What does the election result mean for Australian socialists?
Peaceniks, not warmongers
The election means Labor will govern for at least 6 more years, likely 9. The peace crisis is one starting point for discussing: “What does 6-9 years of Labor mean for Australian socialists?”
Socialists are peaceniks, not warmongers. We have joined with many others in opposing Australian government support for war in other countries and regions.
For the first time since the Second World War, however, all peace activists, including those in the ALP membership, must build an anti-war movement to defeat an ALP government’s warlike tendencies and promote peaceful relations among peoples and their governments. There are two reasons for that.
Labor’s next 6 years in government coincide with the United States government positioning itself for war with China.
Second, this Labor government has embraced the destructive AUKUS and the continuity of the associated ANZUS treaty. These are the primary focal points in Australia for the struggle for peace to triumph. The spin-offs are Labor’s acceptance, if not support, for Indonesia’s military occupation of West Papua, general protection for Israel’s attempt to kill off the Palestinian people, one-sided blaming of Russia to support Ukraine in that war, and the belligerent USA military build-up on Australian soil and in the Pacific.
The parliamentary Labor Party has positioned itself as a war-mongering government desiring the USA’s continuity as the dominant imperial state. The Labor Party has form here. About 110 years ago, a Labor government drove Australia’s servile participation in the First World War, supporting the British Empire leading to a split in its ranks.
The election positions the ALP as the manager of the system of exploitation and expropriation further into the 21st century. For at least six years, the Labor government will be coordinating the system of wealth accumulation by the most powerful corporations, delivering more living standards problems and poverty to the majority and failing to rescue nature.
The fundamental question is, “Should socialists and laborists accept that the limit of activity is to ask the Labor government to do a bit more than what it has promised?”
The socialist dimension is an immediate necessity.
There are 3 reasons why all socialists must work out how to be more relevant and effective in these years and beyond.
First, the five overarching and interacting crises, summarised as the economic and the ecological (more so a single crisis), human relations, expressed in racist and misogynistic behaviour, and parliamentary democracy. What Labor has done so far and proposes is inadequate to control and reverse these. Each of them spawns serious subsidiary crises that also interact. For example, persistent downward pressure on living standards and poverty draws at best piecemeal and patchy reform from parliamentary activity.
Second, public discussion about the election outcome is dominated by its meaning for the Liberal and National parties, the ALP as the Party of government (much less so for the members of the ALP), the Greens and the Teals.
Yet, socialists fought just as hard as any to defeat Dutton’s LNP.
We celebrate the LNP’s defeat and the setback for the ultra-right as much as anybody and can be proud of what we have achieved.
Third, as socialists, we do draw some different conclusions from Labor’s thumping victory because Labor has long not been a socialist party, its progressivism is diminished and inadequate, and even absent in important ways.
Who and what are socialists?
Socialists define their thinking and other activism to the left of the ALP and the Greens, arguing that 21st-century capitalism will continue to cause more destruction of human society and nature and requires replacement with a better system that renews and nourishes both. Socialists are members of the ALP and the Greens, the various small left parties, including the promising Victorian Socialists, and many are not members of any party. We are atomised.
Still, we struggle for the development of working-class agency, asserting that fundamental change is that which is pursued and won by the working class, not something done for or to them by party apparatchiks.
All of us are active in various ways, and most are comfortable with and advocates for progressive reforms that are consistent with socialist intent. So, we have some things in common with progressives who are comfortable with capitalism in the 21st century.
In economic policy and strategy, we elevate public ownership of resources and other economic entities, infused with familiar and new forms of workers and other democracy. We see various forms of social or public ownership as essential for the rescue and restoration of living standards and nature.
Most of us are feminists or convinced that socialist feminism is an essential element of our practice in the present, and into more advanced change.
We are dedicated anti-racists who, among other things, actively practice solidarity with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in their campaigns for reform and more complete liberation, and we oppose all forms of discrimination based on race.
In opposition to individualism, we seek to advance the potential of each human individuality. Social solidarity is the font for the development of each person’s unique potential.
We say that nature’s despoliation and gross inequalities are intrinsic to a system that depends on expropriation of country, exploitation of people and nature for private profiteering and ownership, and a constant tendency to crisis with, at best, weaker and briefer moments of recovery. Our socialism, in its present and its continuity, seeks to rescue and nourish nature.
Explaining polycrisis
The polycrisis of our times, summarised above, draws and matches with the experience of daily life for most people. Our experience of it is somewhat unique in human history, although how each element produces specific crises is familiar: for example, regional wars for resources, pandemics, housing “shortage”, water pollution by land and now by sea, food production and supply. Climate change is distinctive, but like the others has been building steadily for several decades.
The progressive and laborist world view suggests capitalism just needs to be managed better, arguing that its “excesses” can be curbed, that some degree of exploitation is acceptable.
It does not explain the causes of recurrent crisis, the dynamic that produces continued and worsening gaps in wealth and power for most people, the recurrence and persistence of instability and stagnation, with uncertain, piecemeal recovery that does not produce certainty for a rescued healthy environment.
Socialists, using an ecological Marxist framework infused with feminism and anti-racism, can offer a credible explanation of polycrisis and the pathway to a peaceful alternative.
Opposing and replacing the polycrisis
The alternative to polycrisis is present in what is happening right now. There are hundreds of struggles of working people for a better deal that proceed each day. In those struggles that take several forms, working people - while working for wages, in need of a secure and decent home, finding health care that works, dealing with pollution, fighting for their job, caring for their children and their retired parents, and so on - demand what they want instead of their grievance.
Many demands have socialist characteristics because they are humanist and counter to profit-taking. Potentially, these struggles hold the ingredients of an alternative programme for a future with socialist characteristics.
However, the struggles and their demands are overwhelmingly atomised, rarely connected, even though their source is common.
Pulling all of these into a common programme through working class agency is the great immediate and historical responsibility of socialists and, also, those progressives who think it makes sense to join in.
Along with the programme, a strategy is required that, among other things, takes account of who its enemies are and what they can and will do to stop it from happening.
Very briefly for now, strategy means stitching together and coordinating all the struggles towards a “moment” when most of the programme can be achieved. Then, in that moment, a new foundation for a new spiral and momentum for change can be advanced.
This perspective does require a big change in how Australian socialists currently work.
A time for socialists’ reckoning
Australian socialists, every single one of us, must do our personal stocktake, taking that into any organization that we participate in.
Because the way we have been working has been ineffective. We, in a different way, are letting down the working class and the natural world on which we all depend. We remain on the fringe, and while we sit there, working class dissatisfaction with the way things are is exposed to the racist and misogynist simplicity of Australia’s ultra-right, funded by and working in the service of big capital, especially the resources sector.
Yet, working-class grumpiness with Labor’s modest and piecemeal offerings is justified. We are correct to encourage it, to demand something more and better as a decisive, permanent trajectory. Laborism will not do that.
We must move on from sect-like political practice, individualistic activity, and major progressive party loyalty. We can build a practical project to make that worth doing, to be explored in another article.
Above all, socialists must come together to enable working class agency to produce its programme and strategy that rescues the planet and promotes peace among all peoples. Waiting for it to happen spontaneously is just not good enough.