Socialist Labor Party (Australia)

The Australian Socialist League, the precursor organisation to the political party, was founded in 1887.[2] The League consisted of three major groups, the "Modern Socialists", the "Scientific socialists or Communist-Anarchists", and the "libertarian and individualist anarchists"[2] Labor historian Verity Burgmann describes the Modern Socialists as a unique historical tendency that "espoused a co-operativist strategy: it was a kind of micro-socialism in that it aimed to build socialist society in bits and pieces, by the voluntary establishment of worker-owned enterprises that would eventually form a socialist whole".[2] Between the late 1890s and 1905, the party shifted towards De Leonism.[3][4]

The party was founded by the Australian Socialist League in 1901 to contest the Australian federal election of 1901.[5] The party nominated six candidates (known as the "Socialist Six") for the Senate seats of New South Wales: Andrew Thomson, James Moroney, Harry Holland, James Morrish, John Neil, and Thomas Melling.[6] None of the candidates came close to winning a seat.[7]

The People weekly newspaper was named the official organ of the party from 3 March 1906.

In January 1920, the party merged with the Industrial Socialist Labor Party, which had broken away from the Labor Party in 1919, retaining the name Socialist Labor Party.[8] The amalgamated Socialist Labor party ran in the 1920 New South Wales state election,[9] with one of the members Percy Brookfield winning the seat of Sturt as a Socialist candidate.[10] Brookfield had the balance of power in the assembly following the election but was murdered the following year.[11][12] Several months before his death, in February 1921, Percy and several other members split from the Socialist Labor Party and reformed the independent Industrial Labor Party, citing they were "dissatisfied with the manner in which the affairs of that party have been carried on".[13]

Michael Considine, Labor member for Barrier in the federal House of Representatives from 1917, joined the Socialist Labor Party in 1920 after his expulsion from the ALP, and unsuccessfully contested the seat of Darling for the party in 1922 as an Industrial Labor candidate.

Support for the party rapidly diminished after the ALP adopted the Socialist Objective in 1921, with many members returning to the ALP and others joining the newly founded Australian Communist Party. The party survived into the 1940s, under the leadership of E.E. Judd.[14] The party survived at a significantly smaller size past the 1940s,[15] and maintained writing its newspaper The People until the 1970s.[16]