More experience of ALP is needed

Vanguard August 2010 p. 3

How to vote in the 2010 Federal elections is occupying people’s thinking at different levels and degrees. Parliamentary elections hide the reality of whoever is elected will merely continue as an Executive Committee whose primary role is efficient administration of capitalism and the imperialist control of Australia.

In the present conditions, the main issues are what would serve the interests of the working class and people and assist the development of mass consciousness to break the stranglehold of social democracy (ALP) over the people. Experience is the greatest teacher. Whichever party wins the elections, struggles will inevitably continue, and escalate.

With Liberals in power the focus of struggle will renew illusions and breathe new life into the ALP and direct struggle to its election into government again. With Labor winning, deeper experience and exposure of the ALP government will help workers and the people to break from dependency on social democracy.

Of all the parliamentary parties, the ALP traditionally draws widest support from the working class. This is not surprising given the ALP historically arose from the struggles of Australia’s working class and the union movement. This enabled it to keep up the pretence of speaking for the working people. From time to time, it took a more progressive stance on a variety of social, environmental, legal and foreign policy matters. But these few progressive policies of the past, important as they were at the time, were never championed by the ALP in a mass way and quickly abandoned at the slightest murmurings of disapproval by the ruling class of big business corporations.

This is because the ALP is a party of monopoly capitalism in Australia. In the recent period, ALP governments paved the way for the most reactionary assaults on the working class, wholesale privatisation of public assets, opened up Australia to neo-liberal policies of imperialist globalisation, destroying Australia’s manufacturing industries.

In spite of all this, the ALP still draws strong support from most workers and working people, who hope against all hope that a change in politicians will somehow turn things around. This is why the ALP is such an important instrument for the ruling class of monopoly capital, in confining the working class to the exploitative system of capitalism.

The three years of Rudd/Gillard government have deepened disillusionment with the ALP, particularly amongst ordinary workers and working people. Yet, there is still a reliance and clinging to the ALP. As long as illusions about the ALP persist, the people won’t be able to move beyond the merry-go-round of two major parties and parliamentarism.

Marxism recognises material conditions, including experience and struggle, as the strongest factors in determining human thinking. More and deeper experience of the ALP in office will help expose its true character of serving monopoly capital above all else. No amount of talk and words on paper, on their own, will convince the people.

No doubt there will be a reaction against Labor in these elections. Some predict a strong swing to the Greens. We won’t discount that such a swing would be a positive development in that working people need to move on from their traditional loyalty to Labor. It would assist the accumulation of political experience at a time when there is a mood to reject Labor whilst maintaining a belief in the bourgeois parliamentary process.