PARTISAN!

The Socialist Party has followed Socialist Alternative on a merry chase in search of a struggle against Hansonism. Conor K. is less than impressed.

The rise of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has made a fool of much of the left. Few have known what to make of it, and even fewer have known what to do about it. Within the Socialist Party, a ruling has been issued against it, conjuring up a mass Anti-Hanson campaign that has mobilized hundreds to “fight the right”. While this objective sounds nice enough, a deeper investigation will reveal its vacuity and moderation.

But first, a brief inquiry into the genesis of the campaign. The nation-wide expansion of the Socialist Party was, undeniably, motivated by the mass response to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The movement for Palestine rallied tens of thousands of would-be Socialists to political conscience(most notably in a 100,000-strong march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge). However, even as the expansion of the party was rubber-stamped by the Conference in 2025, this movement was losing its momentum. The numbers dwindled at the weekly rallies, which eventually became monthly. By the October 2025 ceasefire, there was practically no movement to speak of.

The collapse of the Palestine movement threatened a similar collapse in the self-proclaimed ‘party of activists’. Without this watchword to rally the capricious crowd, the Socialist Party faced a silent crisis – the leadership must either institute the discipline and cultivation required to develop cadre, risking the awakening of a party capable of sustaining itself, independent of the Executive, or they must rapidly re-orient to follow the fickle hand of the 24-hour news cycle. Pauline Hanson’s rise came as nothing less than divine providence.

The party’s reliance on a levy of activists, rather than a standing force of cadre, necessarily condemns them to conform to – that is, to tail – the motivations of this body, more often than not trawled up from the protean muck spilled forth by mass media. As long as our self-conception is bound in this way to the confines of capitalism, regardless of phrasemongering, our actions will be too.

This was demonstrated farcically in Red Flag’s latest edition, where the Greens, the party with “no solution” to One Nation on page 8, contributed their “deputy leader” as star speaker to the Anti-Hanson rally on page 4. This overt cooperation with the liberal capitalist Greens (which may be more palatable to a liberal capitalist activist, but not to us!) only indicates a covert (un)Popular Front of cooperation between the Socialists and the political parties of capitalism. If, as the staff of Red Flag say, Labor, the “biggest defenders of the status quo” are “often more [effective] than the conservatives” in their attacks against the worker, then why do we defend their vote, and even the vote of the Liberals and Nationals, from One Nation? Especially considering Red Flag’s assertion that Hanson’s working-class vote is inconsequential, very few of these people will be voting for an ‘activist party’ – at least not of the socialist disposition.

It is clear to see that the (at times mechanistic) construction of the Anti-Hanson Campaign is necessary for the reproduction of the Socialist Party in its ‘activist party’ form, but the non-sequitur tactic of ‘fighting the right’ the Socialist Party is so committed to finds its origin in the Anti-Nazi League (ANL) of 1970s Britain. The ANL was a groundbreaking success in the Cliffite psyche, when “10,000” British leftists rallied around a “two-pronged attack” to fight the National Front – one prong to “crush them at the ballot box”, the other to crush them in the streets.

This second prong was played out, to disastrous effect, as a temporary suture during the March for Australia (M4A) rallies. Predictably, this erroneous strategy of ritual blood sport and squadism against small bands of street gangs did not lead to the replenishing of leftist forces, but the pummeling of the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism back into historical obscurity. Much like the March for Australia rallies themselves, the barbarous struggle was redirected into the refined plane of electoralism.

By the Socialists’ own admission, the Anti-Hanson Campaign cannot simultaneously hold positive and negative dimensions. On one hand, the negative attempt at “demoralisation” of Hanson’s forces will not serve to bring huge swathes of apparently nonexistent right-wing workers to the side of the Socialists, but rather functions to uphold the ‘cordon sanitaire’ against an intolerably uncivilized genre of politics. On the other hand, the positive message reduces Anti-Hansonism to a mere mantra, representing anti-racism, refinement, solidarity, and general good feelings, phrasemongering in place of real politics. The campaign comes into its own as a shibboleth, surrogate for cadre.

Red Flag, which, as the organ of Socialist Alternative, has become intimately and complexly tied up with the Socialist Party Executive, has itself conceded that this movement will not “seriously undermine” Hanson or One Nation, falling back on lofty-sounding ideas of “resistance” and “traditions” that are, ultimately, empty. However, they also argue for a “serious alternative to establishment politics” – a point with which I emphatically agree. However, I do not believe this task can be carried out by the party as it stands. What serious party building demands is not tying our party at the hip to “activism”, but building an independent, communist cadre that can put forward a positive program of permanent opposition to capitalism in all forms.

I do not oppose unequivocally resistance against One Nation; just as I would not oppose resistance against any party of capitalism. But what the times demand of us now is a struggle, positive in nature, for the establishment of a mass party, for the cadreisation and education of the Socialists, and for the program of a new era of international communism.