Who are the Victorian Socialists? The Marxists who might win a seat in Victoria
If you live in the inner northern suburbs of Melbourne then I don’t need to tell you that a new party calling itself the “Victorian Socialists” is running in the upcoming Victorian State election. On some streets you can no longer find a wall without a poster (or twelve) bearing the sallow face of Councillor Stephen Jolly grimacing back at you like a week dead corpse unburied and photographed.
Recently it was announced that VS has received a very favourable preference deal from the ALP in their main target area, the Northern Metro upper house electorate. The new party has also received funds and endorsements from prominent Unions including the ETU, VAHPA, UFU, CFMMEU (MUA division), AMIEU and NUW. Some of the financial support has been significant; the ETU alone has contributed over $50,000.
Surprisingly they’ve also gotten some celebrity endorsements including former ABC employee Tom Ballard, former ABC employee Corinne Grant and (less surprisingly) Helen Razer, Noam Chomsky and Tariq Ali.
With all this support and the favourable preferences flowing in their direction it’s very possible that Stephen Jolly (who is first on their ticket for the Northern Metro area) might actually win a seat.
Which would be quite remarkable really as this would be the first time an avowed Communist party has held a state parliamentary seat since Fred Paterson in Queensland in the 1940s.
Yes you read that right. The Victorian “Socialists” are 100% full on Communists. The whole bloody revolution, dictatorship of the proletariat, open up the gulags and initiate the five year plan old style red flag waving Communists.
VS was formed as an electoral alliance between the Trotskyist Socialist Alliance, the Trotskyist Socialist Alternative and Councillor Jolly himself who has been a Trotskyist activist since well before he moved to Australia from the UK in the early 90s.
All three groups profess variations on the Marxist idea that society should be divided along class lines, that the classes should then be antagonised to the point of civil war and that in the aftermath of the subsequent revolution the Marxist activists or “cadre” can then abolish the police, the army, the courts, free speech, freedom of religion, private property, the concept of borders and the very idea of Australia as a nation and replace all these things with a totalitarian regime run by themselves.
Seriously.
They’re not even pretending to hide it. You can read all about it on their websites and in the statements of principles for their organisations. They openly denounce the ALP and the Greens as right-wing cowards and “reformist” class-traitors for not being in favour of instigating the violent revolution they believe is needed to bring on utopia.
Among the candidates on the ballot for VS at this election are twelve prominent activists from Socialist Alliance, six activists from Socialist Alternative and Jolly himself (formerly of Militant UK, then founder of Militant Australia, which then became the Socialist Party, which then after a sex scandal became “The Socialists”). The remainder are made up of paper candidates and a few hacks from those unions mentioned above who’ve contributed funds or other support.
The extreme nature of these groups and personalities isn’t hidden or some profound intelligence coup, it’s stated on the freaking Vic Socialists Wikipedia page.
Stephen Jolly even recently gained the endorsement of the Australian branch of the Lebanese Communist Party, a group funded for most of its existence by the Soviet Union and who during the Lebanese Civil War maintained both a fanatical Stalinist political line and a well-armed militia of almost 5,000 fighters.
It’s a credit to Jolly that as a Trotskyist he managed to get the support of a long time Stalinist group (relations between activists of the two Marxist factions are traditionally… pointed) but it’s not really all that comforting to the rest of us that someone on the cusp of holding significant political power feels entirely comfortable not only making the Marxist closed fist salute with a Stalinist in front of a hammer and sickle flag the month before the election but also publishing a photo of him doing so on his parties’ Facebook page.
But Stephen had nothing to fear. An entire generation has grown up being taught nothing about Marxism, the ideology that murdered a hundred million people in the twentieth century, enslaved entire nations, turned brother against brother and held the world on the cusp of nuclear annihilation for decades.
Jolly even boasted to the press about how the new generation has no prejudice against his murderous totalitarian beliefs, saying that the youth’s public perception of Socialism isn’t all about “Siberia and Stalin” anymore (even as he takes the endorsement of a Stalinist party).
How did Marxism manage to mainstream itself again after all the failures, all the deaths, all the economic catastrophes, the dictatorships, the terrorism and totalitarianism? After all there are literally still large piles of skulls in some of the places where Marxists last tried to create their “better world”.
So how did this happen?
Well nobody on the right bothered to fight it. Even today supposedly right wing journalists and media outlets never bother to name the extremist backgrounds of the spokespeople for these groups, calling them “anti-racists” or “anti-fascists” or “pro-refugee” or even simply “protesters” without even bothering to do even a simple Google search.
Activists on the right have been even worse, fighting about superfluous inanities like Israel (pro or con), and obsessing over conspiracy theories while an open conspiracy was gaining strength and indoctrinating new generations in our schools, universities, unions and government institutions right in front of our damn faces.
Perhaps it’s a good thing if Jolly wins. Perhaps it’s a good thing if some of the most violent political extremists in Australia get access to even more power and resources. Because at this point perhaps nothing else will wake us up from the self-imposed sleep the wider Australian right has been immersed in since the end of the Cold War.
Marxism isn’t dead, it’s alive and kicking. Its votaries don’t care about the piles of corpses their ideology has amassed along the way. That wasn’t real Communism you see, and they just have to keep trying again and again until they get it right.
But don’t worry; I’m sure they’ve worked out the kinks this time around.
And after all, you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs can you?
