>His [Alex Callinicos's] engagement with contemporary politics came
>down to - Seattle was great, but the kids need a Leninist party. So
>Leninoid seems rather apt, if slightly overdone.
Alex Callinicos would argue for a political party, to be sure, but the sort of party activities that Callinicos and the Socialist Workers Party are involved in are hardly what fits into your idea of a "Leninist party."
Why can't you be as factually accurate as such bourgeois media as BBC?
***** Friday, 25 May, 2001, 09:04 GMT 10:04 UK Socialist Alliance
The Socialist Alliance is a left-wing party which aims to offer a "real alternative to the New Labour-Tory consensus".
It is composed of individual members with no affiliated organisations.
However, there are a number of supporting organisations such as the Socialist Party (formerly Militant), the Socialist Workers Party, the Communist Party of Great Britain, the Alliance for Workers' Liberty, Workers Power, and the International Socialist Group.
The alliance's well-known backers include film director Ken Loach, playwright Harold Pinter and comedian Mark Thomas.
Among the members are former Labour MP Dave Nellist and Liz Davies, who was on Labour's ruling national executive committee from 1998-2000.
It is putting up 92 candidates in England.
Elsewehere in Britain the alliance has sister parties - the Scottish Socialist Party and the Welsh Socialist Alliance.
Main policies
Any candidates who win a seat have pledged to refuse a full MP's salary, taking only the equivalent of the average working wage.
Its policies include:
* Renationalisation of the railways and an end to all privatisation
* An end to hospital closures and use of the private finance initiative
* Restoration of the link between pensions and earnings
* An increase the minimum wage
* Raise taxes on the rich
* End university fees
* Scrap the voucher system for asylum seekers
* Cancel third world debt
* Oppose the World Trade Organisation, the World Bank, and the IMF
The Socialist Alliance proposes to pay for these reforms by taking the wealth that they say is in the hands of a tiny elite and re-distributing it to benefit the great majority. So the SA calls for:
* The abolition of VAT
* A "swingeing tax" on the profits of the oil companies like BP
* An end to arms spending and use the defence budget to rebuild the NHS and other public services
* All of the privatised utilities to be brought back into public ownership
* Nationalisation of banks and major financial institutions
Struggle
The alliance was formed in a bid to boost support across the board for socialists.
The alliance says that it aims to draw in thousands of activists "who have revolutionary socialist ideas but will not at present accept affiliation to any of the groups".
In doing so, it would have "a whole much more than the sum of its parts".
The alliance plans to campaign, not just in elections, but in "every big struggle" be it in the workplace or on housing estates.
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/vote2001/hi/english/parties/newsid_1179000/1179195.stm> *****
A quite sensible endeavor, actually, in the face of thoroughly neoliberal New Labour. A similar alliance building in France was recently reported in _Financial Times_:
***** EUROPE: New alliance redraws French left's landscape By Robert Graham in Paris Financial Times; Nov 03, 2003
The political landscape of the French left has acquired an important new dimension following a decision at the weekend by the country's two militant leftist parties to form an alliance ahead of next year's regional and European parliamentary elections.
The alliance, between the Communist Revolutionary League (LCR), headed by Olivier Besancenot, and Workers Struggle (LO), led by the veteran militant Arlette Laguiller, has raised the prospect of next year's elections becoming a four-cornered contest - the hard left, the mainstream left, the moderate right and the extreme right.
The hard left under the LCR-LO banner, excluding the Communist party, will be competing with the far-right National Front for the protest vote and seeking to attract voters dissatisfied with the mainstream parties of the left. The aim is to appeal to the 10 per cent of the electorate who voted for the three candidates of the hard left in the first round of last year's presidential elections.
Backing for these candidates embracing a Trotskyite platform contributed to the defeat of Lionel Jospin, the Socialist candidate for the presidency, who was backed by the moderate left.
It also helped accelerate the decline of the Communist party, which had been junior coalition partner in the Jospin government from 1997 to 2002.
An opinion poll published yesterday in Journal de Dimanche showed 22 per cent were ready to consider voting for the first time for the hard left next year. This was in addition to 9 per cent who said they had already cast such a vote and would do so again.
Despite differences, the move underscores the way in which the LCR and LO have been making common cause. Their sympathisers in the trade union movement were the most active in organising protests against the government's pension reform plans this year and have spearheaded strike action in the public services this year.
The 29 year-old Mr Besancenot has acquired a considerable media presence after winning 4.5 per cent of the vote as the LCR candidate in the first-round presidential race last year. Mild-mannered and with boyish charm, he has proved an able salesman for the rhetoric of anti-capitalism and the anti-globalisation movement.
Under the pact approved by a two-thirds majority at the XVth congress of the LCR, Mr Besancenot will head the list for the militant left in the European parliamentary elections. In return Ms Laguiller will head their joint list for the presidency of the Paris region in the regional elections. *****
US leftists would do well to take a page from UK and French leftists, rather than building their own little sects or getting stuck in a politics of serial protests (as Negri ends up recommending by default) easily recuperated into the Democratic Party each election year. -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>