The Return of Socialist Counterpublics in a ‘Digital Age’: The Victorian Socialists’ Strategy for Organising a Counterpublic

Recent years have seen the return of nominally socialist counterpublics1 across the electoral landscape of the Global North. This poses new questions about the formation of counterpublics in contemporary conditions. This thesis examines one localised case of an electorally impactful socialist counterpublic: the Victorian Socialists—an electoral coalition in the Australian state of Victoria— from its formation in 2018, to 2020. The thesis centrally asks what this socialist counterpublic can tell us about political communication and organisation in the ‘digital age.’ The thesis uses an ethnographic method to elucidate the practices and experiences of organisation and communication. This approach combines participant observation, interviews, and multimedia analysis. A central contention of the thesis is that counterpublics literature must engage more with questions of organisational form that transcend the digital. In addressing the thesis sub-question of what kind of organisation the Victorian Socialists are, the thesis argues that the Victorian Socialists ( also known as VicSocialists) are a socialist ‘macro-sect’. This is a term drawn from earlier analysis of a parallel socialist group, the Democratic Socialists of America or DSA (Regrettable Century 2018). Although these groups are distinct in certain respects, both are broader than micro-sects but narrower than mass parties, both intervene in elections to form a broader socialist counterpublic than micro-sects have been able to develop, and members of both tend to be sceptical of the limitations of digital media (Barnes 2020), although it is deeply embedded in their practices. This organisational form contrasts with the “digital parties”, which can also be termed platform parties—as unlike the socialist macro-sects they develop their own digital platforms as a special space for communication (Gerbaudo 2018). The VicSocialists tend to use digital media more for promotion than participation. Their use of digital communication is complementary with other forms of communication and organisation—with doorknocking particularly elevated by members as the most important. The thesis places counterpublics in a context of “contentious publicness” (Kavada & Poell 2020), a communicative infrastructure that rewards contention. Intersectional counterpublics tend to engage in pluralised, horizontal public contention, that challenges the limitations of existing counterpublics (Lamont Hill 2016, Jackson & Banaszcyk 2016, Kuo 2018). In this case that contention included challenges around the VicSocialists’ handling of abuse allegations, and perceived hijacking of Indigenous rallies. VicSocialist members tended to be critical of this horizontal contention, advocating formalised and centralised horizontal contention with capital. Some contend that the basis for classical working-class socialist counterpublics no longer exists (Frankel 2020). The thesis therefore examines the VicSocialists’ interpellation of a working-class socialist counterpublic, through demands that include and exclude on a class basis. The case study finds that interpellating such a counterpublic is possible in present conditions, demonstrated by both local electoral wins and activist campaign wins, although this is modest in scale and requires significant organisational commitment. Finally, the thesis examines how the VicSocialists adapted to COVID-era acceleration of existing trends towards digitised communication. The thesis draws on literature from the Communication as Constitutive of Organisation (CCO) school. In particular, the case study draws on Arnaud & Faure’s (2016) study of the technological competencies required to adapt to a shifting communicative infrastructure, that apparently transcends human agency,. I find that while the VicSocialists’ adaptation to COVID-era shifts was delayed, the organisation proved resilient. This period also saw the membership challenging the organisational form of the VicSocialists, resolved in part through the formation of a new heterogeneous caucus that developed “authoritative texts” (Kuhn 2008, Koschmann 2012b) serving as a basis for organisational identification. The group also found a common orientation or “co-orientation” (Taylor 2009) toward communication with members, with authoritative texts and co-orientation serving as anchors in a context of communicative chaos.