Tommy Sheridan, the best-known member of the Scottish Socialist Party, headed one of the chapters in Imagine, the book he co-wrote with Alan McCoombes,"A time to take sides".
In it, he explains: "When resistance ... is divided into different fragments labelled 'animal-rights protest', 'trade-union protest', 'anti-road protest', 'anti-nuclear protest', each can be picked off and defeated, just as the individual strands of a rope can easily be snapped. But when the protests are woven together, like the strands of a rope, they become stronger and less easily broken."
Nothing better sums up what the Socialist Alliance is all about — people coming together for our common cause.
Noam Chomsky has described how, in his travels around the US, he found small groups of people working for the same goal, sometimes separated only by a neighbourhood, who knew nothing about each other.
In his book Understanding Power, he observed, "We're all facing essentially the same fact: there's no structure of popular institutions within which we can work" and "we don't have political parties or media that represent us in any way".
Chomsky feels the numbers are there — "thousands of flowers blooming all over the place". He argued that tremendous diversity is also a strength — "a real way of learning, of learning about yourself, and what you care about, and what you want to do".
But, he writes, we need to organise ourselves. We cannot count on mainstream institutions to help us. "That would be crazy... you cannot expect an institution to say, 'Help me destroy myself,' that's not the way institutions work..."
On the other side, the people with power in our society are very well organised and they are very good at unity and working for common cause — common to a small elite. Anyone who works for a corporation will be well aware of this.
Chomsky says that they are organised, they learn from their mistakes, they have plenty of resources to try out different strategies and they do it better the next time. And they spend a lot of time and effort working to keep people from organising against their interests, convincing us that we don't have a chance.
"Of course they are going to tell us that... As long as power is concentrated, that's what it's going to tell us — 'There's no point in working to help other people, you don't care about them, you're just out for yourself'... There's no point in telling ourselves, 'They're lying to us', over and over again. Of course they are; it's like saying the sun is setting."
Why are we not maximising our energies, our efforts and our resources by uniting in common cause? What are we afraid of? Yes, change can be scary, but of course a great number of changes are taking place at a frightening rate in our society right now.
Our Medicare system is being decimated and education fees are going through the ceiling. People are working harder and longer than their grandparents and so stress — as measured by medical indicators like stroke which will soon be our number one killer — is rising. Even the most casual observer can see that we are trashing our planet at an unsustainable rate. And we are being asked to accept living in a constant state of war and strife.
Do we have to be socialists to unite for strength and common cause? We can always keep the old system clunking along, but that is not the most intelligent thing to do. Sheridan writes, "Genuine socialists will always fight for reforms, for improvements, no matter how modest, in the lives of ordinary people... One thing that differentiates conscious socialism from militant trade unionism, or from radical environmentalism, is that we have a clear goal, a definite destination."
I am reading a recent, lengthy biography of Bertrand Russell and was struck by the fact that Russell and most of the reformers in his circle of friends, 100 years ago, were socialists. Caring for people and for their well-being naturally leads one to embrace an economic system that makes this its focus and to view with suspicion one that champions competition amongst individuals and acquisitiveness in the marketplace. For me, in the Socialist Alliance, the prime focus is the empowerment of people and their personal well-being.
There has never been a better time; the time is now, a time to take sides. If you care, and if you have been "doing what you can" in a small group, consider increasing your effectiveness with no increase in effort by joining in common cause with us, the coalition of the caring, the Socialist Alliance.
Austin Whitten
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, May 26, 2004.
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