PARTISAN!

As the need for unity between Socialist Alliance and The Socialists becomes clearer over the electoral registration of the NSW Socialists, Victorian Socialists member Daniel Lopez provides an independent (non-Socialist Alternative) perspective to the unity debates.

Socialists in Australia agree that we need to build a united socialist party with a strong working class membership that both contests elections and organises in unions and community campaigns. By and large, there is also a fair degree of consensus over the program that such a party ought to have.

But as anyone who’s met the Left knows, it’s much easier to affirm unity as a principle than to build unity in practice.

When Victorian Socialists was founded in 2018, we took an important step towards a united socialist party, even though VS began as an electoral coalition formed by separate organisations and individuals. Some two years later, we took a step back as Socialist Alliance withdrew from VS.

Their decision was precipitated by a fairly fractious internal debate, and in the aftermath, the Socialist Alliance published a document outlining their reasoning. Although I disagreed at the time, I nevertheless regarded the Socialist Alliance’s decision as informed by legitimate scepticism. At the same time, the perspective that informed my decision to remain a VS member was unproven, and it involved a good degree of uncertainty.

I don’t intend to re-hash those debates. Rather, I want to assess them in light of the results five years on. To put my cards on the table, I believe VS has come a long way since then, and that whatever the merits of Socialist Alliance’s analysis in 2020, the situation now is different.

In sum, I believe VS has begun to develop a model of party that can democratically sustain both unity and political difference. And if this is indeed the case, it makes sense to reopen the discussion over unity, whatever that might look like.

Socialist Disunity

Given my role in instigating the debates in 2020, it is first necessary to go over a little bit of my political background.

In 2019, after being a member of Socialist Alternative for going-on twenty years, after a lengthy debate, I came to the view that my expulsion was more or less inevitable. So, I resigned under duress. On the surface, the debate was over how socialists should assess Bernie Sanders’ campaign in the Democratic Party primaries, although of course, there were other issues at stake. While I still regard the hill I chose to die on with great fondness, the moment for those arguments has passed.

After resigning from Socialist Alternative, I remained an active, independent member of Victorian Socialists because I regarded it as the most viable party-building project in Australia. Around the same time, I began working as Commissioning Editor for Jacobin magazine. In that role, I have commissioned content by over 400 authors — including some who are members of Socialist Alliance or Socialist Alternative. With respect to the various currents and organisations that populate the far Left, I would describe my position as “radically ecumenical.”

Despite its promise in 2019, Victorian Socialists had not yet developed into a party, in the full sense of the term. Although a registered electoral party with a few impressive results to its name, VS did not have branches, structures, processes or a constitution that could allow it to maintain itself as a party independent of its constituent groups. Apart from the minority of VS members who were members of its constituent organisations, the VS membership was not active or engaged, and many were non-financial. Nor did VS organise between elections. Of course, as part of its constituent organisations, VS members were involved in union and campaign work — but not as VS members. There were also no plans at that point to build our membership and dues base, to expand interstate or to found a federal party. From where I stood, it seemed clear that VS was being mothballed between elections.

So, as an independent, I convened a coalition of around forty VS members that referred to itself as the “Active Party Platform.” Many leading VS independents supported this platform, including three then-members of the VS Executive Committee. The Socialist Alliance was also a key part of the Active Party Platform from the beginning.

Over a series of discussions, we developed a series of points we agreed to argue for within VS. These included:

• Re-engaging VS’s existing membership and launching a recruitment drive,
• Developing VS into a party that engaged in sustained non-electoral activism,
• Developing VS’s public and internal communications,
• Increasing membership dues, to sustain an independent, professional party organisation, including paid organisers,
• Building a branch structure, including regular public and members’ meetings,
• Developing VS structures to coordinate members’ union work,

The details of the debate that ensued aren’t really the main point. Suffice to say, while the Active Party Platform represented a significant group of active and experienced VS members, we simply didn’t have enough votes to win the day.

But even though we were out-voted at the conference convened to address the points we’d raised, we won a number of important concessions, including on a membership drive and dues, and on party activity and communications. In the early months of the pandemic, VS kicked into action — we hosted well-attended public meetings, set up a newsletter for members, and began recruiting. These efforts put us in good stead for the local council election campaign in late 2020.

It must be said, however, the debate itself was fractious. To some extent this reflected Socialist Alternative’s political culture, half shaped by student politics and half shaped by the idiosyncrasies of an exiled IST offshoot in a country whose culture and workers’ movement aren’t famed for their manners. And in fairness, it’s a culture that shaped my own approach to debate: I’ve read Lenin, I don’t mind a bit of a row.

But it must also be said, the intensity of that debate also reflected the then-recent history I mentioned above. One can hardly expect an organisation to look charitably upon an opposition led by a recently kicked-out leading member — and I say this with no implied recrimination!

The intensity of that debate was a considerable factor in Socialist Alliance’s departure, and although I disagreed with their decision at the time, in retrospect their objections on this front were reasonable enough. Now, however, it’s possible to assess the long term outcomes.

Socialist Unity: A Good Idea Then

Following the 2020 debate, I founded a caucus in Victorian Socialists named Socialist Unity. Unlike the Active Party Platform, Socialist Unity was a caucus; we recruited, held regular meetings (both public and for members) and decided democratically on our principles and structures.

Socialist Unity wasn’t an ideological caucus, which is to say, we weren’t committed to a specific tradition or brand of Marxism. Rather, we were a party reform caucus. We came together to keep pushing Victorian Socialists towards becoming an established party with a significant working class membership that organized outside of elections.

It’s not necessary to go over the whole story of Socialist Unity. But two points are salient.

Firstly, Socialist Unity promoted an “open caucus” system. To be clear, Socialist Alternative — the only other caucus in Victorian Socialists at the time — did not disagree with us on this point. Indeed, the model we developed drew in part on how Socialist Alternative relates to Victorian Socialists.

Essentially, we affirmed that some members of Victorian Socialists were and would continue to be members of other organisations. In the case of Socialist Alternative, it’s an organisation with an independent existence, separate activity and a specific intellectual tradition. In the case of Socialist Unity, we did not build an organisation outside of Victorian Socialists; rather we required our members to be members of VS while we affirmed our right to promote our caucus, its events and its views to VS members and publicly.

At the same time, we affirmed our commitment to VS and ensured that our activities didn’t undermine VS or provoke unnecessary conflict with Socialist Alternative. In one or two cases Socialist Alternative members acted in ways you might expect from an aspiring school captain at Trinity or MLC. But none of that was result of Socialist Alternative’s leadership — and it’s not as though SU was completely faultless. In the end, however, it wasn’t a big deal. The more SU and SA worked together, the better we worked together. The key was being committed to the shared project of building a socialist party.

As you would expect, Socialist Unity put forward alternative perspectives for VS at a number of conferences and members’ meetings, and these were often — but not always — opposed by Socialist Alternative. For the most part, these weren’t in-principle disagreements, but over timing and details. Because we were committed to the democratic principle of “one member, one vote,” when we were in a minority, we accepted the outcome. Other times, we negotiated outcomes we could all support. Other times again, we simply went ahead and tested our proposals for VS in practice — a path that’s often more persuasive than moving a motion.

At the same time, SU members stood as VS candidates in local council elections, and we won positions in VS’s leadership bodies in proportion to our vote at conferences. SU members, myself included, were also tasked with leading areas of work. Far from being excluded, we often found that the barrier to our members standing as candidates or taking on areas of work was the time commitment involved. The point is, we worked together while maintaining different perspectives.

Today, Victorian Socialists and its interstate branches have incorporated the open caucus model SU helped to develop. In Victoria, in addition to many independent members, there are at present two recognized caucuses, Socialist Alternative and the Communist Caucus. In a few other states, different caucuses have already launched.

Until the conference earlier this year, there was a third caucus within VS, the Socialist Workers’ Caucus. The SWC was also a reform caucus, and it campaigned for VS to organise in unions. And they won a major victory when the conference year voted to incorporate the SWC as an official party body. This, in my view, was an important vindication of both the SWC’s perspective and the open caucus model — after all, the SWC obviously won the argument, and the result speaks for itself.

The second point to make about Socialist Unity is that we were also successful, albeit in a less clear-cut way than the SWC. Today, with one or two relatively small exceptions, every point that SU demanded has been achieved, and for the most part, this was also led by members of Socialist Alternative.

This is the main reason why Socialist Unity no longer exists: VS has taken major steps towards becoming the party we envisaged, and indeed, it’s gone beyond many of Socialist Unity’s demands. So why continue to organise around those demands? And personally speaking, I prefer the aristocratic freedom of independence.

Socialist Unity: An Even Better Idea Now

The point of the above account is to address some of the barriers to unity that Socialist Alliance has raised.

In the document published following their departure from Victorian Socialists, Socialist Alliance wrote:

… we no longer feel that the Victorian Socialist project is capable of uniting broader layers of socialists in an alliance that has the dynamic to move beyond electoral politics.

Recent decisions have shown that Victorian Socialists is not open to allowing any groups of independents, for example, to develop its political life outside of elections.

Indeed, the majority faction organised by Socialist Alternative has made clear that it will not accept anything which is not electorally oriented beyond the very limited Membership and Activity Committee decided upon at the Governing Council on May 9.

Previously at the May 2 membership consultation, Socialist Alternative mobilised overwhelming numbers of its members to vote down a motion, which Socialist Alliance supported, from independent socialist members of Victorian Socialists.

That motion called on Victorian Socialists to: “… develop its organisational structures and sustain a more active membership”. It insisted that, “… avenues must be made available for members to be active outside of the electoral cycle”. The motion also noted that, “…the bulk of Victorian Socialist activity is confined to electoral activity, where it should be fighting around multiple issues the whole year round.”

Socialist Alternative’s preparedness to use its numbers to restrict the democratic participation of independents in the Victorian Socialists means that Socialist Alliance does not believe that our continued participation in the project can be effective.

Notwithstanding that “using numbers” to win a vote is actually just democracy, the other points raised above were, in the aftermath of the 2020 debate, understandable. And my decision to remain in VS and to form a caucus was predicated on two perspectives that hadn’t yet been proven.

Firstly, I regarded Victorian Socialists as by far the most promising party-building project.

Today, this has obviously been vindicated. We have established a federal party with:

• Over 5400 members, a growing branch structure led by democratically responsible district coordinators and a strong degree of member participation in the larger branches,
• Electoral registration with the AEC and the VEC and on-track registration campaigns elsewhere,
• Substantial revenues from members’ dues, donations, sales and electoral funding,
• Structures that facilitate VS members’ work in multiple unions and activist campaigns,
• Greatly improved professionalism in communications and design, data management, policy development and other organising areas,
• A democratic constitution and culture that recognizes caucuses — including newly formed caucuses in interstate branches — and that grants caucuses rights within the party.

The second perspective that kept me in VS was an analysis of Socialist Alternative.

Obviously, I had criticisms of Socialist Alternative, both as a member of theirs, and later as an independent member of VS. Equally obviously, I have not been shy about raising them.

But equally, I have disagreed many times with comrades who transformed their disagreements with Socialist Alternative into rigid, sectarian opposition.

For the most part, I understood the negative elements of Socialist Alternative’s politics and practice to be outcomes of the culture and mentality that can grow in the isolated and moralistic world of small propaganda groups. There are, of course, huge variations between small socialist groups, which range from the most self-isolated, strange and sometimes destructive, to those that contribute valuably to the Left and the workers’ movement, despite their small size.

One of the key factors, in my mind, is the extent to which small groups cultivate meaningful engagements in the real world, and attempt to push beyond the confines imposed by history and the political context they operate in. The further a socialist group retreats into its own structures and culture, the more likely it is to become a sect, in the pathological sense of the term. A sect can survive for decades, but what members of such sects usually don’t realize is that they’ve covertly abandoned the goal of establishing a socialist party in favour of maintaining a sub-culture.

At the same time, however, there are many examples in history of small propaganda groups that have overcome isolation and contributed to founding mass parties. Such groups must learn two basic things: first, they must learn to be involved in mass politics, whatever that looks like. And secondly, they must learn to operate alongside others in larger organisations, where the political uniformity of a sect is simply impossible.

Few would deny that as an organisation, Socialist Alternative is possessed with a perhaps inflated sense of its own correctness about everything, and as a consequence, can sometimes be abrasive or instrumental. Perhaps traits helped Socialist Alternative to survive and grow from the 1990s to the 2010s.

At times, this approach has been damaging. But at the same time, I have consistently argued that it’s wrong to assess Socialist Alternative on the basis of this alone. In 2020, I viewed Socialist Alternative as an organisation with elements of sectarianism in their politics, theory and practice, but at the same time, as an organisation that was leading the most serious effort to form a socialist party in many years.

This is important because a party is a qualitatively higher form of organisation than a small propaganda group. A party can sustain a more pluralistic political culture than small groups can, without ceasing to be radical or revolutionary, and this is by virtue of a party’s mass membership and stake in mass politics, as well as its structures, leadership and politics. In short, the only solution to the pathologies of small group politics is mass politics — which, of course, comes with its own set of worse dangers. I dare to say, historical mass socialist parties have also seen their share of unpleasantness.

But as I argued in 2020, although Socialist Alternative represented a minority of Victorian Socialists’ membership as a whole, Socialist Alternative was nevertheless necessary to VS’s success, owing to their resources and experience, as well as their members’ commitment to and capacity for activism.

I also argued that members of Socialist Alternative would learn from the experience of forming Victorian Socialists and campaigning to a mass audience, and that this would gradually diminish the more abrasive and sectarian aspects of their political culture.

As the saying goes, practice determines consciousness.

I think this perspective has also been vindicated. I’ve got no idea whether Socialist Alternative members see things in these terms — they probably don’t, but that isn’t really the point.

The basic point is that the Victorian Socialists have come a very long way since 2020. We are now a federal party with a small but substantial membership, a democratic constitution and culture, and with promising opportunities ahead. Socialist Alternative has been a part of that, to the benefit of both VS and Socialist Alternative. And if I can get along with them, there’s hope for a united socialist Left yet.

Which is to say, the reasons Socialist Alliance cited in 2020 to explain their departure from VS no longer apply.

So, it makes sense to explore unity. Together, we’ll be in a far better position to elect candidates from the Socialist Alliance — alongside independents, candidates from Socialist Alternative, and from other caucuses.

And if the Socialist Party is successful, this is, in fact, the best way to preserve and extend the achievements of all constituent groups that join. A united socialist movement strengthens the entire Left. And best of all, I believe this is possible without requiring that the Socialist Alliance sacrifice the organisation and legacy they’ve spent many years building.