Labor Tribune aims to contribute to a renewal of socialist thought and practice in the Australian Labor Party and labour movement. It is a resource for news, opinion, discussion and debate. While supporters of Labor Tribune are mainly members of the ALP its website, forums and publications are open to views from across the working-class movement and the socialist left.
We fight for the unity of the working class in a single mass party committed to the revolutionary transformation of capitalism and the victory of socialism.
Socialism and the ALP
The Australian Labor Party constitution states the organisation is a “democratic socialist party” and its first objective is the “democratic socialisation of industry, production, distribution and exchange to the extent necessary to eliminate exploitation and other anti-social features in these fields”.
Yet the ALP has never been a socialist party. It is party based on the unions with a mass working class voting base, but with a leadership committed to managing capitalism.
A central task for socialists is to positively overcome this contradiction as part of the fight against Laborism and for the formation of a mass workers’ party committed to the victory of socialism.
Labor Tribune holds that support for capitalism is incompatible with the ALP’s socialisation objective. Capitalism’s essence is the accumulation of private wealth through the exploitation of human labour power and the out-of-control abuse of our planet’s resources.
Only the complete socialisation of industry, production, distribution and exchange can eliminate exploitation. The main structural impediment to human progress is the contradiction between the increasing socialised nature of production and the continued private accumulation of its wealth. Human progress is incompatible with private property.
Capitalism had a beginning, it will have an end
All around the evidence of capitalist degeneration is visible: ecological crisis, climate change and species extinction; heightened militarism risking world war and nuclear catastrophe; economic crisis, extreme wealth disparity, alienation, sexual oppression, national chauvinism and social fragmentation.
Yet, as a species we have the potential to create a world of human prosperity, ecological sustainability, peace, global cooperation and solidarity.
The workers’ movement and the left remain hopelessly divided in its opposition to capitalism or complicit in its continuation. The collapse of ‘official’ communism and the decline of reformist social democracy means that narrow electoral pragmatism is the main vision driving the Australian Labor Party. But minimalist programs to incrementally improve the lot of workers under capitalism are uninspiring and worse than inadequate.
While creating the material basis for socialism, by turning human beings and our labour power into mere commodities, capitalism rips the democratic heart out of modern society.
Yet, more than at any time in its past, the ALP is dominated by the politics of managing capital, not politics in the interests of the working class.
Labor Tribune rejects this pessimism and champions a resurgence of socialism in the labour movement. Capitalism had a beginning, and it will have an end.
We face a choice between the barbarism of social alienation, increased militarism and environmental pillage or socialism, collective solutions to our problems and a positive future for our species.
Labor Tribune
- Labor Tribune promotes analysis from a Marxist perspective.
- The experiences of the 20th century show us that socialism without democracy becomes its opposite. This is the case for Stalin’s Soviet Union and present-day China as much as it is the case for social democracy.
- Labor Tribune is for the political independence of the working class. Our class is the only consistently democratic class. The struggle for workers’ liberation is a political, rather than a purely economic, struggle. Workers must champion their own freedom and the democratic struggles of all oppressed peoples.
- Labor Tribune supports women’s equality and sexual liberation as vital to the future of humanity and intrinsic to the struggle for socialism. Sexism, homophobia and transphobia are hostile to the interests of the working class.
- Labor Tribune recognises Australia is a junior imperialist power within the global militarised hierarchy and falls within the control system of the United States. Australia acts as the local enforcer of the imperialist order.
- Labor Tribune opposes militarism, imperialism and its wars. We are for the withdrawal of Australia from the ANZUS alliance, Five Eyes intelligence syndicate and AUKUS.
- Originating as a British colonial possession, Australia has never accounted for the genocidal dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. We support the struggles of Australia’s First Nations and oppose the racist colonial legacy of Australia’s foundation.
- Labor Tribune is for the unity of workers in a mass party committed to the revolutionary transformation of capitalist society and the establishment of socialism – the democratic rule of the working class.
- Labor Tribune combats all manifestations of opportunism in the labour movement. The tendency for our leaders, parliamentarians, officials and some sections of our class to accommodate with, or capitulate to, the interests of capital is the greatest barrier preventing our class uniting around a consistently democratic and socialist program.
- Labor Tribune supports socialist and working-class unity at the highest possible level, based on open democratic debate and unity of action around a socialist program in a mass party. We oppose sect organisational methods, which have typically discredited Marxist politics in the labour movement.
- The ALP is a contradictory class formation. While it has never been socialist it is a party based on the organised labour movement but with a leadership that pursue pro-capitalist politics.
- The role of Marxists is to overcome the central contradiction of Laborism positively by building a political centre in the labour movement that not only analyses the world but attempts to change it. Marxists campaign for working-class socialist politics in all areas of the labour movement and society.
- The ALP is riven with factionalism. However, with the demise of the Cold War and the collapse of the Communist Party, ideological divisions between left and right have effectively disappeared. The factions now operate mainly as machinery to divide power and jobs between career aspirants.
Labor Tribune promotes republicanism, socialism and internationalism. The working class can only come to power in the form of a democratic republic. Socialism is international and democratic, or it is nothing.