Australia: International greetings to the Socialist Alliance's 7th national conference
January 9, 2010 – Sydney – The Socialist Alliance conference – held January 2-5, 2010 – was attended by representatives of a
number of parties and organisations overseas, who presented verbal
greetings to the conference. These were:
Abelardo Curbelo Padron, ambassador to Australia for the Republic of Cuba;
Sivaranjani Manickam, Socialist Party of Malaysia;
Reihana Mohideen, Party of the Labouring Masses, Philippines;
Peter Hughes, Socialist Worker New Zealand; and
Mike Treen, Unite, New Zealand.
The greetings below were sent by organisations and activists unable to attend the conference.
[Just prior to the Socialist Alliance conference, the Democratic Socialist Perspective voted to merge with the Socialist Alliance to strengthen left unity in Australia. For reports see HERE and HERE.]
Socialist Voice, Canada
Dear Comrades of the Socialist Alliance,
On behalf of Socialist Voice and our network of contributing editors and collaborators, we send to you our warmest greetings and heartiest wishes for a successful 7th convention.
It is an inspiration for us to see your successes in cohering the broadest possible socialist unity in Australia. We are doubly inspired with your efforts to work hand in hand with fighters for social justice throughout the world, especially those victimised by Australia's imperialist rulers.
The recent climate summit in Copenhagen served as a stark reminder of the urgency of the worldwide struggle for socialism. Capitalism is bringing the world to ruin. Nothing less that the survival of the human race and the biosphere from which all life sustenance is drawn is at stake in the struggle to replace this system with a new economic order based on principles of equality and social justice.
We stand with you in the struggle for socialism in the 21st century!
Comnradely regards,
John Riddell, Ian Angus, Roger Annis
Socialist Voice (Canada)
Labour Party Pakistan
The Labour Party Pakistan sends revolutionary greetings to the delegates of the Socialist Alliance conference. Socialists in Australia have taken a step forward, being able to unite under this important platform. Socialist Alliance has played and will play an important role in bringing together the forces of the left and important trade union activists and leaders.
We also congratulate in advance to the members of the Democratic Socialist Perspective if they merge into Socialist Alliance, thus paving the way for a clear alternative of one platform and no confusions. This will be a historic example to be followed by others in future to think above and beyond the name cult.
SA has already shown its fruitful usefulness by winning its first seat at council by painstaking persistent work. Sometime results comes later than you expect. However, winning a seat means a step forward for building the Socialist alternative in Australia and bringing a hope and confidence. All we need is a hope for the future for a better life, not only here but all over.
The Labour Party Pakistan considered itself a sister organisation of the DSP, in future, it will be honoured to call ourselves the same with SA.
All the way, in happiness and pain, we will unite and work together for a socialist world.
Nazli Javed (Women secretary)
Nisar Shah (General secretary)
Farooq Tariq (Spokesperson)
Labour Party Pakistan
Scottish Socialist Party
Dear comrades,
Unfortunately we will not be able to send a delegate to your conference. In the next few weeks we are sending delegations to Barcelona, Karachi and Venezuela. Australia is simply one delegation too far.
Despite this we wish you every success with your conference and look forward to receiving a conference report. These are exciting times for the left internationally with the twin challenges posed by the global crisis of capitalism and the environmental crisis highlighted by the failed Copenhagen Conference. We also note the call by President Chavez for the creation of a new Fifth International and see this as a positive initiative; hence our representation at the Caracas Conference in April.
Again, every success with your conference.
Yours in comradeship,
Bill Bonnar
International secretary
Scottish Socialist Party
Socialist Resistance, Britain
As Britain approaches the most important election for a generation, all the main parties offer the same solution – austerity for the majority and bail-outs for the rich. Socialist Resistance, along with our comrades in Respect and the Scottish Socialist Party, and with the important ecosocialist trends in the Green Party, Plaid Cymru and other organisations, are helping present an alternative – not only in the elections but also in the growing struggles against racism, public sector cuts, unemployment and climate change.
In Australia, working people face similar challenges, and a far more imminent threat from climate change. Our solidarity is with you!
Liam MacUaid, editor, Socialist Resistance.
Communist Party of India (Marxist Leninist)
Message of greetings and solidarity for the DSP Congress and National Conference of SA, Australia
Dear comrades,
It gives us great pleasure to know that you are beginning the new year with the DSP’s decision-making congress followed by the 7th National Conference of the Socialist Alliance. We highly value the invitation extended to us for participation in these important events but unfortunately we are not in a position to send any representative of the CPI (ML) to your conferences. We understand that these conferences will discuss a whole range of pressing questions facing the socialist movement in Australia as well as internationally.
The year that just ended saw global capitalism facing one of its deepest recessions and big banks and financial institutions collapsing like ninepins. It is significant that the US which is spearheading a global imperialist war in the name of tackling terror had to bear the brunt of this global financial crisis. Yet capitalism’s desperate attempts to overcome the financial tremors have inflicted tremendous hardships on the working people with states diverting any amount of tax payers’ money to bail out crisis-ridden firms. The war in Iraq and Afghanistan has continued unabated while racism could be seen intensifying in several parts of the world including Australia.
The anti-capitalist class struggle and solidarity of the working class must therefore be integrated ever more intimately with struggles against imperialism and racism the world over. The left in Australia could play a key role in this context and we revolutionary communists in India feel at one with the left in Australia and other developed countries in the worldwide resistance against global capitalism, imperialism and racism. We hope the bonds established between our struggles and organisations in the last decade of the previous century will continue to get stronger in the coming days and enable us to play bigger roles in our respective spheres towards attaining our long-cherished common dreams.
Wishing you every success with the congress of the DSP and the National Conference of the Socialist Alliance, Australia.
With warm greetings of proletarian internationalist solidarity,
Dipankar Bhattacharya
General secretary,
CPI (ML) (Liberation)
Turn Left Thailand
Turn Left, Thailand, send fraternal greetings to the Socialist Alliance in Australia. We wish you every success in your struggle for socialism. It is a struggle we share with you in the Asia-Pacific region. We thank you for the solidarity shown to us in our struggle against the Thai dictatorship. Long live socialism!
Best wishes
Giles Ji Ungpakorn
Green Left, England and Wales
On behalf of Green Left, the ecosocialist current in the Green Party of England and Wales, I would like to send our comradely greetings to the DSP and Socialist Alliance for your Socialist Alliance's 7th National Congress.
Your work continues to inspire us here, you have done a tremendous job in making Greens redder and Reds Greener.
You have pioneered a politics which is plural and welcoming but also strong and focused.
To create a viable world, which is ecological and just, we must build a global ecosocialist movement, more than most you have contributed to this vital task.
Copenhagen has failed but we can succeed, indeed we must succeed in creating climate justice.
We salute you!
Derek Wall, Green Left, London, UK.
Dale McKinley, South Africa
Comrades of the Socialist Alliance. The most resolute, revolutionary greetings from South Africa to your 7th National Conference. It is extremely inspiring to be associated (even if from afar) with this crucially important gathering precisely because both Australia and our world need, more than ever, the presence, organisation and struggles of mass, socialist forces. The Socialist Alliance represents that force in Australia.
For all socialists, despite the setbacks, there have also been victories and now new opportunities opened up by the widening crisis of capitalist economics and social relations. I have no doubt that this Congress will note the setbacks, affirm the victories and then chart a creative and enabling way forward.
Know that many socialist militants here in South Africa stand by, and with, you all.
In revolutionary struggle and solidarity,
Dale T. McKinley (South Africa)
Working People’s Association, Indonesia
Greeting of Working Peoples!
We, Working People's Association, are very happy and extend our solidarity to the Congress of Democratic Socialist Perspective and National Conference of Socialist Alliance. Those agenda will mark a new phase in the struggle for Socialism in Australia. A step that will strengthen comrades struggle against Imperialism and Neoliberalism. We will learn a lot from the struggle that comrades done in Australia. Working People's Association, since our founding in 2004 stated the need for a Left Unification in Indonesia. Because in the middle of strengthening bourgeois politic, the working class wandered blindly and don’t have their own political identity. The Left Unification itself must be based on political perspective and work together with mass based and programmatic.
The global capitalism crisis that we faced is the biggest crisis in the last 80 years. This crisis again highlighting that there is no welfare and democracy in capitalism framework. When 5 billion people worldwide living in poverty, unemployed and without decent health facility, solution of the international bourgeois class is to giving bail out for the banks that they control. And put all the cost to the working class, directly or indirectly.
But of course capitalism will not be destroy by itself. The liberation of working people can only achieve by the working people itself with trust and leadership of a Working Class Party that one of its principle is internationalism. This internationalism is accordance to the Principle of Struggle and result of Second Congress of Working People Association last January 2009. That with condition of global capitalism crisis the need of unity is more urgent.
Because of that, Working People Association emphasizing the need to form a stronger unity between progressive and revolutionary political parties, mass organisations and individuals. Working together with Democratic Socialist Perspective and Socialist Alliance is a very good start to build that unity. Although at this occasion we cannot come to be with comrades but we belief that we are one in spirit. Seeing that we have the same noble goal, socialism. Although our struggle in their early stage is in national framework but we do not conceal our ultimate destination that we have a world to win. Let the ruling classes tremble at a socialist revolution. The working classes have nothing to lose but their chain. We shall unitedly strive to change the existing social order of the exploitative society, so as to usher in a new world order controlled by the toiling people.
Working Men of All Country, Unite!
Socialism, the True Liberation for Working People!
Socialism, the Solution for Global Crisis of Capitalism!
Unite, Build Working Class Party!
Jakarta, 2 December 2010
Central Committee, Working Peoples Association (KP-PRP)
National Chairperson (Anwar Ma'ruf)
General Secretary (Rendro Prayogo)
Die Linke, Germany
Dear friends and comrades!
On occasion of your Seventh International Conference, we send you the warm greetings of DIE LINKE.
We wish your congress constructive debates and good results. We think that a strong and vital message will come from your congress; a message which is really needed in today's Australia: the problems of increasing social injustice, racism, the ongoing destruction of our environment can be only tackled in the spirit of solidarity. That's what our common struggle stands for. We want to built up a convincing alternative to the turbo-capitalist societies of nowadays.
DIE LINKE hopes to develop the ties of cooperation with the Socialist Alliance and the Democratic Socialist Perspective.
Workers Party, New Zealand
Comrades of the DSP and Socialist Alliance
Greetings for the New Year
The Workers Party of New Zealand would like to wish you every success for your conferences being held in January. While we were not in a position to send a representative to your gathering we look forward to reading any published material coming out of the events and to having further contact with your organisations.
In solidarity,
Daphna Whitmore
Secretary, Workers Party of New Zealand
People's Democratic Party (PRD) Indonesia
The Central Leadership Committee of People's Democratic Party Indonesia (KPP PRD) would like to convey our warm congratulations on the full merger of the Democratic Socialist Perspective (DSP) into Socialist Alliance (SA), on January 2, 2010, in Australia.
We feel the enthusiasm that radiates from our comrades on welcoming this historic moment of socialist unity. We have continued to follow the concrete achievements of the consistent and dedicated campaigns of the Democratic Socialist Perspective (DSP) and Socialist Alliance (SA) activists, around the problems of workers and the most oppressed people, whether in Australia or other in countries all over the world. And finally, we see this unity as a new qualitative achievement, in constructively building on socialist traditions in response to the latest development of capitalist exploitation (and crisis) as well as the people’s fightback.
This big step also means that you have agreed to choose new political tools, as a culmination of the DSP’s work for at least three decades and the last nine years of the left unity process in Australia. We sincerely express our gratitude to all our comrades in DSP for the solidarity and cooperation built together with PRD over the past years. It also means, from this moment, the PRD opens a new page of solidarity with Socialist Alliance for a better future, for victories by oppressed peoples, and finally, at the end, for the defeat of greedy and barbaric capitalism.
Once again, PRD expresses our warm congratulations to all Socialist Alliance members!
Yours faithfully,
Dominggus Oktavianus
Temporary International Affairs Officer
People's Democratic Party (PRD) Indonesia
Jakarta, 31 January 2010