should move towards becoming a political we would argue on the same sort of lines as the Scottish Socialist Party. But the question of tempo will be important here. Few people would have imagined just one year ago that the Alliance would develop anything like as rapidly as it has done. Even when we started discussing standing in the General Election back at the end of last year, people were talking about standing in around 50 constituencies. In the event we will stand in more than 90. New Alliances are being set up almost every week. Particularly since Liz Davies announcement that she would support the Alliance, people who have been Labour Party members all their lives, including many who have been councillors or held prominent positions in local parties, are joining, These people are coming into the Alliance focused on the general election itself rather than on what the future of the Alliance shout be.
Even amongst the majority of people who have been invoted for some time, the question of the future shape of the Alliance has not been the issue at the forefront of their minds - making the best possible showing at the election has rightly been predominant.
The conference of the Socialist Alliance in the autumn will discuss the question of the Alliance's structures. It seems to be common ground amongst most involved that we should move to an individual membership structure, where anyone who joins nationally automatically becomes a member locally and vice versa.
Ensuring that we have structures that reflect the political diversity of the Alliance should be possible without the current quota system because by then we will have worked together long enough to know what those strands are.
The Socialist Worker's Party have made clear in the current issue of Socialist Worker (May 5) that they favour strengthenine the cental stuctures of the Alance -through steps such as taking on full time staff and maintaining an office, employing full timers and creating a system of ammations. Elsewhere in this issue of Socialist Outlook (p10), Terry Conway and Alan Thornet respond to their position that there' is not the basis to create a new party at this that ating toyour of as in reasons is i am in favour of "adopting reforms" in order to win broader forces to the Alliance. That is not my approach at all. I don't think it is possible to point to anything in the Socialist Alliance manifesto that could be seen to argue that working class people should have confidence in parliament or the institutions of the capitalist state. And that is the essence of reformism; not the fact that we argue for reforms such as a minimum wage of £7.40 an hour. At the core of Trotsky's approach was the idea that revolutionaries had to build bridges between current levels of consciousness and the ideas necessary to defend or advance the interests of working class people. This cannot mean in all circumstances just repeating the demands that Trotsky himself put forward in 1938, it must mean analysing the concrete situation we are in and putting forward the appropriate demands for that actual lving situation.
To be more concrete, let's look at what was proposed on the manifesto that the ISG opposed. On the question of the police for exampic, Worker's Power in amendment 18 starts:
*The police cannot be reformed as an insti. tution. The police force exist to defend the bosses system. That is why we support the disbanding of the police......
Or the CPGB in Amendment 23 "The Socialist Alliance is against the standing army and for the armed people".
If this isn't a maximum programme, then! don't know what is. There is no way that this reflects the consciousness of the majority of people breaking from New Labour - the audience we want to win to revolutionary ideas through a transitional approach.
Self defence
Jason doesn't himself use this formula. Instead he talks about community self defence - and explicitly argues that this should be a demand that socialists "raise from day one".
But even community defence councils canracy or the destruction of the existing state system. Revolutionary socialists want and need to convince them - or at least significant numbers of them - that this is what is needed. We can do this to some extent by working with them in campaigns and through the trade unions, but we can also do this through political dialogue in the Socialist Level of debate The level of political debate about these fundamental questions that affect all our lives today and for the future is not high in the British Labour movement. While the majority of people who are disillusioned with new Labour do not define themselves consciously as revolutionary socialists, few of them have hardened ideas from which they would argue against our type of politics.
We should point out that revolutionary Ideas are really very commonsensical. After all we want a society that is organised in the interests and with the active participation of the majority - our opponents are the ones who want a world that puts profit before pout unless there is a huge rise in the class struggle that leads to a major shift in political consciousness, that if we succeed in creating a new party, conscious revolutionanes will be in a minority. That is the situation in which we will need a 'revolutionary platform". a banner within the broader party around which to organise to fight for our ideas.
The opportunities that are opened up by the Alliance project are enormously exciting - we have the potential to create a sustained challenge to the system that is and our planet.
At the same time the challenge we face to avoid the twin dangers of rightism and ultraleftism makes the fullest possible debate about the steps we need to take to achieve our goals indispensible.
OUTLOOK monthly marxist review. No 45. May 2001. 50p