PARTISAN!

Fox Luces presents a series of theses on the newly formed Australian Socialist Party and its limitations, and outlines a possible alternative.

“The working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. Instead of the conservative motto: ‘A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!” they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: “Abolition of the wages system!’- Karl Marx, 1865 speech to the First International

Preamble

“Keep Dutton out, get Labor to act”. This was the nauseating slogan under which the Australian Greens organised their 2025 federal election campaign, pouring ice water over the kindling of the real momentum they had begun to build three years earlier. It seemed fitting that first term superstar MP Max Chandler-Mather was among the casualties: he, who had championed the most concretely radical policies the party had ever platformed, he who had enjoyed more social media reach than any other politician while he was in office, he who rose on September the 11th to speak about the assassination of socialist Chilean president Salvador Allende by the CIA: it was his vision, if not his person, that was utterly betrayed by the Greens’ unwillingness to be more than a pitiful leech trying to suck the obviously unsalvageable Labor party to the left.

What does this have to do with us? In a purely chronological sense, it is in this milieu that the as-yet marginal Victorian Socialists took the reckless decision to launch nationally, a reckless decision that in hindsight was entirely correct. Though recency and familiarity complicate any simple narrative, future historians may be tempted to write: The Socialists was born in the ashes of the Greens’ left-wing. This set of observations is an attempt to ensure that we do not die there.

The thing about momentum that the left seems continually to misunderstand is that it is not a thing to be cashed in: it’s a thing to be ridden. All the socialist projects that, having caught the winds of change, got spooked at the last second and dug their heels in, against the will of the people – the workers – that propelled them forward deserve their historical defeat. When the Communist Party of France sold out the rioters and occupiers of 1968 to the government for a chance at electoral rewards, the contract they signed may as well have been their own death warrant. Though the stakes were higher then than for the 2025 Greens, the lesson remains the same: while it is certainly possible to suffer setbacks for being too eager, all our most painful defeats come from being too prudent and too acquiescent, too easily recuperated by power.

This WA May Day, held in Fremantle on Sunday May 3rd 2026, I watched with dismay as the party which is now mine held aloft red banners and repeatedly shouted: “I’ve got a budget fix: tax, tax, tax the rich!”. The idea that this context – a march of unionists, socialists, anarchists and communists – was ripe for the socialist party section to chant slogans compatible with the Nordic model baffles me. This comes at a time when the populist proposal for a 25% tax on Gas export revenue is championed by a man¹ who repeatedly says: “I’m a capitalist, I support capitalism, this is good capitalism”. He has his niche. Do we have ours? Are we meeting the workers where they’re at, or applying downward pressure against where they could be?

I am a member of the Socialist party, and of the Communist Caucus. But above all I am a human being interested in the liberation of human beings. This document is a call out to those who can say the same, regardless of faction.

Part One: Chameleon Socialist Alternative

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. – Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto

1. Those inclined to serious analysis know to yawn when Socialist Alternative is labelled a cult, but should give pause to a wholly different and more serious charge: that it is a cult of action.
2. Alternative’s electoral turn would never have taken place if the organisation had not so clearly run out of steam, had run its course. Only the threat of disintegration and death produced the self-reflection needed to make such a shift in strategy.
3. Buoyed by the injection of motion and energy that electoralism has administered, Alternative now resume the senseless march forward into action after action, scarcely a moment of reflection on one before the next is proposed and carried out.
4. Revolutionaries who engage in electoral work must be at all times deathly afraid of its neutralising capability, of the sinkhole for energy and motivation it can become. To launch headlong into electoralism without being conscious of this condemns one to reproduce ruling class logic, no matter how radical your intentions. Alternative beckon this process already.
5. Currently, the Socialists is Alternative’s party. They overwhelmingly staff its executive, dominate its membership, launch its events, in the same organisational manner they have always done. This is natural given their numbers, but if Alternative wish the Socialists to be something more than their own electoral wing, as they say, then they must be prepared to make real concessions to independent and opposing factions. Real party democracy means always and exclusively the right of the minority to be heard and their proposals to be seriously considered.
6. Alternative can complain that members outside of their own fold do not do enough party-building work until the sun swallows the earth, but they are the ones that make this so difficult. When the strategy, positions and brand of the party are developed behind Alternative’s closed doors, the only thing left for outsiders is to await their orders: this is not what people join a socialist party for.
7. The cult of action creates a chameleon tendency in Alternative. At once revolutionary socialists who dismiss parties such as Labor and the Greens for being incapable of truly representing the class, they mirror reformist rhetoric when in their electoral incarnation. They refuse to campaign on abolition of the police, expropriation of capital, workers’ self-government, and the abolition of class. Yes, these are misunderstood proposals in the population as it stands, but what is left for us if we hide them like skeletons in the closet? Making the rich pay their ‘fair share’? What is fair about the private ownership of capital at all? If we want to bring revolutionary socialism into the mainstream, we must represent it wholeheartedly from the start. We must disdain to conceal our views to defeat the disdain of our views.
8. I have heard Alternative members wonder aloud at the popularity of One Nation, as they remember the resistance that Hansonism met when it first articulated itself. Yet One Nation are simply reaping the rewards of having blasted the airwaves with an anti-establishment message consistently for many years. Never mind that their politics are garbage and servile to the ruling class: when class is off the agenda, this is where the momentum congeals following the collapse of the centre.
9. To defeat Hanson, to eradicate anti-immigrant sentiment, we must shout from every-working class rooftop: “Your misery is alienation! Your misery is manufactured by the capital system directly! Abolish it all, and your misery will melt away!”. Instead we say: Pauline Hanson is friends with Gina Reinhardt. Notice that this is exactly the line that Labor-right treasurer Jim Chalmers reached for when the bourgeois media asked his opinion.

Part Two: Our Unknown Purpose

1. The health of any party depends on its ability to articulate a positive internal purpose, as opposed to a negative, externally related purpose. In other words, we must be for something as well as against something.
2. Of the seven paragraphs under the ‘What we stand for’ section of the Victorian Socialists website, five complain bitterly about existing states of affairs. This is what we stand against. The last paragraph states: ‘give us 100 days in parliament and we will give you 100 ways we will fight to take power from the elite and return it to those who create wealth in the first place.’ In other words, give us your trust and your vote, and we will give you our word that things will be different. What a banner under which to defeat politics as usual!
3. The ‘our aims’ section of the website is more clearly incompatible with capitalism, yet remains negative and confusingly torn. The section on ‘Cooperation and Economic Democracy’ commits us to the following three things: abolition of class, abolition of private property and… progressive taxation (in that order). Progressive taxation of whom? The bourgeoisie we have just stated we wish to abolish?
4. Following the events of the 1871 Paris Commune, Marx and Engels stated the following year, in their preface to the German edition of the Communist Manifesto, that their earlier calls for a revolutionary transition involving progressive taxation and centralisation had become antiquated. One may well ask: if a policy was declared antiquated and abandoned in 1872, what place does it have in the constitution of a socialist party in 2026, coexisting uneasily with the truly revolutionary measures of expropriation and democratisation of private property directly?
5. When Marx and Engels further state in the same document that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes”, what do we learn? That we can lay hold of state machinery provided it is unicameral and republican? Surely not. The fight for working class power is the fight against the state itself, the ‘supernatural abortion of society’ as Marx put it.
6. Is our goal to get one of us elected? Surely, but to what end? To have someone to stand up in parliament and cry havoc when the ruling class lets slip the dogs of war? The Greens have been doing this for years, to extremely limited success. If our aim is to conquer another stage for our politics, we commit a folly in thinking that the parliamentary stage is a neutral one: what of when our socialist member is thrown out of parliament? Will the class feel represented, or think: “another loud, unpragmatic politician of the left”? Do we flatter ourselves to use the most finely honed tool of the ruling class – the parliament – for working class ends? By the time we have watered down our politics enough to elect anyone, will our socialist politician even dare to call the Labor party traitors to the working class?
7. None of this has been thought through, or, if it has, it has been behind closed doors. The membership have not been polled or consulted. No truly open process for determining the strategy, position and future of the party has been conducted. Lightning quick conferences in which 90% of the available time is swallowed up with endless discussions of the points on which we agree, with disagreement swiftly voted down as unrealistic and not worth considering, do not a members’ party make. The sensation of being in the socialists as it stands is of occult orders trickling down from an unknown source.

Part Three: Some Preliminary Remarks For an Alternative Vision

Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical, real consciousness that exists for other men as well, and only therefore does it also exist for me; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men. – Karl Marx, The German Ideology

1. Capitalism produces a capitalist culture, and this culture reproduces capitalism. It is not possible to defeat capitalism meeting it on the purely political level (through protests and elections) because capital has its finger on the scale through its control of culture. Culture is, as the Situationist International pointed out, “The ideal commodity – the one which helps sell all the others”.
2. With the complete suffocation of working-class culture, more than bland affirmation of the ‘many’ against the ‘few’ is needed to turn the ship around. The diffusion of capitalist social relations to the point of invisibility calls for creative measures towards a window out.
3. Whatever you think of anarchists, the counterculture developed by the CNT-FAI and their allies in Spain in is a model to study seriously. For one thing, it actually precipitated social revolution; for another, they accomplished it amongst workers in far less favourable objective conditions for organisation than we face today.²
4. Central to the development of socialist culture in Spain were the Ateneos, essentially radical public houses run by the workers’ movement. “An ateneo typically featured a cafe, library, reading rooms, meeting rooms for anarchist and neighbourhood groups, and an auditorium for formal debates, public talks and artistic performances.” (Zoe Baker, Anarchist Counter Culture in Spain). In several states, the new socialist party has access to a brick-and-mortar building; at present these only house a bookshop and launch campaigns. If we want to build ‘grassroots’ support (if that word still has content) we need to start using our assets.
5. Socialist party events in general are, at present, mostly bone-dry affairs: a keynote address followed by speaking practice from already prominent members, sounding suspiciously like they have rehearsed their talking points in advance. The discourse is one sided. There is no conversing. At any instant there is an active speaker and passive listeners. When a newcomer offers a genuine question, they are often replied to in a tone dripping with irony. One example from the WA launch of the Anti-Hanson campaign comes to mind. After an hour and a torrent of words about how dire the rise of the far right is becoming, a clearly new and unaligned person arose and asked a brave question: “So what do we do about all this? Do we have a revolution?”. The response was essentially barely stifled laughter and “yeah, yeah, one day. For now, come knock on doors with us.”
6. The point is not to promise revolution tomorrow, but any successful socialist project must provide ways for all its members to do something revolutionary, today. Protest is no longer enough, though it is part of the whole. We must ask ourselves: what is it that capital truly fears? The answer is the development of a belligerent community that can attend to its own needs. One such need is food, healthcare, and a place to stay. Another – becoming clearer by the day – is self-defense, against fascists and against the police. Another still is outlets for creative expression.
7. Is the party in a position to meet these needs yet? Mostly not, though that says nothing of their inherent value. We need something more immediate to work towards than the Revolution, yet more far-reaching than sporadic protest and electioneering. Besides: with a rapidly expanding membership of 6,100 all paying somewhere in the range of $24-$252 per year³ the resources we have access to are not inconsiderable (as yet there is zero budgetary information easily available to the members, though we can assume this will change soon).
8. The socialists should seek to form much greater bonds with the tenant unions in operation around the country. Due to the structure of Australian capitalism, renters represent a class extremely vulnerable both to the failures of the market economy and to political betrayal; they therefore contain revolutionary potential so obvious a child could point it out. If we are to differentiate our stance on the housing question at all from the Greens, we must place the development of a fighting, organised renting class at its centre. We should support and encourage collective bargaining agreements against landlords, as well as rent strikes. This support should take a verbal, financial, and physical form.
9. For this project to make a real, lasting mark on Australia’s political fabric we will have to get used to dealing with that which feels just outside our reach. The Socialist Workers’ Caucus is a good example of this – while initially the question of what hope a small network of explicitly socialist interventions into trade unions had of forging progress, the signs from Victoria on this front are encouraging. Yet, if trade unionism is the furthest from protests and elections that we go with any gusto, we are doomed to be routed and defeated within the decade.

Postscript

If our party is to succeed, we the members who make up its body and limbs have to articulate with absolute clarity what we fight for and why we fight for it. Socialism is no series of augmentations, however radical, to the current political-economic system. It is a completely new system. This is both a frightening and wildly exciting fact; after all, what we are dealing with is the liberation of the human race. It would be crushing folly to try and contain its potential. Let nobody that reads our policies and our press releases, follows our campaigns, hears any one of our voices, make the mistake of believing Socialism to be the hollowed out, defanged thing championed by so many that organise under the ‘social democrat’ or ‘democratic socialist’ banner. Higher taxes and higher wages merely guild the chain. Our task is to break it.

1. Konrad Benjamin, aka Punter’s Politics. ↩︎
2. For one, a little over half of workers couldn’t read. ↩︎
3. This figure does not take into account the fact that most existing memberships will be on ‘founding’ dues, i.e. $10 a year. The points stand, as the section is aspirational. ↩︎