A socialist manifesto for Labor

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.