The World Socialist Web Site is today publishing the third YouTube video address by Nick Beams, Socialist Equality Party national secretary and senate candidate in New South Wales. Beams, a leading authority on Marxist political economy and member of the WSWS International Editorial Board, is heading a national slate of 13 SEP candidates advancing a socialist and internationalist alternative to war and militarism, social inequality and the escalating attack on democratic rights.

In this three-minute video presentation, Beams points out that the Socialist Equality Party is the only party contesting the upcoming federal election to consistently oppose Australia’s military-police interventions in East Timor, Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, and other South Pacific countries. He explains the reasons behind these filthy neo-colonial operations, and indicts all the parliamentary parties, and their apologists in the radical protest milieu, that have not only remained silent, but endorsed—and even insisted upon—the Howard government’s continuing aggression in the region.

Beams focuses in particular on the role of the misnamed Socialist Alliance, and its principal component, the Democratic Socialist Perspective (DSP)—publishers of the Green Left Weekly. In 1999, the DSP led demonstrations demanding “troops in”, a function applauded by the ruling elite in its leading financial organ, the Australian Financial Review. An editorial in the AFR at the time drew out that the DSP’s demand ended the “taboo” that had operated since the Vietnam War on the deployment of Australian troops overseas.

Beams concludes by noting that the positions of the Socialist Alliance and the DSP arise out of opportunist and nationalist politics, which represent “an accommodation to the deepest interests of the government and Australian imperialism as a whole.”

The YouTube addresses by Beams and other SEP candidates can be viewed on the SEP’s election website (www.sep.org.au) and our YouTube channel.

Authorised by N. Beams, 100B Sydenham Rd, Marrickville, NSW