The Partisan Editorial Board introduce Partisan! #9.
It is once again election time.
In 2022, Anthony Albanese and the Labor Party smashed almost ten years of uncontested LNP rule, on an ambitious platform of neoliberal reform. In his three year tenure, Albanese has not only failed to live up to these promises (the Voice to Parliament was an embarrassment that was quickly launched down the memory hole), he has managed to be even worse: between attacks against the unions his party is on paper meant to represent (via the CFMEU administration), to attacks against workers and students supporting Palestine, to cutting deals with US imperialists.
These three years of Labor have almost been a disaster. By the time this issue is released, the election would have most likely already taken place, so we can’t make many good proscriptions as to what you should do for the election. Instead, we should approach the election from a post-perspective: what should communists do after? We already have our election perspectives at hand: we encourage comrades to vote socialist first, put Labor second, and put Greens third.
Why vote socialist? If you support socialist politics and policies, you should vote for socialists. We think it’s that simple, really. Voting socialist is a small but necessary way to demonstrate your support for socialism in the electoral realm. Why Labor second? Given Labor’s attacks against workers and Palestine, this was a controversial and rough decision to make. For better and for worse (mostly worse), the working class still views Labor as “its party”, even if much of the working class is critical of it. So we must adopt a different position to Labor, a ‘liberal workers party’, than to the Greens. We view the Greens as being a party of middle class radicals, who while they often have a left-wing orientation, act more as gendarmes against socialist regroupment than a supplement.
After the election, of course, comrades should keep doing what they were doing before (ideally, less of the bad things, and more of the good things). The ‘ideal situation’ is that Labor wins (most likely a Labor minority) and we do not have to contest an LNP government. But in the slim likelihood that the LNP wins, our plans should more or less be the same.
Much of the Left kicks up hysterics over elections. Elections are evil! They’re distractions from the Real Struggle! This is the most important election of our lives! Democracy is at stake! This issue of Partisan cuts through the slop to get the politics of the issue: whether communists should engage critically with elections to the degree that they are avenues for political struggle (we say: yes).
We wholeheartedly believe a renewed communist party should engage with elections, and put up candidates of its own. But we don’t believe the working class can take power through elections – in historical cases of this happening, it only led to the ruin of the movement (see: SPD). But this doesn’t mean that we should shy away from elections entirely, or that electoral work is “dirty”. Much of the Left carries a syndicalist infliction that tries to convince comrades that the only legitimate, real struggle is that of workers in the workplace. This is by no means not an important struggle, but as history shows, restricting yourself to economistic workplace struggles make you as opportunistic as those who restrict themselves to the electoral realm.
Best,
Partisan Staff
PARTISAN! 