Today I went to a "Socialism Day", organised by Socialist Alternative, the Dutch branch of the Committee for a Workers' International. "Socialism" is a name regularly used by several CWI sections for open meetings that feature discussion, mostly introduced by CWI members.

The observant reader might note that I also went to a meeting organised by the SP branch in Breda recently with the same name. There is a simple reason for this: Once upon a time, back in the...

Below is a translation of my introduction to the SP discussion meeting. I'm making a new post because it was too long for a comment.

The SP and the demand for the republic

Republican discussion: A non-discussion

There is no republican tradition anymore in the Netherlands. The most advanced that we now seem to have is the New Republican Society. I’ll quote from their website what they’re all about:

...

So, today was a so called "Socialism Day", organised by the SP branch in Breda for the 13th time as an annual event. The theme this year was "the SP and the monarchy" which had two discussions and a third discussion which was about the running party discussion on "democratisation of the economy" (see my blog here). This year's event had some 20 people, which is not bad for a branch meeting, although about half of the people were not from the branch or even the SP....

Original post here.

When I became politically active in early 2003 I was a loyal Dutch SP follower.

The SP is a left-wing parliamentarian formation that started out as a Maoist grouplet in the 1960's but by 1991 formally renounced Marxism-Leninism and afterwards shifted rightwards towards coalitionism. Dutch politics consists of a complex parliamentary formation, given that our electoral system is fully proportionally representative where parliament has 150 seats and...

Today there was another branch meeting from the SP about "democracy in the economy". There were ten proposals under discussion. These proposals were made by the "scientific bureau" of the party (for context: All Dutch parties have "scientific bureaus" as this makes them eligible for state funding)....