revolutionaryprogramme

In the absence of the projected November ULA national conference (now postponed until January next year at the earliest) the non-aligned in the ULA are having a national meeting this coming Saturday (27 October) where we will be electing two new reps to the ULA national steering committee as both of the old reps, Therese and Joe, are standing down.

As the ULA is probably dead as a vehicle for a new workers’ party, or at least is in a very deep coma, I believe the key issue for the non-aligned at the moment is how to raise the banner of the immediate need for that new party. As regular readers of this blog will be aware I am of course not agnostic as to the political basis of the new workers’ party and, to the extent the 400 word limit allowed, have outlined some of the key elements of the programme I believe is necessary for that party to really meet our needs as a class.

Below is my election statement that will be distributed to the non-aligned members over the next week.

My general political perspective is as a revolutionary Marxist within the Leninist-Trotskyist tradition. I stood unsuccessfully for the position of non-aligned rep on the national steering committee in February this year and my  programmatic framework for the steps required to achieve socialism in the current day Irish context is detailed in my election statement from that time (https://revolutionaryprogramme.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/alan-gibson-election-statement.pdf). Other material illustrating my political views is available on my blog (https://revolutionaryprogramme.wordpress.com) particularly in https://revolutionaryprogramme.wordpress.com/for-a-revolutionary-socialist-programme-2/.

I believe that the new workers’ party we need to build has to have a programme that has real answers for how to replace this rotten capitalist system with a socialist society that replaces the needs of capital with the needs of living human beings as its central driving force.

Big business (both Irish-based and the multinationals) must be expropriated and placed under democratic control of new working class organs of direct participatory democracy. The debt to international financiers should beunilaterally repudiated. The creation of real and strong links with political organisations across Europe which also have a vision of a revolutionary transformation of society must be a central and immediate task.

But how does all that relate to the ULA and our immediate tasks?

We need to begin by accepting that the ULA is currently going through an extremely difficult time – probably a terminal decline. Even if it survives this crisis, the ULA is moving backwards. The key task for the upcoming period should be trying tosalvage what we can from the ULA for the project of building a new workers’ party.

This cannot be just any workers’ party. It needs a clear and realistic programme for the socialist transformation of society, and therefore needs to go far beyond the ULA founding statement which by itself leads to the reformist conclusions that wesaw taken by the component groups in the 2011 general election – as I critiqued at the time when I was in the IBT (http://www.bolshevik.org/Leaflets/2011IrishElection.html). Our class deserves more than that.

It is not enough to defend the ULA for the ULA’s sake. The non-aligned reps on the national steering committee have to be absolutely committed to the project of creating the new workers’ party our class so desperately needs. I promise toaggressively champion this cause if elected and I stand on my record of having always put this to the forefront of my involvement in the ULA.