By Tom Flanagan
SYDNEY — About 90 people attended a seminar titled "Globalisation and the Third Way" presented by the International Socialist Organisation on April 16 at the University of Technology, Sydney. Speakers were ALP parliamentarian Mark Latham (author of Civilising Global Capital) and Alison Stewart, editor of the ISO newspaper Socialist Worker.
In his presentation, Latham claimed his "third way" is an attempt to apply traditional left-wing values in the context of "globalisation" and the "information age" and thus enable social democratic parties to remain relevant in the future.
He justified the accommodation with capitalism that his project involves by claiming that the growing number of information workers are escaping from alienation through the production process by working in self-managed teams and thereby controlling their own labour.
Latham argued that the economic revolution embodied in the information age had achieved what Marxists thought possible only through a political revolution. This, he concludes, makes political revolution no longer necessary and class struggle old hat. The information age, he says, is dissolving the dialectical tension between capital and labour.
Stewart accurately pointed out that the supposed ability of multinational capital to wander the globe in search of the best deal has become a justification for social democratic parties to shift to the right, further accommodating the interests of capital.
However, she failed to mention the consistent role of the ALP in serving the interests of Australian capital. Against Latham's right-wing Labor policies she called for "old-style Labor policies", such as increasing taxes on business, a 35-hour week with no loss in pay and nationalisation.
The ensuing discussion indicated that no-one took Latham's claims about the irrelevance of class struggle seriously. Unfortunately, the question of how to get the policies advocated by Stewart implemented was not pursued.
Historically the Labor Party has implemented socially progressive policies only when it has been under the pressure of mass struggles for reforms, when the interests of capital, even the preservation of the legitimacy of the capitalist order, has required that such concessions be granted.
Was Stewart advocating working inside the Labor Party to change its policies, pressuring it from the outside or breaking with the Labor Party altogether and building a political alternative? These are key questions for socialists, yet they were not investigated.
While all participants were able to disagree with the individual Mark Latham, they were not challenged by the ISO to come to grips with the question of the Labor Party itself.