This article explains the accomplishments and limitations of VS, and why it is an important field for the communist movement in Australia.
The political project of the Communist Caucus, as pushed forward at the Victorian Socialists conference earlier this year, invites a very simple question; why are we here? Why, given our immense disagreements with the current platform of the electoral party and its current strategic outlook, do we choose to join it rather than forming our own party?
It is in the activity of the party, as well as what it means for the left as the whole, that we find the answer. Instead of understanding VS to have taken socialism to the ballot box, we understand it to have taken the socialists to the ballot box; to have brought together a wide majority of socialists who are interested in electoral action and placed them behind the same banner. Its formation and continued existence should be understood in the context of an underlying understanding for the need for something more than the sect, of an understanding that the sects alone, impotent as they are, had no ability to reach to the masses in any remotely significant capacity and achieve electoral victories.
It is the possibilities presented by an electoral party which brings the socialists together in one room, rather than the mere fact of a party that calls itself socialist, which makes it a compelling project. It is the possibilities of the contradictory nature of the “broad-left party”, rather than the mere fact that that party claims itself to be to the left of the Greens, that makes us interested in a project not just of winning the party over to our politics, but seriously building it as our party. VS has brought the socialists to elections and a substantial and growing number of workers to their ballot line. It threatens to split the activist swamp and force an open confrontation over the contradictions of Socialist Alternative’s political strategy. It provides a unique possibility to win, through its transformation from a broad party to a mass party, a substantial number of workers and a majority of the socialist movement to a single unified communist party, one which the communist movement cannot let slip by.
In hindsight, it appears obvious that the formation of Victorian Socialists in 2018 marked the beginning of a new period in the redevelopment of socialist politics in Australia. What began as a mere vehicle of Socialist Alternative and Socialist Alliance to get Stephen Jolly elected to the Victorian Parliament has grown far beyond the expectations of its founding, surviving the withdrawal of Alliance in 2020 and gradually gaining more and more of a political life outside of electoral politics. Now, with the project’s nationwide expansion, it seems poised to consolidate much of the milieu interested in a party to the left of the Greens, as small but significant elements from both the Greens and even Labor flirt with the young party of the broad left.
VS’ ability to reach beyond the existing left is key to understanding it as a more credible socialist electoral front than those which came previously. The appeal of the broad party comes with the realisation of the inadequacies of the sect. As the sect isolates itself from criticism and thus the broader working class movement, it is unable to have the sort of electoral breakthroughs which the broad party allows for. Unlike Socialist Alternative, VS is not organised as a sect. It is not organised to the exclusion of any particular section of the workers’ movement, even if it functions as a recruitment front for Socialist Alternative. As such, it is able to claim to represent the socialist movement in elections in a way no individual sect, even Socialist Alternative, is otherwise capable of. Additionally, though few sects have formally entered VS, many have, understanding its significance, endorsed and supported its electoral efforts, such as the Freedom Socialist Party and the Spartacist League.
This has resulted in a party which, on paper, reaches far beyond Socialist Alternative. Its thousands of members both inside and outside of Victoria well outpace estimates of Socialist Alternative’s membership (around 600-700). While a great majority of the non-Socialist Alternative membership are paper members, independents play an important role in the life of VS as a party, and even paper members can, on occasion, be mobilised for the most important campaigns.
The result can be seen plainly in the numbers. Results nearing 20% in most booths in Footscray. Double digit results in booths in working class outer suburbs like Epping. Figures like this for a socialist party would have been unthinkable 10 years ago. Importantly, VS’ voter base, as can be seen in the geography of the 2025 election, have escaped the middle-class conundrum of the Greens. In the seats of Wills and Cooper, for instance, the Greens have had their geographic and economic base demarcated by the “Bell Street divide” between gentrified Greens voting inner suburbs and the Labor voting suburbs further north. For VS (and, in this case, Socialist Alliance in Wills, though the distinction between the two campaigns was thin) this divide has not appeared. Socialists only did a smidge better in Brunswick than they did in Reservoir.
It’s safe to say there’s some strong buy-in from working class voters. For the first time in many years, a substantial number of working class votes have gone to a party composed primarily by socialists. What is missing is the program and political content. The broad party as a model attempts to obfuscate questions of the state and state-loyalism by stating its desire to include both reformists and revolutionaries. The result is a party running on a thoroughly reformist program, which ignores the tasks of the working class in relation to the abolition of the capitalist state and its replacement with a workers’ republic; the question of how the proletariat will take political power. The result is a formation locked in the assumptions of the left-wing of bourgeois politics, a “One Nation of the left” (in the words of Corey Oakley) which will have to come to some accord with a Labor government in pursuit of reformist aims.
Socialist Alternative, on a sugar high of good booths and new recruits, believes it can maintain its own revolutionary politics in spite of its commitment to VS. It does this with a careful dance, openly admitting that it itself is revolutionary while VS is reformist, and engaging in a creative doublethink, where VS is an emergent mass party when it is growing in organisational life, and a mere electoral front when the question of the implication of its reformist program emerges. As its commitment to VS grows, the organisational life of VS outside of elections flowers, and VS comes closer and closer to the fateful day where its representatives will sit in a parliament, this position becomes more and more untenable. What happens when VS parliamentarians, plucked from Socialist Alternative’s own ranks, have to choose between a “better than nothing” Labor budget or “obstructionism”? What happens when Socialist Alternative’s members act more and more through VS in organisational activities which were usually the domain of the cadre organisation (rather than the front party) such as union work? What happens when Socialist Alternative is forced to pick between its revolutionary politics and the strategy which has brought it to high office?
Now, I do not think so little of Socialist Alternative that I think this will happen on the first day of the next Victorian parliament. Certainly there will be resistance in the ranks of both Socialist Alternative and VS that would have many things to say about any capitulation of this sort. But the pressure to come to a political accord with the parties of the bourgeois left, to be “respectable” and “reasonable” will invariably be placed on both VS and Socialist Alternative. They may flap their wings as they please, but gravity will bring them down with time, and the form of the broad party is a considerable handicap. With the broad party, liquidation, at least of the revolutionary side of Socialist Alternative’s politics, is inevitable. Coalitionism soon follows.
But it doesn’t have to be like this. The form of the broad party is not yet set in stone. The dynamics and contradictions of the emergence of the broad party from an organisation such as Socialist Alternative allow for a brief window in which far more than a broad party can be won. With the convergence of the socialists and the leftward wing of working class voters, both are poised to take the road of reformism and state-loyalism. Their being in the same place however provides an opportunity for an intervention by communists to win both to a mass, programmatic party, rather than a broad party. Unlike the broad party, the mass party clarifies its politics through a program, combining open and democratic debate with unity of action and political clarity. While the mass party is not immune to opportunism, degeneration, and the emergence of state-loyalist elements, the clarity of politics it offers and the culture of criticism and debate it fosters is a far greater defence against these phenomena than the model of the broad party.
Accomplishing this is the task of the Communist Caucus. It is our task to win VS and the broader Socialist Party to a revolutionary and clarified programmatic politics. To strike while the iron is hot and forge VS into a mass party of systemic opposition to the capitalist state. VS is still a young party, and it has changed and come a long way since its days as a one election campaign vehicle. Only by fighting for a mass party and revolutionary politics can we win a party which remains one of total opposition to the capitalist state, one which can answer the questions of state power which the broad party consciously ignores and can prepare the proletariat to take political power.
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