With a world in crisis, the left is struggling to rethink how to engage in mass politics that are true to the radical traditions of Marxism. Labor Tribune aims to contribute to a renaissance.
It seems there has never been a greater disparity between the need to radically change society and the capacity of the workers’ movement to do so.
To achieve real social change, the working class needs a political party armed with a democratic program that lays out the strategic road to socialism, in Australia and internationally.
Faced with this task, however, socialists today have difficulty uniting, thinking critically and pursuing the collective work of getting that job under way.
Labor Tribune aims to be a forum to support that shared work.
Since the slow collapse of the Communist Party in Australia reached its miserable end in 1991, the radical left has seemed scattered into disparate tribes speaking different languages, repeating errors of the last century over and again. What was then tragedy has become farce.
A culture of unity seems beyond the fragments of the Marxist left. Yet this is what is needed as part of a general fightback against the rapaciousness of unfettered capitalism.
Socialism – the positive transformation of capitalist society – can only be the conscious and democratic act of the working class, the vast majority of global society. Capitalism won’t end spontaneously, except negatively, through war, environmental catastrophe and barbarism.
Where the left does seek to become relevant to masses of people, it mostly does so on a reformist agenda far below what is needed to achieve radical change.
Genuine debate, unity in action
Left groups often focus narrowly on recruiting to their ranks: every cause is measured by how ‘recruitable’ it is. Real and important differences in doctrine and tradition between organisations and trends calls for genuine and open debate. Where differences are acknowledged, they are more often dealt with in a sterile, diplomatic and formulaic manner. Mostly, though, differences are buried as embarrassing squabbles, not to be had ‘in front of the children’: a false unity at the lowest common denominator is preached.
Yet, to become the ruling class of a socialist society, the working class needs a culture of democracy and openness, where differences can be debated and discussed in the open and unity in action achieved at the highest possible level.
With a world in crisis, the left is struggling to rethink how to engage in mass politics that are true to the radical and democratic traditions of Marxism. Labor Tribune aims to contribute to a renaissance in the way the left collectively thinks, debates and organises.
Marxism is not about delivering the ‘truth’ as Holy scripture to the working class, it is a social science, a methodology and a weapon for the working class to grab hold of and learn in order to make itself into a ruling class and sweep capitalism aside.
The absence of a radical organised left and the victories of neoliberal capitalism since the 1980s have seen the ALP become ever more open in its championing of capitalism and nationalism. In Australia, this has reached an apogee where the titular head of the ALP ‘left’ is now a prime minister who embraces a military alliance with the United States to prop up its fading empire.
This side of the workers’ movement, the ‘coalitionist’ wing that seeks compromise with the system, is more powerful than ever before and in full embrace of collaboration with the capitalist class, hoping to achieve crumbs from the table.
Much of the far left, on the other hand, forlornly hopes that the working class will arise spontaneously through a ‘streets and strikes’ strategy that has proven in practice to be illusionary.
Political leadership, mass organisation and a political program are absent.
What happened to Pax Americana?
The global withering of the workers’ and socialist movements over the past 40 years has left the planet open to the largely unrestricted greed of the capitalist system and its ruling classes.
The Soviet Union was a living example of what goes wrong when a workers’ revolution is isolated in a backward country and fails to transform the most advanced economies. The USSR became its opposite – a testament to the fact that without democracy and internationalism, socialism is not sustainable.
The anti-democratic ‘emergency measures’ taken to try to save that revolution were turned into organisational principles by most of the left, ensuring we lost the fight for democracy again and again.
Yet the collapse of the Soviet Union was meant to herald a Pax Americana, a peace dividend and the final triumph of liberal capitalism. That was all buried in the bloodied sands of Iraq in 2003, when the USA, UK, Australia and others invaded based on invented ‘intelligence evidence’ of weapons of mass destruction that simply didn’t exist.
Since then, we have seen an explosion in inequality, an environmental catastrophe unfolding before us and the world inching closer to wars that could trigger a nuclear exchange, obliterating modern civilisation.
This has not gone uncontested. As Vincent Bevins noted in his book If We Burn, the decade up to 2020 saw more people mobilised in mass demonstration than perhaps in all human history. From the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 up to the COVID pandemic, millions of people took to the streets as part of the Arab Spring, as part of the Occupy movement, on the streets of Chile and South Korea, in Hong Kong and Brazil.
Yet Bevins says that while the 2010s was the ‘Mass Protest Decade’ it was also the decade of the ‘Missing Revolution’.
In an interview with Jewish Currents, Bevins said that if you contest power, you better be prepared to take it because “a counterrevolution always comes”. And he argues the radical left and workers’ movements globally were not prepared to take power out of the hands of the oligarchs and warmongers.
‘At the beginning of the 2010s, a lot of people had the assumption that if they raised enough awareness, if they proved very clearly that they were right, and if the people were on their side, then the people in power would have to respond positively. And that’s just simply not true, especially when you’re dealing with geopolitics.’
Vincent Bevins
Protest is not enough. Politics is key.
We are learning this over again in the protests against the genocide in Gaza. On the coalitionist wing of the Palestine solidarity movement, there is a touching faith in international law and a vain hope that the UN can deliver a two-states solution.
Much of the far left seems to think that by holding ever larger demonstrations, this will trigger a radical transformation leading to a break from imperialism and Zionism.
Both strategies are dead ends, not just for Gaza, but for the workers’ movement in general.
Rebuilding strategy, rebuilding memory
It is, unfortunately, as if the working class has lost its memory. And in a sense, it has. The role played by the communist parties in countries like Australia was to act as the memory and collective organiser of the most militant and far-sighted parts of the working class.
While the communist movement had faded into a left reformist shell of its former potential, it still organised the most militant workers and kept the memory and hope of a better society alive.
Labor Tribune aims to contribute to the formation of an authoritative political centre that can rebuild a revolutionary strategy for the working-class movement, with militant opposition to the monarchist constitutional order at its centre.
This is no mere academic exercise. While the working class needs Marxism, it is equally true that Marxism needs the working class.
German social democratic leader, Karl Kautsky, said one of the great historical achievements of Karl Marx was the merger of the labour movement with socialism.
Until that unity is once again achieved, socialism cannot become a material force.
Why are you in the Labor Party?
The project to rebuild a mass Marxist left in this country will need to involve political struggle in the existing organisations of the working class; that includes the trade unions and the Labor Party as well as the groups of the socialist left.
We publish in our first edition of Labor Tribune a letter from the Communist International to the Communist Party of Australia from 1922. It urges the new CPA to work with the ALP, even though it was an openly racist and pro-Empire party. This was not in pursuit of a peace agreement, but to “unmask the opportunist leaders of the Labor Party”.
While a century has passed, it is still relevant for Marxists in Australia to organise in the Labor Party, in the unions and to seek joint work towards organisational unity with socialists across the labour movement.
To help achieve that, Labor Tribune will facilitate debate and support socialist organisation across the movement. Most of us are in the ALP, not because we harbour illusions that in its current form the ALP can lead the working class to socialism, but because a mass working class party dedicated to the revolutionary transformation of society will need, in part, to go through the existing organisations of the working class.
The Australian Labor Party is and has always been a capitalist or bourgeois workers’ party. It also represents an echo of working-class consciousness – the need for the workers to organise. The ALP seeks reforms that protect and benefit the working class in Australia, but it does so strictly within and is moulded by Australian capitalism’s priorities and its social, political and parliamentary framework.
In its rules, the ALP describes itself as a ‘democratic socialist party’ and has as its first objective the socialisation of means of production, distribution and exchange (with Cold War-era provisos introduced in the early 1950s). This means the Labor Party is a strange beast – a contradiction born of the needs of the working class to organise but dominated by the ideology of the capitalist class.
This makes it an important area of struggle. While the mass of the working class presently has no vision of a socialist future, it seeks a better life within capitalism through the ALP. To the extent the working class mobilises for socialism, this will in part manifest within the ALP.
That is why for Marxists, working in a liberal-bourgeois workers’ party is as relevant as working in the trade unions or working in the broader movement as part of our fight for a workers’ party that is organised around a revolutionary and democratic program.
Marxists, communists and socialists should seek to shape the political nature of the ALP’s left wing – from within and without – and not just leave it to spontaneous formation. We fight for the ALP to be an open, democratic united front of the working class where socialists and communists can openly argue for their politics.
Our aim is to overturn the current ‘commonsense’ of Laborism, which seeks reforms while maintaining capitalism, with a new commonsense of Marxism, championing the working class to embrace democratic republicanism and socialism.
As we state in our founding ‘About Us’ statement:
- 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 parliamentary and union 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.
We look forward to working with all those in the ALP and the broader workers’ movement who share our vision for a world without war, without classes, without exploitation, without oppression, without environmental calamity. Just imagine what we can achieve together.