A Left without class can only be left behind by the culture wars

The passing of Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser, a mere five months apart, have rightly seen us reflect upon their significant place in Australian history, especially with reference to the transition from a self-avowed racist nation to a more diverse, multicultural and cosmopolitan society.

It is important, however, not to exaggerate their role.

There were important underlying economic and global transitions that provided the impetus for this shift, most especially the entry of Britain to the common market, increasing economic engagement with Asia and the advent of a more globally interdependent system of production, distribution and exchange.

The needs and requirements of capitalism in Australia and the old racist order no longer were in sync, and so racist Australia "was buried, almost in secret, by the governments of Holt, Gorton and McMahon" to cite Robert Manne.

You will struggle to find the realisation that White Australia was abandoned because of changes in the regional and global economic order in much of the commentary in the mainstream. To merely hint at underlying economic dynamics affecting social and cultural change is to be dismissed as a "Marxist," whatever that term means.

Just as significant was the role that the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s played in changing Australia. They made Gough Whitlam and the social Malcolm Fraser possible, and they made it possible for avowedly racist discourse and dispositions to become if not unthinkable then largely illegitimate and beyond the pale.

But even here it was the hard struggle in the most hardest of years by the working class activists of the Communist Party of Australia that kick started the movements that came to fruition in the 1960s and 1970s. Their role in our history has, most unjustly, been put totally aside.

So much had attitudes changed in Australia that John Howard's attempt to whip up a frenzy over Asian immigration in the 1980s floundered and, in part, caused him to lose an election.

My, had and have times changed.

John Howard famously stated his time would come and his time most emphatically did come when racist attitudes and opinions became more prevalent in Australian society.

From Asians in the ghetto, Kalashnikov totting boat people, the attack on Indigenous self determination, and the shariaisation of Australia, we increasingly have witnessed a backlash against multicultural and cosmopolitan Australia.

A backlash seized upon by the acolytes of power and privilege to further a neoliberal jihad against the broader population.

This backlash has confounded the Left of Australian politics that has been struck dumb by the culture wars; the Right continues to goosestep from victory to victory.

The Left needs to consider a simple question; why?

But even before this question can be answered one must examine the causes of the backlash.

Although racist attitudes and opinions have been stoked by right wing commentators, the corporate especially Murdoch press, and conservative political leaders nonetheless this is a stoking, not a manufacturing, of views that have grown more prevalent over time.

The transition from White Australia to multiculturalism was couched within a broader social contract between capital and labour. When the first wave of post war migrants came to Australia they came to an Australia committed to full employment, arbitration and conciliation as a means to codify this contract, industrial development, and social justice through the implements of a social welfare state.

Australian corporations, in turn, needed labour and this labour came through immigration. The migrants became more ethnically diverse as time progressed.

So it was then that the Australian working class was reconciled to large levels of immigration, and the social and cultural changes occasioned by such immigration.

The backlash against multiculturalism has come as a consequence of the breaking of this contract; the commitment to full employment, manufacturing industry, arbitration and conciliation, the welfare state, all have been torn asunder yet the migrants keep coming.

The Australian working class, to put it simply, is less reconciled to a multicultural Australia because it will not reconcile itself to a social order founded on its abandonment.

How, then, should this be a problem for the Left?

It is a problem in two senses.

Firstly, the Australian Labor Party, traditionally the party of the working class, no longer can be said to represent its interests, to the limited extent that we can say it ever did, and the same applies to the union movement more broadly it must be said.

It was the Hawke-Keating government that liberalised financial markets, gave us enterprise bargaining, shifted the emphasis of economic policy from full employment to fiscal conservatism, emphasised wage restraint as a necessity of economic reform, privatised public assets, gave us rich friendly tax reform, and tightened the barriers to welfare for the poor.

The union movement was a willing collaborator in all this through the aegis of the Accord, and through the subsequent refusal to use sustained struggle at the point of production to combat the pillars of the neoliberal framework.

At the same time the ALP has been associated, whether correctly or no is not the point here, with multiculturalism, immigration, lax border protection, Indigenous self determination and the like.

Support for the Labor Party among its core working class constituency has thereby become tepid and tenous, a fact seized upon by the right wing commentariat and the political representatives of corporate Australia to both keep Labor out of office and to discipline Labor when in office.

By the same token within the public sphere the Left in Australia is almost exclusively associated with identity politics. It is rare indeed to see a recognisably Left wing commentator that speaks regularly of industrial disputation, wages, bargaining agreements, cost of living pressures, neoliberal globalisation and other such issues of material concern to working people.

This is partly because the corporate media desire the people to see the Left they want them to see.

But it is also because the Left has abandoned the idiom and reality of class.

A Left wing commentator today would more readily wax lyrical of grammatology than proletarian internationalism. They could tell one more of genealogy than the genealogy of class struggle. All of this would be packaged and padded with profound sounding though nonsensical polysyllabic discourse, designer stubble, and tweed jackets.

None of this is designed to go down well on Struggle Street, as it were, the very existence of which on the supposedly multicultural SBS, now firmly controlled by a neoconservative government, doubtless serves as a propaganda ploy to further cement the discord between multiculturalism and the working class.

Furthermore, a disturbing differentiation between ecological politics and class based politics has occurred. It is possible for an idealistic new generation of activist to be highly ecologically conscious, and to parlay that consciousness into political action, but to think nothing of class consciousness and class struggle.

This simply will not do.

Social change in capitalist society comes either by self-consciously carrying the working class or self-consciously attacking it and its ability to resist.

A Left that has abandoned the working class is a Left that will increasingly be left behind by the culture wars.

What is required is a Left that is, of, by, and for the working class. A Left that engages in industrial and political struggle through its very design to reverse the neoliberal order and to replace it with one more in accord with the principles of social justice and solidarity.

Only such a Left can head the conservative and liberal defenders of the rich and powerful off at the pass as they seek to use working class grievances to further cement and extend the privileges of the rich.

The working class people of Australia, the people I as a wog grew up, work, live, struggle, and play with are a decent and caring people.

It takes both effort and force of circumstance to make such people hateful and spiteful.

The Left cannot do much about the minions of the privileged who provide the effort, but through hard work, dissidence, and activism it can do something about the force of circumstance.