The ALP and the unions
Do we need Steve Loosley with gritted teeth?
Comment by Bob Lewis
Phil Cleary's win in the Wills by-election has led to renewed discussion about the ALP, its relationship to the working class, and the attitude socialists should adopt towards Labor. This is not surprising, for these are among the oldest topics of debate in the labour movement, and particularly on the left.
Since the formation of the ALP in the 1890s, the movement has divided into three broad camps on this question: those who supported Labor and joined it, those who supported it but didn't join and those who didn't support it at all. Of course, there are many shades of opinion within those camps.
Today, some very strange co-dwellers have pitched their tents in the two pro-ALP camps. ALP president Steve Loosley is there, of course. "The Wills result demonstrates that it is vital the labour movement speaks with a single voice in support of Labor candidates", he said after the by-election. Loosley wants to insist not only that Labor is a working-class party, but that it is the working-class party. No surprises there: Labor has been a political prison for organised labour for more than 100 years, and Loosley is one of the latter day turnkeys. What else could he say?
But what's this? Over on the far left of the support-but-don't-join camp, could that be the International Socialist Organisation, the latest exponents of the hard-talking, bash-on-the-head school of radical-liberal politics (though not nearly as effective at it as the early '70s Maoists)?
'Working class'
Yes, it is. Here's Anne Lawson in a letter to the April 15 Green Left Weekly: "For the International Socialist Organisation the only electoral option in the Wills by-election is to vote for the Labor Party. The ALP has strong, organic links with the unions through the union bureaucracy. It is because of this link that workers have historically considered it to be their party, and have seen voting for it as the beginnings of class consciousness. So, gritting our teeth and voting for the ALP is the only electoral way we have to show we are working class and proud of it."
Leave out the gritted teeth and the tough description of trade union officialdom, and it could be Steve Loosley talking. The NSW mates pride themselves on their working-class origins, though that's the limit of their progress towards working-class political consciousness.
Unfortunately for the ISO (and Steve Loosley), most of the working class in Wills had the good sense to vote for Phil Cleary, the most left-wing of the three candidates with a chance of winning. That was a very good result for the working class, both in Wills and around the country. It dealt a blow to the two-party system and to economic rationalist politics. Some workers stuck with the ALP (were they really the most class conscious?), and probably 15-20% voted for the f the most working-class electorates in the country, it was hardly a resounding confirmation of the theory that workers regard Labor as their party, historically or any other way.
Part of the problem for the ISO and others on the left is the fact that the discussion of the ALP and similar parties around the world has gone on so long, producing a tendency to lump rather different political formations into categories and leave them there regardless of historical developments. Thus, the ALP is classed as part of the same species as the British Labour Party, the Workers' Party of Brazil, the social engineers of the Singapore government, the Social Democratic Party of Germany etc.
Different history
Leaving aside the usefulness of a political category as broad as this, historically it is at least questionable that the ALP should be in this category at all. It was never, even formally, a Marxist party and so didn't share the evolution of the European Social Democratic parties from Marxist to reformist politics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Moreover, it has rarely if ever been so deeply rooted in working-class communities as the British Labour Party, or even perhaps the New Zealand Labour Party.
In 1913, Lenin made some sharp observations about the ALP and its leaders: "The Australian Labor Party does not even call itself a socialist party. Actually it is a liberal-bourgeois party, while the so-called Liberals in Australia are really conservatives ... The leaders of the Australian Labor Party are trade union officials, everywhere the most moderate and capital-serving element, and in Australia altogether peaceable, purely liberal ... In Australia the Labor Party has done what in other countries was done by the Liberals." Of course, Lenin could have been wrong, but a long history of right-wing Labor governments suggests that he got the ALP's number way back then.
Perhaps things have changed since that time? Well, it's undeniable a lot of things have changed, but has the ALP become more working class? Today, given the parallels between Hawke's and Thatcher's policies through the '80s, and now the parallels between Keating's and Major's, it wouldn't be outrageous to say that Labor does in Australia what the conservatives do elsewhere! Everyone knows today's liberals (the Democrats) are well to the left of Labor on most questions.
While most unions are affiliated to the Labor Party, it's worth asking whether this makes it a trade union party, or merely a very effective trap for the union movement. In 1923, left-wing Labor activist and historian Vere Gordon Childe pointed out that the party's initial support included some trade unions, but also "democrats", Australian nationalists (including militant White Australia supporters), small farmers, prospectors, mining proprietors, small shopkeepers, the Catholic Church "and perhaps certain business interests — notably the liquor trade". What's more, some of the trade union support was of dubious class consciousness, resting on common views with parts of the capitalist class on questions such as federation and a common national market, protection of Australian industry, White Australia and other matters. It's true there was a militant industrial wing, and in the early years it clashed sharply with the other elements, losing out most of the time. In my opinion, the ALP never realised its potential to become a trade union party, let alone a working-class one.
Today
But leave history aside for a moment. Even if Labor was at one time a working-class party, what is it today, after huge numbers of its ranks have walked out in disgust at right-wing policies, and even its traditional electoral base is drastically eroded and under continuing attack from independents, Democrats, greens and even the Liberals?
Isn't it mainly a vehicle for a parade of mostly middle-class parliamentary aspirants, most of whom would be appalled at any notion that the party might be working class, let alone socialist? Is this political formation so different from the US Democratic Party, which also draws much of its support from organised labour, but which most of the left around the world agrees is definitely not a working-class party? The long list of mates who've been off to study at the CIA-influenced Harvard school probably wouldn't think so.
Whatever we make of the ALP's dubious claims to have been a working-class party at some time in the past, it's very difficult to make a case that it is one today. There's little doubt the trade unions can do more for their members outside the walls of the Labor prison, and those unions that supported Phil Cleary's campaign are to be congratulated. The Wills result indicates once more that the future for progressive and socialist politics lies outside the ALP. Steve Loosley, with or without gritted teeth, has nothing to contribute.
[Bob Lewis was the Democratic Socialist Party candidate in the Wills by-election.]