Why do socialists run in elections?

Socialism is a state of affairs in which the working class governs society over the whole of the Earth. The people whose labour produces the vast bulk of the wealth— the people who build, operate and maintain the extraordinary productive network that spans our globe—will rule.

As soon as we describe such a society, it’s clear that it will never come into existence by merely voting for it. Regardless of the outcome of elections, the Gina Rineharts, the Elon Musks, their political servants like Albo or partners like Trump and the totalitarian rulers of China, are not going to simply hand power to the billions of workers who work to create the wealth they control.

So if elections aren’t going to usher in socialism, what’s the point of socialists participating in them?

Measuring forces, building forces

Good ideas don’t just grow legs and start wandering around in the world, changing things for the better. History, for good and for ill, is made by organised political forces. Helping to build such a movement that can fight for socialism is one important reason for running electoral campaigns.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels talked about socialists participating in elections in order to “measure our forces”. This is good advice in general, but there’s not a great benefit in following it if our forces are small enough to fit into a single, not-very-large room. And more fundamentally, there’s something that isn’t quite captured by the idea of elections being a passive “measuring” of socialist forces or a “thermometer” of the class struggle, as Engels put it.

Part of the joy of Victorian Socialists is that the party involves enough dedicated socialist campaigners to actually win a credible vote. Most recently, we won 7.2 percent in the by-election in the Victorian state seat of Werribee, with booth results as high as 14 percent.

This matches our results from the 2022 Victorian state election. We won an average of 6.2 percent of votes in the eleven seats in Melbourne’s north (8 percent in Broadmeadows, 7.7 percent in Thomastown, and 8.1 percent in Brunswick), and 5 percent in the eleven seats in Melbourne’s west (including 6.6 percent in St Albans, 6.8 percent in Kororoit, and 9.3 percent in Footscray). In the upper house, we won more than 50,000 votes: our two main candidates won more primary votes than several successful upper house candidates in other parts of Victoria, though both of us missed out on a seat on preferences.

The fact that a socialist electoral project could win this sort of vote—the highest number of votes for a socialist outside of Labor since the 1940s—has been an important contribution to the project of hauling socialism off the margins of political life in this country and into the daily and weekly political discussions of many thousands of people.

Our federal campaign is now kicking off in earnest and is already clearly having the same effect—both through our campaign activities, and through engagement with many of those familiar with our excellent Senate candidate Jordan van den Lamb (aka Purplepingers), the scourge of every scumbag landlord through his shitrentals.org site.

All of our campaigning—letterboxing, doorknocking and talking with voters wherever we can—plays a role in normalising socialist campaigns and building support for socialist political positions. This activity also gives essential training for the campaigners themselves as we engage with all sorts of people with a listening ear and a socialist message of hope and resistance.

In other words, we run in election campaigns not just to “count our forces” but to build socialist political forces. Victorian Socialists has been quite successful in doing so, as the growth of the project—already by far the largest socialist political project in this country in decades—continues to show.

What would a socialist member of parliament do?

Victorian Socialists’ purpose in winning a parliamentary seat is not to be first in line for the daily buffet in the parliamentary dining room, nor to rain socialism down upon a grateful public. In keeping with a long-held socialist principle, our elected representatives will take only the wage of an average worker, with the rest going to build community and worker campaigns.

One of the main jobs of our elected representatives will be to build every act of workers’ struggle and collective resistance outside the parliament. And inside the parliament? We’ll be there to take on the major parties, not just to make pious speeches.

Though socialist MPs are a rarity in Australian history, we can get some idea of what’s possible from past practice.

Percy Brookfield was elected to the New South Wales parliament as the representative for the militant mining town of Broken Hill in 1917, during the greatest social and political revolt in Australia’s history. Expelled from Labor in 1919, he was re-elected as an independent in 1920 despite a statewide red scare against him.

Brookfield worked tirelessly to support the NSW general strike of 1917, and the epic eighteen-month “Big Strike” for shorter hours by 4,000 Broken Hill miners, which started in May 1919. He was outspoken in support of the Russian Revolution of October 1917 and was part of the discussions that led to the formation of the Communist Party of Australia.

In addition to building strikes and socialist organisations outside of parliament, Brookfield used his position in parliament to build the class struggle. He used parliamentary privilege to reveal how police had fabricated evidence against the IWW Twelve, members of the militant Industrial Workers of the World who had been jailed in a frame-up case.

When Labor needed his vote to stay in government after the 1920 election, Brookfield made his support conditional on Labor releasing the IWW Twelve and meeting the strikers’ demands for shorter hours in the ongoing Big Strike in Broken Hill. Both demands were achieved within six months—thanks to months and years of organising and struggle involving many thousands of people, and aided by Brookfield putting his political weight on the scales at a crucial time.

Two decades after Brookfield, in 1944 Fred Paterson became the only member of the Communist Party elected to a parliament in Australia. Paterson represented the seat of Bowen, south of Townsville, in the Queensland parliament. Bowen at this time included major coal centres, a large meatworks, sugar plantations, rail and ports—and twelve CPA branches.

Paterson was on the central strike committee of the massive Queensland rail strike, which started in February 1948, helping to coordinate the distribution of 850,000 leaflets supporting the strikers and visiting the pickets each day before attending parliament. When police tried to disperse the pickets, Paterson pointed to a loophole that allowed the pickets to remain as long as they kept moving.

The Queensland Labor government rammed an anti-strike law through parliament; they described it as the “Paterson bill” because it was designed to undermine the legal strategies he had advised. Paterson returned the compliment, describing the new law as “the greatest scab-herding strike-breaking piece of legislation ever introduced by a Labor government anywhere in Australia”.

On 17 March 1948, while observing workers being dispersed by the police, Paterson was bashed unconscious from behind by a cop. Paterson’s bashing sparked a Brisbane rally of 15,000 to 20,000 in support of the strikers. Protests, stop-works and meetings were held in Townsville, Bowen and Collinsville, and coal miners in NSW struck for 24 hours. The rail strike was settled a few weeks later, with the government conceding wage rises of 77 percent of the initial claim for trades workers and 95 percent for labourers.

Our short roll call of socialists outside of the Labor Party who have been elected to Australian parliaments should also include George Petersen. Petersen was part of a Trotskyist group when he became active in Labor Party politics in Wollongong and was elected to the NSW parliament in 1968. One of the most radical members of an Australian parliament, Petersen was an agitator for homosexual law reform, abortion law reform and prisoners’ rights. He used parliamentary privilege to expose the reign of terror exercised by guards in NSW prisons. Petersen campaigned to expose the frame-up of the alleged Hilton bombers in 1978 and was a staunch supporter of the Palestinian struggle.

Petersen worked closely with union members in the Illawarra, and his reminiscences contain plenty of thoughtful reflections. Petersen developed a political relationship with Brian Phipps, an electrician who was secretary of the Combined Mining Unions committee at Huntley Colliery in Petersen’s electorate of Illawarra. Petersen recalled of Phipps:

“He is a militant socialist and we worked together harmoniously for seventeen years promoting the cause of these workers, and, in return, receiving their total support ... I often thought that the relationship between Brian and me was the relationship I would like to have with all worker militants. That would have required me to be a member of a Leninist-type party, combining my work in a bourgeois parliament with that of fellow party members who occupied the same sort of position in the trade union movement as Brian did at Huntley Colliery. My great problem was that there was no such party to which I could belong.”

In 1987, Petersen voted against the Unsworth Labor government’s attacks on the NSW workers’ compensation scheme. Automatically excluded from the Labor caucus, Petersen contested his seat as an independent but lost despite a spirited campaign.

Of course, circumstances in Victoria in the 2020s differ in various ways from the examples above. Notably, the reformist and Stalinist political forces that dominated working-class politics for the past century have decayed or collapsed. For this reason at least, any newly elected, radical socialist MP will have to focus on building socialist political forces rather than just providing expression to pre-existing forces.

All of this lies in the future, along with the many challenges and opportunities that having a socialist MP will bring. In the meantime, no-one in Victorian Socialists plans to just sit around waiting for a socialist movement to rebuild itself. Rather, this is our central project.

Like many political campaigns and projects, Victorian Socialists includes revolutionaries (such as Socialist Alternative members) as well as non-revolutionaries who are just sick of Labor’s sell-outs, and many people engaging with socialist politics for the first time. We’re an electoral front in which no-one has to hide their politics and in which anyone who wants to help rebuild a socialist political current is welcome to join.

Our party program popularises socialist political positions—for the right to strike, for pulling out of the US alliance, for a punitive tax on billionaires to fund the services we need, for taking over empty houses to ease the housing crisis. Many of us are knee-deep in community campaigns, worker organising and other socialist political projects.

All of us are serious about fighting for the socialist future we need: joining Victorian Socialists and getting active is a positive contribution to that project.