En Passant

The true crisis in Labor is not that leadership strife is preventing it from effectively promoting and implementing its policies. It is that these policies run directly counter to the interests of the party’s historic base: the working class, the poor, the dispossessed. Labor is proving is that it is no alternative to the ruling elite, but its willing instrument. This has always been the case. Labor MPs, like all other parliamentarians, serve power, and serve it adamantly. It is just that no one remains in the party to argue against this or to offer a vision of an alternative. This is why Labor’s membership has crumbled. This is why its electoral support is dissipating toward record lows. This is why voters find it harder and harder to distinguish between Labor and Liberal. This is the true crisis for Labor, a crisis that no simple leadership spill will solve.

The choice for Labor is the Hugo Chavez route or oblivion. Goodbye Labor.

I have a suggestion for Labor. Abandon neoliberalism. Adopt a radical program like that which Chavez put forward. Tax the rich to improve the lives of the 2.2 million Australians in poverty and fix up the 17% gender gap. Use this money to negotiate a treaty with Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders.

That of course would just be the opening salvos of a radical program to fundamentally challenge the rule of capital.  It would involve nationalising the banks, mining companies and the other big battalions of capital and massively increase spending on public health, education, transport and social payments and develop a real program to address climate change.

That of course would just be the opening salvos of a radical program to fundamentally challenge the rule of capital.  It would involve nationalising the banks, mining companies, and other big battalions of capital and massively increase spending on public health, education, transport and social payments and develop a real program to address climate change.

Is there an alternative to the failure that is Labor? The need now for a revolutionary socialist workers’ party is great. But we cannot hurry history. Workers will have to learn the lessons of struggle and history, with input from the revolutionary left where we can to patiently explain the way forward and our view of the world.

Labor might be gone but the struggle continues.

It is important to fight every manifestation of Labor’s neoliberalism now, its attacks on workers, its racism, sexism and homophobia, its kowtowing to religious bigotry.

But that will not be enough because any gains, even if won through mass action, itself problematic in today’s environment of class peace, will be under attack as the needs of capital for more and more profit reinforce the attacks on women, Aborigines and the discrimination against gays and lesbians and the acquiescence to religious bigotry of all parties in government, Labor or Liberal.

A revolutionary workers party, big enough to offer an alternative vision of real democracy and production to satisfy human need, is needed now. That is what Socialist Alternative and its unity project is about.

Yours truly in today’s The Age on Jenny Macklin, the dole and driving single Mums into more poverty. I argue we need to fight industrially against the neoliberal Labor Party to end this sort of systemic misogyny.   Here are a few snippets:  ‘The rich are getting richer and we are not bothering to fight [...]

The alternative to a neoliberal ALP is not a return to a Whitlamite ‘nirvana’. First, it wasn’t a nirvana. Workers were still exploited, making all the wealth the bosses expropriated.

Second there can be no return to the halcyon days of the late 60s and early 70s because the system has aged, profit rates now are much lower than then and the long recession can only be overcome by massive economic crisis or revolution.

The first alternative is a return to the militancy of the late 60s and early 70s. Then the task is to build a fighting alternative, a revolutionary socialist organisation committed to a society based on democracy and satisfying human need.

Over 2.2 million Australians are living below the poverty line. That is Labor’s legacy.

Capitalism is a system built on the blood of its soldiers, indigenous people, refugees and workers. Only overthrowing this system of death can bring peace and safety to the world.

Abbott’s instability, his thought bubble approach to policy, his climate denialist base within the extreme right of the Liberal Party and the looming economic crisis in Australia all make for a possible tumultuous period of rule for the current leader of the Opposition and his by and large unremarkable front bench if they win, as they will, the next election.

The key will be class struggle. How much longer can Australian workers not fight?