It was the biggest event the Victorian Socialists (VS) have put on since we formed in 2018. On Saturday, 1 August, 800 people turned out to the Aborigines Advancement League in the northern Melbourne suburb of Thornbury to help us launch our campaign for the 2026 state election. Tickets were selling so fast in the week leading up to it that we had to scramble to ensure the bigger-than-expected crowd could be properly accommodated.
It’s a long time since the socialist movement in Australia has had to deal with an issue like this, and it was hard not to feel, on the night, that something significant has changed. The evening’s compere, VS candidate for Northcote Kath Larkin, expressed the feeling in her opening remarks. “We know that this election will not be easily won”, she said, “but if tonight is anything to go by, we’ve got masses of people who are ready to fight for a socialist future”.
For decades now the numbers of people concluding that the major problems in society are caused by capitalism, and that it’s socialist politics and organising that provide the answers, have never really gone beyond a slow drip. But watching the movement of hundreds of people up and down the steps leading into the central part of the launch venue evoked—in this hopeful mind at least—something like a waterfall. I’d have settled for a steady stream, but this felt like something more than that.
Despite the multiplying and deepening crises of capitalism afflicting society today, we know the fortunes of our movement won’t change just overnight. “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living”, as Marx put it in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Part of that nightmare, for us, is the widespread sense of hopelessness and passivity in the face of the many obvious problems of society—a product of decades of one-sided class war being waged by the capitalist class and their political servants against working-class people, the poor and the oppressed.
There’s no shortage of people who feel, on some level, that something is very wrong with society. The problem is, very few think there’s anything much we can do about it. So, a big part of what we were trying to do at the launch was rekindle a sense of hope for the future and a belief that if working-class people stand up, get organised and fight back, then we can achieve the kind of radical change our society so desperately needs.
This was a dominant theme of all the speeches. Public school teacher and VS candidate for Niddrie Brendan Laws, who is running against the former Labor education minister and now Premier Ben Carroll, talked about it in connection with his work as a leader of the Socialists in Schools rank-and-file union group. “We organised Socialists in Schools”, he said, “to be the dogged fighters, to raise expectations, to assuage the fears about striking, [and] to let people know what power we have ... This year we’ve had this huge segment of workers get a bit more confidence, and it is now the most urgent task to translate that into the fight for the whole new society that we deserve”.
VS candidate for Footscray Jasmine Duff, who as a convener of Students for Palestine has played a central role in the Palestine solidarity movement, spoke similarly. “Socialism is about saying we deserve better”, she said. “We deserve a world of dignity, and we deserve a world where our lives aren’t measured by what we produce for the capitalists.”
The path to re-establishing socialism as a genuine fighting force in Australian political life is a long one. It will require the collective intellect and energy of thousands of committed socialist activists devoting themselves to our cause, not just for this election campaign, but for years and decades into the future.
As we move along that path, however, it’s important to mark the moments that feel like genuine milestones. The VS launch was one such moment—providing exactly the spark of inspiration needed as we embark on what we hope will be a historic, breakthrough campaign.
James Plested is the Victorian Socialists communications director.
