Having previously explained the momentum model and Rising Tide’s politics, Max J writes on how Rising Tide engages with the Left, and how the Left engages with Rising Tide in turn.

Socialists are unclear on how to relate to and engage with Rising Tide, and groups like it. Organisations such as Socialist Alternative and their electoral front The Socialists aim to cozy up with Rising Tide and its few hundred activists, in the hopes of winning them away from the Greens and using their activist celebrity power to win more votes. Similarly, Socialist Alliance also aims to win over Rising Tide activists, but with a comfortable second preference from the Greens.

Communist groups such as the RCO, the CPA, and others, have more mixed approaches to Rising Tide. While the RCO supports workers taking action against climate change, we deviate from the environmentalists on several key issues. RCO members have made clear their criticisms of Rising Tide and the broader environmentalist movement, while advocating for a critical engagement with it. RCO members from its Newcastle section were present at the 2023 and 2024 blockades, while hosting a stall at the latter alongside members of the Freedom Socialist Party (who issued a statement in support of Rising Tide and the blockade).

While the CPA has made no mention of Rising Tide, its members were present at the 2023 and 2024 blockades, hosting their own pavilion at the latter. With no official statements on Rising Tide or the environmentalist movement of the 2020s, it can only be inferred that the CPA is broadly supportive of Rising Tide and the movement writ large. This is supported by the CPA’s endorsement of the Greens in the 2025 federal election.

Crucial to developing a socialist perspective on Rising Tide, and developing a strategy of engaging with them, is understanding their politics, their base, and how they view themselves as a project. We can neither dismiss them outright, nor take them at their word. Once we develop a socialist perspective on Rising Tide, we can engage with them in a way that aligns with our strategy of building class power.

Rising Tide’s engagements with the Left have been few and far between. Rising Tide has attended ostensibly left-wing protests, especially those around Palestine. To their credit, many Rising Tide activists are also involved in pro-Palestine groups, in particular the Palestine Action Groups based in each major city (including Newcastle). Up until recently, there was no official engagement between Rising Tide and the Left (as in, the organised socialist left).

Since the nation-wide expansion of their electoral front in Victoria, Socialist Alternative has made a strong push to seemingly win over Rising Tide activists. Or at the very least, they’ve made a push to try and ingratiate themselves with Rising Tide. The NSW Socialists launch in July 2025 included amongst its speakers Zack Schofield, a long-time environmentalist activist from Newcastle, and organiser within Rising Tide.

Schofield was also a speaker at a ‘politics in the pub’ event hosted by the NSW Socialists Newcastle on October 19^th. Socialist Alternative has put much work into warming themselves up with Rising Tide activists like Schofield – in spite of the refusal of these activists to join the party. In a recent Red Flag article written by Lily Campbell (a Socialist Alternative member now based in Newcastle), Schofield is given a softball interview about Rising Tide and the activism around it.

The most interesting part of this interview is the end. In it, Schofield makes a few statements. His first statement, that “materialist politics are critical to understanding how the world works and how change happens”, is uncontroversial. Interestingly, he attempts to tie Rising Tide into the “tradition” of organised, mass action that the socialist movement has: “Socialists understand that change doesn’t come from ideas alone or radicalism alone; it comes from actually becoming powerful enough and accessible enough to as many people as possible to shape the dominant politics of the day.”

This statement helps contrast the views of Rising Tide and its activists with those of the organised socialist movement. While Rising Tide believes in social ecosystems, that activists have special roles in the ecosystem, and that change is made by an active minority winning over a passive majority, socialists, or at the very least serious communists, believe the opposite. Communists support the mass action of the working class, and we aim to foster this mass action through comprehensive political education and putting forward a program worth fighting for. While Rising Tide’s leading activists search the realm for “weavers”, “experimenters” or “builders”, communists aim to organise the ‘advanced workers’ (working class people who are already politically conscious and active), and raise the rest of the working class to that ‘advanced’ level. The difference couldn’t be more day and night.

Socialist Alternative’s push toward winning over Rising Tide activists is not unsurprising. Rising Tide activists are experienced organisers, experienced in the environmentalist movement, experienced dealing with legal challenges (to their credit, they’ve managed to fight anti-democratic anti-protest laws in NSW), and have greater ties to the rest of the activist scene than Socialist Alternative. This is in spite of Rising Tide organising in the milieu that Socialist Alternative would otherwise dismiss as “the swamp”. Socialist Alternative aims to bring Rising Tide activists into their electoral front, to benefit from their activist experience, and to use them as part of a springboard into national relevance.

However, it is remarkable that Socialist Alternative is succeeding where the other sects have failed. While Socialist Alliance can get Rising Tide activists to speak at their events, Alliance has hardly been able to use (for example) Zack Schofield’s platform for their potential electoral success. Despite their success in goading Rising Tide activists into platforming them (and vice versa), however, Rising Tide activists have no interest in joining The Socialists (beyond one or two exceptions).

Communists and Rising Tide

The political differences between communists and Rising Tide could not be more obvious. Communists view the working class, that being the class of people reliant on the wage fund, as their central subject. In contrast, Rising Tide views “the people” as their central subject, and organises their populist and green slogans around this. While communists aim to organise the entire class, lifting all working class people to an ‘advanced’ level, Rising Tide seeks to organise a militant minority of activists of all ages – and all classes.

Rising Tide and Socialist Alternative/The Socialists seem to get along so well as they have a few core similarities, this being that their form of activism tries to seek out special individuals who they can elevate to near celebrity status. The environmentalist movement has done this to Greta Thunberg (to her credit, a principled activist), and has long sought out a ‘new’ Thunberg from which they can propel themselves into international relevance. In The Socialists, the entry of Jordan Van Den Lamb into the Victorian Socialists as a senate candidate has irreparably changed the orientation of The Socialists forever. Every The Socialists event includes some kind of mention of Jordan Van Den Lamb, more recently the announcement of The Socialists attending the blockade. Glowing praise is given to Thunberg and Van Den Lamb in The Socialists, and it could very well be that the Socialist Alternative leadership of The Socialists sees in Schofield the next Van Den Lamb or Thunberg.

Communists should orient themselves critically to Rising Tide. Just as we are critical of the left-labor union leadership, the Labor Party and the Greens, we should be critical of the professional activist leadership and its silent bureaucracy. This is a layer that is resistant to revolutionary change on anyone’s terms except their own, and as we see through the momentum model, it is a layer with a disjointed, incorrect view of the world. This layer of activist leadership, with the wrong ideas, can only lead activists and potential militants toward disaster, and has done so repeatedly. The constant cycle of ‘civil disobedience’ activism, where activists purposefully get arrested to “send a statement”, is unsustainable in the long. Smaller groups that have attempted this, such as Blockade Australia (which now survives through organising activist ‘fronts’ framed as “grassroots organising spaces”), have been destroyed by it. Rising Tide only appears immune to this, as they grow at a rate in which they can overcome the attrition of mass arrests. But nothing lasts forever.

Communists need to be careful in their engagements with Rising Tide. Communists, unionists, and other militants are components within the momentum model’s “ecosystem” structure, which also includes activists, small business owners, and progressive NGOs. Since we are just components in an ecosystem, Rising Tide is oriented toward convincing communists to attend their events and actions, since this brings variety. Rising Tide stands to benefit from bringing in experienced socialists and union organisers. As a result, Rising Tide activists, especially the older and more experienced activists, are adept at doing so. Zack Schofield, for example, is a savvy political operator, and knows the right words, phrases and slogans to use to convince certain socialists to fall behind him. This is not to say that Schofield isn’t in some way sincere in his socialist-ish politics, but that due to the momentum model, it is impossible for him to openly be a socialist, or to join a socialist organisation, and he is incentivised to say whatever is necessary to get people to show up. Similar reasons are why Rising Tide cannot be socialist, even if its leading activists wanted it to be (they don’t).

The Blockade

Rising Tide’s blockades are far from advertised: as opposed to using militant action to block the coal ports and occupy a park in Newcastle (whether we should would want to block the coal port in the first place is a different question), they instead resemble a music festival. It is more accurate to describe them as Woodstock with less drugs and less people abusing or trying to kill each other. However, many in Rising Tide, despite decorating the blockade with radical sounding slogans, will often admit that the blockade isn’t quite as intense or radical as they make it out to be.

In his interview with Red Flag, Schofield states: “At the moment, the blockade is a form of civil disobedience, or storytelling with a material target. We’re putting ourselves in the way of the problem to tell a story about why there’s a problem and why people should do something about it. We impact the company’s bottom line a bit, but not enough for it to really matter. The objective is to build that mass of organised people to the level of civil resistance, where we become a force to be negotiated with, rather than policed away. By growing our numbers, we can make a material impact and actually stop business as usual.”

At the 2024 Blockade, Rising Tide activists were unable to completely block the channel, and multiple coal ships managed to pass by as the days progressed. In spite of the underwhelming nature of the blockade, we advocate for communists to go anyway. This is because communists have a duty to intervene in all avenues of the struggle, where working people are present and engaged. This includes the blockade, although when workers attend, they are misled by activists in Rising Tide.

The Blockade brings out thousands of people, many of whom are sympathetic to radical changes to the system, but are mislead by activists into supporting environmentalism. The presence of serious communists at the blockade provides an outlet for these sympathies. There is a growing trend in support of direct actionist politics in the left and soft-left. This is because people are viewing electoral politics as being insufficiently capable of solving pressing issues in society. As a result, activists are drawn towards adventurism (striking out against the system on their own or in small groups), or insurrectionism and terrorism. Blockade Australia was the result of this tendency, and it was not able to survive the resulting police suppression.

It may seem contradictory to state that Rising Tide wants to goad communists into going to their blockade, and then tell communists to go to the blockade anyway. This is only the case if you view the blockade as being a historically or politically significant event, which is not quite (it is too soon to say). Communists should attend the blockade without falling for Rising Tide’s illusions of grandeur: the blockade is simply just another protest we attend to promote communist views and try to win sympathisers at.

With plans for the construction of a container terminal at the Newcastle port, it may very well seem that capitalism has decided to fix the issue for Rising Tide. Rising Tide’s “solutions” to the climate crisis mirror that of its environmentalist contemporaries: tax fossil fuels, stop building new fossil fuels, recycle more often, ride a bike instead of driving, plant more trees, so on. But the communist solution to the climate crisis is to build a mass movement of working people that is willing to fundamentally and totally transform society. Communists aim to revolutionise production, taking it under democratic management. They aim to revolutionise consumption and distribution. Such a total transformation is against the interests of Rising Tide, who want there to be a liberal market economy for their friends in small business and the not-for-profit sector.

Communists need to be able to present a viable alternative to the misleaders in Rising Tide and beyond: a mass communist party with a Marxist program capable of leading the working class to power.