BY DICK NICHOLS
Subscribers to the catalogues of left-wing Sydney bookseller and ALP member Bob Gould were probably surprised to receive in a recent mailing a four-page polemic against something he dubbed "the Green Left Weekly school of falsification" of Australian Labor Party history.
Two pieces that have appeared in recent issues of Green Left earned Bob Gould's wrath. The first was the editorial in GLW #448 ("100 years of service to capitalism"), scored as "unbalanced and self-serving historiography" which "lies repeatedly, by leaving out of account all gains and reforms achieved within the ALP and trade union framework, and only recording betrayals that took place".
The second was an article of mine on the Socialist Alliance (GLW #449) — in Gould's eyes "a vintage piece of fulmination against Laborism" marked by surreal expectations of the newly formed alliance's electoral possibilities.
Normally there's not much point replying to Bob Gould's numerous outpourings. However, this latest offering is perhaps different because it involves the vital issue of how socialists should relate to the ALP at a time when the new Socialist Alliance is growing and some ALPers and ex-ALPers are beginning to show curiosity about it.
Before getting to the heart of the issue, Gould is correct on two matters of fact which Green Left Weekly shouldn't have got wrong: the ALP did not introduce conscription in World War I and Gough Whitlam did not tell enraged ALP supporters to "relax, don't fight, go home, go back to sleep" after the November 11, 1975 coup by Governor-General John Kerr.
Of course, these errors in themselves don't remotely constitute a "school of falsification" along Stalinist lines. After all, Labor leaders Billie Hughes and W. A. Holman moved heaven and earth to try to get conscription adopted during the First World War. And while Whitlam called on all to "maintain the rage", the ALP and ACTU leaders spent their energies in hosing "the rage" down and getting ALP supporters refocused on the ballot box.
However, Gould's claim rests mainly on what the Green Left editorial leaves out.
He lists 10 points he claims would be necessary inclusions in any balanced view of the ALP, including "incremental industrial and social improvements for the working class" enacted by Labor governments, certain progressive stances taken by ALP leaders against outright reactionary positions, and various battles within the party against capitalist policies being implemented by Labor governments themelves.
Behind all these examples lies the eternal skirmishing over Labor's "socialisation objective", which reached its sharpest expression with the emergence of the "Socialisation Units" during the Great Depression.
'Capital-serving'
However, the editorial's "omission of relevant facts" such as these was due to one simple reason. Its purpose was to stress — on the 100th anniversary of Federation and in the midst of the pomp, circumstance and self-congratulation of the ALP "mates" — the essential political character of the party since its birth 110 years ago.
The editorial repeated the assessment of Vladimir Lenin and of ... Kim Beazley. In a speech to federation celebrants the ALP leader smugly wore these 1913 words of the great Russian revolutionist as a badge of pride: "The leaders of the Australian Labor Party are trade union officials, everywhere the most moderate and 'capital-serving' element, and in Australia, altogether peaceable, purely liberal."
Does Bob Gould disagree? His description of Lenin's words as "a throwaway remark" suggests he does, and he goes on to cite Lenin's 1920s advice to the fledgling Communist Party of Australia to campaign vigorously for affiliation to the ALP as evidence that Lenin had developed a more favourable view of the party.
This inference is mistaken to the marrow. Once the social-democratic and labour parties backed their respective ruling classes in the horrendous carnage that was World War I, Lenin never changed his analysis.
Irrespective of internal factional balances, the super-revolutionary rhetoric of leaders and the illusions and expectations of working people, these parties had overwhelmingly been captured by an oligarchy of bureaucrats and trade union officials who had made their peace with the capitalist system.
Their social support base was the better-off, stably employed and conservative sections of the working class — not a small milieu in a "lucky country" like Australia.
Where was Lenin wrong? The ALP has always stood with the Australian "investing class" in its moments of crisis.
As for iconic ALP "rebels" like the populist bully and demagogue Jack Lang and the great Gough (friend of East Timor) — they both in their time meekly submitted to judicial execution by representatives of the crown, leaving their followers in the lurch.
This analysis is just the letter A of the revolutionary socialist alphabet in this country.
Tactics towards Labor
But why then try to affiliate the communist movement to such a creature? Here we get to letter B.
In his 1920 work Left-Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder, Lenin's point was not that the labour and social democratic parties had somehow changed their spots, but that it was futile and self-defeating for small communist groups to restrict themselves to sideline denunciation of them.
The bulk of workers still saw these parties — which all had large, if confused and amorphous, left wings — as their own, regarded them as somehow socialist and expected them to deliver on their platforms.
That was especially the case in prosperous Australia, where there had been considerable space for the ALP to introduce reforms without threatening the workings of Australian capitalism.
The workers' actual experience of Labor from 1891 to 1914 was summed up in a Labor College account of the time:
"When the Labor Party was formed ... the working day ... was unlimited. There was no overtime payment, no workers compensation, no paid holidays, annual leave or long service leave, no sick pay, no basic wage, no age or invalid pensions, no maternity allowances, no child endowment, no unemployment benefits and no thoughts of full employment, a 40-hour week or social security. Labor pioneered all these."
That was in 1920 — when the Russian Revolution still inspired millions and before the frost of Stalinism had descended.
But what about now, 80 years later, when the ALP is for most workers little more than a lesser evil compared to the Coalition and when no-one — certainly not the official ALP left — believes in the socialisation objective? What tactical stance should socialists take to this ALP?
Letter A of course remains in force — to explain to newcomers to the left and socialist universe what sort of beast the ALP is.
Letter B is to give the socialist cause as strong and united a voice of its own as possible — which is why the Socialist Alliance has been launched.
Letter C is to collaborate with everyone — Labor, Green, Democrats and unaffiliated — who is involved in struggle against all the anti-worker and inhuman attacks of neoliberal austerity, whether Coalition or ALP-inspired. The support achieved during the Maritime Union of Australia's 1998 fight against Patrick, despite the final retreat of its "leaders", was a fine example of what can be achieved.
This is the approach of the Socialist Alliance, notwithstanding Bob Gould's bizarre assertion that Green Left is "trying to erect a literary barrier between the activists of the DSP and any Laborites moving to the left".
Making sense of ALP history
But how did we get from the ALP of 1920 to today's outfit? Gould's listing of the positive features of ALP history provides no clues, context or interpretation.
When capitalism boomed after World War II, it wasn't difficult for "both sides of politics" across the advanced capitalist world to introduce the measures that made up what used to be called the "welfare state", with the full support of the big corporations.
However, once the boom ended and the space for reform narrowed, there were hardly any gains that Labor governments weren't as prepared as the Coalition to rescind, once they became incompatible with capitalist competitiveness.
And so the workers' compensation system that Labor gave to NSW workers has been cut to pieces not by Liberal administrations but first by Barry Unsworth's Labor government (1987) and now by Bob Carr. And an unreconstructed old-style Tory like Malcolm Fraser stands to the left of Kim Beazley on many issues.
The biggest omission in Bob Gould's narrative of the ALP as a timeless site of major battles between progressive and avowedly pro-capitalist forces is any mention of the small matter of who won.
This gap is rather remarkable, given that the late George Petersen, Labor MP for Illawarra for many years and life-long fellow warrior of Gould's in battles against the NSW ALP right and the "official" left of the Steering Committee, had no hesitation in reading the scoreline.
In his memoirs, George Petersen Remembers: the Contradictions, Problems and Betrayals of Labor in Government in New South Wales, he states:
"My experiences of the [Neville] Wran and Unsworth governments from 1976 to 1988 have reinforced my belief ... that the selfish and cowardly opportunism of Labor's parliamentary representatives means that Labor governments will never fulfil Labor's platform."
If the long-run history of the ALP hasn't been a process of taming, marginalising or booting out a left that is serious about its platform, then it hasn't been anything.
From 1923, when Jack Lang banned CPA affiliation, to the federal intervention in the Victorian branch in the 1970s, to the expulsion or forced departure of principled left-wingers like Bill Morrow, Bill Hartley, George Georges, George Petersen and countless others, the ALP right and fake left have ruthlessly reduced the space even for progressive democratic politics.
This does not mean that "the Laborites are essentially the same as the Howard Liberals", or that the ALP is "one reactionary mass" or totally made up of union barons and careerists — views Gould groundlessly attributes to me.
Obviously a Labor government that reduces unemployment via slightly greater job-creation (Paul Keating's "Working Nation") is marginally better than Tony Abbott's outright persecution of the unemployed. However, the question in all "policy areas" is: why are we stuck with this sort of awful choice?
None of this balance sheet implies that the independently organised socialist movement shouldn't pay the closest possible attention to developments within the ALP.
Indeed, it's one of the lessons of ALP history (a point Gould neglects) that Labor has introduced its best reforms when it has been under pressure from parties and movements acting upon its left flank and looking for the most productive ways to link up with sympathetic forces within the ALP.
Finally, let's concede for the sake of argument that Bob Gould is right about all these historical issues. Even if he is, the fact remains that his observations are all irrelevant to the key question that the emergence of Socialist Alliance is posing right across the Australian left today.
Firstly, can more be done for the socialist cause by continuing to mole away inside the putrid ALP universe of branch-stacking — especially now that the Socialist Alliance exists and interested leftists don't have to choose between any of its affiliate organisations?
Of the many tactics towards the ALP that socialists have had to employ over the years there's one that we can surely now discard — "entrism", or the insertion of small groups of socialists in order to win the most militant ALPers to their side.
The usual result of this tactic has been that what begins as a tactic hardens into a timeless strategy and then degenerates into a comfortable way of political life, as is exemplified by Bob Gould's own political trajectory.
On the basis of his 30 years of experience of internal struggle within the ALP, the verdict of George Petersen surely holds:
"With the advantage of hindsight I now believe the strategy [of entrism] was a flawed one. A revolutionary socialist who is a member of the ALP is essentially a parasite on the body politic of the ALP. The parasite enters the host and the host changes the parasite."
If that's true, why doesn't Bob Gould finally drop the ALP and join the Socialist Alliance? What else can he possibly be waiting for?
[Dick Nichols is the joint Acting National Convenor of the Socialist Alliance.]