Socialism can win in Australia, but its proponents need to get serious Andy B Follow Nov 19, 2017 · Unlisted

I am a socialist, and an anarchist, because, as a 23-year-old living in outer Sydney, I feel criminalised by the very fact of my existence in this country.

If you’re a member of the 99% like me — whether a politics junkie or a relatively apolitical observer of the six o’clock news — you probably feel the same.

You’re anxious to get out if you take a turn into a rich neighbourhood. You’re scared of getting picked up by the cops on some bullshit misdemeanour on a night out. You’re unsure if you’ll still have a place to live next year. You’ve moved around so much you don’t really feel like you have a home anymore.

You go without meals. If you have a job, you don’t know what’ll happen if you lose it. If you don’t, you don’t know how long it’ll be before you get one. You’d be lucky to get an interview with an average of 17 people applying for the same job. Your CV was tossed out immediately because you have an ethnic surname, and you got a $100 parking ticket while your job agency berated you over a draconian new Centrelink regulation and single-handedly got your payments cancelled.

Everything you own is falling apart and you constantly have to worry about replacing something. You’re trapped in a prison made of debt. Money is a factor in everything. Cost looms over everything.

This insecurity causes you mental terror but you still have to wait 6 weeks to see a psychologist and only get the 10 subsidised sessions per year; even then you don’t know if you’ll be able to pay the gap next week.

If you’re like me, the cruellest part is that you feel like you’re being punished for doing the right thing. I was good in school and excelled in everything we were told to value. The joke was on me: the most secure people nowadays were the ones who ditched the education system as soon as possible in favour of marketable or even vaguely relevant skills.

Forget your hopes and dreams, kids; forget actually enjoying your life: just do whatever you have to do to survive.

I feel criminalised by the very fact of my existence in this country.

This is what it feels like to live in 21st century Australia. The rich have the power of security, of control over their lives, of actually having the freedom to enjoy their time on Earth; and the rest of us get nothing.

No-one speaks for us

It’s not just me and my associates in the radical underground who feel this way. It’s virtually everyone I know. From Aboriginal people to recent migrants, from teens to seniors, women and men, gay and straight, we are the 99%.

For the 99%, everyday life is intensely political. But who speaks for us?

Are the words of some old guy with a degree more valuable to our movement than those of the union member who cleans his bathroom?

The ABS reports that around 1% of the population have ever participated in a political party. The 99% of the 99% don’t know if they are left-wing or right-wing. They don’t always know who to vote for come election time. They believe the Treasurer if he tells us we need to tighten our belts. If they’ve heard of the political spectrum, they might even believe “left-wing” appropriately describes Hillary Clinton.

Everyone can tell you how they are being ripped off by their bosses. Very few know what is meant by “the means of production”.

And yet, while the Left (rightly) decries the technocratic orgy envisioned by centrists, they are just as bad when it comes to the fetishisation of academic thought.

You don’t have to be a sociologist to know you’re oppressed. No-one knows more about our lived experience than we do, but most of the time I’ve spent in rooms with lefties has felt less like a revolutionary union meeting and more like an elite university’s tweed-jacket book club.

We’re in the bizarrely ironic situation where Australian socialists idolise populists like Jeremy Corbyn, but celebrate this with tone-deaf events like reading groups and forums in inner-city bars.

We have an endless supply of factions, but the one thing that seems to be common to all of them is that you’ll be totally isolated if you don’t have a hundred thousand pages of ideological education behind you. I won’t pretend I haven’t been guilty of this as well. Look, there is nothing wrong with taking pride in intellect, or promoting education, but how can we purport to believe in a radically democratic, non-hierarchical society while we cherish one tradition of knowledge to the exclusion of all others?

The 99% certainly doesn’t have a friend in the right, but do they have a friend in the left if none of their activists can explain their campaign to someone nice enough to stop and take a leaflet?

Do we really not understand just how totally outside the margins of popular consciousness we are?

We are made to be criminals, we are pushed to the absolute furthest margins of society by the state and their elite cronies in the media.

Politics is about power, and power is about winning.

What the left-wing populists emerging in Europe and elsewhere understand, and what successful revolutionaries have always understood, is that our cute little subcultures mean nothing. We can have the best anthems, but who cares if no-one is going to sing along?

We cannot win when people are so alienated from our message that they prefer our enemies. The entirety of established power in our society is against us.

But in a world where we should have millions and millions of allies, we need to take seriously the idea that we have utterly failed to inspire people. We need to take seriously the idea that we need a new message, new ways of communicating, and a new way of doing politics if we are going to make a real effort to tackle today’s challenges.

No, I don’t want to re-join the Greens for a preselection

With rising inequality, and an increasingly radicalising global polity, it may well be a good time to be a socialist. But we can’t allow this opportunity to give way to despair. It’s tempting to freak out and yell at people to snap out of it.

But remember again that we are in competition for people’s hearts and minds. Given the stakes, we need to think seriously about what is going on in Australia.

Take the Greens as a place to reflect on the popular left in this country.

In short, it is One Nation, not the Greens, who are winning when it comes to working people.

If you live in the inner cities of Melbourne or Sydney, you could be forgiven for thinking the Greens represent real hope for the community. Spend time in literally any other part of the country, and you will find that the party is dismissed entirely with a sentence. It has so irretrievably failed to make its case that it will never be taken seriously by the general public.

For many self-identified left-wingers, the socialist tendencies of the party provide nothing more than cover for narcissistic liberal-centrist careerists. The tensions between such radically opposed factions of the party result in an image that appeals to almost no-one because it is so inconsistent. Populism can’t be done partially or in pieces.

At the time of writing, the Australian Greens is currently expending large amounts of its airtime prosecuting the case that members of Parliament undone by an archaic, racist, and undemocratic section of our Constitution should be made retroactively ineligible by the High Court. This says virtually everything that needs to be said about the party.

As they meekly cling to their eternal 10% share of the vote, and concentrate massive amounts political energy into winning a seat or two at any given state or federal election, Pauline Hanson gets on TV and the political class is in meltdown. With nothing more than One Nation’s particular brand of incoherent loudness, their poll numbers soar into the twenties and thirties and they are projected to massively increase their parliamentary representation. They falter only through the accident of history that made Pauline Hanson — rather than someone smarter and more charismatic — a leader for the far-right.

In short, it is One Nation, not the Greens, who are winning when it comes to working people.

A recent Queensland poll found that only 47% of One Nation supporters actually declare any confidence in the party’s policies, compared to 74% of Greens supporters.

People are angry. It is not enough for some PhDs to come up with some cool budgetary reforms, draft an economic review to explain how it’ll work, chuck out a media release and hope for the best. You need to be able to speak to the 99%.

The elite have every incentive to platform the far-right and continue to marginalise the left. We make it so much easier when we collaborate with liberals — or conversely, hammer and sickle types — for the sake of unity. Our enemies laugh in our faces. These people control everything: the economy, the use of force, the media. They can make us look ridiculous effortlessly because a majority of people simply don’t identify with us.

Do we really not understand just how totally outside the margins of popular consciousness we are?

All of this fatally dooms the prospect that the Greens are a viable force for hope among the 99%. The party is an energy sink, drowning good people in internal wars and having them half-heartedly promote an uninspiring message. This might seem harsh, especially given that the Labor party wastes its countless millions and does absolutely nothing to engage the community.

The left of the party could split, or it could disendorse and drive away the liberals. But unfortunately, the big players have decided to consign themselves to fighting preselection battles, at best delaying the inevitable; at worst, providing life support for an organisation that relies on these talented members to cover for its immutable liberalism.

What’s next?

I don’t need to remind any of you how bad things are on this planet. I barely scratched the surface: you are probably as emotionally overwhelmed as I am by all the horrific stories of human suffering, many never reaching the mainstream media and barely rating a mention by anyone with any influence.

In this climate, where the socialist message is struggling to make any headway, where revolutionary thought has been made so marginal, it is hard to take seriously the idea that liberal organisations like the Greens, or the myriad out-of-touch and pretentious socialist micro-groups, represent any semblance of a step forward. If we really understand how urgent our problems are, we need to abandon plainly failed avenues for change.

We talk a lot about our ideologies and current affairs and the intricacies of the status quo. But I don’t think we talk about our goals often enough. Where do we want to be in a year, or five, or fifty?

The general mood seems to suggest that the most we can do is pave the way for future generations. If we score some wins on renewable energy and international cooperation, we might even be able to guarantee that they will still be able to inhabit the world’s major cities. To be frank, though, I’m not really content with this uneasy existence. I want to feel joy — and to experience a meaningful and fulfilling existence — now, not in 80 years.

All I want is for us to have this discussion. When the time comes, how are we going to really engage ordinary people in civic life? What are we going to do to communicate better? How are we going to organise ourselves? What is going to inspire people? How do we build alternative political institutions? How do we bring together all the atomised campaign groups to work towards something broader, bigger, and better?

Once we start doing that, I believe, we might actually have a chance of setting a different trajectory for our communities.