Appeal: United Left Alliance members for a new working class party

May 2012

The crisis of capital and the all-out offensive on the working class continues to unfold. The failure of traditional leaderships means that the workers must develop new structures, new forms of struggle if they are to resist being crushed. The most important structure to unite struggles is a new working class party.

Socialists in the United Left Alliance should fight for such a party. They should fight for the most democratic structure possible, allowing the fullest discussion and analysis closely linked to common action and exploring all the possibilities of resistance open to the working class.

The central elements of the resistance should be:

Opposing utterly the austerity policy pursued by successive Irish governments and supervised by the Troika. 

We oppose the immediate aim of the austerity - that the workers pay the debts of the bondholders or any part thereof.

We oppose the goal of restructuring, aimed at driving wages, services and conditions down in an indefinite race to the bottom.

We assert that there are no "better, fairer ways" to pay the bondholders. A worker's economic programme to provide jobs and services would require immediately the tearing up all promissory notes and the expulsion of the troika.

The ULA should oppose the trade union leadership's collaboration in the imposition of austerity. We call for the scrapping of the Croke Park agreement and urge the building of a rank and file trade union network that will unite workers across union structures and allow them to organize against collaboration both inside and outside the unions.