Socialist Alternative stands in the tradition of Marx and Engels—who identified the need for a revolution led by the working class to establish a new society of equality—Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who opposed reformism and imperialism and led the most successful workers’ revolution, and Trotsky, who fought for Marxism against the horrors of Stalin’s counter-revolution.
The world we face in 2026 is very different from that which these and other socialists contended with in the past. The revolutionary left today is relatively weak, as is the workers’ movement in most of the world. Yet the system continues to generate new horrors—including war, environmental destruction and economic crisis—and deny the mass of people access to the basic necessities of life, like healthy food and quality housing. Resistance to these horrors, in one form or another, is never far away. For this resistance to develop into a force capable of radically reshaping society in the interests of the majority, a stronger socialist movement is necessary. Socialist Alternative is trying to build an organisation of people committed to this goal—but what does that mean in practice?
Our history
Socialist Alternative was formed in 1995 during a disorienting period for the far left. A downturn in industrial and political militancy began in the late 1970s, a difficult adjustment for a generation of radicals who had entered politics amid the heady struggles of the 1960s and early 1970s.
The working class suffered many defeats in the 1980s, including the global triumph of neoliberalism. We faced a special brand of this class war in Australia, led by the ALP under Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. There was also an influx of activists and former leftists into the academy, where anti-Marxist ideas were taken up with gusto.
In an immediate sense, this was more damaging for the far left than the broader ruling-class offensive. From being broadly popular in left-wing circles, revolutionary politics was maligned and ridiculed. The newly dominant postmodern politics attacked notions such as class interest, solidarity and revolution, reflecting in theory the real attacks against the working class going on outside the ivory tower.
Yet the political situation improved in the 1990s, with big protests against the first Gulf War, important battles against the Kennett Liberal government in Victoria and, towards the end of the decade, a movement against far-right figure Pauline Hanson, a big strike on the docks and then a series of global protests against corporate greed, usually called the anti-capitalist movement.
Stalinism was also in terminal decline after the collapse of the USSR at the beginning of the 1990s. But though this opened opportunities for the anti-Stalinist left, it was not enough to counteract the broader trend of socialist marginalisation, or sufficient to revive working-class organisations and confidence to their former strength or to generate ongoing mass movements. Indeed, for many people, including leftists, the collapse of Stalinism was viewed as the final nail in the coffin of the entire socialist project.
Various socialists worldwide deluded themselves that the situation was more promising than it was. For example, Socialist Alternative was formed from a split in the International Socialist Organisation after that group failed to accept the new reality. Its leaders said that the 1990s resembled the 1930s—a decade that had begun with the global Great Depression and the triumph of Adolph Hitler in Germany and concluded with the outbreak of World War Two. In the face of the collapse of the socialist movement, the ISO leaders also claimed that there were boundless opportunities to win people to socialism. Socialist Alternative was tasked with coming up with a more realistic assessment.
Early student perspective
Socialist Alternative started with around 70 members, mostly in Melbourne. The group needed a hard-headed appraisal of the political situation and how we could begin to rebuild. It would have been laughable for the group to proclaim itself the working class’s leaders or make grandiose attempts to launch mass struggles.
Instead we decided to direct most of our energies to building socialist clubs on university campuses. This has proved to be an essential tactic. Today, Socialist Alternative, with more than 650 members, still puts considerable effort into relating to students and organising political activity on campuses. We have sizeable clubs at all major universities in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, Canberra and Wollongong.
Our clubs engage students with revolutionary Marxism and initiate activist campaigns. We launched the first Gaza solidarity student encampment in Australia and were responsible for most of the encampments across the country. For years, we have been the main organised force to the left of the Labor Party in the student unions and have led numerous campaigns against education cuts and fee increases, as well as around issues such as abortion and LGBT rights.
Despite claims by some on the left that relating to students means downgrading the importance of workers, it’s clear from history that any serious organisation needs an orientation to young people and students. Not only because, as we have proved, campuses are a place to meet people and involve them in the socialist movement, but also because young people are an important social layer that has often catalysed protest movements and revolutions.
It is highly advantageous for the left that students are concentrated on enormous university campuses. While most students will adopt the dominant ideas of the day, there will always be a minority who are open to radical and revolutionary ideas. This is why students have always played an important role in the socialist movement.
Of course, this doesn’t mean students can replace the working class as the revolutionary agent of social change. But once convinced of a socialist perspective, students can and have played an important role in leading struggles, both on and off campuses. As proof of this, Socialist Alternative has the highest number of working-class militants of any socialist group since the Communist Party before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Many of these members were trained on the campuses. As the organisation continues to grow, we are also increasingly meeting and recruiting workers out of other areas of work, including the Socialist Party.
Political clarity
Political clarity is crucial for building socialist organisations. We may not be in a revolutionary situation, but revolutionary politics matter for navigating every twist and turn in the political situation, making strategic arguments about the way forward and resisting the latest liberal ideological trends and fads.
Having such a focus on campus work made it doubly important to be clear on this. The universities are where most anti-working-class and anti-Marxist theories are generated and propagated. Identity politics has infused all of liberal academia and beyond. It has become “common sense” to see distinctions along the lines of race, gender or sexuality as more important than class distinctions. This is extremely disorienting for fights against sexism, racism, homophobia and transphobia, but also in shaping broad left political opinion. The importance of social class has been obscured, and strategies for social change based on solidarity and working-class power have been maligned.
Over the years, we have fought for revolutionary Marxist theory and politics in the face of various rival approaches like patriarchy theory, identity politics, forms of anarchism and settler colonial theory. This is not about belligerently asserting that Marx was right in the nineteenth century, but about applying a living theory of social revolution to the changing dynamics of oppression in our society. At the same time, we are extremely engaged with movements against oppression and take seriously the need to build working-class politics, not separate from, but in connection with them.
Rejecting liquidationism and reformism
As Socialist Alternative was establishing itself, many organisations on the revolutionary left internationally were shifting towards a supposedly “broad party” model of organisation. The argument was that lots of workers were moving rapidly to the left while social democratic parties were moving rapidly to the right, and this was creating a political vacuum that revolutionaries should step in to fill. Reasonable people could debate this analysis at the time, though it’s clear now that the early 2000s were definitively not a period of advance for the left.
More important than the diagnosis was the proposed cure: to create or support “broad”, “anti-capitalist” or “anti-neoliberal” organisations that were explicitly non-revolutionary. Revolutionaries dissolved themselves into the Scottish Socialist Party, which shortly afterwards collapsed. In France, the left shrank in the years following the establishment of the New Anticapitalist Party by the old Revolutionary Communist League. In Brazil and Italy, revolutionaries entered reformist parties and gave them left cover as they attacked workers and supported imperialist policies, including the invasion of Afghanistan.
In Australia, the main example was the Socialist Alliance, initiated by the Democratic Socialist Party, which eventually dissolved itself and its commitment to revolutionary politics into the Alliance in 2010. Today, far from being a big, broad organisation, the Socialist Alliance is a fraction of the size of the explicitly revolutionary Socialist Alternative. When revolutionaries remain up front and assertive about our politics, rather than diluting or apologising for them out of deference to forces to our right, people are more likely to be convinced to join the socialist movement and fight alongside us.
A few years later, a new rationale emerged for revolutionaries to dilute their politics. After the global financial crisis, a spate of “new reformist” parties and figures emerged: Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Bernie Sanders in the US. In Europe, the failure of mass street movements and strikes to block vicious government austerity led people to look to parliamentary change instead.
It was important for revolutionary socialists to relate to the hope and support that were galvanised around these parties. But the call made by sections of the left to tail them uncritically represented another, more degenerate, version of the same defensiveness in the earlier broad party debates. In the case of Bernie Sanders, the left was championing a longstanding liberal organised in an openly capitalist party.
Several socialist groups in the US collapsed in part because of these pressures.
These issues led to huge debates on the broad left and within Socialist Alternative. The lessons learnt from this era remain relevant: successful reformist projects will always create challenges and opportunities for revolutionaries to navigate.
Programs and unity
The political basis for organisational unity among revolutionary socialists is agreement on the need for a revolution led by workers and the need to build active and democratic organisations. Important principles flow from this, like opposition to imperialism and militarism, support for struggles against oppression and opposition to class collaboration. Socialist Alternative’s statement of principles reflects this.
In previous periods, other questions, such as the class nature of the Soviet Union, were questions of organisational demarcation. Although debates about questions like this still matter, they are not central to taking forward the international left. In 2013, Socialist Alternative successfully unified with the Revolutionary Socialist Party, a group that had split from the Democratic Socialist Party and remained committed to revolutionary politics.
Political differences remain between comrades from this tendency and the majority from the international socialist current, but we agree on the core principles and strategy. So far, we’ve found that debates around contemporary issues divide along new lines rather than historic organisational loyalties.
All of this has been useful for Socialist Alternative. It clarified our hostility to the sectarian approach of some organisations, including sections of the Trotskyist tradition, which have obsessed over secondary points of analysis or demands. A mass revolutionary workers’ party will come about only through the fusion of many different currents and tendencies of revolutionary politics.
Recruitment and cadre
Today, the most important area of work for revolutionary socialists is recruitment. We are way too small to make the most of the mass discontent and anti-capitalist sentiment among sections of students and workers. We desperately need to grow.
At certain times, active recruitment may be less necessary than it is now—for example, when masses of people feel compelled to join the party they are most aligned with to make any meaningful contribution to social change. But right now, this is far from clear to people. And many people who identify with or are open to revolutionary socialism do not have much knowledge of what it entails politically and strategically, let alone familiarity with Marxist history and theory.
To rebuild the socialist movement, it has been essential to put a lot of effort into recruiting and educating members through discussion groups, public meetings and so on. This is the foundation of everything we do. As a result of our steady growth over the years, we have expanded into new cities and campuses, built our publications and conferences (with our annual Marxism conference attracting thousands each year), and initiated numerous campaigns, movements and protests.
Interventionism
Socialist Alternative is not a group that sits on the sidelines and offers commentary about the world. We’re always fighting to change and shape it. From early on, we were involved in important movements, such as calling mass demonstrations against Pauline Hanson and serving on the executive council of the Melbourne Iraq war protests, of which we were part of the organising committee. We have also been part of long-term campaigns such as the refugee rights movement and the marriage equality movement, the activist wings of which we spearheaded.
We have a proud history of helping to lead Palestine solidarity campaigns around Australia. We mobilised against Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 2006. When Israel invaded Gaza in 2008, we worked with Arab and Muslim organisations to establish major demonstrations. We set up Students for Palestine on university campuses, which remains the only national Palestine solidarity student network. These have been crucial to making the campuses a focal point of opposition to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Socialists have limited forces, so it is not always possible to address every injustice. However, given our size relative to the rest of the left, we have taken on more and more responsibility to initiate actions and coalitions where necessary.
When Roe v. Wade was overturned in the US, we called demonstrations across the country, including one organised by the Victorian Socialists in Melbourne, which was at least 15,000 strong. In 2019, we threw ourselves into the environment movement, participating in networks like Extinction Rebellion and School Strike for Climate, and despite hysterical media and government denunciations for “politicising” horrendous fires and their consequences, we called mass and defiant demonstrations in the summer of 2019-20.
Anti-fascist work has also been an important area for us. This began with taking on the far-right Reclaim Australia movement and joining many important campaigns and demonstrations alongside anarchists, other socialists and anti-fascist activists, including counter-demonstrations against the anti-vax right during the pandemic.
A key project in recent years has been establishing and working within the Socialist Party. The Socialist Party is a more open and broader group than Socialist Alternative, with a focus on contesting elections. However, revolutionaries have not liquidated our forces; we participate in the Socialist Party while maintaining our revolutionary organisation and perspective. Through this work, comrades have had the opportunity to put a concrete socialist program to hundreds of thousands of workers who would otherwise never have heard of it. We do this alongside hundreds of others, most of whom are not revolutionaries but nevertheless agree with our approach.
It is a real advance that there is now a serious electoral alternative based on anti-capitalist, working-class politics, as opposed to the liberal progressivism of the Greens.
Conclusion
Building revolutionary organisations is the key task for socialists everywhere. There is no shortage of reasons to overthrow capitalism, and there is also widespread disillusionment and discontent. Over the last decade, explosive moments of resistance have frequently involved masses of people.
But everywhere, there is a lack of organisations that orient to working-class power, can lead struggles that wrest serious concessions from the ruling class and can start to build the mass consciousness and confidence needed to challenge the system decisively.
Mass revolutionary parties cannot be built overnight. And they will not just be enlarged versions of groups that exist today. They are likely to be the product of radicalisations, periods of exponential growth for the left, splits and regroupments.
But the foundations have to be laid today. Without organisations that fight for a revolutionary perspective, train their members in revolutionary politics, history and strategy, and build credibility and experience over time, there cannot be any hope of winning mass influence in the future.
Socialist Alternative is building today with that aim in mind. But we are not just investing in the future. Socialist organising is also about contributing to the politics and possibilities of the present. Revolutionary Marxism is a living, breathing tradition kept alive by socialists working together: making sense of the politics of the day, intervening in and initiating struggles and convincing more people of the need for a revolutionary alternative.
