Jim McIlroy continues a debate
Roger Clarke (GLW #162) correctly describes isolation from the working class as the key problem facing the socialist movement today. In his article entitled "Isolation from the workers: the real prison for the left", Roger replies to my contribution, "The ALP: A prison for the left", (GLW #160) in which I argued that a socialist strategy based on rebuilding the left of the Labor Party is a dead end at present.
"The only political party in Australia with any reasonable claim to be connected to the working class is the ALP", Roger states. Agreed. But this is the central problem of progressive politics in this country.
The domination of the ALP over the workers' movement is the main reason socialism is a minority force in Australia. It is the major reason why the capitalist offensive against working people has made big gains in the past decade.
The ALP has crushed unions, such as the BLF and the pilots, with the active assistance of the official trade union leadership.
It has used the ALP-ACTU Accord to demobilise the unions while cutting real wages and conditions, raising unemployment to record levels and massively shifting wealth from the poor to the rich.
It has betrayed on the environment, on women's rights, on Aboriginal rights, on privatisation and on student fees.
The federal Labor government is an ally of the brutal military junta in Jakarta, and the world's major apologist for Indonesia's genocide in East Timor.
Most recently, we have the revolting spectacle of Hawke and Keating arguing over who was the biggest warmonger in the Gulf War.
The ALP has been the main political instrument of capitalist restructuring over the past decade, much more so than the Liberals.
The Labor Party is an enemy agent in the midst of the working class.
'For and against'
Yet Roger argues, "The relationship between socialists and the ALP should be both for and against. For the working class supporters who want the ALP rather than the Liberals to form the government; against the pro-capitalist nature of ALP government."
Of course we should be "for" the working class supporters of the ALP — just as we should be "for" the interests of workers who voted in huge numbers against the disastrous ALP state governments in Victoria, WA and SA because of the anti-worker policies of those governments.
But in what sense can we speak of socialists being "for" the ALP? We must be resolutely against the ALP politically. Any valid strategy for socialism involves a struggle to break the working class away from the deadly tentacles of the Labor Party.
To get to square one on this, we must be clear on the true nature of the ALP: it is not partly a workers party and partly a capitalist party. It is a "liberal capitalist" party (to quote Lenin), which has the special feature of controlling the workers' movement through its stranglehold on the leadership of the unions.
Its "connection" with the working class is its base in the trade union bureaucracy, not any organic link to rank-and-file workers. If that ever existed to any extent, it has been broken in recent years.
When socialists call for a vote for Labor against the Liberals, it is mainly on the basis that, as a slightly milder form of capitalist rule, the ALP is usually a lesser evil.
It is also necessary to allow experience of Labor in office to expose the reactionary character of the ALP to working people.
Objective basis
The question of how to break the isolation of socialists from the majority of the working class is a much broader issue. The real problem is that there is a strong objective basis for this relative isolation.
The collapse of the Soviet bloc and the gains of the international anti-socialist offensive mounted by capitalist ideologues, including the leaders of social democratic parties, have placed a major challenge in the path of socialists.
How to overcome this challenge to socialism is the $64 question.
It certainly won't be done by going underground in the ALP.
Joining the Labor Party and working to "rebuild" the ALP left, in the current situation in the party and society, would not reduce the isolation of socialists from the workers. It would put the open struggle for socialism and social change even more out of the public arena, and hence separated from the activity and consciousness of working people.
The urgent first priority must be to struggle to raise the profile of socialism in the community, using whatever limited means are available, and to build those movements which directly challenge the capitalist status quo and mobilise working people in their own interests.
This means building openly socialist organisations like the Democratic Socialist Party and Resistance, which campaign for the active involvement of people around their own struggles — not parliamentarist fix-it solutions from on high.
It means supporting in every way a progressive paper like Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, which today plays a unique role in publicising and building people's movements. (It is ironic that this debate on socialism and the ALP can occur only in GLW, since there is no public Labor left publication in which to stage it.)
Far from being a short-cut to breaking the isolation of the socialist movement, going into the ALP is a short cut to burying socialism in a maze of internal factional struggles.
This view is not based on grand theory, but on observation of the real state of the Labor left and its actual role right now.
What has the real ALP left — not some future, fanciful one — achieved in the past 15 years or so? Has any section of it led any mass campaign of any kind in the past period?
How would any ordinary worker, not tuned in to the internal machinations of ALP and union leadership feuds, know that the Labor left exists?
Where was it during the Gulf War, the East Timor and Bougainville wars, the federal government's use of penal powers to smash the BLF and the pilots' union, and most of the big campaigns around saving the forests and other environmental issues?
Where the ALP left does operate, such as in the student movement around the National Union of Students and the anti-fees campaign, its role is to derail mass mobilisation into lobbying and other actions which won't challenge the ALP federal government. In the women's movement, its role is to head off campaigns for repeal of abortion laws, for example, to avoid embarrassing ALP governments.
Real options
Roger Clarke's scenario of a left split in the ALP linking up with the Greens, the Democrats and the Indigenous Peoples Party would be nice, but is not at all likely for the foreseeable future.
The real options faced by socialists are whether to go back into the ALP, as a desperate, last-ditch stand proposed by George Georges (GLW #159) to "rebuild" the socialist left, or to continue with the hard, but essential, struggle to construct a progressive third force in Australian politics.
This option in the immediate term means joining and building organisations like the Democratic Socialist Party and Resistance, which are trying to link up socialist and green forces into a genuine political alternative to Labor.
What Roger Clarke is beginning to dispute is the fundamental strategy of building an independent revolutionary socialist party, separate from the Labor left. Without such an independent socialist party, the socialist project will wither and die.
With the human resources available to the left being so limited at present, precious time and energy are much better spent building the socialist project through Resistance and the DSP than being drawn into the electoralist careerism of the ALP.
For those who do join Labor, it is essential to unite with them in common campaigns on progressive issues so that the reality of the ALP is revealed in the course of struggle.
In this way, the necessity of the socialist alternative will become apparent to wider and wider Â鶹´«Ã½ of youth and working people, and socialism will be placed back on the broader political scene in this country.