As of this year, the Greens are the only nationalist party in Australian politics. This is completely counterintuitive – according to the right-wing media, the Greens are “woke”, they are anti-patriotic and hate everything about Australia. The Greens themselves do not realise this either, they consider their own political project to be one of universal moral values and urbanite cosmopolitanism. This unconscious development could be the seed of a new type of politics, one that is far more advanced and with more revolutionary potential than anything presented by the big parties and most of the self-described “socialist” and even “communist” left.
In Australian political discourse, ‘patriotism’ just means whether or not you wave the flag, hate immigrants and want to keep Australia day on the 26th of January – either right-wing culture war chauvinism or just a vague apolitical love of one’s country. Australian political consciousness has been lobotomised with these sorts of stupid and simplistic tropes; ‘woke VS anti-woke’ culture war and a narrow conception of Left VS Right. Real politics is about the objective position on the core contradiction, which in our case is Imperialism: the imperialist monopoly-finance capitalism headquartered in the United States.
Nationalism, the ideology of putting the sovereignty of the nation state as primary, is progressive in semi-colonial countries as it means waging the struggle for independence against imperialism, which subjugates the nation-state to the US empire. As most of the Australian population is petite bourgeois or semi-proletarian, there cannot be a purely proletarian ‘socialist’ revolution in this country. The only way the communist movement can take the leading role is if it leads a coalition of progressive forces opposed to imperialism in a New Democratic revolution, which is at its core nationalist.
“Although such a revolution in a colonial and semi-colonial country is still fundamentally bourgeois-democratic in its social character during its first stage or first step, and although its objective mission is to clear the path for the development of capitalism, it is no longer a revolution of the old type led by the bourgeoisie with the aim of establishing a capitalist society and a state under bourgeois dictatorship. It belongs to the new type of revolution led by the proletariat with the aim, in the first stage, of establishing a new-democratic society and a state under the joint dictatorship of all the revolutionary classes.” – Mao Zedong, on new democracy.
The Greens, despite being a reformist party filled with left-utopians, have taken up an objective position in opposing American imperialism and have tapped into a nascent new-democratic nationalist politics that this country needs. By rejecting military aid to the proxy war in Ukraine and supporting a sovereign defence policy, the Greens under David Shoebridge have committed to an objective opposition towards American imperialism in all forms. The lack of internal democracy within the Greens ironically works to their advantage here, as it is unlikely that their base would have voted for these advanced positions. Green parties, driven by a subjective commitment to moral values over materialist class politics, tend to start out on the left but with their decidedly non-revolutionary base of petite bourgeois urban professionals drift to the right. The German Green party for example is an utterly reactionary social-fascist abomination that is more militaristic and more in support of Imperialism than even the AfD (Alternative for Deustchland) – it is no surprise then that the Australian greens have been condemned by international alliances of Green parties, and are being smeared with the type of ‘red-brown’ or ‘horseshoe theory’ libel that is thrown at anything that is a real threat to the liberal status quo.
If the Greens want to continue on this course and break out of their 13-15% support ceiling, they must change their base and rebrand to a party representing the cause of Australia as a whole. We draw a historical parallel to the Chinese nationalist party, the Guomindang, and their ideology of the three principles of the people (democracy, socialism and nationalism). The CPC won the struggle for China by struggling for the three principles and extending them to their most revolutionary conclusion. Ultimately these changes in the Greens will likely be temporary, and being top-down rather than bottom up rely on the commitment of a clique of politicians rather than a genuine mass revolutionary movement. It is the responsibility of the communist movement then to capitalise on this opportunity and plant the seeds of a New Democratic consciousness, pushing on contradictions within the greens and the contradictions between the fake ‘patriotism’ of the right and the real nature of the right-wing parties, which is an even deeper submission to imperialism.
