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Competing for the hearts and minds of the working class in the twentieth century were the ideas of fascism and communism. These ideas – and the concept of revolution they produced – were never supported by Labor. As Lenin said in 1913, “The Australian Labor Party does not even call itself a socialist party. Actually it is a liberal-bourgeois party, while the so-called Liberals in Australia are really conservatives.” Labor’s leaders, he continued, were “altogether peaceable, purely liberal.”
Labor’s commitment to electoral politics was a principled rather than a tactical one. The party was willing to compromise not just in the interests of building alliances but also because peaceful existence rested on mutual respect and accommodation. It was reformist or, as the Marxists put it, “revisionist.” It certainly wasn’t revolutionary in organisation or outlook.
A socialist party?
If you look at Labor’s history and its platform you would be hard-pressed to conclude it was a socialist party. It does believe in what we used to call a mixed economy rather than in a fully privatised or a fully socialised one. Private, public and community-based enterprises have all been supported, a good mix between the three being seen as the best to produce good outcomes from an economic system. Sometimes that has meant bringing enterprises and activities into the public sector and sometimes the reverse through privatisation or contracting arrangements.
Support for competition as opposed to monopoly led some of the first Labor governments to create public enterprises to provide choice for consumers and better working conditions for workers. In the 1970s Gough Whitlam proposed freer trade, as did his successors in the 1980s and early 1990s, but they added to the mix what came to be known as national competition policy.
Nor could it be said that Labor has been a proponent of equality of outcomes. It has always supported fair wages for work performed, and a tax and public expenditure mix that evens things out in the interests of equality of opportunity and social mobility. The approach taken by the philosopher John Rawls is a good, if not perfect, description of what Labor has represented in Australian political economy. All offices and positions, he said, should be open to all – and effectively, not just formally, so. Inequality was justified but only to the extent that it worked to the advantage of the worst-off in society. It’s not a socialist but rather a fair society to which Labor is attracted.
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Workers – unskilled or skilled, blue collar or white collar – are employed by others who own the means of production. They are employees who work for a wage and there are plenty of them, even though self-employment has gained added traction in our economy and society. It is true that Labor was formed from the movement created by such workers in the late nineteenth century, and they have continued to play a role – directly and indirectly – in the party.
In some ways the idea in play when describing Labor as a working-class party is a pretty simple one. Labor should provide a framework within which this working class in all its manifestations works out a set of policies to take to an election. In other words it should be a party owned by the working class and controlled by the majority view therein.
The working class doesn’t exist in a vacuum and nor is its future immune from technological and social change, be it global or local.
Like other classes in our society it needs leadership – and hopefully that leadership will not just project the party’s interests today but also urge it to think ahead and plan for tomorrow.
That, I believe, is the way Hawke and Keating saw their task – not to mirror working-class opinion but rather to engage it around a national narrative that showed an understanding of working-class needs but also challenged workers and their unions to accept change.
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It seems to me that Labor has always worked best when it’s been more than just the sum of its parts. It is – but it is not just – an organisation for workers and their unions. It is also, importantly, a party that can “think big” about minorities as well as majorities, about the environment as well as the economy and about the future as well as the present.
Indeed it’s been a good thing that the structure of the party was such that intellectuals, the self-employed, small business people, professionals and the well-intentioned wealthy were given the chance to influence its development. Indeed, they were part of the dynamic that helped push Labor into new areas of policy and also into thinking more broadly than its working-class base might allow. Importantly, as well, they added to and complemented a bohemian and libertarian element that existed in parts of the working class.
How, then, do we bring this together? Labor is clearly for democracy and equal representation. Sometimes radical but sometimes conservative, it has been influenced by socialism but isn’t socialist. It’s strongly influenced by the working class but isn’t just a working-class party. It’s connected to unions but not all unions are affiliated. There have been libertarian, socialist, environmental and communitarian influences on the development of the Platform but none of them on their own describes what the party has represented in Australian history. I’m led, therefore, to favour social democracy as the preferred description – a party of democracy that brings the social question to the table, and more recently the environmental one as well.
Reform implications
I’m left with a problem. The preferred description I have given for Labor doesn’t fit well with the structures inherited from the past. Indeed the party’s organisational structure is out of tune – and radically so – with the world in which it seeks support. In a party with many members and strongly supported unions social democracy was well-placed to succeed against other tendencies, and not just in the working class. Labor could produce personnel and craft policies that attracted majorities at the local, state and national levels of government. In a sense, Labor was a mini political and democratic system working within the larger system that was Australian democracy.
Today the working class still exists and needs support in the interests of fairness, but it is a different beast which both the party and trade unions find harder to engage. Both Labor and unions need more democracy, not less, if they are to attract not just workers and their families but also others in our society. Today this has to mean party structures that put members on an equal base and that create new community-based methods of preselection. In such a world Labor’s distinctive policy platform should be viewed as the basis for attracting members, not as an inconvenience to be discarded when it suits. It is true that specific powerful interests may lose out in this process but they will not include, I would contend, the working class or social democracy and the ideas it favours. The reason for that is simple – they are good ideas and we should be confident of their capacity to win over a majority.