The Australian federal election is marked by popular hostility to the major parties and their bipartisan program of austerity and war.
There is also growing opposition to capitalism and an attraction to socialism among significant layers of workers and youth. In that context and amid a breakdown of the capitalist system globally, key questions are posed. What is a socialist perspective? How is it fought for? And most importantly, which political party advances that fight?
The Socialist Equality Party states bluntly that the Victorian Socialists and their election campaign have nothing to do with socialism or the interests of the working class whatsoever. Based on its history, political program and class character, the Victorian Socialists can only be described as a political trap, whose function is to prevent the development of a genuine socialist movement of the working class, directed against the entire political establishment and the capitalist system itself.
In terms of its history, the Victorian Socialists (VS) derives from a political tendency that broke from the world socialist movement decades ago. It represents, not the working class, but a grasping layer of the upper-middle class, which seeks to advance its own privileges within the framework of the profit system. Politically, VS promotes and seeks to subordinate workers and youth to the chief props of capitalism—Labor, the Greens and the union bureaucracy.
VS was established in 2018 by the pseudo-left Socialist Alternative (SAlt) organisation. In elections since then, it has received small but notable votes numbering in the thousands, including in working-class areas of Melbourne, a sign of the growing attraction to socialism. The 2025 VS campaign has received some prominence, including in the corporate media, based largely on its selection of social media celebrity Jordan Van Den Lamb as its lead candidate for the Senate in the state of Victoria.
Van Den Lamb, who goes by the moniker “PurplePingers,” has a following on social media platforms based on short videos documenting different elements of the housing crisis. Until recently a senior lawyer representing the federal government, Van Den Lamb’s content has generally promoted individual and anarchistic “solutions” to the housing disaster, such as squatting. He only seems to have begun vaguely referencing socialism last year prior to the announcement of his candidacy.
However, such references to socialism, by Van Den Lamb and VS, are simply window-dressing, with no connection to the policies they are advancing in the election. Their program is confined to milquetoast reformism. There is no suggestion of mobilising the working class, but instead it consists of appealing to the powers-that-be to implement various palliatives, within the framework of the existing socio-economic order.
The most striking feature of the VS campaign is its parochialism. A state-based organisation, with a state-based name, VS and its candidates have virtually nothing to say about the world.
And this under conditions where the world is already at war. Amid a grab bag of demands and slogans, there is a pro-forma reference to opposition to the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and to the AUKUS military pact involving Australia, the US and the UK. But VS says nothing, whatsoever, about the fact that the globe is closer to a world war than at any point in the past 80 years, with a hot war raging in Europe, between the US and NATO on the one side and Russia on the other, the prospect of conflagration throughout the Middle East and advanced US-led preparations for war with China.
The silence of VS on these immense dangers dovetails with the official election campaign, which is aimed at chloroforming the population and covering up the reality that whatever the outcome on May 3, the working class is confronted with a historic crisis of capitalism that is leading to a return to the barbarism of the 1930s, from genocide, to all-out trade war, militarism, fascism and dictatorship.
Reformism in an era without reforms
That reality completely refutes the reformist line of VS. What is on the agenda is not reform, but social counter-revolution. That involves the gutting of working-class living standards and the destruction of social services, a policy being implemented not only by fascistic figures such as Trump, but by every capitalist government. This includes the current Labor government, which has presided over the sharpest reversal in working-class living standards of the post-World War II period.
The real agenda of whichever party comes to office is being outlined every day in the financial press, which insists on the need for sweeping “structural reform” and a “productivity” drive, codewords for austerity, amid a decade of forecast deficits, an underlying economic slump and the immense volatility produced by Trump’s trade war.
As with the question of war, VS covers up this basic dynamic. Its program is a grab bag of limited social measures, including taxing corporations, a five-year rent freeze, price caps on food and electricity, building 1 million new public housing units, and putting politicians on a worker’s wage. While speaking about the need to put “people over profits,” and occasionally raising that ultimately the only solution is socialism, VS candidates emphasise that such demands are eminently achievable, including within the framework of capitalism.
Their program does not even call for the nationalisation of the largest banks and corporations. It demands the renationalisation of the Commonwealth Bank, leaving the other three largest financial institutions unscathed, except to call for a “portion of their funds” to be “invested in socially useful areas.” Even Australia’s billionaires, largely composed of mining barons and vultures of the housing crisis, get off rather lightly, facing the prospect, not of expropriation, but of a ten percent tax on their wealth.
The description of this program as “reformism” is something of a misnomer. It is far less ambitious than the policies advanced by social-democratic parties in an earlier period of history, always on paper and with the aim of preventing a revolutionary movement of the working class. It is largely identical to the policies outlined by the Greens. And as with the Greens’ various social demands, the VS policies have the character of a wish-list, aimed above all at winning votes.
In his corporate media appearances, Van Den Lamb is indistinguishable from a Greens politician, frequently shelving even the pretence of socialist phraseology, and holding up as models to be emulated such things as greater rental rights in Europe.
Promoting illusions in the Greens and union bureaucracy
At the VS election launch, Van Den Lamb was particularly candid about the orientation of VS to the existing political establishment. He promoted illusions that, not only the Labor Party, but even the Liberal-Nationals, could be pressured into granting social reforms. “We know that the ruling class will never ensure that our basic needs are met out of the goodness of their hearts,” he stated. “They only respond if we threaten them…. If we build this movement, we can win. And that’s not because Labor or Liberal will suddenly grow a conscience, it’s because they’ll be forced to.”
That is no less a fraud than the phoney campaign promises of Labor and the Liberals alike. These are parties of the banks and the corporations, which are and will implement the dictates of the financial markets. As the attacks on democratic rights by the outgoing Labor government make clear, from its attempts to criminalise pro-Palestinian protests, to its placement of the construction union under quasi-dictatorial state control, the response of the next government to opposition from below will be state repression and authoritarianism.
VS is once again peddling the fraud that Labor is a lesser-evil to the Liberals, when they have identical policies on all fundamental issues. At the same time, it promotes the Greens as allies to be worked with. On his Instagram page, Van Den Lamb has said that he “likes the Greens,” “there are socialists within the Greens” and that some of their policies are “nice.” The entire thrust of the Greens’ election campaign is to form a coalition government with Labor, with its leader Adam Bandt repeatedly emphasising that it is placing no conditions whatsoever on the establishment of such a big-business government.
Another strand of the VS orientation to the political establishment is its uncritical promotion of the union bureaucracy. VS hails the unions as “our organisations of struggle,” to be built and strengthened. But these are corporatised entities, completely under the dominance of a bureaucracy tied by a thousand strings to Labor and the corporations. The union officialdom has played the key role in suppressing the struggles of the working class, not just over the past three years, but over the past four decades.
A pro-imperialist tendency
One of the only international issues raised by the VS campaign is Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza. But as with everything else, this question is put forward only to stoke illusions in the viability of pressure politics.
For the past 18 months, VS and SAlt have, together with the Greens, dominated the mass anti-genocide protests. There they have peddled the fraud that Labor could be pressured to end its complicity in the mass slaughter, through endless appeals and pressure. But VS and SAlt continue the same bankrupt line, not only on the genocide, but on the housing crisis and every other issue.
The objective function of this line is to demobilise the working class and block it from entering the path of independent struggle. The subordination of the anti-genocide movement to the very government supporting the atrocities is simply one expression of the hostility of VS and SAlt to the fight to build a genuine anti-war movement, which of necessity must be directed against Labor, the political establishment and the capitalist system that is the source of war.
In reality, VS and SAlt are pro-imperialist tendencies. For more than a decade, they supported the US-led regime change operation in Syria, presenting this imperialist intervention as a revolution. Even after this operation resulted in the establishment of an Al-Qaeda linked dictatorship, VS continued to hail it, with one of its candidates Omar Hassan travelling to Syria earlier this year to provide breathless reports whitewashing the US-aligned Islamist regime.
VS and SAlt have similarly backed the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine. They have covered up the fact that Russia’s reactionary invasion was deliberately provoked by the US, with the aim of inflicting a massive defeat on Moscow. And they have presented the US puppet regime in Kiev as an exemplar of democracy, when it is in fact a fascist-infested dictatorship subservient to imperialism.
In this region, VS and SAlt have for years downplayed the possibility of a US-led war with China, while at the same time lining up with the imperialist propaganda to legitimise a military build-up by falsely presenting Beijing as the aggressor.
The pseudo-left versus a genuine socialist perspective
These positions are not an error, but express definite class interests. SAlt derives from a tendency that broke from the world socialist movement, the Fourth International, in the post-World War II period. It rejected the revolutionary role of the working class and the fight for its political independence, instead orienting to other forces, particularly the pro-imperialist social democracy.
In the decades since, organisations such as SAlt have become the political representatives of an affluent layer of the upper-middle class. Ensconced in the top echelons of the public sector, the union bureaucracy and academia, this layer advances its own privileges within the framework of capitalism, including through the use of identity politics based on race, gender and sexual orientation.
VS is a thinly-veiled attempt by SAlt to gain a foothold in the political establishment, including through collaboration with the Greens and the union bureaucracy. VS representatives are candid that their ultimate aim is to win a seat in the Victorian state parliament, which they present as an entrance into the big-time world of official politics.
This is the antithesis of the fight for socialism, advanced by the Socialist Equality Party. Together with our international co-thinkers, we are sounding the alarm on the threat of world war, fascism, dictatorship and social counter-revolution. We are telling the working class the truth: The election will resolve nothing whatsoever, and will be followed by stepped-up attacks on social and democratic rights.
The critical issue is building an independent movement of the working class, directed against every other party and capitalism itself, based on a socialist and revolutionary program. Join and support the SEP’s campaign to take up this fight.
Authorised by Cheryl Crisp for the Socialist Equality Party, Level 1/457-459 Elizabeth Street, Surry Hills, NSW, 2010, Australia.