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

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.