The Socialist Alliance as parliamentary cretinism

Humphrey McQueen upbraids The Socialist Alliance as parliamentary cretinism in the March 2005 edition of Seeing Red Magazine. In the last Federal election, the Socialist Alliance got 0.12% of the national vote. (So, no communist revolution for a while yet.) Cde McQueen is

...fearful that the flopperoo at the federal polls will produce little more than excuses of the kind that followed the miserable results in earlier campaigns. In short, the danger now is that leaders are setting their faces against learning from our pathetic showing by denying its reality.

The results were very disappointing given that we were all hopeful that the impetus of the creation of the Socialist Alliance would unleash a Socialist upwelling in the population. The painful reality is that we are facing a huge task and the biggest hurdle is ourselves. As Marxists, we are supposed to focus on the objective reality not on the subjective fantasy.

Having polled appallingly in October 2004, the proponents of wasting more resources on electoralism are talking up factionally better results in a couple of Melbourne pocket boroughs. In a ward of Yarra council, the non-Alliance activist Steve Jolly got up on preferences after twelve years committed to local activism, most recently in organising casual workers around Brunswick Street, behind which the Alliance should have put its efforts. ...

Some parts of the Alliance seem to lack the staying power needed to take on the Capitalist state. They want to fly from one crisis to the next without setting down roots. For an activist to remain committed to an area for twelve years would be unthinkable. Maybe they that comrades are interchangable. They seem to forget all activism is based upon personal relationships which are built up over time. Stirrers come and go, but fighters stay on.

Of course, socialists must engage in politics, but our politics is to replace the bourgeois state. Electoral politics is one of the key forms that bourgeois ideologists adopt to deflect attention from the class struggle. ...

As thinkers on the left and the right realise, the governments may change but the international bankers remain in charge. We had the false debate over which political party would ensue lower interest rates. The reality is far different. The Australian economy is integrated into the world economy and our trade deficit and foreign debt means that our interest rates are effected by what happens in the G7 countries, especially the USA. Alan Greenspan has more control over interest rates in Australia than the federal government has.

Countering bourgeois ideology is one of the two key tasks for socialists. Insights into the operation of the state should be one the comparative advantages that the Alliance offers the organised working-class.

We should remember we are just one of the many competing ideas out there on the street, in the workplace, or in the blogosphere. We ask for no special consideration but we should be prepared to struggle for the conciousness of the working people.

Parliamentary cretinism has nothing to do with the mental capacities of its players. Rather, it refers to the way in which electoral politics infect our understanding of power. Parliamentary cretinism manifests itself in an obsession with trivia, the latest news on the hour. Around the broad left this stupefaction is apparent in the obsession with Howard....

We should be setting the agenda instead to reacting to everything that the capitalist propaganda machine throws at us. We are building understanding and relationships.

The alternative is not the mindless militancy of yet another demonstration of 20 people about each new crime in Iraq. Rather, Alliance members should devote themselves to extra-parliamentary politics, giving priority to workplace organisation while battling for position on the ideological front. Both of these efforts will require activists to become fluent about interest rates as about Iraq.

The electoral road is easier than either of these because parliamentary cretinism involves following paths of action laid down by the state appartus. One puts up posters, distributes a manifesto and hands out how-to-vote cards just like any bourgeois party. Mimicking our enemy is easier than working out how to engage in mass activism that is more than symbolic.

In other words, help workers to organise themselves, understand the class nature of the struggles, and advance the democracy of the workers against the tyranny of the bosses.

Updated 4 April for url of article