Fwd from Nick Fredman: Re: Socialist Alliance vote in NSW

[Ben Courtice <benj@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[Yo Ben, waddup? Could you do me a favour and please forward the
following to marxmail? My free copy of Eudora has gone all minimalist on
me after I declined to have advertising, ie I don't have an option for
plain text, and won't have time to sort it for a bit]


Tom O'Lincoln writes re the Socialist Alliance NSW election campaign


>How long can we reasonably be asked to wait for some modest success?


What Tom O'Lincoln refuses to do is rate the success of socialist
electoral activity by any measure apart from votes. He's of course not
consistent as he hasn't ever been positive about occasional socialist
votes of 4-12% over the last decade. The statistics I'm interested in
include: the nearly 300 people who participated in the election
campaign, 30% more than participated in NSW in the 2002 federal election
campaign, and probably double the numbers involved in the Democratic
Socialist campaign in the 1999 NSW elections; the 30 people we involved
in Lismore, 50% more than we involved in the 1999 DS campaign; the
approx 100 people who came to one or more of the several public events
we held in Lismore in the lead up to the elections; and the dozen people
who've joined or agreed to join the organisation here in recent weeks,
who include ex-Communist Party members as well as radical youth. I don't
know how other branches have gone in these regards but I'm sure they're
had some success with the recent campus tour of Humphrey MacQueen,
Australia's leading Marxist intellectual.


Despite problems Socialist Alliance has had real success, of at least
the modest level, in involving people in building a socialist
alternative, people who generally wouldn't have joined any of the
competing socialist groups. Tom's fixation with voting figures to the
exclusion of other measures (which of course he knows nothing about,
which is why he should maybe be more circumspect in commenting on the
success of SA) is the negative inverse of the narrow electoralist
approach to Socialist Alliance unfortantely still held by Tom's former
organisation, the ISO.