Left unites to form Socialist Alliance in Australia

By Sean Healy

The Australian left is on a roll. Fresh from the inspiration of S11, when tens of thousands confronted the world’s power brokers at Melbourne’s Crown Casino, and with plans well underway for mass blockades of stock exchanges and financial districts on May 1, eight radical left organisations have united to form the Socialist Alliance, a combined electoral front to contest this year’s federal election.

Meeting in Sydney on February 17, the Democratic Socialist Party (DSP), the International Socialist Organization (ISO), the Freedom Socialist Party, the Workers League, the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq (Australian branch), Workers Power and Workers Liberty agreed to form the alliance. Socialist Democracy has also agreed to join.

Others also are likely to get on board. The Melbourne branch of the Progressive Labor Party has recommended to the rest of the party that it too join the Socialist Alliance, and leading PLP members in Canberra and Sydney have expressed enthusiasm for doing so. The Communist Party (formerly the SPA), Socialist Alternative and the Socialist Party (formerly Militant) are also discussing whether they will join the alliance.

The Socialist Alliance is an unprecedented step forward for the Australian socialist left — and enthusiasm for it is total. “This is a tremendously exciting development,” the International Socialist Organiza-tion’s Ian Rintoul told Green Left Weekly, summing up the mood of all the alliance’s participants. Rintoul argues that the alliance couldn’t come at a better time: “All political indications from the Western Australian and Queensland elections are that the Socialist Alliance will strike a chord with a large number of people.”

The Democratic Socialist Party’s Peter Boyle agrees. “The context for this initiative is the revival of radicalism following Seattle,” he said, referring to the massive protests against the World Trade Organization in the US west-coast city in November 1999, which kicked off the burgeoning anti-corporate movement in the industrialized countries. The Socialist Alliance provides a chance to do more than take advantage of immediate opportunities, though, its participants say: it’s also a chance for the left to find some much-needed common ground and common purpose.

Socialist Democracy’s John Tully told Green Left Weekly, “For longer than any of us care to remember, the left has been split into a plethora of small groups, and it hasn’t been helpful.”

“We can’t keep blaming ‘the objective situation’ for our failure to grow,” he said. “The objective situation surely must favor a genuine alternative to the present system. There is a crying need for an organization that gets stuck in there and attacks everything that is wrong about this system.”

Boyle believes that it is “very significant” that there is a “greater degree of political unity of the forces coming into this alliance” than in some other attempts at left regroupment in the past.

“For a start, these are all radical groups, they all have revolutionary politics as their basic ideas,” he said. “Any differences are specific to how to implement those ideas.”

In contrast, most past attempts to regroup the left have been “based on a liberal, rather than a radical, opening, with unity with left-reformist forces, like the Greens or the old Communist Party,” Boyle argued. “This attempt is very different.”

Boyle also believes that the decision to make the Socialist Alliance a membership organization, rather than just a pact between parties, is an important one. “The decision to make it a membership organization shows an ambition to grow,” Boyle stated.

The next steps for the alliance include discussion of a summary document on its process, structure and politics, and the consolidation of groups in all major cities. The stage will then be set for big public launches of the Socialist Alliance.

The upshot of the Socialist Alliance’s formation is hard to underestimate: the days of a weak, divided, ghettoised left appear to be ending, amid a rise of massive, new protest movements and a new sense that revolutionary socialists can unite to popularize their message and again become an important force in Australian politics.

Source: Green Left Weekly: www.greenleft.org.au

Spaniards protest water project

Madrid, Spain, Mar. 11— More than 100,000 people marched through Madrid on Sunday in the latest of a series of rallies against a $23 billion plan to divert huge amounts of water from Spain’s biggest river to dry areas far to the south.

City police estimated that 120,000 attended the rally, but organizers put the number at 400,000. Many came to the Spanish capital from the northeast Aragon and Catalonia regions, which protesters say stand to lose out most if the eight-year plan goes ahead.

Demonstrators -- some dressed up as droplets of water -- waved red and yellow balloons and played music as they inched their way along broad boulevards and emptied into a downtown plaza.

The Madrid rally was called by a 26 member coalition of ecological groups, farmers’ associations, labor unions and political parties.

The controversial mega-plan calls for building 120 dams to transfer 26 billion gallons of water per year from the Ebro River to the Mediterranean coast areas of Valencia, Almeria and Murcia.

The government says the Ebro has water to spare and the resource must be shared among Spaniards.

Ecologists say the plan is misguided, insisting that water shortages in the south would be better solved by more efficient use of existing resources and other means. They also say the project will cause serious harm to the Ebro by raising salinity levels.

The plan was approved by the Cabinet in February despite warnings from engineers and hydrologists and is now before Parliament.

Source: Associated Press

Brazilian women occupy McDonald’s in anti-globalization protest

Brasilia, Brazil, Mar. 8— Women farmers throughout Brazil demonstrated Thursday on International Women’s Day to protest worldwide economic policies they say are unfair. Some 700 women, members of Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers Movement, occupied a McDonald’s restaurant in Porto Alegre. They burned flags bearing the fast-food chain’s logo, criticized economic globalization and called the Brazilian government a slave to “world neoliberalism.’’

Thursday’s protest was inspired by the anti-globalization efforts of French activist Jose Bove, a sheep farmer who gained fame for ransacking a McDonald’s restaurant in France. Bove was arrested in Brazil last January after he joined the workers movement in a massive protest wherein the activists uprooted acres of genetically modified Monsanto crops. Also on Thursday, some 2,000 women blocked access to a supermarket in Florianopolis, claiming it sold genetically engineered food.

Source: Associated Press

Mayor reverses ban aimed at FTAA protesters

Quebec, Canada, Mar. 7— A bylaw passed by a Quebec City suburb to bar people from concealing their faces with scarves or masks at the Summit of the Americas has been scrapped.

Ste-Foy Mayor Andree Boucher said she “listened to her conscience’’ and decided to respect individual rights and the presumption of innocence.

“Too often in other countries, laws have been abusively applied,’’ she said yesterday.

The bylaw, adopted for the April 20-22 summit in Quebec City, had made it illegal to “wear or have in your possession a mask, hood or ski mask, or any other object of the same nature to cover one’s face, in whole or in part.’’

A civil liberties group had said the bylaw could have given police a reason to detain protesters unnecessarily.

“We agree summit-goers should be able to go about their work peacefully, but people also need to be able to gather freely and express themselves,’’ Andre Paradis, head of Quebec’s Ligue des Droits et Libertes, said recently.

Security will be tight at the summit, where international free trade deals and globalization will be discussed. Five thousand police officers will be on hand for the event.

Source: Toronto Star

Over 400 civilians killed in US- British air strikes against Iraq

Moscow, Russia, Mar. 8— Some 420 civilians were killed and more than a thousand injured by the joint US-British air strikes against Iraq since the first operation in December 1998, the Russian foreign ministry said Wednesday.

In addition, the United States and Britain had stepped up their patrolling of the no-fly zones in Iraq this February, the ministry charged, adding that missiles were launched against civilian targets. “The US-British patrols concentrated their attention on the southern Iraqi provinces, violating Iraqi air space 890 times,” the foreign ministry’s statement said.

Russia was among the staunchest critics of the US-British over-flights, insisting that the no-fly zones were established without UN approval and were illegitimate from the point of view of international law.

Source: Agence France Presse

Euro-court outlaws criticism of EU

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

Brussels, Belgium, Mar. 7— The European Court of Justice ruled yesterday that the European Union (EU) can lawfully suppress political criticism of its institutions and of leading figures, sweeping aside English Common Law and 50 years of European precedents on civil liberties. The EU’s top court found that the European Commission was entitled to fire Bernard Connolly, a British economist dismissed in 1995 for writing a critique of European monetary integration entitled, “The Rotten Heart of Europe.”

The ruling stated that the commission could restrict dissent in order to “protect the rights of others” and punish individuals who “damaged the institution’s image and reputation.” The case has wider implications for free speech that could extend to EU citizens who do not work for the Brussels bureaucracy.

Mr. Connolly, who has been told to pay the European Commission’s legal costs, said the proceedings did not amount to a fair hearing. He said: “We’re back to the Star Chamber and Acts of Attainder: the rights of defendants are not respected or guaranteed in any way; the offense of seditious libel has been resurrected.”

Source: London Telegraph