The Guardian 3 September, 2008
Editorial
Capitalist nature of social democracy
Ninety-five years ago in 1913, Lenin wrote a short article on the Australian political scene.
He wrote: "What sort of a peculiar capitalist country is this in which the workers’ representatives predominate in the Upper House… yet the capitalist system is in no danger? 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." (Lenin Collected Works Vol 19, p 216).
Since that time there have been a number of fluctuations but no basic change in the social democracy of the ALP. There was an initial splurge in which a number of public enterprises were set up by an ALP federal government but they were aimed at developing a capitalist economy in Australia — not a socialist one.
All these enterprises were subsequently privatised or closed, a process that is still going on.
There was the all too short period of the Whitlam government which introduced a number of more radical reforms in the early 1970s. But they were soon cut short by the predominant capitalist economic and political forces and the media. Whitlam was soon followed by the right-wing Hawke and Keating Labor governments.
They enthusiastically introduced the economic rationalist theories of Milton Friedman — privatisation of enterprises and abandonment of the more liberal theories of Keynes. In industrial relations the award system was dismantled and the Hawke/Keating governments set about introducing enterprise bargaining which was aimed at dividing workers and weakening the union movement. They pushed the class collaboration theories of the Accord, began the attacks on welfare and continued the slavish subservience to the most reactionary sections of the US ruling class.
Hawke and Keating were followed by John Howard who took the same path but intensified the right-wing conservative course.
Howard stepped up the attacks on the trade unions and the working class (WorkChoices), on refugees (the Pacific Solution), on public education (promotion of Church and independent schools), on health care (by promoting private hospitals and undermining the universal character of Medicare), by throwing Australia into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and by more privatisation of formerly publicly owned enterprises (Telstra and airports, etc).
If the electorate expected that a Rudd/Gillard ALP government would reverse important aspects of Howard’s policies they are already beginning to see the reality.
In fact in some ways the Rudd government is already showing that it is more anti-working class even than Howard.
The failure to really ditch WorkChoices, the retention of the ABCC which has fascist-like powers, the blackmail threats against teachers and public education, its continued support of privatisation, and its pro-US, pro-war, pro-imperialist foreign policy: many of its social and economic policies differ very little from those of the Howard government.
As Lenin wrote all those years ago — "The ALP is really Liberal and the Liberals are really conservatives."
In some respects the ALP leadership has become more conservative than the conservatives — witness the gyrations of the ALP leadership and the Liberal party leadership over the privatisation of the electricity network in NSW.
The ALP leaders are being enthusiastically supported by the capitalist-owned mass media which has not lost sight of its class interests.
This differentiation and exposure of the realities are a necessary stage in the progress in the political consciousness of the Australian people.
Right-wing social democracy (the ALP leadership) has always been a major road-block on the path to the forward development of political consciousness in Australia. The path must be cleared.
It is a slow process but it is happening.
The disillusionment now taking place in the trade union movement and among more workers is perhaps a start.
Then there is the social and economic crisis that is steadily overtaking the capitalist economic and social system.
Another depression as devastating as the great depression of the 1930s is not to be ruled out.
It would have devastating consequences for the lives and living standards of millions of people and if sophisticated leadership is provided by the genuine left and progressive forces — communists, left Labor and others — Australia will also put its foot on the road similar to that now being followed in Latin America and elsewhere.