PARTISAN!

Revmira, Melbourne

Peter Khalil has been re-elected as the member for Wills. After a long vote count, the swing to the Greens and the Socialist Alliance/Victorian Socialists coalition (but I repeat myself) has not proven large enough to take him down.

This can be understood as one thing and one thing only: A decisive defeat for the Palestine movement in Australia and a total repudiation of the program, strategy, and politics that dominates it.

Khalil became a major target of the movement due to his rabid Zionism, deep connections to the NATO-ANZUS political order, and the role he took as the “Special Envoy for Social Cohesion”. To the Melbourne Palestine movement, Kahlil took on this role as the ‘Great Satan’ of the ALP – his name became byword for treason and lapdogs of the America-Israel alliance. On election night, Palestine organising chats were blowing up across Melbourne with the near singular focus on Wills, hoping against hope that they had managed to knock on enough doors and leaflet enough houses for Khalil to lose his seat, and that Samantha Ratnam would be swept into parliament.

They were wrong. Khalil is back in. Not out of the evils of the voters of Wills, or the lack of radical enough action, but because the Palestine movement in this country has abjectly failed to have a material impact on Australian politics in a positive manner – let alone the genocide in Gaza which, notionally, we mobilise to stop. There was no positive program put forward, just a routine series of denunciations of the ALP, the LNP, and occasional stump speeches for the Greens. The socialist movement which threw itself into this struggle liquidated their politics, organisational independence, and their strategy.

The entire struggle had a policy of tailing the liberal leadership of the rallies. They left radicalism to infantile ultras, whose radicalism devolved into nothing more than wrecker behaviour. Notionally the largest socialist groups in Australia did nothing to genuinely organise against this genocide, there was no attempt to use the growing struggle within the unions to force a split from the Labourite politics of the leadership – Socialist Alliance flat out called for a vote for the Greens in the WA state election. There was never any attempt to cohere a socialist and proletarian pole – not under the banner of a sect, let alone under a united banner of the movement.

Now, of course, a genuine break with the Greens, and a split in the class, can only emerge with the existence of a unified Communist Party that unites the most politically advanced layers of the Australian proletariat. We can go nowhere without a Communist Party because without the party we are nothing. Without a strategy to reforge it, and a strategy on how to win the fight for Communism, we are less than nothing.

The Left has not advanced a strategy throughout the entire duration of the bombardment of Palestine. Every rocket that has fallen on Gaza has done so without the need to worry about the international proletariat standing up to stop it. The socialist and the Palestine movements in Australia need to sit down, analyse the barriers that are facing us and the actions we have taken, and ditch the dogma we cling too. 0.000% of communism has been built – the left has been shattered, and it revels in that.

Let the swamp camp in Peter Kahlil’s office; the communist movement has a task before it. It must focus itself on constant rigorous analysis and an unrelenting proletarian strategy.

Either we break from the Greens, from Laborism, and fight for communism, or we wither away into irrelevance like the rest of the swamp.

Those are the options facing the Australian left. The choice needs to be made yesterday. Those who choose poorly shall consign themselves to the dustbin of history.