Nick G.
Labor leader Bill Shorten (above) delivered a speech some weeks ago under the title Towards a modern Labor Party.
The speech presented what purported to be a “vision” of a
membership-based and community-based “modern, outward-looking, confident and
democratic party”.
Essentially, this turned upon an easier “one-click”
online joining model for new members, removal of the requirement that
prospective members join a union, removal of the practice of affiliated unions
exercising “factional, centralised
decision-making”, giving local members 70% of the say in selecting their local
candidate, giving local party members a “meaningful say in the selection of
Senate candidates” and redrafting the first chapter of the party’s National
Platform which contains its “enduring values”.
How values can be said to be “enduring” when they need to
be redrafted was not explained.
A
liberal bourgeois party
As for the rest, it really does reflect the direction
that one would expect of a liberal bourgeois parliamentary party in the era of
the complete domination of industrial capital by international finance capital,
of the destruction of manufacturing by the greater attraction to investors of
financial speculation, and of the numerical decline of the organised working
class and its replacement by both precariously employed and largely unorganised
semi-proletarians and service workers.
And perhaps the most frustrating obstacle to a Bill
Shorten in his desire to “modernise” the Labor Party is precisely that this
party which all along has been a liberal bourgeois party cannot rebrand itself
– in this advertising era of continual rebranding of “the image” – as the
Liberal Party because the conservative party stole that name nearly seven decades
ago and refuses to give it up.
Ties
to unions or tying up unions?
There will be some in the organised union movement who
will dispute the truth that the Labor Party is a party of capitalism, is a
bourgeois liberal party.
“The unions gave birth to the Labor Party,” they will
very correctly assert and will point to a succession of Labor leaders who have
come up through the ranks of the union movement. What they dare not admit is that these Labor
pollies born of trade union officialdom have been, even in the very earliest
days of the ALP, “everywhere the most moderate and ‘capital-serving’ element”,
as Lenin observed in 1913.
Shorten is living proof that there has been no
“modernising” of that aspect of the Labor Party.
A
party of capitalism
Some will try to argue that the ALP is a
social-democratic party of the working class because it has traditionally had a
membership base in the working class.
But that is also true of the Australian Army, the
majority of whose soldiers are drawn from the working class. That does not make it the Australian version
of the PLA!
The ALP has always been a party of capitalism because it
chose the political institution of capitalism, parliament, as the arena for the
pursuit of its objectives; and because those objectives, even when expressed
through social-democratic values, never went beyond the economic system of
capitalism, beyond the reach of a market-driven system of economic activity.
Reform
essential to capitalism
“…the Liberal Party have always put the interests of powerful
lobby groups ahead of the vulnerable,” asserts Shorten. “That is why they exist
–it is what they live for –vested interests.
“By contrast, Labor is the party of change, the party of
optimism and opportunity for all.”
But capitalism itself continually revolutionises the
conditions of production, its instruments, its technical components and its
structural features. The strongest and
most reactionary components of the ruling class are indeed “vested interests”
and they are well-represented by conservative parties around the world.
Labor has historically had the role in Australia of
adapting the social superstructure of jurisprudence and processes to the latest
ways in which the economic laws of capitalism determine the dynamism and
resilience of the system.
A component of that has always been to offer working
people some small measures of support in return for their compliance with that
system.
Often that “support” has been more apparent than real, as
for example in recent decades with wage indexation (and discouraging strikes
for better pay), the Accord (discouraging strikes in return for social
programs), and Enterprise Bargaining (restricting the legally protected scope
of strikes, dividing the working class and preventing solidarity actions).
With changes like these, who needs conservatism?
It makes Labor no less a party of capitalism to claim
that it is “the party of change, the party of optimism and opportunity for
all”.
Why
workers need a revolutionary party
The best elements of the working class have always
understood that Labor is a party of capitalism.
The most politically advanced sections of the working
class have sought out and joined the revolutionary working class party, the
Communist Party.
The Communist Party exists to lead the broadest ranks of
the people, under the leadership of its living core, the industrial
proletariat, to anti-imperialist independence and socialism.
It seeks, even in the most peaceful and non-revolutionary
circumstances, to build the existing and ongoing movement for the revolutionary
denial of the property rights of the capitalist class and the destruction of
their political, ideological and military domination of society.
It exists to prepare the way for the elevation of the
working class to a position of rule over the capitalists, over the global
institutions and corporations of the world economic system, not through the
institution of parliament, but through new institutions that will prevent those
overthrown forces from ever staging a come-back.
It challenges the ruling class with immediate demands
that are required for the temporary amelioration of the hardships faced by the
people, but challenges the people with the realisation that temporary
improvement is no substitute for abolishing the cause of hardship – capitalism
– once and for all.
Class conscious workers have the choice.
Either, a party which seeks to perpetuate the hardships
and injustices of an exploitative system through change and reform, or a party
which whilst fighting for immediate demands, plans for the destruction of the
system of hardship and social injustice.
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