Faulkner’s lament for Labor

Vanguard July 2011 p. 3

A recent speech delivered by the retiring ALP Senator John Faulkner gives an insight into the crisis of the ALP and social democracy.

The speech reveals the depth of disconnect between the lives and needs of ordinary working people and rank and file members, and the ALP parliamentary machine.

In his speech, Falkner mourns the disintegrating support for the ALP from its traditional base, the ordinary working people and grass roots activists. He lists the previously progressive stands of the ALP in “ending Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War, defending unions and unionists in the workplace, fighting apartheid in South Africa, free tertiary education and health care...”.

He pays tribute to past ALP rank and file members who made their activism in building mass organisations to make the world a better place for the people, not merely to manipulate people’s votes during elections and win a plum job in parliament.

He contrasts this with the present rock bottom membership base and support, suppression of any dissent and discussion of different views, no internal democracy in the party and the overwhelming domination by self-serving parliamentary careerist apparatchiks and factional warlords.

Faulkner’s solution for rescuing the Labor Party is simply making change to “culture, values and party structures” in the Party machine. This wishful thinking is not based on any class analysis of the Labor party as a party of capitalism. Shuffling around leading personnel, parliamentarians and “culture” will not change the class nature of the ALP as a party of capitalism. That’s where the problem lies. The values and culture he talks about are based on capitalist values of social democracy that has little room to manoeuvre during economic crisis. All the characteristics that Faulkner and others complain about arise from the capitalist class nature and ideology of the ALP. It has little to do with individuals and personalities.

From its inception 120 years ago the ALP has always been a parliamentary party of capitalism in Australia. Its origins and, until recently, its base in the working class, gave it some progressive features. It has never been anything but a reformist parliamentary party within the capitalist system, prepared to go only as far in its reforms as not to challenge the class order of the capitalist system. Today Australia’s capitalism is held up by imperialism, mainly US. There the ALP will never advance and champion the interests of the working class that threaten the interests of monopoly capital in any way or shape.

Nevertheless, the ALP’s previous positive features and large rank and file activism in mass struggles have made an important contribution to the development of the working class struggle in Australia. On the other hand, it directs people’s activism into safe channels of bourgeois parliamentarism. The progressive positions taken by the parliamentary ALP were forced from the activism of its rank and file members in the working class.

In the present period of domination by international monopoly capital and the deepening global capitalist economic crisis, there is virtually no room for capitalism and imperialism to employ its softer, reformist measures, previously represented by policies of social democracy of the ALP. In today’s parliament, its main parties manage and administer the capitalist system for the multinational corporations and local monopolies - imperialism.

For the working class and the people this reality points in the direction of building and organising a people’s movement for a genuine democratic and anti-imperialist independent Australia, as part of the struggle for socialism.