There’s less than two weeks to go until the Victorian state election. It’s predicted that Dan Andrews will be returned to power fairly easily, but some on the left are looking past the bigger picture to focus on a smaller element: the campaign of the Victorian Socialists (VS). While VS began as a project involving a collection of different Trotskyist organisations, it has now been whittled down to just Socialist Alternative and a handful of others, including some anarchists we consider our comrades.
VS represents an electoral turn for an organisation, Socialist Alternative, which used to have little interest in such things. While previous state and federal campaigns ended in failure, they do now stand a reasonable chance of getting elected through preference harvesting. Jerome Small might well be elected in the region of Northern Metropolitan. While VS seems to be the best of the options available for a Victorian voter – along with Socialist Alliance in the lower house – we still feel the need to look at things a bit more critically as committed socialists.
The most fundamental issue at hand is one that, ten years ago, Socialist Alternative might have agreed with us on: about whether socialists see change as coming from below, from unions, activist campaigns and student groups, or whether they see it as coming from above, through parliamentary action. That is the basis of our entire political outlook. As far as we’re concerned, it’s the only real basis for socialism.
Socialist Alternative would still say they agree with us, but after being blasted with their billboards telling us that “for real change” we need to “vote socialist”, we’re not so sure. VS candidates now speculate about holding the balance of power with two members, getting themselves giddy imagining what they could accomplish in terms of voting down or amending poor bills. This is identical to what Greens politicians argue for – that holding the balance of power would let them force progressive policies through.
On a much smaller, less severe scale, it represents the same kind of political tendency encouraged by Labor in the public sector unions: why worry about strikes and other industrial actions, when you could just campaign for Labor to get elected instead and accomplish your goals that way?
Nothing about VS is essentially different to the inhumane way major political parties conduct themselves – as much has been obvious for a number of years. In 2019 VS made the decision to expel their previous lead candidate Stephen Jolly due to evidence of sexual harassment. This decision came after Jolly had been their centrepiece political candidate. It also came after a years-long public campaign by the survivors of Jolly’s harassment to expose him as the misogynist he is.
In a nutshell, VS pretended it did not have credible evidence of their lead candidate sexually harassing women until after the election had well and truly finished, at which point they could then arrange the expulsion. Justified outrage at this entire situation from principled former VS, Socialist Alternative and Socialist Alliance members can be seen in the comments of the Facebook post. To put things further into context, Stephen Jolly’s main political activity in recent years has been to campaign against a safe injection room in his electorate.
Strange bedfellows
Victoria is probably the only remaining state to still use the Group Voting Ticket system, meaning wheeling and dealing via backroom preference deals is a viable way of getting yourself elected. VS’ most realistic way of getting elected from their tiny vote share will depend on the preference deals it has presumably negotiated with other small parties.
It has likely concluded some kind of a deal with Fiona Patten’s teal-coloured Reason Party, who in the Northern Metropolitan has preferenced the VS candidates directly after their own. Reason is a Macron-inspired continuation of the Australian Sex Party, the political wing of the Eros Association – the peak body for sex industry businesses. It still serves this basic purpose. We need to stress: this political party represents the capitalists of the sex industry, not the sex workers that socialists should be orienting towards.
VS will also benefit from the preference flows of Legalise Cannabis, which has ranked them third after their own candidates and Reason’s, and who VS has preferenced high in exchange. Legalise Cannabis is a single-issue party whose membership and political representatives care about a lot more than just the single-issue in the name. Legalise Cannabis’ two elected representatives in Western Australia are both anti-vaccine cranks, and one of them was suspended from parliament for a time because she refused to show her proof-of-vaccination certificate.
Legalise Cannabis’ crackpot nature is not contained to Western Australia. One of their most high profile candidates in New South Wales is Jeremy Buckingham, the disgraced former right-faction Greens representative who quit his party rather than face inevitable expulsion for sexual assault. But why trust us? Why not trust senior Socialist Alternative member Tom Bramble instead, who described Legalise Cannabis as “a bunch of anti vax racists and far-right nut-jobs”?
All of this forces people to look critically at Socialist Alternative’s grandiose claims about the value elections have in terms of spreading socialism and representing the most militant sectors of the class. What does it mean for socialism if VS are elected through the preferences of people who thought they were voting for legal weed, more freely accessible porn, and centrist liberalism?
Of programmes and manifestos
Essential to the Victorian Socialists project is a kind of opportunism. There is a long tradition of Marxists participating in electoral projects; the most coherent of them did so with one or another programmatic framework. Whether it’s the “minimum-maximum” programme of pre-war social-democracy, or Trotsky’s transitional program, or the ideas formed by Marx in critique of the Gotha Programme, these Marxists have conceived of electoral politics as a bridge and as a necessary form of agitation to get the working-class from its current position, into the position as the ruling class.
VS stands out because of the total absence of such a framework. Instead, its manifesto is essentially a list of random, popular social-democratic ideas – as previously pointed out by many others, it’s not particularly different from something you’d find in a left-wing Greens manifesto, in the wish-lists of Labor Left members, or even in a Whitlam-era ALP policy platform. The government-owned people’s bank idea was a fixation of Labor politicians for decades and provided the impetus for the founding of the Commonwealth Bank. Some of VS’ policies are patronising attempts at populism that nobody in VS would seriously believe in, like the policy to lower MP salaries to $87 000 because “if politicians had to live like the rest of us, maybe they’d think differently about the decisions they make in parliament”.
The closest it gets to an actual understanding of socialism – working-class control of the means of production – is a small section on co-operatives arguing for increased worker control coming through changes to the Corporation Act, tax concessions and aid to co-operatives, and punitive taxes on businesses that aren’t cooperatively run.
This idea was succinctly dealt with by Marx, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme:
That the workers desire to establish the conditions for co-operative production on a social scale, and first of all on a national scale, in their own country, only means that they are working to revolutionise the present conditions of production, and it has nothing in common with the foundation of co-operative societies with state aid. But as far as the present co-operative societies are concerned, they are of value only insofar as they are the independent creations of the workers and not protégés either of the governments or of the bourgeois.
The irony is not lost on us that we anarchists are currently trying to remind Socialist Alternative about the ABCs of revolutionary Marxism. Still, there is something more substantial here than just a quip: do you see socialism arising from the initiative of workers from below, or do you see it arising through representatives in government doing it for them, and leading them along? Where does revolutionary leadership fit in here – at the base, in union branches and campaign groups, or at the top, in the house and senate?
What would a VS victory mean for SAlt?
It may seem odd for a Sydney-based organisation such as our own to take so much interest in what is going on in Victoria. Though, we’d argue that our interest is not as odd as bussing down dozens of organisation members to Victoria from other states just to campaign, which is what Socialist Alternative is already doing. We’re interested because what happens in one part of the country affects us directly, and as radical leftists operating in progressive and working-class spaces, this becomes extremely obvious.
An electoral victory for the Victorian Socialists would likely be used by Socialist Alternative members in other states as validation for existing unprincipled strategies, like signing pacts with the Labor Right in order to gain student representative officer positions, or preferencing right-wingers above leftists in the University of Sydney (USyd) NTEU branch.
Opportunism by Socialist Alternative has the immediate effect of encouraging opportunism by others on the left. What argument is there to be made to leftist Green and socialist Labor students to oppose conservative unionists, if even the largest revolutionary socialist faction makes deals with them for positions? Such decisions normalise the horse-trading that dominates student politics, the unprincipled mess that prevents representative councils from being the serious organising bodies that they should be.
Socialist Alternative’s decision in the USyd NTEU branch to preference the right (Thrive) above the other left ticket, Rank-and-File Action (RAFA), resulted directly in the right winning a vice-presidential spot:
Dowling (Thrive) defeated Dylan Griffiths (RAFA) and Jennifer Huch-Hoogvliet (Fightback) to be elected to Branch Vice President (General Staff). Dowling received 63 first preference votes, Griffiths received 64, and Huch-Hoogvliet received 41. Dowling was elected with a final vote of 81 compared to Griffiths 70.
Socialist Alternative defends this and other reactionary decisions on the grounds that other left factions and the right-wing are all more or less the same as each other, so therefore it doesn’t make any particular difference whether one is preferenced over the other. The practical impacts of this notion at USyd are already being felt. Since her election, Dowling’s primary political intervention has been to oppose a pro-Palestinian BDS resolution at the NTEU national conference. Put more simply, the “they’re all the same” thesis translates to “whichever decision benefits SAlt the most, is the most left-wing decision to make”.
A small-scale version of the VS political strategy and its impacts appeared at the USyd student elections a few months ago. One of the voting days coincided with an industrial action by the NTEU at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). Black Flag members and others in the Student Left Alliance (SLA) encouraged a suspension of campaigning among left-wing groups in order to support the industrial action in person.
In response, Socialist Alternative and their ticket Left Action made the decision to send a token couple of members to UTS but to otherwise keep campaigning. Rather than walking their large number of student campaigners a few hundred metres down the road to support a brief industrial action, Socialist Alternative prioritised scraping together a few more votes in a student election they were already predicted to do well in.
What message does this send to tertiary education sector workers? In the context of a major industrial dispute at USyd that a mass student solidarity campaign could help win, such a decision is an insult.
We should also note that in the final USyd SRC meeting of the year, Socialist Alternative spoke against a successful motion from Black Flag members which proposed a serious strategy for a student-led education campaign within key faculties of the university. This motion aimed to build on the existing approach of just calling student contingents to strikes through the central student organising group. SAlt proposed (ultimately unsuccessful) amendments which would have diluted the specificity of the proposal’s strategy, and expressed dissent at our efforts to broaden and deepen the campaign beyond the existing student left and the elected office bearers. Evidently, organising work is unnecessary if socialists hold the right positions.
The path forward for Socialist Alternative
A VS victory would also likely mean a less dynamic, productive Socialist Alternative. A victory would mean the flow of public funds to the organisation via payments for offices and staffers, exacerbating what is already a fairly bureaucratic internal structure. There’s no amount of political “checking” that would prevent the conservatising effects of relying on funds from the bourgeois state: it’s a matter of facing reality.
In a number of situations, our members work with Socialist Alternative productively – these are situations we hope continue. We don’t count ourselves among the anarchists who spend all their free time engaging in “SAlt-bashing”. Part of the reason we oppose Victorian Socialists to the extent that we do is because we recognise the significant role Socialist Alternative plays on the left.
A less radical, less revolutionary Socialist Alternative means a less radical, less revolutionary left generally. It will mean less demonstrations, with fewer people mobilised, and with worse politics. It will mean a diminished level of activity in spaces like union branches, where the number of workers mobilised by small groups of radicals can win enormously significant industrial disputes. Socialist Alternative members think they can have their cake and eat it too – that they can run election campaigns, sit in parliament and devote themselves to grassroots politics all at the same time. We think the signs that this viewpoint is deluded are already apparent.
It is for the sake of grassroots and rank-and-file politics that we’re publishing this article. What will we see more of in the future? A Socialist Alternative that will get countless people to marriage equality rallies, or a Socialist Alternative that sends its members interstate to campaign electorally in the middle of an industrial dispute, as occurred at USyd during this year’s federal election?
For us, we do not get “real change” through voting for anyone. We get it through striking, protesting, occupying and leading from below, in order to tear down the ruling class – not to enter into it.