En Passant

Socialist Alternative has now decided on a name for our new paper: Red Flag. The first issue will go to print on 11 June.

This year Socialist Alternative, having just completed a merger with the Revolutionary Socialist Party, will be marching alongside the Socialist Alliance and others in joint “Fight back” contingents around the country. We invite you to join us as we march together.

Rjurik Davidson explains why he is joining Socialist Alternative. Now that there is an opportunity to build an open, democratic socialist group open to multiple “currents” and capable of having differences without driving out minorities, it is important that I participate. As long as the organisation is open and democratic, as long as a culture of healthy debate can be developed, … differences can be worked out in the context of a united organisation. It is our responsibility to make that happen.

The ideas set out in the Communist Manifesto can still help us make sense of this world. That’s why it is worth reading it today. But we need to do more than just read. The task remains what it was when the Manifesto was first penned: to fuse the ideas with the real movement, and to be part of the struggle for a classless society that operates according the maxim “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need”.

The Marxism 2013 conference, held in Melbourne over the Easter weekend, was the biggest and the most successful to date write the editors of Socialist Alternative. Some 1,140 people came to participate in debates and discussions and to hear stories of the struggle from Australia and the world.

The true crisis in Labor is not that leadership strife is preventing it from effectively promoting and implementing its policies. It is that these policies run directly counter to the interests of the party’s historic base: the working class, the poor, the dispossessed. Labor is proving is that it is no alternative to the ruling elite, but its willing instrument. This has always been the case. Labor MPs, like all other parliamentarians, serve power, and serve it adamantly. It is just that no one remains in the party to argue against this or to offer a vision of an alternative. This is why Labor’s membership has crumbled. This is why its electoral support is dissipating toward record lows. This is why voters find it harder and harder to distinguish between Labor and Liberal. This is the true crisis for Labor, a crisis that no simple leadership spill will solve.

Once again Gina Rinehart has topped the Forbes billionaires list, with a net worth of $17 billion. It’s been a busy year for her, not only gobbling up media assets but also telling the rest of us how to live our lives and run society writes Katie Wood in Socialist Alternative.

Revolution won’t come about by us wishing and waiting writes Nick Everett in Socialist Alternative in Australia. We need to fight for change. Socialism – a society that organises production to meet human need, not corporate greed – is not only possible, but urgently necessary.

There is an alternative to capitalism’s economic and environmental crises. It is socialism, a society organised democratically to satisfy human need. That can only come about by workers setting up their own democratic institutions to decide what to produce not for a profit but to address our needs as human beings.