We publish an edited version of a speech given by Labor Tribune editor, Marcus Strom, at a well-attended event held on 3 May 2026 in central Sydney to celebrate May Day and the recent launch of Labor Tribune.
More than 30 people attended from across the labour movement: ALP members, trade unionists, disability activists, socialists and communists.
It’s great to see such a diverse crowd here. That’s what Labor Tribune is about.
We’ve got people here from the Labor Party, from different socialist organisations, trade unions, and activists from across the labour movement. The whole idea of Labor Tribune is to work towards rebuilding a left because, to be frank, the left is pretty moribund at the moment.
I just got a text – I hoped it was a typo – that there were only about 200 people at Unions NSW ‘family fun day’ for May Day at Parramatta today. I’d hoped it was 2,000, but no, about 200. It shows what a big job we have ahead of us.
I live in central Sydney not far from here – and it’s great to see the secretary of my Labor Party branch here.
This area has been part of my life since I was very young. My family used to come to Glebe for political events, including visits to Tranby Aboriginal College, which is still there. My family, after the political divorce in the Communist Party, ended up in the Socialist Party of Australia – the pro-Soviet wing of the communist movement – even as the Communist Party itself was in decline, eventually dissolving in 1991.
Growing up, it wasn’t unusual for me to have contact with Aboriginal people at political events. It wasn’t until I got older that I realised this wasn’t the experience of most non-Aboriginal Australians.
I raise this in the context of an acknowledgement of country. Why was that my experience? I’d say it’s because we had a communist movement in this country.
The Communist Party was the first party to acknowledge colonisation and genocide, the first to reject the White Australia policy, and the first to organise in solidarity with Aboriginal people. Communist-led unions helped establish organisations like Tranby in the 1950s and supported struggles like the Gurindji walk-off at Wave Hill in 1966 – a pivotal moment in the fight for land rights.
A Communist Party doesn’t just organise the most militant layers of the working class – it also acts as our memory.
With the demise of organised Marxism in the labour movement, we’ve forgotten a great deal.
Today, acknowledgements of country often feel overly performative. This has been seized upon by the far-right to stoke bigotry – witness the booing at Anzac Day just a week ago.
But doesn’t it strike you as odd that many left-wing, union, and workplace meetings now begin in the same way as board meetings at BHP or Rio Tinto – with a tick-a-box acknowledgement of country?
There’s something about this that we know in our guts feels wrong, but we hesitate to say so for fear of causing offence.
I looked up Rio Tinto’s reconciliation commitments. After destroying the Juukan Gorge rock shelters in 2020, their statement says it is a “powerful reminder of the need to do better”. That’s the best they can offer – aspiring to do better while destroying Sacred Sites.
Capitalism is culturally very strong. Over the past 150 years it has shown an extraordinary capacity to absorb and commodify movements against it. Look at International Women’s Day or Mardi Gras – both began as militant democratic movements, and both have been absorbed into capitalist culture.
I raise this because Labor Tribune was established to help the left think again – to move beyond tick-a-box politics. Much of the left’s day-to-day activity, frankly, is what my kids would call cringe – performative and lacking meaningful content.
Modern left tails or copies liberalism
My argument is that as the left has stopped thinking. Because it lacks a clear, independent political program for working-class power it tends to either tail liberalism or adopt liberalism as its program.
For the reformist left, this has metastasised into Blairism, or what Thomas Piketty calls the “Brahmin left”. This current now dominates polite progressive society, right up to the governor-general herself. But liberalism is also dominant across much of the radical left – essentially liberalism pushed to its extreme, what you might call Green politics on steroids.
This performative politics is a turn-off to most working-class people – indeed, to most people, full-stop.
Of course, I’m not against the working class creating and maintaining its own traditions. These are essential. May Day is a great example. And Welcomes to Country can be powerful and meaningful.
But when these traditions blend into liberalism, we have a problem.
Another point about culture and political hegemony. Ruling classes also work hard to project their system as timeless and immutable. Think of how the Victorians effectively invented “Scottishness” in the 19th century. History shows that culture is malleable – and that working-class movements can and do shape alternative cultures.
I’m certainly not saying the cultural weakness of the left today is the cause of its moribund nature, rather it is a superficial symptom of deeper problems.
The left has either collapsed into managing capitalism or exists on the fringes – reliving the 20th century as small re-enactment societies.
The people who started Labor Tribune, many of us connected through Labor Against War and the Palestine solidarity movement, don’t believe we can resolve this alone. That would be absurd. Our position is quite the opposite – we need to organise together. And that’s why we are holding this meeting and publishing this journal – to unite the Marxist left within the workers’ movement, wherever we organise.
Dead Russians
The most studied socialist movement of the past 150 years is no doubt the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party and its Bolshevik faction because they took power – albeit briefly.
At its formation in the late 19th century the socialist movement in Russia was riddled with amateurism and disorganisation. Beyond that general disunity and amateurism, I’m not saying we are in the same concrete situation as socialists were in Russia 130 years ago. But it is worthwhile examining the method they adopted to achieve unity at the highest possible political level. A method we aim to emulate to overcome our own disunity and amateurism – through open political debate.
In many ways, the Marxist left globally has been scattered to the four winds. We are like a lost tribe across distant islands, speaking the same language but unable to understand each other and hence unable to think.
We need a culture of discussion and debate that allows us to rebuild a common language and a workers’ movement that can think. Otherwise, how can the working class become a ruling class?
Most socialist organisations today do not allow this. Step outside the orthodoxy and you risk being driven out. That culture will get us nowhere.
Pick up any serious bourgeois paper, like the Financial Times, and it will have a broad range of competing ideas on how to rule and run capitalist society.
Today, socialist groups, parties and trade unions treat political differences as private information – controlled by leaderships. It’s dismissed as “gossip”, but its open expression is in fact essential to democratic decision-making.
At its foundation in 1900, the Russian socialist journal Iskra journal said:
The unity of Russian Social-Democrats has still to be created, and to this end it is necessary to have an open and all-embracing discussion of the fundamental questions of principle and tactics raised by the present-day…
Open polemics, conducted in full view of all Social-Democrats and class-conscious workers, are necessary and desirable in order to clarify the depth of existing differences.
Later, Lenin argued:
There can be no mass party, no party of a class, without full clarity of essential shadings, without open struggle between various tendencies, without informing the masses as to which leaders and which organisations of the party are pursuing this or that line. Without this, a party worthy of the name cannot be built.
We take inspiration from that approach. Without it, real unity is impossible. Further, I do not think this method was specific to the Bolsheviks. It was the mode of operation of the mass Marxist parties across Europe. That is why we can read the debates of Luxemburg, Berstein, Kautsky, Bebel, Liebknecht, and so on. They were published in the hundreds of socialist journals that were a cultural hallmark of those early mass socialist parties.
No matter whether you thought the Soviet Union was ‘actually existing socialism’, or ‘state capitalism’ or some other social formation, since its collapse, the left has been in retreat. Thatcher’s claim that “there is no alternative” still resonates. Social theorist Mark Fisher popularised Frederic Jameson’s observation that it is now easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
Despite this, most groups either bury the importance of theory or claim that their theory is immutable and has always been correct. They deem theoretical work unimportant and instead prioritise activity or ‘going straight to the class.
My conjecture is that without organising through a mass party, small groups going “to the class” is futile. We need a party capable of organising the working class as a class for itself.
Without a mass party, we won’t be able win the battle of ideas for a future without exploitation, war, famine, climate disaster, for a world based on human solidarity.
That will take ongoing development of theory to inform or practice.
At the moment, it does not seem like the small socialist groups are up to the task. While the Socialist Party project has made some headway, I fear for its future.
Overcoming Laborism
Inside the ALP, the left has largely disappeared. Nonetheless, despite or because of its contradictions, in the ALP we are dealing with mass politics – tens of thousands of members, hundreds of thousands in affiliated unions, and millions of voters.
This is why some of us organise there. Not because we believe the ALP is socialist – it isn’t, despite claiming to be a ‘democratic socialist party’ – but because it remains a mass party connected to the working-class movement, albeit one led by people committed to managing capitalism.
Slowly building small competing socialist circles will not radically transform the left. But neither will trench warfare inside the ALP. We need to think about how to transform the politics of the working class at a mass scale. That will take a genuine communist party.
The major strategic barrier preventing the working class forming into a such a party and into a class for itself capable of self-liberation, is Laborism – a form of ruling-class ideology within the workers’ movement.
Our task is to positively overcome this contradiction and fight for the formation of a mass workers’ party committed to the revolutionary socialist transformation of capitalism.
To achieve this, we will need a political centre in the labour movement that can think, analyse, and act.
British Marxist, Mike Macnair, has written a very useful pamphlet on Revolutionary Strategy that examines the struggle for left and working-class unity over the past 150 years.
In a nutshell, he argues there have historically been three broad strategies – reformism, insurrectionism and the “revolutionary centre” of orthodox Marxism.
Reformism has been the dominant trend since 1914: workers’ organisations that seek compromise with capitalism, enter coalitions with pro-capitalist parties and merely ameliorate the conditions of the working class under capitalism.
On the far-left are those whose strategy is essentially for a general strike to trigger an insurrection as the pathway to working class power. This, Macnair argues, is economistic, elitist and fundamentally anti-democratic. It emerges not so much from Marxism, but from anarchism and Bakuninism. This is the dominant approach of much of the Trotskyist left today with its ‘streets and strikes’ strategy.
Then there is the revolutionary centre of orthodox Marxism which was dominant until 1914. A strategy of revolutionary patience that seeks to win a majority of the working class to revolutionary ideas.
That is the strategy we believe is necessary today.
This requires a mass Marxist party – a communist party – not the parodies of small Marxist groups that recruit students to put them on a hamster wheel of mindless activism.
We do not believe the ALP can simply be transformed into such a party. But we do fight for it to become a democratic united front in which socialists and communists can openly organise.
What we are not is an ‘entrist’ organisation any more than Marxists are ‘entrists’ in their unions, anti-war groups, community organisations. We are not pretending that we are ‘real Labor’ the way Militant did in the British Labour Party.
And we are not like the ‘soft left’ faction, which is trying to win the ALP over one branch at a time to some amorphous idea of being leftwing. That method – bereft of any democratic program – if successful will see them recreate what the Albanese left has achieved: unprincipled compromise with capitalism to retain power.
We see ourselves as a Marxist network within the ALP and labour movement – albeit without there being a communist party. We aim to build a network across the labour movement – in unions, community organisations, the ALP and socialist societies.
I was interested to read in Marxist Left Review an article by Omar Hassan this week, where he says of the Victorian Socialists work:
We discovered that electoral work was not fundamentally different from other political interventions into student and trade unions, single-issue campaigns, and so on. Each form of struggle and activity has its own rhythms and challenges, and requires a specific set of tactics and strategies.
Who knew?! While this smacks a little of teenagers discovering sex, and Socialist Alternative’s ongoing student politics obsession, it points to a certain truth. In a sense, we also apply this approach to ALP work.
But we see the need for a new left that has ambition for our class. Not one that puts out radical versions of Green and liberal politics, or “Greens on steroids” as the NSW Socialists has self-identified.
We need a left with ambition – a left that offers a democratic, republican program for working-class rule, not just more radical versions of liberalism.
This cannot be done using the so-called ‘transitional method’ which is akin to leaving breadcrumbs for workers to follow. We know how that worked out for Hansel and Gretel.
An example of this is around defence policy. As National Convenor of Labor Against War, I am often asked to explain what ‘our’ alternative to AUKUS is. LAW itself does not have one and is not going to propose one: that would split the anti-AUKUS coalition inside the ALP.
However, the left and the working class does need an alternative defence and foreign policy.
The mainstream reformist ‘left’ seeks national solutions for an ‘independent foreign policy’ or adherence to ‘international law’ and the UN, despite it being a system that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has said is ‘ruptured’ and was ‘always a lie’.
Almost without exception, the radical or ‘insurrectionist’ left proposes pacificist or economistic salves merely to reduce the defence budget. The CPA says cut it by 10%; the Socialist Alliance says cut it by 50%. Victorian Socialists says to ‘cut it’ without giving an amount – though they do call for the SAS to be disbanded, presumably leaving the ADF standing army intact, albeit with a reduced budget.
This is not a program for a future ruling class.
Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries it was completely normal for the workers’ and democratic movements to propose the disbanding of the standing army and demand instead a popular, democratic militia – a citizen army. It was part of the British Labour Party’s first election manifesto.
This approach is central to a genuinely republican democratic method to building working class power – a democratic program for how society should operate. Our minimum platform for taking responsibility for government.
During the last election campaign, I asked a leading member of the Socialist Alliance what it would spend its $28 billion on for its defence budget (as at the time, that is what 50% cut of the defence budget means). She told me it was more a ‘mobilising slogan’ than a program to be implemented.
No wonder most people don’t take the left seriously; it doesn’t take itself seriously.
The ALP Left today under the leadership of Anthony Albanese has capitulated to managing capitalism and maintaining alliance with US imperialism. The internal life of the party has degenerated into factional careerism.
If the Marxist left can get its act together, there is a real opportunity to grow.
Unfortunately, the defeats of the 20th century have the left terrified of its own shadow, beaten into the corners of society; it dares not lay out its actual ideas for the future.
In part that is because the ‘real program’ of the ‘revolutionary left’ is to wait for a spontaneous crisis and then demand ‘all power to the soviets’. Until then, reformist gruel for the masses – Greens on steroids – to trick people into being ever more radical.
Omar Hassan laid this out:
VS policies are far from the most maximal. This reflects our assessment that slogans we raise should connect to the most radical edge of really existing left sentiment, rather than pretending we stand before a more politicised working class of earlier generations. It is a conscious concession to the reality of a greatly weakened workers’ movement and the dramatically lowered expectations produced by years of right-wing attacks and limited defensive struggles.
Unfortunately, what passes as the Marxist left today does not believe it has a Marxism relevant to non-revolutionary periods.
This means we need a Marxist politics that is actually relevant to today. That is what we are proposing the left should organise around. And have the courage to have this discussion openly.
But that requires courage – to openly argue for our ideas, to develop a coherent minimum program for non-revolutionary periods, and to build power and capacity over time.
We cannot wait for spontaneous crises. We must prepare.
That is what we are proposing – a left that organises around program, theory, and open debate in order to act.
Labor Tribune alone cannot achieve this. It must happen across the entire movement.
If we hold that the working class is the only subject capable of winning universal liberation through its own self-liberation – then we cannot hide our ideas away, hoping to gently fool people into gradual change.
It is incumbent on us to be ambitious with our ideas. And confident enough to change them when they are wrong. That requires open political discussion.
Only through an audacity of vision and struggle can we hope to lift our collective sights beyond the day to day and to fight for a future worth living in.
That is the project before us – and we hope you will join us in making it real.
Thank you, comrades.