The Australian Labor Party remains an important site of struggle against imperialism, against Zionism and against the US military alliance, writes ALP member Marcus Strom.
The Australian Labor Party is a liberal-bourgeois workers’ party. It governs in the interests of capitalism but does so on the base of the organised working class, and the electoral support of most workers in Australia. Given the class nature of the union bureaucracy, even the non-affiliated unions look to Labor in government to deliver piecemeal reforms.
In its rules, the ALP describes itself as a ‘democratic socialist party’ and has as its first objective the socialisation of means of production, distribution and exchange. This means the Labor Party is a strange beast – a contradiction born of the needs of the working class to organise but dominated by the ideology of the capitalist class.
This makes it an important area of struggle. While the mass of the working class presently has no vision of a socialist future, it seeks a better life within capitalism through the ALP. To the extent the working class mobilises for socialism, this will in part manifest within the ALP.
The re-election of the Albanese government was a partial class expression of the atomised workers and the trade unions. With no communist party of its own to fight for its direct and objective interests, the working class voted (again) for the only tool available to defeat a Trump-lite, Dutton-led conservative LNP opposition.
While the character of the ALP has ebbed and flowed since its foundation, in essence it remains a bourgeois workers’ party, the pro-imperialist nature of the Albanese government notwithstanding. The ALP leadership has always been in favour of Empire (first British and now US); it has always ruled in the interests of the capitalist class.
As the size, scale and intensity of the class struggle shifts, the expression of working-class politics within the ALP changes. Given the workers’ movement is at present at a nadir, the proletarian pole within the ALP is also at a low point.
However, unless the contradictory class character of the ALP changes, as the working class re-emerges from political slumber this will no doubt find expression within the ALP as much as outside it. We see this even today in the fight for Palestinian solidarity and in the campaign to oppose AUKUS.
That is why for Marxists, working in a bourgeois workers’ party is as relevant as working in the trade unions or working in the broader movement as part of our fight for a workers’ party that is organised around a revolutionary and democratic program.
Marxists, communists and socialists should seek to shape the political nature of the ALP’s left wing – from within and without – and not just leave it to spontaneous formation. We fight for the ALP to be an open, democratic united front of the working class where socialists and communists can openly argue for their politics.
Palestine
For the mass movement in solidarity with Palestine to impact beyond protest, it needs to find the form of ongoing political expression. Mass demonstrations clearly impact society, but they cannot in and of themselves affect lasting change.
It is tremendous that Palestine solidarity in Australia has broken into a mass movement. On August 2nd, more than 200,000 people demonstrated on the Sydney Harbour Bridge in one of the biggest mobilisations ever seen in Australia.
Three weeks later, hundreds of thousands marched in cities and towns in a Nationwide March for Palestine. From Tathra to Geraldton, Alice Springs to Townsville; in 40 locations across the country, Australians turned out in solidarity with the people of Palestine and in disgust at the genocidal Israeli regime raining terror on the people of Gaza.
Trade union banners were more present than previous demonstrations as were some union leaders, including leaders of the ACTU and Unions NSW.
The question now is what political expression can such a movement take? If it returns to simply holding weekly demonstrations, it risks fading into the background.
People are understandably disgusted at the weasel-words and both-sideism of the Albanese government. Yet for the mass movement to have a political expression beyond demonstrations, this will take some form in the Australian Labor Party itself.
Soon after Israel launched its onslaught on Gaza, elements around the NSW ‘soft left’ faction (which is hostile to the Albanese ‘left’), mobilised in ALP branches through Labor Friends of Palestine. It continues to do so, passing motions calling for sanctions on Israel in branches across the country. ALP members and ‘soft left’ MPs in NSW have marched in the Palestine demonstrations from the very beginning. On August 3rd they were joined by Ed Husic, Bob Carr, and Tony Sheldon from the ALP right.
A united front for Palestine needs to organise both within and without the ALP. For the Palestine Action Group leaders, under influence from Socialist Alternative sectarians, to ban pro-Palestine Labor MPs from speaking at demonstrations is to shoot the movement in the foot. It seems some protest organisers and Albanese share one thing in common – a desire to keep ALP MPs off the speaking platform.
There can be no illusions that work within the ALP alone can transform the attitude of the Albanese government – that would be opportunist idiocy. But likewise, thinking that treating all ALP members or ALP affiliated unions as haram would be sectarian idiocy.
Inviting pro-Palestine ALP MPs such as Anthony D’Adam onto the platform does not mean you withhold criticism for him voting for the anti-democratic protest laws in NSW. A united front is not a diplomatic peace agreement. But our aim is surely to increase the space to organise for Palestine within the ALP, not narrow it down.
Mass Line
The fact that so many people are now marching can be partly attributed to the determination of the Palestine Action Group for marching, week in week out. But that is not a strategy. The new and welcome ‘mass line’ came not from this approach, which limited the movement, but was forced on PAG by events of mass starvation in Gaza itself, by the intransigence of Netanyahu and his Washington backers and the anti-democratic instincts of the NSW Labor Government and NSW Police seeking to ban the demonstration over the Harbour Bridge.
The Queensland Police repeated this on August 24th, and while they successfully prevented the demonstration over Storey Bridge, the police intervention no doubt spurred people to attend.
As it has shifted gears from the few thousands on the streets to the hundreds of thousands, the mass movement is having an impact. The Albanese Labor Government has said it will recognise a Palestinian state at the UN General Assembly in September. While this is in concert with European imperial powers such as France, Britain and Germany – and falls far short of what is needed, which is isolating the Israeli regime – the fact it has been dragged to this position reflects the pressure from below, in Australia and in Europe.
This is a victory of the Palestine solidarity movement and is due to ongoing pressure against the ALP leaders by the mass movement and from within the ALP, led by Labor Friends of Palestine.
Recognition of Palestine with Gaza in ruins, amid Zionist pogroms in the West Bank, all while Australia maintains diplomatic and trade support for Israel will not satisfy the mass movement. And nor should it.
Marxists should fight to transform the emerging mass movement in Australia into an ongoing democratic political campaign.
For starters, the ‘ad hoc’ organising committee that called the 24 August national marches needs to be democratised. A national conference should be planned for to elect the committee; recallable delegates from community groups, socialist groups, ALP branches, union branches should attend and vote at such a conference. The organising committee needs to be accountable and authoritative.
A unifying and militant action program should be agreed, which could include demands:
- Sanctions against Israel
- Expel the Israeli ambassador
- Australia to exit the F35 program
- – No arms export licences to Israel
- Support ICJ moves to indict war criminals
- Investigate Australians returning from active IDF service for war crimes.
While an essential part of the movement, the expression of Palestine solidarity within the ALP has its faults. Labor Friends of Palestine continues to advocate for the long-lost two-states solution and has a worrying faith in ‘international law’.
While nominally independent, international law has never been enforceable and rulings against the US and its allies flagrantly ignored. It was always a fig leaf for imperialism in the final analysis.
To hanker today for yesterday’s assurances of the ‘international rules-based order’, a mantra of pro-imperialist politicians, is a counter-productive strategy.
Ultimately, this is a ‘state-loyalist’ and reformist approach, which must be challenged. But to do this effectively, Marxists need to be active within and without the ALP.
AUKUS
While Palestine has rightly received most attention, given the ongoing daily atrocities and genocide livestreamed before us, the Albanese government’s attachment to the United States through the AUKUS agreement is, in many ways, the more insidious.
What should have been thrown into the furnace of bad Scott Morrison ideas after the 2022 federal election, was not only kept but moved to the centre of the Albanese foreign policy agenda.
An agreement that clearly is in the economic, strategic and military interests of the United States above all, now has Uncle Sam unsure if Australia will come to the (war) party in any conflict between the US and China. We now have the unedifying spectacle of the Albanese government bowing and scraping to avoid offending Donald Trump lest he dump the AUKUS agreement.
The fight against AUKUS has yet to become a mass movement. Those forces outside the ALP fighting it are, in the main, veterans of the 1990s and 2000s anti-war movements against George W Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard and their bloody folly in Iraq.
Understandably, young leftwing activists are drawn to campaign against the horrors happening now in Palestine and not against the much greater horrors that could come if Australia is dragged into a war between the US and China.
Yet, AUKUS is a more fundamental representation of Australia as junior imperialist partner of the United States.
For that reason, the work of Labor Against War has been vital in keeping the struggle against Albanese’s capitulation to the US war agenda.
Labor Against War in 2023 forced a debate at the ALP National Conference about AUKUS, one that the ALP leadership tried to avoid.
That debate showed the potential shape of an anti-AUKUS coalition in the labour movement, from ALP branches to unions like the Maritime Union of Australia and the Electrical Trades Union and even federal MP Josh Wilson spoke out against AUKUS.
More than a hundred party units – including the Victorian and Queensland state branches – have passed resolutions opposing AUKUS. That fight will continue up to the ALP National Conference next year.
A united front of working class and community organisations should work to oppose AUKUS and the further enmeshing of Australia into war planning by the United States. AUKUS has been revealed as nothing more than US and Australian imperialism seeking to contain the rise of China, Australia’s main trading partner.
Anti-Imperialism
What this provides is raw material to build anti-imperialist sentiment and organisation across the labour movement. The fight against Australian support for Israel and against the Australian military alliance with the United States is connected.
As Marxists, we know that only the eclipsing of the constitutional order through a working class led democratic revolution for socialism in concert with workers across the world can remove Australia from the imperialist world order. It is not a question of changing the policy of the government of the day.
That fight needs us to challenge Laborism within the ALP.
Historically – from the White Australia policy onwards – the labour movement in Australia has been awash with reactionary and ruling class ideas. This is the very nature of Laborism, one of the main strategic barriers blocking the development of a mass democratic and revolutionary workers’ movement.
To abstain from organisational engagement with the ALP is sectarian folly and a sure way to keep Marxist ideas on the fringes of the workers’ movement and society as a whole.
PARTISAN! 
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