Quick! Get the surface spray

Vanguard April 2013 p.4
Jack D.

It looks like the ALP hierarchy has just now woken up to the fact they have largely ‘missed the boat’.

Tony Sheldon, National Secretary of the Transport Workers Union and National Vice-President of the ALP, has taken a swing at some of his party’s misdeeds and some wrong-doers. He said, "Like cockroaches, B-grade politicians are able to thrive on the corruption and detritus that lies under the dishwasher." He also said, "It's a crisis of belief brought on by a lack of moral and political purpose."

On his first point what does he want? Perhaps a 200 litre drum of the most potent of surface spray may do the trick. It is the only thing that might fix it. Simply changing leaders like musical chairs will achieve nothing. In fact, that is basically what has been going on for many decades as older working people will know.

Tony Sheldon is right on the button when he said, "It's a crisis of belief brought on by a lack of moral and political purpose." The ALP is not a real working class party, a party of the working-class. It never was and never can be. It is a social democrat bourgeois party, imbued with that ideology and confined to always work within the limitations set by capitalism.

It does not lack political purpose. It serves the purpose that is set by and for those with the cold stony, rusty heart of the capitalist class. That purpose is to mislead and divert working-class struggle into areas harmless to capital as that class intensifies its profit maximization schemes, its exploitation of the workers.

Study the tides

It is a purpose the ALP have become most efficient at; after all, there has been no fundamental change in the exploitation of the working class since the advent of the ALP. This is because it has been tied in to capital all of its existence. It is tied to capital more so today than ever before. It is therefore unreasonable to expect anything more from it as it is not a revolutionary party and essentially it serves the interests of capital, not the working class.

To rely on the likes of the ALP and on the parliamentary system to bring about fundamental change in the relationships of production is about as much use as standing on the sea shore piddling into the ocean trying to stop the tide from going out! I know. I tried both. It doesn’t work, it is asking the impossible.