A new beginning for socialism in Australia
For the past three decades or more, socialism has been a very marginal current in Australian political life. There are signs, however, that our movement’s fortunes might be changing for the better.
On Tuesday, 13 May, this year, just over a week after the federal election, the Victorian Socialists (VS) executive announced its plan to take the project Australia-wide. It called on people to sign up as founding members of parties modelled on VS in every state and territory. In the following weeks, thousands of people heeded the call. By early June, party branches around the country collectively had more than 3,000 paid members. Since then, the figure has risen to more than 5,600.
This might, on the face of it, not seem very impressive. The New York mayoral campaign of Zohran Mamdani claimed to have mobilised more than 100,000 volunteers. The Democratic Socialists of America, which Mamdani is part of, claims a membership of more than 90,000.
In the Australian context, though, an explicitly socialist party growing from a membership of less than 1,000 to more than 5,000 in the space of half a year is something of a breakthrough. No other Australian socialist formation in the 80 years since the end of World War Two has come close to such rapid growth. Even the Greens, in their heyday, didn’t manage it (according to figures provided by Stewart Jackson from the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney, cited by Ben Hillier in his 2010 Marxist Left Review article “A Marxist critique of the Australian Greens”, it took the party ten years from its foundation in 1992 to reach a membership of more than 5,000).
What are the factors that made this breakthrough possible? Why is it that Victorian Socialists, and now its sister parties across Australia, have enjoyed such rapid growth—even if, in the bigger picture, still on a very modest scale—where others haven’t?
Around 1930, while he was languishing in one of the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini’s prisons, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci wrote, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters”. By the old world he meant the kind of liberal capitalist order that had predominated in Europe prior to World War One. By the new world he meant communism. The monsters were primarily those of fascism.
The same basic schema can be applied, arguably, to the fortunes of the socialist left in many Western countries in the decades since the collapse of the Stalinist eastern bloc states and Soviet Russia in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The 1990s was a time when the “old world” of the left—one dominated, in Australia as (mostly) elsewhere, by the Communist Party and its various offshoots—was dead or rapidly dying. At the same time the “new world”—the promise of a renewal of revolutionary socialist politics unfettered by the dead weight of Stalinism—was very much struggling to be born.
From the perspective of the socialist left, the obstacles and diversions of the 1990s and 2000s were the various shades of small-l liberal politics that appeared to many to be the only realistic alternatives amid the post-Cold War ascendancy of neoliberal capitalism. In Australia this meant, above all, the rise of the Greens and of various social movements and campaigns that, as the years progressed, became increasingly identity-based and suspicious of the kind of “grand narratives” of change and traditional models of organising adhered to by socialists.
The biggest groups on the socialist left in Australia in the 1990s were, by a significant margin, the Democratic Socialist Party (DSP—which in 2010 dissolved into the Socialist Alliance) and the International Socialist Organisation (ISO—the Australian franchise of the British Socialist Workers Party-led International Socialist Tendency). The DSP peaked at around 400 members in the late 1990s, while the ISO reached 300.
Looking back on those years, it’s now clear there was significant pressure on the socialist left to water down its politics to appeal better to liberals. This was evident, for example, in the decision of the DSP to wind up its newspaper Direct Action at the end of 1990 and relaunch it as the much more respectable-sounding Green Left Weekly in 1991. It was also apparent in the increasingly desperate attempts made by the ISO to square the circle of its overblown “1930s in slow motion” perspective by downplaying the need for political clarification and argument with supporters and new members.
When the anti-capitalist movement arrived in Australia in 2000, the ISO recruited widely among radicalising student activists. It didn’t, however, attempt to educate them in Marxist politics or even expect them to identify publicly with the group (for example, by selling its newspaper). As a result, it lost the vast bulk of them again in the 2001-02 period—to autonomism, the Greens and other more or less radical-liberal political currents (the remaining, much diminished, rump of the ISO later went on to unite with two other small IST splinter groups to form Solidarity).
The last significant attempt to build a nationwide socialist electoral alternative in Australia came with the foundation of the Socialist Alliance in 2001—a joint initiative of the DSP and the ISO which, initially at least, was a genuine alliance of the bulk of the organised far left. The immediate context in which it was formed gave some justification for the high hopes of its leading participants. 2001 was the peak of the global anti-capitalist movement and a wave of radicalism was sweeping university campuses and (to a degree) high schools. Zoom out, though, and it’s clear the odds were very much stacked against it.
The period in which the Alliance was founded coincides almost exactly with the moment when the rubber really hit the road for the Greens. The Greens were prominent participants in the anti-capitalist movement and the subsequent mass movement against the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In the year 2000 they had, nationally, a little more than 2,000 members. By 2005 this had risen to just under 8,600 (figures, again, from Stewart Jackson at the University of Sydney). In the 1998 federal election, the Greens received 2.1 percent of first preference votes nationally in the House of Representatives, and 2.2 percent in the Senate. By 2004 this had increased to 7.2 percent and 7.7 percent respectively.
At the same time, major party dominance, though declining, was still much more pronounced than it is today. The combined share of first preference votes going to Labor and the Coalition in the 2004 House of Representatives election was 84.3 percent. In 2007 it was 85.5 percent. Since then it has steadily declined, falling to 68.3 percent in 2022 and 66.4 percent in this year’s federal election.
In 2001, then, the political centre was very much holding strong. And to the extent that there was space opening up to the left of Labor, it was rapidly being filled by the Greens.
When looking, in retrospect, at the 1990s and early 2000s as a whole, it seems there was some truth to Francis Fukayama’s famously triumphalist “end of history” thesis put forward in his book The End of History and the Last Man in 1992. Fukuyama saw in the collapse of Stalinist “communism” “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”. And in the West at least, the overwhelmingly hegemonic view of politics in that period, both on the left and the right, was very much in line with that.
Of course Fukuyama was wrong. However much history may have seemed to have ended in those years, it’s now very much back on.
The first real revving of its engines occurred with the global financial crisis of 2008, which pulled the rug from under the dominant neoliberal economic and political framework of the time. When Barack Obama was first elected US president in 2008, he was almost universally feted by the global left. By the time he left office in 2016—replaced, shockingly and largely unexpectedly, by the Republican bête noire Donald Trump—he was widely despised.
The GFC exposed the rotten core of a capitalist system built on the exploitation of the many by the wealthiest few. Its impact, in the West at least, was summed up by the slogan of the 2011 occupy movement: “We are the 99%”. Around the world, increasing numbers of people became conscious, for the first time, of the extent to which the system was rigged for “the 1%”, and the role of supposedly progressive politicians like Obama in protecting and advancing their interests.
The hundreds of billions spent bailing out the banks while working-class people were left to rot. The violent police repression of occupy and other movements for change. The economic “recovery” built on the backs of workers, and the doubling-down of technocratic political elites on all the most hated aspects of the neoliberal order that contributed to the crisis in the first place. All this fuelled a deep-seated anger that gradually ate away at the foundations on which the political centre had rested securely for the preceding two decades.
By the time the VS project was launched in early 2018, we’d already seen some of the consequences of this play out. A new consciousness was emerging on both the left and the right, and new political forces were attempting to relate to it. In 2015, Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the British Labour Party. 2016 brought the Brexit referendum in the UK, Bernie Sanders’ insurgent (though ultimately doomed) campaign for nomination as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate and the election of Donald Trump.
VS’s growth, in its early years, was far from spectacular. Its vote, however, was from the start better than anything achieved by socialists in Australia in many decades.
Its first test came with the 2018 Victorian state election. In the northern metro region of Victoria’s upper house—encompassing 11 lower-house seats and a voting population of around 500,000—VS came fifth out of nineteen parties, with just over 4 percent of the primary vote. In the working-class lower-house electorate of Broadmeadows in Melbourne’s north, VS candidate Jerome Small got 7.2 percent.
The 2019 federal election included more good results. In the seat of Calwell in Melbourne’s outer northern suburbs, Jerome Small got 4.6 percent. In the inner north seat of Wills, Sue Bolton (an Alliance member who was running with VS at the time in line with the party’s Victorian branch’s decision to join VS when it first formed in 2018) got 4.5 percent. And in Cooper (formerly Batman), Kath Larkin got 4.2 percent.
Between 2019 and 2025 VS’s membership and presence within Victorian political life continued to grow. Socialist Alliance members in Victoria decided to leave the party again in 2021, but this did little to slow its momentum. The scope of the party’s campaign work (both at election time and outside it) and its presence in local communities across Melbourne and some regional cities has steadily increased. And, come election time, its vote has risen accordingly.
This process has been accelerated by another major political earthquake of the post-end of history era: the genocide in Gaza. Israel’s war brought the underlying tensions and divisions of society to the fore. This was particularly the case in a country like Australia, which has long numbered among Israel’s closest allies. For more than two years now, a mass movement for Palestine has faced off against the full force of the pro-Israel establishment (not just politicians and police, but also the media, universities, the NGO sector and so on).
Socialists have long played a prominent part in the Palestine solidarity movement in Australia. And the work we’ve done to help build resistance to Israel’s genocide since October 2023 has helped further establish socialism as a visible force in Australian political life.
Perhaps, in part, reflecting this, VS’s results in the 2025 federal election were its best yet. Kath Larkin got 8.4 percent in Cooper, Omar Hassan got 6.5 percent in Scullin, Jasmine Duff got 6.2 percent in Fraser, and VS’s candidate for the Senate Jordan van den Lamb (widely known by his social media handle “purplepingers”) got 1.5 percent statewide (a total of just over 63,000 first preference votes). Sue Bolton, running as the Socialist Alliance candidate for the seat of Wills and backed (financially and in terms of volunteer “boots on the ground”) by VS, got 8 percent.
The growth of the new Victorian Socialists-affiliated parties across Australia this year has to be seen in this context. Van den Lamb’s nationwide profile as a campaigner for renters’ rights certainly played its part. But the fact that a figure like that would even think of joining and running as a candidate for a party like VS rather than, for example, the Greens, reflects the tireless work of VS members building it up organisationally and politically over many years.
A big part of this picture is the role of members of Socialist Alternative (SA), publisher of Red Flag. The results VS has achieved in elections, and the profile it has gained, would not have happened without the energy, enthusiasm and, frankly, sheer bloody-mindedness of SA’s growing cohort of youthful socialist activists (and, it must be said, of the less youthful ones too). Nor would the expansion of the project Australia-wide have been possible without the organisational infrastructure and personnel provided by SA branches across the country.
It’s clear now that in the period from the 1990s to today the “new world struggling to be born” was not to be found among the diminishing remnants of the old left, nor among those attracted to the respectable forms of “resistance” offered by the Greens, NGOs and other liberal organisations, and definitely not among the increasingly hollowed-out husks of union bureaucracies but—as has so often been the case throughout history—among students and the youth.
Whatever the exact balance of factors that brought us to the current moment, though, it’s clear socialists now have an opportunity for growth unlike anything we’ve seen in decades. The thousands of people who’ve signed up to the new socialist parties across Australia this year won’t all, of course, be worked-out revolutionaries—willing to devote their lives to the struggle for socialism. Our challenge, made more urgent by the global upsurge of the far right, is to convince as many of them as possible to do just that.
