Jim McIlroy continues a debate
In the ongoing debate in the pages of Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly recently over the question of socialists, the ALP and the working class, it is important to distinguish two separate (but related) questions.
First is the nature of the ALP. What kind of party is it? Is it fundamentally a workers' party, or fundamentally a capitalist party? Whose interests does it serve in the final instance? Is it part of the solution or part of the problem?
Second, what tactical attitude should socialists take toward work within the ALP and toward rank-and-file party members, and workers who support the ALP?
In order to answer the second question, it is essential to get the first crystal clear.
Roger Clarke (GLW #168) accuses me in a previous article of blurring "the vital distinction between capitalists and non-socialist workers" by describing the Labor Party as a capitalist party.
Not at all. In the accurate, but apparently controversial, formulation of Lenin in 1913, the ALP is a "liberal capitalist" party.
That is, it represents the interests of the Australian capitalist class, with the extra advantage for our corporate masters that it exercises an ironclad control over the leadership of the trade union movement and ruthlessly utilises that control to stifle and, if necessary, crush militant struggles.
In so far as the ALP maintains a "connection" with the workers, that influence serves to act against the interests of the working class.
The Labor Party, as the recent major party of capitalist federal government, is in fact the main party of Australian capitalism right now.
This is a reality which will not go away, however much we may wish it would. In fact, the ALP under Hawke and Keating is a lot more "conservative" and a lot less "liberal" than was in Lenin's day!
Material basis
To delve somewhat deeper into Lenin's analysis of international social democracy — the parties of the corrupt Second International which led their respective working classes into the bloodbath of World War I — we need to examine the material basis for the pro-capitalist nature of these parties.
A resolution adopted by the founding congress of the Communist International in 1919 explained:
"The general course of economic development had given the bourgeoisie in the wealthiest countries the opportunity to tempt and buy off the upper layers of the working class — the labour aristocracy — with crumbs from its enormous profits. The petty-bourgeois 'camp-followers' of socialism swelled the ranks of the official social-democratic parties and gradually altered their politics in a bourgeois direction.
"From the leaders of the peaceable labour movement, the heads of the trade unions, the secretaries, editors and officials of social democracy there developed a caste — a labour bureaucracy with its own selfish interests, essentially hostile to socialism."
This analysis fits the Australian Labor Party to a T.
The ALP represents not the most oppressed and exploited Â鶹´«Ã½ of Australian working people — migrants, Aborigines, women, youth — nor even the majority of ordinary workers, but the most privileged layers of that class.
In particular, the Labor Party represents the trade union bureaucrats who gain mutual advantage and rewarding career paths from the merging of union and ALP officialdom.
What Roger Clarke describes as my "top down" view of the ALP is no more than a depiction of reality.
Break-out
The political character and structure of the ALP preclude genuine working-class control. Because the domination of pro-capitalist leadership is so complete, the essential precondition to a shattering of the present right-wing stranglehold on the ALP and the ACTU is a militant break-out by rank-and-file unionists, independent of control by ALP union officials.
This does not mean progressive ALP union leaders and militants cannot be involved, just that prospects for success are infinitely greater if any new militant workers' movement can maintain its organisational independence from the Labor Party.
To illustrate this in a negative way: can anyone imagine that workers would have meekly accepted the disaster which has befallen them under the ALP-ACTU Accord over the past 12 years without the overwhelming political hegemony of ALP union officials?
That is why the Democratic Socialist Party favours union disaffiliation from the ALP. Only a truly independent union movement can rebuild from the parlous state a dozen years of the Accord has reduced it to.
A large-scale break-out from ALP control would be a significant opening toward a genuine struggle around wages, jobs and conditions. In the real world of today, union affiliation does not give rank-and-file workers any say at all over the policies and actions of the ALP, let alone a Labor government in power.
On the contrary, the merging of union and ALP leaderships means that unions lose any independence of action. They become a mechanism for policing the workers' movement in the interests of the re-election of the Labor Party.
The actual road to a revival of working-class struggle today lies not through further entrenching the stranglehold of the pro-capitalist ALP union leaders, but in militant, independent action to weaken and break that control.
In the course of that struggle, which will necessarily throw up new leaderships from the shop floor, ALP members and supporters may well be involved.
That involvement is fine, but it would be a death knell to a new militant workers' movement to have it beholden to the present Labor Party leadership, whether formally left or right.
Roger Clarke's implied analogy between the ALP — the current main governing party of an imperialist country, which ruthlessly protects the interests of Australian multinational capital — and the Brazilian Workers Party (PT), the mass party of the working people and oppressed of a Third World country, is absurd.
Yes, in both Brazil and Australia socialists need to work toward the establishment of a mass-based, revolutionary party, which is capable of leading the struggles of the workers and oppressed people to a socialist transformation of society.
But, to take up the second issue raised at the beginning of this contribution, the tactics required to advance this goal at any particular time must be very flexible. In Australia right now, and for the foreseeable future, the road to building the socialist movement primarily through the ALP is effectively blocked.
Working inside the ALP may well be a subsidiary tactic as the class struggle develops and this engenders political differentiation inside the Labor Party.
But at this stage of relative quiescence in the class struggle — largely due to the ALP's domination of the workers' movement and its cooption of progressive sectors — building the socialist movement centres on campaigning to construct independent organisations outside the Labor Party.
This is the tactic being pursued by the Democratic Socialist Party and the socialist youth organisation Resistance.
It is true that because of the delay in the establishment of a broad-based progressive alternative to the two-party system in our country, some people are looking again at the possibilities for left-wing organisation within the ALP.
This is a path to disillusionment and failure for those who are genuinely seeking to advance the progressive cause, and to cooption and corruption for those who are not. The Australian Labor Party must, in the long term, be removed as an obstacle in the path to socialism.
At this early stage in the struggle, the main task is to prepare the ground: to build independent movements which challenge the status quo, and to construct a socialist organisation which can carry the ideological fight for socialism right up to the capitalists and their parties, whether Liberal or Labor.
[Jim McIlroy is the secretary of the Brisbane branch of the Democratic Socialist Party.]