On Saturday, 18 July, in the ballroom of the InterContinental Hotel in Greenwich, London, Pauline Hanson took the stage. She was speaking to the British wing of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and her speech—titled “The Australian Fight Back”—hit all the hot button issues of the global far right. She took aim at migration, Muslims, environmental regulation and trans people, and then wrapped it in a bow and called it “the fight back against woke”. Among the attendees at the conference was Australia’s richest person and prominent One Nation Party backer, Gina Rinehart.
Over the same weekend, on the other side of the world, 170 or so delegates—elected from among the more than 5,000 members of the newly formed Australian Socialist Party—gathered at venues in cities across Australia (linked via Zoom) for a very different conference. This conference did not play host to billionaires like Rinehart and their pocket politicians. It declared war on them.
Socialist teachers, nurses, IT workers, electricians, train drivers, students, writers and activists spent the weekend formalising and giving flesh to a project of building a more serious, mass socialist force in Australian political life. In one of the key motions passed at the conference, “Building a Socialist Party in Australia”, delegates acknowledged that “Australian capitalism—always built on inequality, exploitation and privilege—is getting worse. While workers struggle with rising rents, mortgages, food prices and insecure work, the wealth of the rich continues to soar”.
Delegates recognised that, to justify and sustain this inequality, 21st-century capitalism is increasingly reliant on authoritarianism. Far-right parties are becoming the preferred choice of the unelected billionaires who control much of our world. What’s more, the conference recognised that this authoritarian posture fits well with intensifying imperial tensions. The preamble to the Building a Socialist Party in Australia motion also noted:
“The threat of world war is growing. The Australian ruling class is enthusiastically joining the march to war. Military spending continues to rise while anti-protest laws and attacks on democratic rights expand. Australian politicians of all stripes wrap themselves in nationalism and patriotism, fuelling the racism that comes with it.”
This motion was passed just hours after another barrage of American missiles rained down on Iran, killing twelve people. In the face of such imperial barbarism, in which all mainstream Australian political parties are complicit, the conference proclaimed that capitalism “must be challenged and ultimately overturned”. This anti-capitalist core was affirmed by delegates as central to the Australian Socialist Party’s theory and practice. The party’s founding documents, discussed and approved at the conference, pull no punches and are designed to ground and guide an organisation utterly uninterested in apologia for the system.
The perspectives discussed at the conference were also undeniably ambitious. It proclaimed the necessity of building a party filled with socialists who are active in their workplaces and trade unions, high schools and universities, and in their local communities. We want a party whose members can contest politics in every sphere.
The nineteenth, twentieths and (early) 21st centuries have been filled with socialist organisations that assumed that the correctness of their ideas would somehow carry the day. Picture here the French utopian socialist Charles Fourier who, in the wake of his theoretical revelations, was said (perhaps apocryphally) to have stood every day in front of his house at noon to wait for followers to arrive. He did this for ten years without anyone taking up his offer.
In contrast, the motions at the founding conference of the Australian Socialist Party urged members to leave the comfort of their own doorsteps, lounge rooms or keyboards. The conference indicated a desire to inspire workers, young people, migrants and students to commit their time and energy to building a real fight back against the bosses and the ALP government—on the streets, in our workplaces and in elections.
Delegates weren’t light minded about such a project. As the discussion about challenging the far right noted, One Nation now, reportedly, has more than 50,000 members. Our side has a long path to climb. Nevertheless, we are putting one foot in front of the other—doing what’s necessary to continue building our movement and our party, however unglamorous and mundane that work might at times be.
We are starting from a low base. Many working-class people are cynical about politics, even if they are angry about the state of the world. The conference nevertheless concluded that there is space for our movement to go forward—a crack of light through the door that we must push on and widen with all the energy at our disposal.
On Saturday, 1 August, the Victorian Socialists will officially launch their campaign for this November’s state election. It is shaping up to be the biggest socialist campaign in an Australian election for many, many decades. In the coming months, VS members will be out and about across Melbourne and many parts of regional Victoria—knocking on doors, raising people’s expectations, encouraging defiance of the current order and building socialism. The party is confident that, come election night on 28 November, it will have achieved the kind of result that will be impossible to ignore—providing another boost to our party as we continue to establish ourselves and grow as a nationwide organisation.
The conference concluded with words from the two newly elected national conveners of the Party, Rebecca Barrigos and Omar Hassan. “It isn’t up and away”, Barrigos said, “but our class has never run away from the hard things. Workers have met the horrors of capitalism with resistance and socialists have organised this fight. And it is a challenge we are all in for, and better equipped to fight, now we have our Australian Socialist Party”.
Vashti Fox is secretary of the WA Socialists.
