James Eisen, Canberra
Australian Capital Territory politics was recently graced by the rare event of something almost happening, with the ACT Greens and Canberra Liberals briefly entertaining the idea of ousting Andrew Barr’s twenty-year Labor government in favour of a Green-Blue alliance, long confined to the nightmares of Labor rusted-ons.
This proposal, brief as it was, was quickly seized upon by ACT Labor and Labor-aligned media to fearmonger and shore up Labor’s non-existent appeal. It’s difficult to argue you need to support Labor to keep the “Tories” out when the “Tories” haven’t governed for twenty years.
Labor members often accuse their opposition of Toryism, or “Tree Toryism” in the case of the Greens. While most often hurled by undergraduates who have never heard of a “Whig”, it is revealing of the party’s self-understanding. Labor imagines it is still fighting the same battles of 1914, 1945, or 1975, seeing all opposition as one reactionary mass.
The Canberra “Left,” for its part, has largely bought into this framing, condemning the Greens for their transgression against the natural party of government. The loudest tut-tutting, however, tends to come from those who either don’t live in Canberra or have been residents for only the last two years of a seven-year undergraduate degree.
Lenin’s “bourgeois worker’s party” remark is repeated endlessly, without regard for how conditions have changed over a century of decomposition and defeat. There are no “workers’ parties” today because there is no politically organised working class; only workers subsumed into one gelatinous mass called “the people.” For Marx, the proletariat was a political, not sociological, category. In Germany in the 1870s, Bismarck could claim he won working-class votes, but only Bebel and Liebknecht could claim the allegiance of an independent, class-conscious proletariat.
Such a proletariat does not exist today. Instead, different sections of the middle and ruling classes rabble-rouse workers just enough to beat rival demagogues into submission, but not enough for independent organisation. Labor is part of this. Politically, it is a bourgeois progressive party, acting as kingmaker in a tripartite balancing act between the state, unions, and business. Sociologically, its membership is almost entirely professional bureaucrats. Its voter base includes many workers, yes, but there are just as many workers who vote Liberal, Green, or One Nation. Any revived socialist movement would have to win over workers from every capitalist party.
If we are choosing which state administrators would be “better” for the struggle for socialism, why prefer Labor? Perhaps a federal argument could be made, but in the ACT, after twenty years in power, Labor cannot even claim to be competent managers of capital.
Far from the well-managed corporate state that was promised, Labor cannot even make the light rail run on time. It has overseen corruption scandals, rolled out an essentially non-functional bus payment system that made most buses free for six months, and turned the most educated electorate in the country against the concept of public transport through painfully prolonged light rail construction times. Not to mention, it cannot run a city of fewer than half a million people without a $100 million annual deficit.
The claim that a Green-Blue coalition would endanger the ACT’s progressive social policies is equally absurd. The Liberals hold less than one-third of the Legislative Assembly, and neither Greens nor Labor would consent to changes to abortion or euthanasia laws. The only valid objection is likely instability and initial unpopularity, but when the alternative is a government so thoroughly incompetent and ossified, is that much of a risk?
The option of an independently organised proletarian socialist movement is always present, and its absence is felt with every new disaster on our screens. But if that’s off the table and we are content to merely be a gadfly on one set of reformist philanthropists, is this the side we must choose, merely because the branding is red?
PARTISAN! 