The Socialist Alternative Party is seeking to build on its success in bringing socialism to Seattle. According to an article by Emily Heffter, staff reporter at the Seattle Times, socialism in Seattle is clearly on the rise amid the economic hardship and inequality that has ballooned in the country at large. According to the article:
Locker’s goals reach beyond membership. He would like to see Seattle’s major labor groups leave behind their longtime allies in the Democratic Party to support Socialist Alternative candidates instead. He wants to elect a slate of Socialist Alternative candidates, taking on housing, wages and health-care issues.
Also, there was a good quote in the article by a longtime Seattle Socialist Alternative Party activist:
“We want to not just be sort of a marginal force on the sidelines, winning a seat here or there, but to build something that would be able to rival and compete with the two major parties. The message that we’ve had is becoming more and more popular,” said Ted Virdone, a Seattle teacher who has been involved in the Socialist Alternative Party for more than a decade. “We intend to leverage this victory in order to really win substantive victories for workers, like the $15 minimum wage.”
More about the Socialist Alternative Party can be found at their newly reinvigorated website or even by visiting Democracy Chronicles’ Third Party Central. From the Socialist Alternative’s own description on their website:
Socialist Alternative is a national organization fighting in our workplaces, communities, and campuses against the exploitation and injustices people face every day. We are community activists fighting against budget cuts in public services; we are union activists fighting for living wage jobs and militant, democratic unions; we are people of all colors speaking out against racism and attacks on immigrants, students organizing against tuition hikes and war, women and men fighting sexism and homophobia. Socialist Alternative is also in political solidarity with the Committee for a Workers’ International, a worldwide socialist organization in 37 countries, on every continent.
Also, there is some really interesting analysis of democracy and socialism on their website including in relation to the Soviet Union:
We believe the dictatorships that existed in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were perversions of what socialism is really about. We are for democratic socialism where ordinary people will have control over our daily lives.
They go on to describe more in detail about their view on the failings of the Russian Revolution and the prospect for socialism in the democratic world:
Socialist Alternative advocates socialist democracy as an alternative to both the bureaucratic socialism of the former Soviet Union and the capitalist democratic model which it considers designed only to benefit the ruling class and disenfranchise working people. It argues that capitalism allows a small minority of wealthy elites at the top to manipulate the political system in their favor while working people are left out of any serious decision making process, whether at work or in government. A socialist society, it maintains, would flip this relationship on its head with working people running the economy, utilizing the enormous wealth and productivity of society to enrich their own lives. As a contrast to capitalist production, which it characterizes as chaotic and “casino capitalism”, a socialist economy would be democratically planned.
It does not consider the former Soviet Union socialist, but rather a “tragic degeneration” of the Russian Revolution and the socialist tradition. While it views the Russian Revolution positively as a mass democratic revolution of the working class in Russia, it is in complete opposition to the bureaucratic dictatorship that came about and Joseph Stalin’s subsequent reign of terror. It sees these not as an inevitable outcome of the Russian Revolution, but an expression of Russia’s isolation and economic starvation and a result of the vacuum of workers’ power from below. “This was not a healthy ground upon which socialism could be built. The whole basis of socialism is having enough to go around, but Russia didn’t have that. In this context, the democratic structures in the Soviets (workers’ assemblies) ceased to function. Who wants to go to political meetings when you’re worried about where your next meal is going to come from?”
For those readers who like Democracy Chronicles are in New York, take a look at the Facebook page of the Alternative Socialist Party in New York City, another liberal stronghold: https://www.facebook.com/SocialistNYC
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