Daniel Friedman argues if we reform the unions, we can take state power.
Socialists in Australia are stuck. After a long period in the wilderness, a full third of Australians now support socialism in public polling. This rises to a majority among Australians under the age of 35. This makes sense, given that since COVID we have experienced one of the steepest and most severe drops in living standards in the developed world. But this is a mass sentiment that holds no power. The left in the Labor Party is dead, the Greens are forever polling at 14%, and the most the Socialist Party can aspire to is an upper house MP. We don’t have a Democratic Socialists of America, and we never had a Momentum, a Podemos, or a La France Insoumise. The question then is why the left has failed to break through here whereas it has made a serious bid for power everywhere else in the West.
The answer is that the Australian left is institutionally blocked. And the solution is for the left to adopt a strategy that has the clearest path to power: democratically contest the union movement, take control of the Labor Party, and take state power.
This article proposes a strategy for the left to break out of its purgatory. To do so, we need to ask the same questions that democratic socialists in the United States asked themselves in 2016 when they started the project of building the DSA into the mass force that is today. Seth Ackerman’s “A Blueprint for a New Party” was published by Jacobin in the wake of Bernie Sanders’ near-victory in the Democratic primary against Hillary Clinton. Ackerman asked why Bernie nearly won, and saw so much popular support compared to the complete failure all other American socialists had faced over the past century.
He suggested that the left had hit a brick wall running their own campaigns for office outside the major parties. Instead of continuing to bash its head against this wall, Ackerman came up with a novel solution: a democratic, mass-membership left organisation – the DSA – could contest Democratic Party primaries and elect socialists to office while still functioning as an independent political party. This proposal was quickly adopted as the DSA’s official strategy, and it has clearly worked. DSA now has the mayor of NYC, a socialist caucus in Congress, and a serious shot at winning the presidency with AOC. When Ackerman said that the left “won’t get far unless we grapple seriously with the exceptional character of the American party system”, he was right.
The left needs to grapple with the exceptional character of the Australian party system, too. We don’t have the same institutional blocks that the Left faces in the United States, in which third parties are denied ballot access and prevented from seriously contesting elections. Our institutional block is our exceptional Labor Party – a party which, unlike most other stewards of Western social democracy, retains its hegemonic base in the working class. Labor is the only party on the left of politics with seats in multicultural suburban seats (like western Sydney), in industrial cities like Newcastle and Wollongong, and in regional working class areas like the Hunter Valley and the NSW South Coast. The Greens have no representation here at all, and nor do the Socialists. As much as the Labor Party has allowed living standards to slowly erode during the Albanese government, the reason it has proved so durable in working-class communities is that took a different path than most after the global financial crisis: under Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard it never engaged in the kind of austerity and anti-union politics that imploded European social democratic parties (“Pasokification”) in the 2010s.
Medicare, public services and workers’ rights have been mostly kept intact under Albanese; the failure to do anything to control spiralling housing costs – the major cause of real wage decline – is seen by working people as a passive omission rather than an overt betrayal. Apart from the NDIS, Albanese has avoided serving as the executioner of social rights in the way that former British prime minister Keir Starmer was to pensioners, French president Francois Hollande to public sector workers, or Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi to the unemployed. Labor can credibly say that life will be worse under the Liberals or One Nation.
So, the left faces a strategic problem. The working class has just enough faith in the Labor Party as its protector that it continues to vote for it, as a kind of negative class consciousness to preserve the status quo. That means that the two options open for a left that is serious about taking power are to either take over Labor and transform the existing mass party of reformism into a mass party of socialism like Corbyn did, or to try to build an independent mass party and somehow replace a Labor Party that is not discredited despite its best efforts.
The problem with reforming Labor is that, unlike the Democratic Party, it cannot be reformed by its rank-and-file members alone. If a DSA-like formation sprung into existence tomorrow and flooded Labor’s local branches with a view to contesting preselections, union officials would still control the party conference and executive, and would block the deselection of sitting MPs. This is the same structure that has locked the left out of power in British Labour since 2020, despite an overwhelming number of rank-and-file members still supporting Corbynism.
Corbyn himself only took power through an accident – a plebiscitary leadership election system in which leftwingers were permitted to sign up en masse and vote for Labour’s leader, a system that Tony Blair’s acolytes self-defeatingly put in place to marginalise the influence of the union officials who had been the primary ballast of support for a competing faction of the Labour right. So, to take power in a labour party the left would need to seriously contest control of the unions that ultimately control it.
Leaving that to the side for a second, the other option is trying to build a mass party to Labor’s left. There have been two attempts in recent times to make that happen.
In the first term of the Albanese government, Max Chandler-Mather attempted to put this into practice in the Greens. Chandler-Mather was an evangelist for independent mass politics. His office had a book club that studied orthodox Marxist theorist Karl Kautsky and often cited the early German SPD in explaining his political strategy, using language seemingly drawn from Kautsky to describe his approach as a “dual strategy” in using parliament to agitate for reforms while “also attempting to be a mass party and aim[ing] to establish roots within society”. For a time, he was stunningly successful in turning the Greens in inner Brisbane into a type of independent mass party. The local Greens did become a kind of deeply rooted grassroots organisation, with members of the party (directly, identifying themselves as Greens members) cleaning people’s homes during the Brisbane floods, handing out COVID-19 care packages, providing free meals to school children, and organising mass meetings of local residents against landlords and developers. This achieved real social weight – the Greens campaign in Griffith in 2022 still stands as the largest single-seat campaign in Australian history, with more than 1,000 active volunteers who doorknocked over 90,000 homes. The result was a breakthrough for the Greens – three federal MPs from Brisbane, and this momentum convinced the Greens establishment to make Chandler-Mather the party’s housing spokesperson.
Before Chandler-Mather came on the scene, the Greens always chickened out. They would campaign on bold progressive demands, then back down and vote up Labor’s bill with some minor compromise brokered behind closed doors. In other words, they were in coalition with Labor as its very weak junior partner. Chandler-Mather instead decided to pursue Kautskyite extreme parliamentary opposition against Labor’s housing bill, a ludicrously inadequate plan to gamble public money on the stock market and give any returns to developers.
By repeatedly blocking the bill and making its passage conditional upon a national rent freeze which Albanese refused to even consider, Chandler-Mather attempted to make clear to renters that Labor had the power to save them from the housing crisis but was deliberately betraying them in the interests of developers and landlords.
Polling showed that this strategy had cut-through: by the end of May 2023, 60% of voters backed the Greens’ call for a national rent freeze. Mainstream media commentators considered it possible at the time that we were on the verge of a major political shift, with renters dealigning from Labor and forming an expanded constituency for the Greens.
But this didn’t happen. Labor was not discredited on housing, and in the 2025 election there was no Greens breakthrough. It is an open question how this would have played out if the Greens had held their nerve and taken Labor’s failure to arrest rising rents to an election. Instead, the party establishment was spooked by Albanese’s rhetoric that the Greens were obstructionists who were ‘blocking housing’. The party room went over Chandler-Mather’s head and agreed to pass the housing bill, with some minor concessions, none of which controlled rents, and housing dropped out of the national conversation.
The Greens then effectively entered into a one-way coalition with Labor, campaigning for Albanese’s re-election on the slogan “Keep Dutton Out”. Still, there was no reward to the Greens for having championed renters’ interests for three years. Chandler-Mather and Greens leader Adam Bandt lost their seats. Renters did not abandon Labor. This obviously doesn’t prove that it’s impossible for the Left to replace Labor through independent politics, but the experience does show that it is very difficult to discredit Labor among working-class voters, even when there is good reason for them to be discredited.
The Socialist Party will likely enter the Victorian upper house in November, and it is possible they will succeed where the Greens did not by maintaining a clean break from Labor and never selling out. The Socialists say their MPs will refuse to participate in coalitions and will be solely focused on using their platforms to organise workers’ struggles and social movements outside parliament. Socialist Alternative still operates as a sect within the Party, but in reality it has taken a mass turn and its members no longer see the Socialist Party as just a front to recruit cadre. They know they are seeing real success and the project has taken on a life of its own. We will have to wait to see how this goes.
I don’t think Socialist Alternative MPs will back down in struggles or engage in opportunism. I can see a future in which charismatic Socialist MPs prove immensely popular, and are able to cohere a mass following from speeches denouncing Labor and the far right that go viral on social media – it was one viral speech on TikTok that caused Die Linke’s support to double before the last German election. If Labor collapses by openly attacking its own supporters, I think the Socialist Party will have an opportunity to absorb at least some of its social base, although I am sceptical they will be able to replace Labor as the mass party of the working class.
But as unpopular as this is to say – I don’t think Albanese is stupid and I don’t think Labor is going to start sadistically attacking its own supporter base. I think the Socialist Party will elect Omar Hassan to the Victorian upper house in Northern Metro and Anneke Demanuele in Western Metro. That’s where I think they will cap out for a long time unless Labor commits grievous errors.
There is a very strong chance that Labor remains the party which most working-class people vote for, and that means that the left needs to consider whether building a mass party to Labor’s left will actually work. I suggest that we need to abandon a dogmatic fixation with third-party politics, and recognise that the clearest path for the left in Australia is capturing the Labor Party by democratically contesting control of the union movement.
The following is a proposal for an alternative strategy: the left should set up reform caucuses in major unions affiliated to the Labor Party, contest union elections, and use the delegates these unions send to win control of the party conference and executive.
This was the main political strategy of the Communist Party of Australia. While the Communists ran their own candidates for parliament, they were in reality an industrial political party. The CPA’s basic tactic was to set up groups in unions and then contest the leadership, arguing for rank-and-file control and a militant industrial strategy. The zenith of Communist power in the union movement was in 1945, when it commanded a majority at the ACTU Congress, led all but one state trades hall, and controlled virtually all strategically important industrial unions. They used this position to wage heroic industrial struggles, including the six-month long Victorian metals strike in 1947 which won the 40-hour week and the 1948 Queensland railway strike which defeated the state Labor government.
But the political component of the CPA’s industrial strategy was to capture control of the unions and to use the weight of their delegations to take over the conferences, executives and branches of the Labor Party. Or, as the CPA’s avowed opponent B.A. Santamaria put it plainly: “Communist control of a sufficient portion of the trade unions must inevitably mean a powerful influence within the ALP. Decisive Communist influence on the trade unions – even if it fell short of a numerical majority – meant decisive Communist influence on the ALP”.
This strategy saw highs and lows. Some of the highs included the CPA assuming control of the NSW branch of the Labor Party in 1939 and installing a Communist as general secretary. Or, the CPA having card-carrying members as ministers in the Whitlam and Hawke governments. Even when the CPA was at its weakest in the late 1980s, it effectively controlled the ALP Left faction by leading the Amalgamated Metal Workers Union – the largest union at Labor conferences.
All of this collapsed when the CPA dissolved itself and closed its industrial cells (the result of a collective nervous breakdown it suffered following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989). The ‘hard left’ unions and the ALP Left faction it previously ran came under the leadership of an opportunist named Anthony Albanese, who happened to ingratiate himself with the last of the CPA union officials at exactly the right time and was allowed to install student politicians loyal to him as their replacements. See, Tim Ayres (Metalworkers), Damian O’Connor (CFMEU Energy), Luke Foley (ASU). This is the origin story of the actually existing ALP Left faction and how it became so right wing – and so successful.
The strategy of democratically contesting the union movement was also followed by Tony Benn and the left in the British Labour Party. They did the same thing but without a vanguard party. The New Left set up reform caucuses inside the major unions in Britain and demanded that rank-and-file members choose and make accountable their representative at Labour conferences. This movement was spectacularly successful and won control of the Labour Party’s conference and national executive in 1972. Conference endorsed an ambitious program of nationalisations, introduced mandatory reselection of Labor candidates, and stewarded more than 50 socialist MPs into parliament. There existed a state of dual power in Labour, wherein the national executive and conference would attempt to and often succeeded in disciplining the parliamentary party and front bench. An all-out war for control of the British state was nearly won through this strategy.
So where does this leave the Australian left today? The general impression that most commentators have is that the unions are an impregnable fortress. But that is not borne out by recent evidence. Last year, a new reform ticket won control of the CPSU Victoria with 65% of the vote. The same happened in the CPSU South Australia. The Victorian Allied Health Professionals Association also saw two-third support for the rank-and-file ticket. These were largely new forces of the left that did not have deep roots. There have also been near-misses, like the federal CPSU election in 2023 and the United Workers Union earlier this year. The take away is that leftwing rank-and-file groups, often with significantly weaker financial resources, were competitive against the established union leaderships.
Where does this animosity for the union bureaucracy come from? Probably from the fact that during an historic cost of living crisis, the union movement (especially the ACTU) acts more like a marketing arm for the federal Labor government than a militant fighting force for workers, frequently celebrating minor policy announcements or cost-of-living adjustments while real wages and conditions stagnate.
More importantly, the financial war chests (slush funds) that union leaderships have assembled through compulsory levies on their staff do not seem to give incumbents a significant institutional advantage. Recent experience is that campaign spending in union elections stops scaling after the first all-member mail out (campaign material sent to members by post). Reform tickets have usually been able to fundraise enough to match this and also get their message out to voters. No matter how much money is spent by incumbents in union elections, turnout has been universally low. More spending doesn’t equal greater turnout for the leadership.
So, my proposal is that the left should contest unions both to ensure rank-and-file control and industrial militancy, but also to pursue control of the Labor Party. This would take the form of broad-based rank-and-file caucuses being set up in major unions, the left financially and logistically supporting reform tickets, and then using majorities at Labor conferences and executives to replace right-wing MPs with socialists.
If an Australian left formation set up a reform caucus in the UWU and the federal CPSU and won control of them, they would control the ALP left faction in all states. If the SDA were also reformed, the Australian left would then have a majority at Labor’s national conference.
Is it easier to set up 100-person reform caucuses in three unions and to raise $100,000 to fund mail-outs for each reform campaign, or is it easier to set up an entirely new mass party of the left with tens of thousands of members and millions of dollars in fundraising and an entirely new media ecosystem to displace the Labor Party?
Maybe we should try both?