22.05.2025

Electoral front goes national

Victorian Socialists are establishing franchises across the country. Marcus Strom looks at the background, the manoeuvring, the programmatic poverty - but welcomes the formation of the Communist Platform

In the aftermath of the Australian federal election, and buoyed by its very limited success, the Victorian Socialists have announced they will become a national party with franchises in all Australian states and territories.

The proposal is for Victorian Socialists to rename itself the Socialist Party and be known throughout Australia’s colonial-era states as ‘The Socialists’. So, in New South Wales, the most populous state, there will be ‘NSW Socialists’, Queensland will have its own ‘QLD Socialists’ and so on across the six states and two territories. Victorian parochialism will go national, with the ‘party’ word largely hidden from the branding.

The VS has a chequered history. Starting in 2018, the formation initially united the state’s two largest socialist organisations, Socialist Alternative and Socialist Alliance, responding to an initiative of Stephen Jolly from the Militant/Committee for a Workers International tradition. Jolly has been a local councillor in Melbourne since 2004 and is now independent mayor of Yarra Valley. After being its star candidate in 2018, Jolly resigned from VS a year later amid “unspecified and serious allegations”. Socialist Alliance, the smaller grouping, withdrew in 2020, when it lost the right to maintain a veto on the VS executive.

Sect project

The Victorian Socialists is now dominated by the (post?) Cliffite Socialist Alternative, which sees the project as its ‘electoral front’ - no doubt to siphon disillusioned Australian Labor Party and Green voters towards its sect project, which it sees as the embryo of the ‘Real Revolutionary Party’. Like most Trotskyist organisations, it thinks the ‘revolutionary’ programme is only relevant during ‘the revolution’. It has no concept of a minimum programme acting as a strategic roadmap to organise today’s struggles to the point the working class wins power. So, in order to do ‘mass work’ during a non-revolutionary period, it peddles warmed-over left reformism to create a pond to fish in. Economic and liberal demands to the fore; democracy and the nature of how society is ruled sidelined.

After winning more than 5% of the vote from three electorates, Socialist Alternative thinks it has the wind at its tail and could hit the big time. A week after announcing the national push on social media, VS says it has signed up 1,700 people, with the national membership now at 3,000.

At its conference in June, it will change its name to ‘The Socialist Party’ and expand its executive from 13 coopting secretaries of each state and territory franchise, all of which have been appointed, not elected, by the Socialist Alternative-controlled Victorian executive - a guaranteed and reinforced majority. In response, the rival Socialist Alliance group, which had a non-aggression pact with VS in the 2025 election (unlike 2022 where they ran against each other), put out a defensive and vaguely threatening statement that said the Socialist Party “has not been initiated by Socialist Alliance, nor is it a united socialist project”.¹

The Alliance statement said that the two groups met on May 8 at the initiative of Socialist Alternative (underlining that VS is still a wholly owned SA vehicle), which will put the expansion proposal to the VS conference in June but with “no immediate desire to seek greater unity for a national electoral project”. In other words, they are merely seeking an arrangement where both avoid standing against each other. At the senate level that could prove tricky. However, realising there could be a clash of registering names, Socialist Alternative asked Socialist Alliance not to block its national party registration in other states with the Australian Electoral Commission. Socialist Alliance stated it would not do this: “as the longest-standing federally registered party with ‘socialist’ in the name, Socialist Alliance has first rights to its use”. A clear threat, but what is unclear is what it wants in response.

The current rules of the Victorian Socialists, while permitting open and public ‘groupings’ (ie, factions), would bar Socialist Alliance members joining the Socialist Party. Reminiscent of anti-communist clauses in the ALP and the British Labour Party, VS rules state: “Members of other (registered political parties), or aligned groupings or organisations attempting to (register) … are not permitted to join or continue membership of the party.”

This puts the Socialist Alliance in a bind. If it stands aside from the Socialist Party project, it risks being completely eclipsed. Its membership is older and smaller than Socialist Alternative, which ran a very strong ground operation in the last election.

No doubt the Socialist Alternative old guard of Mick Armstrong, Sandra Bloodworth and Diane Fieldes sees an opportunity to put their old DSP rivals to the sword. And, given the fait accompli presented to it by Socialist Alternative, the Socialist Alliance would need to renounce its separate electoral registration to join the Socialist Party.

Of course, it should just join. One of the main reasons people do not vote for socialists is they present as a collection of infighting, rag-tag sects. Speaking as a Marxist in the Australian Labor Party, I believe it would make fighting for socialist politics in the ALP that much easier if Marxists outside got their act together.

Seizing on the opportunity to push the organisation beyond being an electoral front of the Socialist Alternative group, the fledgling Revolutionary Communist Organisation has just voted to instruct its members and supporters to join the new Socialist Party as a site to fight for democratic unity around a Marxist programme.

Recognising the potential pitfalls, the decision of the RCO’s central committee notes the launch of the Socialist Party project is a “cynical attempt by the Socialist Alternative group to expand the reach of their electoral front. This new organisation will be wholly and undemocratically dominated by Socialist Alternative and will primarily serve as a front for them to recruit to their sectarian organisation.” But the living reality of such a project could create opportunities for the RCO to develop its own political culture and experience.

Resolution

The RCO resolution states:

We should not understate the importance of this opportunity to the development of the partyist tendency in Australia. The creation of the Socialist Party will deepen the liquidationist trend within the mainline of Australian Cliffism and open up a space for political struggle around socialist ideas. It would be sectarian posturing to stay out of such a struggle.

Last weekend, the RCO launched a Communist Caucus of the Victorian Socialists, that will expand nationally with the Socialist Party. It will not be limited to RCO members, but open to any in the Socialists who accepts its platform for revolutionary republican-democracy and partyism.

The RCO resolution further states:

Without the active intervention of an organised and disciplined partyist faction, the Socialist Party will inevitably degenerate into another ‘broad left’ project which tails Laborism and furthers the weakness and division of the socialist movement. However, with such a faction, the formation of the Socialist Party can be the beginning of an open struggle for a genuinely democratic mass socialist party with a firm base in the workers’ movement.

This points to the fact that Socialist Alternative and some of its independent allies in VS believe they can present left reformist nostrums merely to build an electoral presence. This is another attempted shortcut to the big time - and we have all seen that movie before. Nonetheless, life can be shaped. It makes sense for all Marxists not in the ALP to join the Socialist Party and take it from being an electoral front of one small sect to an organisation that has the potential to be much more.

The Solidarity group (the official Cliffite franchisee), the Communist Party of Australia, the Australian Communist Party, the New Communist Party, the Communist Party (ML), Socialist Alliance, Red Ant/Red Spark, Freedom Socialist Party, etc - all should leave their sect pasts behind them and try to unite: not as reformists, but Marxists. The current VS electoral platform, however, is more for ‘wealth redistribution’ and ‘social justice’ than socialism. While it talks about a different and new society, and calls for capitalism to be abolished, there is no strategic roadmap to achieve this goal.

And it certainly does not take this demand into its election material. While the VS aims refer to socialism (along with confused descriptions), they also state: “Victorian Socialist candidates, if elected, will fight for a radical redistribution of wealth and power.” A clear left reformist formulation. While it says there will be a ‘socialist republic’, there are no demands to abolish the monarchy, the Senate or the colonial era states and territories. Nothing on the nature of the judiciary or even calls for proportional representation. While it does call for the abolition of the security services (ASIO), it says the money saved should be diverted “into spending on social services”. While it calls for cuts to military spending, it is happy to leave the armed forces standing, only calling for the disbandment of the Special Air Service.

There should be no illusion here, either, that the VS results represent a qualitative electoral break for the Marxist left. While getting a handful of decent votes, these remained in single percentage digits - and the vote for the Senate across the whole of Victoria was 1.49%. The politics taken to the election are barely distinguishable from the petty bourgeois, left-reformist Green Party: justice for renters, action on climate change, justice for Palestine, fight the far right, people before profit. The language used by VS is more leftwing, highlighting that there is a class war within capitalism (even Warren Buffet has made that point), but the policy platform is liberal-economistic reformism.

It is telling that its electoral offering is to the right of the aims stated on its website: a common fault of Laborism. And even amid these aims there is no clarity on how the working class can win power. Instead, you get this vague formulation: “Australia’s constitution, government, legal system and state institutions originate in British settler-colonialism, were built on the dispossession and genocide of Aboriginal people and are geared to serve the interests of capitalism. Consequently, they must be replaced.”

Righto. But this misses out how these are to be replaced and with what - two things that might come in handy.

The VS believes it is a potential short cut to mass politics based on left reformism. It challenges the Labor Party, but on the basis of left Laborism.

Socialist Alternative’s journal Marxist Left Review in 2019 covered the launch of the Victorian Socialists the previous year. Author Liz Walsh wrote:

In contrast to many other new left formations, the Victorian Socialists was not established as a ‘broad party’ aiming to become the primary vehicle through which socialists organise interventions into union, social and political struggle … The party is more akin to an electoral front, with participants primarily uniting around the concrete goal of electing a socialist to the state parliament.²

Here there is a similarity to the attitude of the Socialist Workers Party in Britain to the Socialist Alliances a generation ago: keep the ambition limited to electing someone to parliament; socialist ‘interventions’ elsewhere should be done by the ‘real party’ through other ‘united fronts’. And the electoral effort is a ‘united front of a special type’, as John Rees dubbed it.

Partyism

But perhaps life is already getting away from this. While Socialist Alternative argues that Victorian Socialists will be limited to an electoral front, VS’s constitution says it will use “workplace organisation”, “community organisation” and “political organisation” (for elections) to win its aims. This could create a trajectory beyond this limited vision. Buoyed by its relative success in pushing three electoral results above the background static that most socialist candidates receive, Socialist Alternative believes it is seizing the moment to create a national electoral vehicle for the non-ALP left - one that it controls.

Success, of course, is relative. Socialist electoral initiatives to the left of the Labor Party rarely break above single digits in terms of percentage votes. And, while the VS got a credible vote share in three seats, it can hardly claim to have broken into the big time. For instance, the Green Party has been stuck at about 10%-12% of the national vote all this century.

In the Senate elections, the VS list attracted just over 61,000 votes from the 4.2 million electors in the state of Victoria (1.51%). This is barely above the level of the ‘cosmic microwave background’ - the static noise in the universe leftover from the Big Bang - although it is higher than the Socialist Alliance received in New South Wales (0.25%), Queensland (0.63%) and Western Australia (0.24%).

What is most interesting about this move, is not the size of the vote, modest as it is, but the partyist logic inherent in what Socialist Alternative is attempting. What is even more remarkable is that SA - which emerged from the four-way split of the Cliffite International Socialists in Australia during the 1990s - is declaring a Socialist Party that allows public factions - previously unthinkable for this tradition.

1. socialist-alliance.org/news/2025-05-18/statement-socialist-alliance-national-expansion-victorian-socialists. Inspired by groups with the same name in Britain, the Socialist Alliance is the remnant of an electoral front that began in 2001 with eight organisations. But other partners peeled off one by one until only the Democratic Socialist Party was left. The DSP then merged itself into the Alliance in 2010.↩︎

2. marxistleftreview.org/articles/launching-victorian-socialists-an-anti-capitalist-electoral-alliance.↩︎