Fox Luces, WA
The debate about the future of the Socialist party in Australia is heating up. In my article on the topic I expressed concern about the party’s ability to break from the left wing of the Greens and provide a stable, fighting force against Australian state and capital. Recently, the issue was discussed between Greens former councillor Jonathan Sriranganathan and three prominent members of Victorian Socialists on their podcast, and some extremely valuable contributions were made on the issue. Below I have transcribed what I believe to be an extremely important impromptu speech made by Sriranganathan (timestamp 54:40 to 58:30) on the material process by which the Greens were co-opted – describing what we Marxists would call a change in consciousness.
There would have been plenty of Greens members who had a very big transformative vision for society, like fundamentally changing how we grow food, how we build housing, how we structure economy, all that sort of stuff. Gradually after a lot of building, after a lot of campaigning, they start to win a few seats here and there. And suddenly you’ve got these elected reps who are responsible to a party, and also responsible to a kind of broader lefty movement, some of whom are volunteers and party members and some of whom aren’t. Then they’re responsive to an electorate which is largely comprised of people who are not yet as radical as the Greens membership, or not quite as on board.
Now those elected reps are coming under pressure from residents in their own electorate, they’re coming under pressure from the media establishment et cetera. What happens as a matter of practice – I’m telling you this as someone who’s been an elected representative – is that you don’t have time to talk to everyone, and you start to defer to trusted people. You might defer to certain lobby groups, a resident action group, or there might be a particular climate action group that you take your lead from strategically, and if they say “Oh I think this is a good local law to pass”, you’ll be like “alright I’ll pass it”. Maybe you should find the way to have more resources, but you don’t actually have time to talk to everyone in your movement.
Then what starts to happen over time is that the party membership is like, “Oh, we don’t quite have enough influence over how our MPs are voting in parliament or council. We want a bit more of the say.” And then the party says, “Okay, we’ll create an we’ll create a parliamentary liaison committee or create some kind of executive committee.” And those are elected members of the party and they’re meant to advise and guide and control the MPs. But then over time what tends to happen is that the MPs are making so many decisions – we’re talking dozens of decisions a week, how to vote on certain bills, what to say to the media about some emerging issue, how to allocate grants money, who to write a letter of support for on some particular local issue, that the executive committee, those volunteer members of your party, don’t actually have enough time to meaningfully scrutinise and and evaluate and guide all the decisions that the MPs are making.
And so then over time you have this emergence of a class of people within the party who might not be the elected reps, but they’re the only people who have enough free time really to be on these time intensive committees. Some of them might be former staffers or some of them might be the type of people who they get paid to campaign, and they take on a campaign manager role at election time and the rest of the time they’re in a volunteer role. But you get this emergent layer which is not just the MPs. It’s the MPs and the MP staff and then it’s some very active party volunteers, and some party staff who are employed by the party, not the party MPs. And so this layer emerges of people who are kind of the establishment within the party and they are really sensitive to the risk of losing seats. They’re sensitive to polling, to media pressure, and they are often the people who are enabling this kind of compromise or reformist approach, that they then push down to the membership, and they say “Sorry guys, we had to do it this way, because we were worried about what the Courier Mail would print about us.”
So what my article was sort of pointing out is that I don’t yet see anything in the structure or the DNA of the new socialist parties that strongly insulates against that same process happening over decades as you get MPs. Right now, it’s very easy for a small party to say our MPs wouldn’t sell out. But you haven’t had MPs yet. and you haven’t fully witnessed the kinds of pressure they are under to compromise. And so I guess I offer it as a provocation: what what will you do differently at a tangible practical level to ensure those same processes don’t happen?”
PARTISAN! 