The general line of this draft report was adopted by the Political Committee of Red Ant in September and October. It is now part of the discussion by Red Spark’s members as they assess their political perspectives leading into their next national conference.

The report is divided into three parts. This is the second in the series. The first part is available here and Part Three here. 

WHAT HAS BEEN THE RESPONSE OF AUSTRALIAN BOURGEOIS POLITICS AND THE LEFT?

The first point is that Australian political trends are following the main long-term international ones in the imperialist states (and much of the Global South), marked by the decline and fragmentation of the historically dominant electoral parties and the political establishment more generally.

The shrinking vote of both the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and Liberal National Party (LNP) Coalition parallel developments in the United Kingdom (UK), France, Germany, Spain and elsewhere. While the US has a different electoral arrangement there is also a haemorrhaging of support for, and legitimacy of, the two historical capitalist parties there. 

The key aspect of the Australian trend – so far – is the slow-motion transfer of votes from the ALP to the Greens. As the ALP has comprehensively expunged any remnants of its historical left social democratic wing, the Greens under Adam Bandt have increasingly tried to transform themselves into a left-social democratic party, though so far they have failed to increase their vote share on this basis.

The de-facto left split from the Liberal Party in the form of the Teal independents, while electorally very damaging for the Liberals in 2022, so far seems to be less threatening to the major parties’ duopoly.

The right haemorrhage from the LNP and ALP is also significant. In 2022 the combined vote of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and United Australia was above 10 per cent. There is also a bunch of other minor right-wing parties which, when combined, have a similar sized vote, though that is not new on the right. So far, no Australian Le Pen or Trump has been able to unite the far right and Dutton is obviously trying to keep as much of that vote in-house as possible. How successful he will be is a big question.

THE ALP IN GOVERNMENT

Since winning back Government in 2022, the ALP has offered no major redistributive measures, despite inheriting a large budget surplus and badly run-down health, education, aged care and childcare services, combined with a rising cost of living. This inaction amounted essentially to economic austerity and was coupled with symbolic measures and progressive sounding language, most notably on Indigenous affairs. That strategy failed dismally with the Voice to Parliament debacle. 

Labor only belatedly re-jigged (but did not abolish) Morrison’s Stage 3 tax cuts for the rich in response to mounting cost of living pressures after losing the Voice referendum. The ALP has since adopted other minor measures on cost of living such as increased Commonwealth rent and energy bill assistance but made no big initiatives.

The ALP housing “policy” (largely to do nothing) was politically defeated by the Greens, forcing the Federal Government to commit $3 billion to housing – though this small figure is still too minimal to have any appreciable effect.

ALP Climate policy is basically business as usual in relation to exporting coal and gas. Domestically 39.4 per cent of Australian electricity was provided by renewable sources in 2023, though the rate of increase of renewables has begun to slow. Still, 75 per cent of all new cars sold are powered by internal combustion engines. Just 8 per cent of new sales are pure Battery Electric Vehicles. 

The overall effect of the lack of urgent action on climate, housing, cost of living, corporate taxation, and the bipartisan ALP-LNP support for AUKUS, ongoing military ties to Israel and refusal to oppose the Gaza genocide, and the failure of Labor’s voice referendum, will have the effect of continuing to haemorrhage the ALP’s vote to the Greens (and also to the right).

GREENS SEEK TO REPLACE THE ALP AS THE MAIN CENTRE-LEFT PARTY?

The decline of the historical form of Left-social democracy (once housed within the ALP), and the continuing rightward march of the ALP, creates a political space which the Greens seem to be orientated towards. This appears to be a change, at least by parts of the national leadership, compared with the period prior to Adam Bandt gaining the national leadership in 2020.

In August this year, Bandt announced the Greens’ so called Robin Hood Reforms policy during an address to the National Press Club. The tax policy would introduce an “excessive profits” tax on large corporations (especially in oil, gas, coal and other mining). There would also be slightly increased taxation on super-rich individuals and the end of the major tax breaks for landlords which allow them to outbid new home buyers in the property market. All up, these are expected to raise half a trillion dollars over ten years (Parliamentary Budget Office calculations) to add free dental care to Medicare, among other things.

The Greens are against AUKUS. They also call for breaking ties with the Israeli military. The party supports free education and childcare, wiping HECS debts, and opposes the forced administration of the Construction, Forestry and Maritime Employees Union (CFMEU). These are all basic reforms that we support and that many or most working people would also support, if and when there is a serious public campaign for their implementation.

Since late last year under Adam Bandt’s leadership, the Greens have formulated their party’s goal as replacing the ALP as the major centre-left party in the parliament. At least, Bandt has done this. This new ambition is coupled with a greater propaganda emphasis on non-environmental economic issues facing working people. Bandt told The Australian in September 2023: 

“As leader, I want people to know that the Greens will fight just as hard for them on housing and education and material interests as cost of living as we will on the climate… I’ve always been of the view the Greens have a strong alternative economic offering and part of our job is to communicate that.”

In July this year, The Australian reported that Bandt rejected the so called “ACT Model” of an ALP-Greens coalition government. That was also the model of the one-term, Rudd-Gillard-Rudd, ALP-Greens de facto coalition in the hung parliament of 2010-2013. Re-entering Government with Labor federally (thereby taking responsibility for yet another neoliberal administration) would almost certainly doom the near-term prospects of the Greens becoming a left alternative to Labor.

This is all good news. We want the Greens to shift to the left because that helps to shift the overall balance of forces toward progressives. More political forces opposing Australia’s domestic or international policy makes the conditions more conducive to struggle against the state. 

Having a parliamentary left is important because it helps to re-create a political climate where social movements can more seriously conceive of winning their demands for new legislation. 

If the Greens left turn is sustained or they achieve increasing parliamentary success with a left platform, that will more sharply pose the question of the orientation of socialist groups to the Greens project.

THE FAR LEFT SCENE

The Victorian Socialists (VS) project is another response to the historical decline of the left-social democracy and the political space opened by the rightward shift of the ALP. The formation of the Socialist Alliance in its original form in 2001 was a previous, now failed, attempt at the same. 

In 2022, on our website, we called for a vote for VS, or other socialists candidates where present and to vote for the Greens ahead of the ALP. However, we don’t see the assignment of revolutionary socialists’ limited time and resources to campaigning for a vote (for a left social democratic platform) as a current priority. Rather, establishing a core of people organised around revolutionary Marxist ideas is the obvious priority. Once that is achieved, more tactical options will open up. But until that is achieved, really nothing is possible on the left.

Victorian Socialists seems to be a major tactical orientation of Socialist Alternative (SAlt), which essentially owns and runs it. However, it is not their only tactical orientation. For the moment at least they continue also to emphasise work in the Palestine solidarity campaign, campus clubs, the Marxism conference, and other pillars of the SAlt project.

Besides SAlt there are no other very significant socialist organisations – though the main ones Solidarity, Socialist Alliance and the Communist party of Australia are all still in existence.

We have been actively investigating what possibilities there might be for unity with one or another socialist group over the last year. Though we are for unity on a principled basis – for example, in accordance with our Perspectives document – we rule out unity with any group that takes imperialist-chauvinist positions. We are also against unity with those opposed to building a Leninist type of organisation. For these reasons we have not considered SAlt, Solidarity or Socialist Alliance as possibilities. That leaves the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) and the much smaller Revolutionary Communist Organisation (RCO).  

Taken together, the contemporary far-left (including our tendency), and also the Greens, are either so small and ideologically rudderless that they are incapable of presenting any effective, popular, interesting, or challenging alternative picture to the status quo. The left and far-left weakness is one side of the “all sided weakness” characteristic of Australian politics outlined above.

A realistic “alternative picture” will only form in most people’s minds when the possibilities are made more real by the rejuvenation of mass struggles that can provide glimpses of the alternative power needed for change. Yet the most critical weakness, which also limits the possibilities of real mass struggles emerging, is the lack of a revolutionary party. Hence the project of establishing the building blocks of a revolutionary Marxist party remains our focus.

PROPAGANDA, CAMPAIGNS, AND WINNING PEOPLE

Any left political project must attempt to gain influence among the layer of people who we have characterised as having a democratic humanist outlook but are not part of any organised ideological project.

The context of no mass social movements, or significant left wing or working-class organisations (such as socially active trade unions), poses the question of how influence, or even a hearing, can be won. How do we even find people? For a small, new revolutionary socialist group such as ours, the question is further complicated by the nature of our project. Socialism is not an electoral but a revolutionary project. So, the question becomes one of winning people to key ideas that do not arise spontaneously, including the need to overthrow the capitalist class. Outside of revolutionary periods revolutionary ideas will only be accepted as a result of conscious and consistent work by organised revolutionaries.

The question of socialist ideological influence is complicated by the long downturn in left organising. This has also resulted in a loss of revolutionary ideas not only among the broader working class, but among the left itself (or what remains of it). Our organisation is a case in point. It’s not the case that we somehow possess a big arsenal of terrific answers to all the key questions of the day, and that it is just a matter of spreading those ideas out. (In any case, few practical “answers” to serious questions can be possible in the absence of mass popular movements.) Rather, as with all other socialist groups today, we only have the weakest grasp on the key questions. So, the goal of advancing socialist ideological influence among an increasing section of the democratic humanist layer requires rebuilding socialist ideology first.

It would be a mistake, however, for us to conclude that what is needed is a period of isolated study, of abstract elaboration of ideas into some sort of brilliant party program, before returning to present this “good book” to the masses. We are already familiar with many of the core principles of Marxism. However, what distinguishes a revolutionary understanding is the ability to apply the core tenets of Marxism in the current situation in a way that can win people to revolutionary struggle. It is through increasing our engagement with current campaigns and struggles that we are likely to come into contact with individuals who, like us, are also searching for answers to the pressing issues of capitalist oppression and who, like us, are wanting to organise with others to fight for revolutionary change.

At the same time, the weak and disparate nature of the struggles that exist means that orientation to existing campaign committees, meetings or actions alone would be a narrow and inadequate tactical orientation. Most campaigns are tiny, only involve the usual suspects, or do not have the scope to allow for discussion or a broad range of ideas. An overemphasis on campaign work in the absence of powerful social movements would stunt our development. We would become just more “movement activists”.

The weakness of campaign organising as it exists today also means that many new socialists or socialist mind individuals, perhaps the overwhelming majority, are not involved in any campaign, and must be reached directly. This means that it is necessary to prioritise the development of consistent and meaningful “propaganda” – developing our understanding of and articulating revolutionary ideas in articles, leaflets, meetings, posters, pamphlets, and so on.

So we have to strike a balance between “propaganda” and “campaign” work – but more than this, we need to bring a highly political approach to all campaigns we are involved in and bring existing struggles, debates, contemporary issues etc into our propaganda. We don’t do Marxist propaganda (say an abstract theoretical article) on Monday and just make glue for Palestine posters on Tuesday. We must avoid simply making ourselves available as help-hands for initiatives that are not strategic. As much as possible we must seek to combine the spheres of propaganda and campaigning.

It’s easy to just say “combine the spheres of propaganda and campaigning”, but it is more challenging to do it. There is a whole field of history and theory on this issue which we’ve only started to collectively study and try to understand. We do already understand one thing we don’t mean by combining propaganda with action: the ultra-left approach. It’s obviously counter-productive to try to foist abstract Marxist dogma onto people wanting to take practical action to stop genocide in Palestine. 

Rather, when we talk about “applying Marxism in the current situation”, in this case, we mean being able to assist the development of the Palestine solidarity campaign in the direction of becoming a mass movement with an organised strategy to win concessions (or reforms) from the Australian state. There are a range of ways we can contribute to this, including propaganda that relates to Palestine and the Australian state, and becoming involved in strategic discussions within the campaign.

One important point is the question of how to find socialists among the dispersed progressive layers. As much as possible, we have to concentrate both direct propaganda work and campaign work on university campuses. Campuses are the location of the largest concentrations of young people. They are also less restricted compared with most workplaces. Students are encouraged, at least in theory, to think about the world and hence they tend to be more open to new ideas. Most of the important campuses tend to be centres of what organising, debates and struggle exist.

Read Part Three of this report here.