Nick G.
Former NSW Premier Bob Carr(above) made a significant start to his new position as Australian Foreign Minister by declaring in an opinion piece written for the Australian Financial Review that social democracy, the political philosophy of the Labor Party, was in crisis.
His answer to this problem was for Labor to more firmly embrace the neo-liberal agenda of “economic liberalism, open markets and rising living standards”, to stop invoking Prime Minister Ben Chifley’s “light on the hill” and instead embrace the “bold economic reform of the Hawke-Keating era”.
It is hard to see any evidence of Chifley’s “light on the hill” in the performance of the Gillard government. And perhaps the absence of light from the hill explains why it is impossible to see “rising living standards” associated with economic liberalism and open markets.
Carr appointed to reassure the US
Carr, a noted enthusiast for US history and politics (he has been trotted out on a regular basis for “expert” TV commentary on the Republican primaries), was hand-picked by Gillard for the position of Foreign Minister to convey to her US overlords that despite the conflict surrounding the recent leadership challenge, it was to be business as usual for the US-Australia relationship.
Indeed, Mark Kenny, writing in the Murdoch press on March 15 observed of a planned visit by Carr to his “long-time friend, Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton” in April, that it will “fuel concerns that the Civil War buff and amateur political historian intends to align Australia’s foreign policy even more closely with that of the US”.
Carr: social democracy has “fulfilled its mission”
It is in this context of reassuring the US imperialists of Australia’s continuing subservience that Carr’s piece on social democracy needs to be read.
It is clear from two instances cited early in his article (one a discussion with West German coal miners, and the other with Swedish social democrats, both in 1977) that Carr, as a young man, saw social democracy primarily as a tool for combating Marxism-Leninism within the working class.
He links the “collapse of the socialist states after 1989” with the “shrinking” of the industrial workforce and the union movement in the Western countries as factors no longer requiring an active social democracy within the working class.
In fact he says, “Arguments that Labor has got to ‘return to its base’ ring hollow when one tries to find the base”.
Labor as the servant of finance capital
The select readership of the Australian Financial Review – the whizz kids and speculators of the financial markets – are Carr’s audience and his hope for the future of the Labor Party.
As Carr admits, he is no pioneer in that respect. Hawke and Keating were champions of deregulation, dancing to the tune of the finance capitalists whose contest with the manufacturing capitalists was fought and won in the early 70’s.
Nor has social democracy in other parts of the world been left behind. Blair’s “New Labour” promoted privatization and the winding back of the “welfare state”.
In Hungary, the Socialist Party (which grew out of the former ruling revisionist party after 1989) is described on Wikipedia as “greater advocates of liberal, free market policies than the conservative opposition”.
Carr approvingly refers to the social democrats of Northern Europe as “unimpeachable economic managers: Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in Germany had to peg back lavish retirement incomes introduced by the Christian Democrats”.
The real crisis for social democracy in this country is that it has always been a party of capitalism, a system which, with the best will in the world, refuses to allow itself to be “unimpeachably managed”.
It, instead, manages the politicians who operate with the confines of the parliamentary system. It is a system of crises of which all the petty political squabbles between and within capitalist political parties are but a mere reflection.
(For a more thorough analysis of social democracy from a communist perspective, read Challenging the ideology of Social Democracy requires Engagement With the People in Australian Communist Oct-Dec 2010, available at http://vanguard.net.au/2008/AC%20full%20Oct-Dec%202010.pdf)
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