the people who eventually formed the People’s Democratic Party which is the main left force in Indonesia today.

A different process was happening in the Communist Party in the Philippines. This was a Maoist party, with a lot of members engaged in guerrilla struggle, that a lot of Communist parties in the region looked to for leadership. In the 1990s some of its leaders began developing an anti-Stalinist line. Unfortunately when the party split the anti-Stalinists weren’t able to keep united and it divided on a regional basis into different parties. But recently there has been a partial reunification of some of these forces which have regrouped into the PNP.

We have been trying to collaborate with a broad range of forces internationally, producing a journal called Links which has contributions from comrades in parties in Asia, the Pacific and the Fourth International. We have also organised conferences to bring these people together.

At the end of the 90s there were a number of campaigns that indicated the mass movement was rising again - against racism, in favour of independence for East Timor and against attempts to smash the waterside union. The global justice movement was also developing in Australia and we saw the Scottish Socialist Party emerging.

Another important change was in the International Socialist Organisation (ISO) in Australia which is aligned to the SWP in Britain. They both decided that it was alright to stand in elections, which they hadn’t done for twenty years. So we proposed a Socialist Alliance which would be both an electoral alliance and a campaigning body. Nine groups were part of it, of which we, the Democratic Socialist Party (DSP) were the largest. It was able to attract many of the activists as well as many of the former members of the DSP and other organisations. In two states the leaders of militant trade union currents joined too.

The anti-war demonstrations in Australia were very big. Half a million people marched in Sydney. The DSP and the majority of non-aligned comrades were convinced that we had to push ahead and build a united, multi-tendency socialist party. The ISO felt that it should be a “united front of a special kind”, focus on elections and not become a party.

At the last conference it was agreed that the Socialist Alliance become a broad, multi-tendency party. We are transferring the assets of the DSP over to the Socialist Alliance. The Alliance is now taking more editorial responsibility for Green Left Weekly, which had been the DSP’s paper as well as publishing a monthly magazine. It is also increasingly involved in organising trade union and anti-war work.