PARTISAN!

Socialist Alternative (SAlt) have no shortage of critics both outside of, and inside the left. Max J rejects some of the more popular criticisms of SAlt whilst providing their own.

It would be difficult to list all the people out there who don’t like Socialist Alternative (SAlt; the Australian post-Cliffite organisation, not related to the US or UK Socialist Alternative/International Socialist Alternative). While there are many valid reasons to disagree with Socialist Alternative, there are many more invalid and unserious reasons to throw scorn on Australia’s largest Marxist organisation. Many people fall in the latter camp.

SAlt has been a target of left-liberals in Australia for decades, but more recently it seems that these attacks have been increasing. In the last 12 months alone, there have been numerous accounts popping up claiming to be “ex-SAlt members”, “in communication with ex-SAlt” members etc, all claiming to be “outing” SAlt as a cult.

The first of these accounts was one under the name of “Rakey Healing” (now defunct?). Rakey’s focus was highlighting stories from alleged ex-SAlt members which painted a stark image of the group. Charges against SAlt from Rakey Healing and others range from “cult-like behaviour”, “transphobia/racism”, “co-opting protests” and “financial abuse”.

What is the point of all this? It seems that this is a red baiting campaign to shut down a socialist group, on fairly flimsy grounds. Is SAlt guilty of any of the things these people accuse them of, and how much of it is actually bad?

The Charges

First, “co-opting”. This C word is the favoured C word of ‘the swamp’ (disorganised left-liberals, radical-liberals, etc), unlike other C words. In their minds, the presence of any open political organisation at a rally (except for the Greens!) means that the organisation in question is trying to “take over” the rally. While SAlt tends to form their own blocs at protests and rallies, this is hardly “co-optation’. For starters, while rally organisers have a responsibility to ensure the rally is safe, they do not ‘own’ the rallies or protests they organise. It is strange, and patently anti-democratic, to try and grant them the power to disallow random groups from attending openly purely on the basis that they attend openly. Left-liberal charges of perfidious Marxists “co-opting” things rings hollow when they allow the Greens, a capitalist electoral party, to openly and brazenly co-opt anything climate related.

Charges of ‘financial abuse’ are also strange. While SAlt isn’t fully open about their dues rates, having exorbitant membership fees (which SAlt may or may not have) does not constitute ‘financial abuse’.

Is SAlt racist? No. Only very rarely are Socialist groups of these kinds overtly and maliciously racist. Most charges of racism against SAlt come from predominantly white left-liberals following behind Keiran Stewart-Assheton of the Black People’s Union (BPU). While SAlt has a majority white membership (one can assume), this is not unique to SAlt, as most other groups on the Socialist left in Australia also have a majority white membership. This boils down less to the racism of these groups (whether they’re actually racist or not is a different question) and more to demographics. That being said, there is much these groups can do to attract a more racially diverse membership. But identitarianism (i.e BPU) isn’t the solution.

A serious analysis of the ‘critiques’ levied against SAlt by these people can only come to one conclusion: that they aren’t really making actual criticisms of SAlt or SAlt’s tactics/strategy. For example, Exposing SAlt at UQ (@socialistalternative_uq) claims that SAlt exerts “media control”. How exactly does SAlt exert “media control”? Through their members arguing with people in Instagram comments sections.

It should be clear that these “criticisms” are deeply unserious. Arguments in Reddit and Instagram comments sections are not “media control”. The claim that student publications are “afraid” of criticising SAlt are blatantly not true, it is much harder to find one saying anything positive about SAlt than attacking it (Lot’s Wife ran a sensationalist hit piece on SAlt titled ‘Inside the Cult of the Monash Socialist Alternative Club’ as recently as this year, from an ‘anonymous’ contributor). Now, either student journalists are genuine cowards who are too afraid to criticise anything lest they be criticised themselves (granted, many journalists are guilty of this), or there are mountains being made of molehills.

When these people attempt to make a serious critique of SAlt’s politics, they only manage to make numerous factual errors that ruin their overall argument. In a June post, Stories of Socialist Alternative makes a variety of claims and statements about SAlt and its origins.

They try to connect SAlt to the UK Socialist Workers Party, infamous for its sexual assaults which were covered up by leading members such as Alex Callinicos. However, SAlt split from the UK SWP in the 1990s, and is not organisationally connected to them (except in adherence to Tony Cliff’s politics): Solidarity is, as a member of the International Socialist Tendency.

Their description of Trotskyism as an “off-shoot of Marxism from the 1940s that advocates for a vanguard revolution as the only solution to capitalism-induced problems” [sic] is similarly surreal. While I can’t expect them to become Trotskyism experts overnight, one would think they would reference the core political points made by Trotsky, most famously the theory of Permanent Revolution. Of course, it must be mentioned that “vanguard revolution” is not an idea limited to Trotsky: it can be traced back to Marx, Engels, or even Kautsky. They then describe vanguardism as a “tendency of socialism from below”.

It is hard to give a serious response to what are a series of deeply unserious accusations levied by people who are broadly guilty of the same thing. While attacking Socialist Alternative for paper sales, recruitment campaigns and charging a membership fee, many other Socialist groups which do the same thing (such as Socialist Alliance and Solidarity) seem to fly under the radar. Solidarity is ‘guilty’ of many of the same charges levied at SAlt, yet the attention is thrown at SAlt specifically.

Attacks against the Victorian Socialists (VS) by “Socialist” Greens are pretty overt: they are scared of being flanked from the Left by an ostensibly Socialist electoral project. While the Victorian Socialists have numerous problems of their own, for Socialists in the state, they are a much better voting option than the Greens (a capitalist party). Attacks against VS by the Greens tend to be nothing more than left-bashing.

Special mention should be made of Keiran and the BPU. Despite being Stalinists cut from the CPA/ACP (Australian Communist Party) cloth, Keiran and the BPU have a pernicious following amongst left-liberals who otherwise denounce Marxism-Leninism, Stalin, the USSR, etc. It is obvious that these left-liberals cling to Keiran and the BPU for legitimacy: a core part of ‘left-identity politics’ is finding a diverse person who says something you agree with, and then propping them up as some kind of ‘expert’. Perhaps this is why Keiran and the BPU have remained tight-lipped on issues around, for example, China’s nation-building policies in Xinjiang and broader repression of Uighurs in the region.

What’s actually wrong with SAlt?

What does a ‘genuine’ critique of Socialist Alternative look like? We should be criticising SAlt for taking the form of a sect, not aiming to build a mass party, for an over-focus on student politics, for not connecting to the working class, and for existing mainly as a propaganda circle (a 300+ person propaganda circle is still a propaganda circle).

Many on the Socialist Left defensively clung to SAlt in response to attacks from Keiran and Rakey Healing. However, this defence is unfounded. While SAlt is ostensibly the largest group on the left with 300+ members (exact numbers unknown), it has little to no impact on the broader movement outside of mostly insular circles of radicals.

While some SAlt members are in unions (notably, the NTEU at Unis where they have student clubs), their ‘pull’ in these unions is marginal, and they mostly take the same role as CPA members: becoming union activists pretending to be rank and file crusaders – a strategy of intervening in unions to seek reforms as opposed to building class power.

Outside of the activist or student left, SAlt is pretty much invisible. Granted, this could be said of other Socialist groups (such as Solidarity!), but SAlt is particularly bad for this due to their size. 300+ is not a tiny amount. While 300+ is small compared to 25M, it is still a fairly large amount of people who could be turned into cadres and used to build the workers movement, build the communist movement, and establish a firm basis for a workers party (through re-unification with communists).

However, SAlt does not do this. It seems that SAlt has very strange priorities indeed, with their student cadres focusing more on student elections and SRCs than in unionisation drives, fighting for democratic student organisations, or even fighting to build an off-campus, communist youth organisation (things that should be considered the bare minimum for serious communists).

Many of these issues can be attributed to SAlt’s middle class sectarianism, which turns away well-meaning sympathisers who would otherwise be sympathetic to communism.

That being said, the charges of SAlt being a “cult” boil down to the liberal use of ‘therapy-speak’, pure and simple. If these people want to be taken seriously, they should try taking themselves seriously first.