Socialist Party Australia - Socialist Alliance sows illusions in Greens

While the Socialist Party (SP) is busy putting the blowtorch to the Greens, another left wing party, Socialist Alliance (SA), continues to build up their credibility.

In their pre-election magazine 'Seeing Red', SA claimed that the Greens represented “instinctive and diffuse anti-capitalism” and that this would “either succumb to the imperatives of the profit system or (become) conscious and purposeful anti-capitalism—socialism in deed if not in word.”

While the Greens have capitalised on Labor’s shift to the Right amongst a layer of youth and radical middle class, the overwhelming mass of their membership are not going to shift to socialist conclusions.

The Greens support the occupation of Iraq, as long as under the UN flag. They support the Australian imperialist intervention in the Solomon Islands, East Timor and Papua New Guinea. Their economic policy is left-wing Keynesianism not in any way a threat to capitalism.

That is not to say we cannot undertake electoral pacts with the Greens – SP has been doing this since 2001. But the task of socialists is to point out to youth the political truth – that the Greens are a safety valve for capitalism to direct the anger of ordinary people along relatively safe lines.