A socialist manifesto for Labor

The Left in Australia and the world faces a number of serious challenges.

I submit that the Left end of the political spectrum in Australia is increasingly without purpose and without strategic direction.

I submit that the Left of Australian politics faces a most peculiar challenge. That being to develop an ideological narrative that brings together its inchoate campaigns and disparate activists under the one banner.

The challenge is to develop an ideological banner that provides cohesion and strategic direction.

I submit that banner should be a standard raised high and raised in the deepest red.

I submit that banner should be socialism.

I submit that socialists should make the Australian Labor Party, with its organic links to the Australian working class, their natural home.

Although the Australian Labor Party is not a socialist party, and arguably never has been a socialist party, it nonetheless from its founding to today has been a party with socialists firmly ensconced within her bosom.

But why do I say we should be for socialism?

Our lives over the past three decades have been largely shaped by neoliberal structural reforms. Not only within Australia but throughout the world it has been a central tendency of political, social and economic life.

There are many reasons why this tendency should be resisted; because it promotes a crass conception of self; because it tears at the social and cultural fabric that makes life worth living; because it widens the divide between the obscenely wealthy and the rest; because it offers no solutions for the multiple, perhaps existential, crises facing humanity; because it doesn't even offer a sound economic doctrine as shown by financial volatility and lower trend rates of economic growth relative to the post war Keynesian era.

The Left has got neoliberalism wrong; terribly wrong. So wrong that leftists the world over observe in awe as neoliberal austerity marches onward despite the global economic crisis.

The standard view of neoliberalism among the Left is that it is a fervently held ideology whose conceptions have dominated policy making given the sway that neoliberal ideas have had over intellectuals, opinion makers, and political leaders.

This is false. Neoliberalism represents an intrinsically capitalist response to the economic crises and class struggles of the 1970s. The ideology itself merely represents a set of ideas to legitimise the restructuring of domestic and international society at the behest of corporate power.

The reason why the opposite view, that it is ideas not corporate power which is sovereign, has attracted the adherence of the Left is precisely because the post-materialist Left eschews socialism; instead the emphasis is on philosophical doctrines that accord primacy to ideas rather than material processes, and these post materialist philosophies were embraced as the Left had bid farewell to the working class.

The first thing that a socialist may offer is a socialist critique of contemporary affairs. Only a socialist critique correctly targets the true nature of the neoliberal processes that have shaped our period of history.

What, exactly, is socialism? The goal of socialism is the emancipation of the working class. Any idea, any systematic doctrine, any small scale social experiment, any society, can only be adjudged socialist if it promotes working class emancipation.

The traditional means to achieve this has been social ownership of the means of production, but this is a means not an end. The end objective is the emancipation of the working class, and a society whose means of production does not stratify groups into definite controlling and subordinate classes is just the preferred method of bringing this about.

Socialism, of course, is a dirty word given the authoritarian nature of the putatively socialist societies such as the Soviet Union. The damning exposes of the Soviet experience are legion; rare is the expose which shows us that the Soviet Union, where a state owned economy was managed by an elitist ruling class that subordinated urban and rural workers to its control, hardly represented socialism.

Nobody can say that the Soviet working class was free.

Critics of Marx, and later the Bolsheviks, within the broader socialist movement, especially anarchosyndicalists and other anti state socialists, pointed out that a "dictatorship of the proletariat" could only amount to a dictatorship over the proletariat.

They were right, of course. But they also had little regard for the parliamentary road to socialism.

Here, too, they were right. They argued that the parliamentary leadership of left wing parties would always be beholden to capitalist power, and would collaborate with that power to maintain their privileged status as parliamentary leaders.

As with the Soviet experience, history shows us that this view is correct.

Although the anarchosyndicalist position is correct, it cannot be elevated into a law of nature. There are no natural laws of politics. It might be possible for a political party, existing as part of a wider social movement, to make a number of structural reforms, such as providing support for cooperative enterprises, that change the character, if not necessarily the substance, of capitalist society and move it toward a socialist future.

Such reforms are worthy of our struggle.

No political party can make a contribution, however, toward socialism so long as it is controlled by a small politburo; the Communist Party of Australia is; the various Trotskyite parties are; so is the Australian Labor Party.

The saving grace of Labor is that it still commands the loyalty of much of the working class in Australia.

Only a genuinely participatory political party can contribute to socialism, and so a key challenge to be faced by socialists within Labor is the democratisation of the Party. The recent leadership election was a step in the right direction, but it was only a step. The politburo had successfully united behind a candidate to ensure his victory over the opposition of the vast majority of the party membership.

They will continue to resist the demands of the membership below, but the members need to keep fighting for a truly Labor Spring to break out.

A key objective ought to be ensuring the supremacy of the party's policy platform, and that platform should be developed via a genuinely democratic process. One way this can be achieved is through the instituting of a process of reselection of Labor MPs so that they become more like delegates and less like mere "representatives."

A number of proposals for further democratic reform of the Labor Party have been made recently. Those which call for the union vote to be weakened should be vehemently resisted. Rodney Cavalier, who recently made such a call, is surely correct to point out that factional control stems from union dominance. Eroding the link to the trade union movement, however, is to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Much more sensible would be to change the way unions are represented within the Labor Party. Union delegates to party conferences should be elected in free and fair elections within the union, rather than appointed by the leadership. This would have the affect of also encouraging more participatory grass roots unionism.

The traditional model of unionism in Australia is all but dead. The working class needs new forms of union organisation that are built from the bottom-up rather than the top-down. Socialists within the Labor Party, but also the industrial wing, are uniquely placed to develop this.

It is possible for the political wing of the movement to initiate the reform of the industrial wing. Moreover, worker owned and managed cooperative enterprises should also be allowed and encouraged to affiliate to the party.

An Australian labour movement, both political and industrial, that is for the working class, by the working class and of the working class is one that can make an advance toward socialism.

This is because only a participatory labour movement would seek to address the source of the inequality in power between corporate owners and managers on the one hand and workers on the other. It is this mismatch in power that accounts for social stratification and inequality in a capitalist society. It is participatory grass roots unions, not clan dominated fiefs, that would take up the banner of workers self management.

I propose that the socialists of the Labor Party, but also those of democratic temper without, should unite together and try to make all this, and more, happen. The forces arraigned against us are powerful. We live but only once; surely it is worth the candle.

Let us develop our own intellectual and activist circle; let us rethink socialism itself; let us rethink the role of politics and the political party; let us rethink trade unionism; let us rethink international relations.

Having rethought them let us fight to bring them about.

That is our challenge.