With Albanese backing Trump’s war on Iran, it might be tempting to rip up your party card. But the Labor leadership has always been imperialist dating to its foundation in 1891. David Lockwood explains why socialists fight in the ALP.
For Marxists, working in the Labor Party is as relevant as working in the trade unions or working in the broader labour and social movements. All of these arenas are relevant sites for our fight for a workers’ party that is organised around a revolutionary and democratic program.
Marxists, communists and socialists should seek to shape the political nature of the ALP’s left wing – from within and outside – and not just leave it to evolve spontaneously. We fight for the ALP to be an open, democratic united front of the working class where socialists and communists can openly argue for their politics.
The reason for doing this – and the reason that it can be done – is the contradictory nature of the Labor Party. The Labor Party is not just a party to which most workers in Australia give their electoral support. It is organisationally linked to many of the trade unions. Indeed, trade union delegates make up 50% the national and various state conferences. It is therefore under pressure to heed trade unions demands. Even the non-affiliated unions look to Labor in government to deliver reforms.
But when push comes to shove, the Labor Party governs in the interests of capitalism (with the support of the union leaderships) – were it not to do so, it would be a very different kind of organisation. As it stands, it is dominated by the ideology of the capitalist class which it puts into practice with the electoral support of most Australian workers.
Labor politics roughly reflects the current state of spontaneous class consciousness in Australia. Most workers are after a better deal from capitalism and are not yet aimed at transforming society and becoming its ruling class.
As the size, scale and intensity of the class struggle shifts, the expression of working-class politics within the ALP changes. Given the workers’ movement is at present at a nadir, the proletarian pole within the ALP is also at a low point.
However, unless the contradictory class character of the ALP changes, as the working class re-emerges from political slumber this will find expression within the ALP as much as outside it. We see this even today in the fight for Palestinian solidarity and in the campaign to oppose AUKUS.
Class consciousness will not be transformed spontaneously by taking workers taking strike action or attending large demonstrations. It takes the active work of socialists to shape the nature of that political expression; to move it from the spontaneous to the conscious.
Palestine
In the case of Palestine, people are understandably disgusted at the weasel-words and both-sideism of the Albanese government, which has provided diplomatic and political cover for Israel’s genocide. But if the mass movement is to have a political expression beyond demonstrations, that will need to take some form in the Australian Labor Party.
Soon after Israel launched its onslaught on Gaza, elements around the NSW ‘soft left’ faction (which is hostile to the Albanese ‘left’), mobilised in ALP branches through Labor Friends of Palestine. It continues to do so, passing motions calling for sanctions on Israel in branches across the country. ALP members, ‘soft left’ and other MPs in NSW have marched in the Palestine demonstrations from the very beginning. For the March for Humanity across the Sydney Harbour Bridge on 3 August 2025 they were joined by federal MP Ed Husic, former Foreign Minister Bob Carr, and NSW Senator Tony Sheldon from the ALP right. A united front for Palestine needs to organise both within and outside the ALP.
While an essential part of the movement, the expression of Palestine solidarity within the ALP has its faults. Labor Friends of Palestine continues to advocate for the long-lost two-states solution and has a worrying faith in ‘international law’. While nominally independent, international law has never been enforceable and rulings against the US and its allies flagrantly ignored. It was always a fig leaf for imperialism in the final analysis.
Even pro-imperialist politicians such as Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney have blown the whistle on the ‘international rules-based order’, declaring it ruptured by the antics of US President Donald Trump. He went further to say that its operation had always been a lie.
To hanker today for yesterday’s assurances of the ‘international rules-based order’, a mantra of pro-imperialist politicians, is a counter-productive strategy. Ultimately, this is a ‘state-loyalist’ and reformist approach, which must be challenged. Only an internationalist foreign and defence policy for the working class – not ‘the nation’ – can counter this. But to do this effectively, Marxists need to be active within and outside the ALP.
AUKUS
While Palestine has rightly received most attention, given the ongoing daily atrocities and genocide livestreamed before us, the Albanese government’s attachment to the United States through the AUKUS agreement is, in many ways, the more insidious. The US and Israel launching of hostilities against Iran – with a US nuclear submarine with Australian sailors on board destroying an Iranian frigate – has brought the role of AUKUS more to the fore in the eye of the public.
What should have been thrown into the furnace of bad Scott Morrison ideas after the Labor victory at the 2022 federal election, AUKUS was not only kept but moved to the centre of the Albanese foreign policy agenda.
AUKUS is a fundamental expression of Australia as junior imperialist partner of the United States. For that reason, the work of Labor Against War has been vital in keeping alive the struggle against Albanese’s capitulation to the US war agenda inside the ALP itself.
In 2023, Labor Against War forced a debate at the ALP National Conference about AUKUS, which the ALP leadership had tried to avoid. That debate showed the potential shape of an anti-AUKUS coalition in the labour movement, from ALP branches to unions like the Maritime Union of Australia and the Electrical Trades Union. Even federal MP Josh Wilson spoke out against AUKUS. More than a hundred party units – including the Victorian and Queensland state branches – have passed resolutions opposing AUKUS. That fight will continue up to the ALP National Conference this year.
A united front of working class and community organisations should work to oppose AUKUS and the further enmeshing of Australia into war planning by the United States. AUKUS has been revealed as nothing more than US and Australian imperialism seeking to contain the rise of China, Australia’s main trading partner.
The Iran war shows that the Albanese government’s foreign policy is completely subordinate to US interests. Albanese was the first cab off the rank to support Trump’s war on Iran. The war has also revealed Royal Australian Navy personnel are serving on US nuclear submarines that are directly involved in Trump’s war.
Australia is completely intertwined with America’s global war-fighting plans.
What this provides is raw material to build anti-imperialist sentiment and organisation across the labour movement. The fight against Australian support for Israel and against the Australian military alliance with the United States is connected.
Stay and fight
Communist work in the Labor Party is not easy. There are, of course, administrative blockages, but not as many as you might imagine. More pressing is that, given the record of this Labor government – from the basic timidity and lack of vision through to the obscene acquiescence to the US in AUKUS and Palestine – there is a continual temptation to tear up one’s party card and abandon the party in protest.
But then what? A choice between lone activism, single-issue campaigning or joining one of the socialist groups to the left of the ALP. In our view, the latter are largely untethered, lacking any real connection with the organised working class. They are largely focused on student recruitment, fixated on increasing their own numbers and still stuck fighting the battles of the 20th century. Their attitudes to Labor range from indifference to studied sectarianism.
There are those who advocate joining the Green Party. While the policies of the Green Party are more leftwing than the ALP on a range of issues (AUKUS, Palestine, Medicare), it is not a socialist party. It is programmatically a middle-class party aimed at promoting the illusion that capitalism can become ‘nice’. Even on paper it does not call for any sort of post-capitalist society, let alone socialism.
There is an apocryphal and probably not true story that when William ‘Billy’ Lane of Eureka Stockade fame was shipping off to Paraguay to found ‘New Australia’ as a utopian socialist colony in 1892, Henry Lawson went to the docks to wave him off.
Billy Lane, the story goes, asked Lawson if he was coming with him. “Nah, I think I’ll stay and fight,” he replied.
It makes no sense to leave the ALP as individuals – or even as small groups – over this or that political crime. The ALP has been a pro-capitalist and pro-imperialist party since its founding.
Whether it was support for World War I, Chifley sending troops in to break the 1949 miners’ strike, Hawke using RAAF to break the 1989 pilots’ strike, Hawke reneging on introducing a national land rights bill or reversing policy on uranium mining. The list is endless. But this is the nature of Laborism – and it needs to be combatted within the ALP as well as outside it.
We encourage comrades to work where they are – whether in the ALP or in one of the socialist groups – not split off to form new groupings.
Of course, the ALP is not the only site of struggle for a mass workers’ party dedicated to the revolutionary and democratic transformation of capitalism. We are happy to work with comrades ploughing other furrows. But ultimately, we need to positively overcome the divisions between the Marxist left to create a single organisation that can coordinate our work across the entire labour movement: in the unions, in the ALP and outside the ALP.
Our approach to the ALP
Firstly, what we do not advocate. At Labor Tribune, we are not working to simply split the Labor Party and create a new, better version of it – which, without a radically different set of politics and trade union leaders would suffer all the problems of the old one. Nor are we setting out on a long march through the branches and committees, winning them over one by one. Given the state of many of the branches, that would be a Pyrrhic victory indeed. Though we are not opposed to winning internal elections where we can.
Nor will we primarily dedicate ourselves to the grinding process of democratic reform in the Party structures – a process which the cemented factional carve-up makes close to impossible in current circumstances. But, of course, we fight to democratise the ALP, point out its current anti-democratic nature and we seek to undermine and expose anti-democratic forces in the party.
We are, of course, in favour of a more leftwing party and trade union leadership, as well as democratically functioning branches and wholesale democratic rectification. But that is not the sole focus of our work. The point for us is that, at each of these levels, there is political work to be done. A political critique of Laborism can be advanced. The case for a different type of political party can be made.
In branches, committees, state and national conferences, debate and argument are possible around Labor policies if there are Marxists there to put the case. Marxist politics can be put forward and can make contact with the many party members and trade unionists alike who consider themselves to be socialists. Our supporters in the party, in Labor Against War and Labor Friends of Palestine are engaged in this work –including supporting socialist candidates to the ALP National Conference in July.
As Marxists, we know that only the eclipsing of the constitutional order through a working-class-led democratic revolution for socialism in concert with workers across the world can remove Australia from the imperialist world order. It is not a question of changing the policy of the government of the day.
That fight needs us to challenge Laborism within the ALP. Historically – from its founding with the White Australia policy onwards – the labour movement in Australia has been awash with reactionary and ruling-class ideas. This is the very nature of Laborism, one of the main strategic barriers blocking the development of a mass democratic and revolutionary workers’ movement.
Laborism – and reformism in general – must be combatted throughout the labour movement. To abstain from organisational engagement with the ALP is either an empty moralistic stance or sectarian folly and a sure way to keep Marxist ideas on the fringes of the workers’ movement and society as a whole.