What’s the difference between the Greens and the Socialists? It’s a common question, one that was the subject of a recent lengthy blog post by Queensland Greens member and former Brisbane City councillor Jonathan Sriranganathan, “Queensland Greens vs the new Queensland Socialists: How different are they?”, published at jonathansri.com on 4 May.
Sriranganathan argues there’s little to distinguish the two parties. “Right now”, he says, “I don’t see the Queensland Socialists as being a fundamentally different kind of political project from the Queensland Greens”. The parties, he points out, ran on broadly similar platforms in the recent Stafford by-election (he also notes the similarities between some of the Greens and Victorian Socialists campaign materials for the 2025 federal election). In addition to their similar campaign pitches, he sees the Greens as sharing the Socialists’ focus on building movements for change outside the electoral sphere.
“Messaging-wise, the main distinction between the Queensland Greens and Queensland Socialists isn’t in the policy platforms. It’s that the Socialists are more explicit about their ideological critique and long-term vision ... While the Greens share the Socialists’ insistence that electioneering isn’t the be-all and end-all, they’ve always been vaguer about exactly what kind of system and society they’re aiming for”.
On this much, we have some agreement. Where we’d disagree is on how important this kind of clarity of vision and purpose actually is. Sriranganathan prevaricates a bit on this, but the ultimate implication is that the vagueness of the Greens’ vision is a strength:
“Personally, I don’t mind the Greens being more agnostic and open-ended about the long-term destination than the Socialists are. ‘Socialism’ has multiple and competing strains and definitions; hitching your wagon to such a heavily-laden ideological label can be a turn-off for some potential supporters.”
Sriranganathan thinks “Greens messaging should be more explicitly anti-capitalist, and offer supporters a clearer diagnosis of exactly why the system is failing”. He just doesn’t want it to be too explicit or clear, because it might turn some people away and undermine the Greens’ capacity to be, as he puts it, “a space for political education where less radical members can come on a journey towards a more robust critique of the status quo”.
One of the problems with this is that the Greens have never been merely vague or not sufficiently explicit about their opposition to capitalism. The party has, quite simply, never been an anti-capitalist party, and none of its most high-profile figures in Australia have ever claimed that it is or ever will be.
Sriranganathan himself cites what he calls “an eternally embarrassing” 2016 article in the Guardian, reporting on the formation of the Left Renewal faction within the NSW Greens—which was an attempt to win the party to an anti-capitalist perspective. In it, Richard di Natale, Greens leader at the time, voiced his hostility to the faction, saying “of course the Greens do not support the overthrow of capitalism or any other ridiculous notions of the sort”. He went on: “If the authors of this ill-thought [Left Renewal] manifesto are so unhappy with Greens policies, perhaps they should consider finding a new political home”.
It wasn’t just di Natale who thought this. The Greens’ historically most defining leader, Bob Brown, shared his hostility. He was appalled, in particular, at the section of the Left Renewal statement of principles that outlined its opposition to “state-mediated oppression in all its forms” and recognition “that violent apparatuses like the police do not share an interest with the working class”. Brown told the Guardian that the faction’s “central tenet of rejecting the state and the police is also a rejection of the Greens charter, which upholds the right of citizens to law and order”.
Sriranganathan points out that “after Adam Bandt became the federal leader in 2020, he more clearly positioned the Greens as a left-wing social democratic party”. But Bandt’s break with the more conservative stance of previous party leaders like Brown and di Natale only went so far. In an interview published in Jacobin in 2021, he was asked, “Do you think the party needs to shift in the direction of democratic socialism?” His response was (an albeit long-winded and diplomatically phrased) “no”.
“I’ve always been of the view”, Bandt said, that “as we fight to tackle the climate crisis and the inequality crisis, we should be campaigning side by side with socialists”—the clear (and welcome) implication being that while the Greens themselves aren’t socialists, they’re happy to work alongside them. In similar terms to Sriranganathan, he went on to downplay the importance of clarifying the party’s politics, saying: “I think people can judge the merits of our platform and decide how they want to label us”.
One indication that Bandt’s own political worldview may be more similar to di Natale and Brown’s than Sriranganathan might wish to admit, is his post-parliamentary move to a highly paid position at the commanding heights of the liberal-NGO world, as chief executive of the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF). The ACF is on the right wing of the climate and environment movements, with a track record of more or less outright greenwashing. It claimed in 2015, for instance, that the Paris Agreement on climate change “signals the end of the fossil fuel age and will turbo charge the clean energy revolution already underway”. (The agreement was correctly dismissed, at the time, by former NASA scientist and “father of climate change awareness” James Hanson as “a fraud ... just worthless words”.)
So much for the party’s main leaders. What about Sriranganathan’s claim that the political openness of the Greens enables them to take “less radical members ... on a journey towards a more robust critique of the status quo”. If this were the case, you’d expect that in the 34 years since it was founded as a nationwide party, it would have thrown up more than a single somewhat serious and organised “anti-capitalist” challenge to the party’s dominant, mildly social democratic and small-l liberal political culture (the previously mentioned NSW Left Renewal faction, which survived only a few years before succumbing to the internal backlash it provoked).
Has even a single, prominent socialist activist in Australia emerged from the Greens? Someone who doesn’t just talk about the kinds of partial demands—“tax the billionaires”, “make public transport free”, “build public housing” etc—that can admittedly be found on both Greens and Socialists election material, but who is prepared to publicly and consistently make the case for socialism? I can’t think of one. Sadly, the pipeline generally runs the other way: socialists who grow tired of being on the margins and working tirelessly for years while making little headway throw up their hands and “retire” into the Greens.
The failure (or non-existence?) of Sriranganathan’s radicalisation pipeline is particularly notable given the wealth of resources the Greens could, if they wanted, devote to it. The Greens have more than enough money to organise socialist education programs and material the likes of which the Socialists could only dream of. And they’ve got no shortage of paid staff who, were it deemed a priority, could act as emissaries and organisers for their (hypothetical) anti-capitalist views—perhaps, as Sriranganathan himself suggests, starting with the university campuses. Instead of doing anything like this, though, it appears to be pretty uncontroversial within the Greens that the vast bulk of their financial and staffing resources should be focused on the operations of their electoral machine.
This relates to the question of the similarities between the two parties’ election campaign materials. You could nitpick about how similar they actually are. I’d argue that Victorian Socialists’ materials (which, as the party’s elected communications director, I help produce) are consistently more radical than those put out by the Greens. Wherever we might land on that question, however, this much is certain: the kinds of partial demands put forward on such materials are much more central to the Greens’ identity and politics than they are for the Socialists.
We have an entire Marxist worldview and hundreds of years of socialist history to draw on. The Greens? They’ve got “put dental into Medicare” and similar demands and slogans, and not much else besides. They may occasionally talk about “system change”, but they don’t have a worked-out theory of the system or the means by which it could be changed. Nor do they have anything much resembling a genuine “Greens tradition” of collective action and organising outside of the electoral sphere—particularly within the workers’ movement, which socialists regard as the primary sphere from which any genuine “system change” could arise.
It’s significant in itself that the word “socialist” appears prominently on all Socialists campaign material, whereas (correct me if I’m wrong) it has very rarely, if ever, appeared on Greens material. Sriranganathan presumably sees this as a positive. The words “socialist” and/or “socialism” are both, as he points out “heavily-laden ideological label[s]”. But while they may legitimately be described as words with significant baggage, they may equally be regarded, positively, as words that provide political ballast. Slogans like “capitalism is killing our future, vote socialist”, which featured prominently in the Victorian Socialists’ campaign for the 2022 state election, gesture to a political horizon well beyond whatever particular set of partial demands are being put forward.
The final thing I want to address is Sriranganathan’s professed “scepticism towards Socialist Alternative”, which he admits “could be colouring my analysis of the Queensland Socialists”. As the article goes on, this scepticism is foregrounded more and more. Among other complaints is his claim that the group aims “to insert a vanguard of revolutionary socialists into any emerging political force to steer it. Thus SAlt organisers frequently create or co-opt groups like Students for Palestine, Students for Climate Action [presumably he means Uni Students for Climate Justice—Students for Climate Action appears to be an American group] etc. whenever there’s growing public concern about an issue”.
There’s a few things to unpack here. First, it’s notable that neither of the campaign groups named by Sriranganathan were “co-opted” by Socialist Alternative—they were both created by us. There’s nothing sinister at work here. Establishing single-issue campaign groups of various kinds has been the bread and butter of the socialist movement since its beginnings in the nineteenth century. The Communist Party of Australia, famously, had a whole array of them, providing an entry point into radical politics and organising for people who are primarily concerned with a particular injustice.
Nor have the various groups established by Socialist Alternative over the years been fly-by-night operations opportunistically relating to momentary “public concerns”. Students for Palestine (SfP) was established in early 2009, in response to Operation Cast Lead—an Israeli assault on Gaza that killed more than 1,500 people in the course of three weeks. This was at a time when the Greens’ policy on Palestine concerned itself more or less equally with both Palestinian and Israeli “rights and aspirations ... to live in peace and security in their own independent, sovereign states”.
The Palestine solidarity movement was, at the time, almost exclusively composed of Palestinians themselves and their supporters among Arab and Muslim communities, First Nations activists like Gary Foley and, alongside them, socialists. Greens MPs were sometimes reluctant to speak at rallies for fear of being seen to associate with “extremists”. Socialists, in contrast, were (as we long had been) centrally involved in the hard work of organising and protesting for Palestine, with many of our comrades being attacked by police and arrested. The leading role played by Socialist Alternative (and Socialist Party) members like Josh Lees in Sydney’s Palestine Action Group and Omar Hassan and Jasmine Duff in the Melbourne Palestine solidarity campaign, is a reflection of the group’s decades-long track record of organising in this area.
In the years since 2009, SfP has continued to work tirelessly—both on and off campus—to raise awareness about Israel’s crimes and the Australian government’s complicity. One of its founders, Socialist Alternative National Executive member Vashti Fox, subsequently wrote a book, The Story of Palestine: Empire, Repression & Resistance, aimed at providing an accessible general introduction to the history and politics of the Palestinian liberation struggle for an Australian audience. And in the context of the escalation of Israel’s genocide since October 2023, SfP has been an absolutely central part of the movement, organising (among other things) the bulk of the university Palestine encampments in 2024 along with student referendums on Palestine that involved thousands of students across Australia.
The Greens’ gradual shift to a more forthright pro-Palestinian position is welcome. The stand taken by many of its leaders against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and their refusal to be cowed by the avalanche of attacks from Zionists (including, before they mostly left the party, those within the Greens) and other pro-Israeli sections of the media and political establishment, has provided a significant boost to the cause. But if we must throw around accusations of bandwagon jumping here (personally I don’t much mind what particular individuals’ or groups’ motivations for getting involved are, so long as they’re contributing in some way), it’s certainly not Socialist Alternative, or socialists more generally, that most fit the bill.
Uni Students for Climate Justice wasn’t sustained for as long as SfP—the period of its most intensive activity was cut short by the Covid-19 pandemic and accompanying lockdowns. But again, there was nothing sinister about what it aimed to achieve. It was conceived as providing a space for more radical politics within a broader climate movement that was led (with the partial exception of Extinction Rebellion), by moderates.
The group’s utility was demonstrated most clearly in January 2020, at the height of Australia’s bushfire crisis, when—in defiance of massive pressure applied by the government and more conservative forces in the movement, who were concerned about drawing police resources away from immediate “relief efforts”—it organised tens-of-thousands-strong anti-government rallies across the country.
It’s a shame, in retrospect, that it couldn’t be a greater counterweight to organisations like School Strike 4 Climate, whose more conservative approach contributed to the decline of the movement, and the capacity for Labor to put the issue to bed by passing (with the support of the Greens) its version of the more or less completely useless “safeguard mechanism” in 2023. The climate movement is still yet to fully recover from this setback.
Movement organising is messy and contested. Mistakes will be made, and animosities generated. But abstaining from active participation in these spaces, either by not being there at all or, in the case of members of political organisations, being there only “as individuals” and not as people (openly and democratically) arguing for particular perspectives on how the movement can go forward, isn’t a virtue—as Sriranganathan seems to suggest. It’s to use movements more as a political prop or a signal of personal virtue than as a genuine avenue for winning change.
Greens MPs are happy to speak at rallies for Palestine and other issues, and to use those speeches to generate sound bites for their social media accounts. But how many Greens leaders have consistently participated in the actual work of organising such rallies? How many have risked making enemies of those with differing views in order to win people to a perspective they believe puts the movement in the best position actually to win change?
As Victorian Socialists communications director, I sometimes envy the Greens’ “hands off” approach to movements, which allows them to avoid becoming embroiled in often heated controversies about this or that protest tactic or similar activist issue. But I recognise that for a party that genuinely aspires to root itself in “really existing” cultures of resistance, you have to be prepared to cop the flak that may sometimes arise from that.
Finally, Sriranganathan expresses concern about the significant role of what he disparagingly refers to as Socialist Alternative’s “fairly small and insular vanguard” within the broader Socialists project. He worries that “this might not be a good foundation for crafting messages and campaigns that appeal to your average worker or pensioner”.
This is a slightly odd thing to raise for someone who has just argued at length that the Socialists’ “messages and campaigns” are essentially the same as the Greens’. Putting that aside, though, my main counter would be, simply, that despite (or one might say, because of) the central role played by Socialist Alternative members in the party, it’s going pretty well so far. Since its foundation in 2018, Victorian Socialists have consistently won much bigger votes than anything else achieved by socialists in Australia for generations. Every election we have run in so far, our vote has grown. In some working-class electorates in Melbourne’s north, we’ve beaten the Greens. And the results achieved in South Australia and other places we’ve run since our nationwide expansion indicate the potential for this to be replicated elsewhere.
Could the Greens move in a more explicitly anti-capitalist direction? Possibly. But that would require a membership that was prepared to wage a serious fight. Perhaps Sriranganathan sees himself as doing that. Unfortunately, there’s little sign that a few critical blog posts will do the trick. What would be needed, as a start, is for anti-capitalists in the Greens actually to get organised—for a renewal, as it were, of Left Renewal.
To the extent there are people in the Greens who want to do that, all I can say is: good luck. If you were to succeed, it would be a positive development in Australian politics, and there may then be more justification for Sriranganathan’s claim that there is no “fundamental difference” between the Greens’ and the Socialists’ respective projects.
As it stands, however, there is a difference. So we have a simple argument: socialists ought to be in a socialist party. We have now established one with more than 5,000 members nationwide. There are certainly differences of opinion in our party. But those disagreements are among socialists who fundamentally agree that we need to build both the socialist and working-class movements. Those goals would be furthered if we had even more socialists organised in the party. To that end, we think that socialists in the Greens—and the Labor Party, for that matter—should join us and fight together.
