Martin Greenfield responds to Daniel Friedman’s proposal for the Australian left to win control of union movement and use it to capture the Labor Party for socialism.
Daniel Friedman’s article, ‘The Australian left needs a strategy to win’, is welcome. While it runs counter to the strategic direction that Labor Tribune is trying to establish, at least it is a strategy. That is considerably more than can be said for most of the Australian left, which seems content to recycle the same tired and failed 20th-century formulas.
Friedman at least attempts to address the question of power. His proposal is that the left should take control of strategically important trade unions, use their delegations to capture the ALP and then replace right-wing MPs with socialists. Perhaps this could be supplemented by the emerging Socialist Party – or another third-party movement – outside Labor. But that shouldn’t be the focus, he argues.
My central criticism of the article is that it is naive about the nature of the capitalist state: it implies that by merely taking control of the existing state through ‘normal’ parliamentary politics, the left can ‘introduce socialism’.
In his analysis of the Paris Commune in 1871 Karl Marx established that this is not a working-class strategy for victory. He argued: “The working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes.”
Further, Friedman’s strategy does not offer an analysis of the trade union bureaucracy. It argues that ‘the left’ (which is not defined either organisationally or programmatically) can use the trade unions to introduce socialist policy into the ALP and to ensure preselection of socialist MPs to carry this through to parliament.
While more thought through, it is equally as fantastic as the ‘all power to the soviets’ re-enactment society approach of much of the Trotskyist student left, or the ‘don’t scare the horses’ popular frontism of the tired, old Stalinists.
Parliament cannot deliver state control
Friedman’s central assumption is that the institutional machinery of the Australian labour movement can be used to take control of the parliamentary state and introduce socialism. He proposes that broad-based rank-and-file caucuses be established in major unions, that the left support reform tickets financially and organisationally, and that the resulting union victories be used to take control of ALP conferences and executives.
This assumes that winning control of the parliamentary institutions of the capitalist state is equivalent to winning political power.
It is not.
It is a strategy, but it isn’t Marxism. More importantly, it can’t win.
The capitalist state is not simply a neutral administrative apparatus waiting for a sufficiently determined socialist government to take charge. Its institutions, monarchist constitutional arrangements, judiciary, police, military and permanent bureaucracy exist to maintain the conditions for capitalist rule. The parliamentary system operates within those limits.
A socialist government elected through normal parliamentary processes would not simply be able to legislate capitalism out of existence. The power of the capitalist class does not reside in parliament. It is embedded in property relations, the ownership and control of industry, the financial system, the coercive institutions of the state, and in social hegemony through education, culture and the like.
What would happen if a socialist government attempted to socialise major industries against the wishes of their owners? What happens when the courts intervene, when the Senate blocks legislation, if the military refuses to accept the authority of an elected government, or when the monarchy and its constitutional arrangements become a barrier to democratic change?
It is worth remembering that the armed forces swear allegiance to the Crown, not the people and the head of the armed forces is the Governor-General. The oath is quite explicit.
I, [name], promise that I will well and truly serve His Majesty King Charles the Third, His Heirs and Successors according to law, as a member of the [insert Royal Australian Navy, Australian Army, or Royal Australian Air Force] … and that I will resist his enemies and faithfully discharge my duty according to the law. So help me God!
Friedman does not address any of this.
The experience of Salvador Allende in Chile should be enough to disabuse anyone of the notion that an electoral victory, even with a substantial popular mandate, can be translated into socialist transformation simply by occupying government. Allende’s government faced the combined resistance of domestic capital, the US state, the military establishment – even the Australian Secret Intelligence Service. The outcome was a bloody military coup.
This is not an argument against contesting elections or fighting for reforms. It is an argument for understanding the limits of parliamentary politics and preparing the working class to confront the institutions that defend capitalist power.
Without a strategy to transform the state itself, parliamentary socialism is a dead end.
What sort of rank and file?
Friedman’s proposal also rests on a rather simplistic and naive understanding of trade union politics.
There is nothing inherently socialist about winning a union election. Nor does a rank-and-file ticket necessarily represent a movement for working-class political independence. Union democracy, accountability and industrial militancy are important, but they do not automatically produce a socialist political program.
‘Broad left’ tickets where socialists water down their politics in alliance with petty-bourgeois elements like Greens and non-socialists are a dead end and end up replicating the trade union bureaucracy.
Friedman points to recent victories by reform tickets in the CPSU and the Victorian Allied Health Professionals Association (VAHPA) as evidence that the union bureaucracy can be challenged.
The VAHPA result is particularly revealing.
The VAHPA Pulse ticket won close to two-thirds of the vote in the recent union election. That is a substantial mandate and was hailed as a victory by Socialist Alternative’s Red Flag. But what was the political basis of the campaign?
Pulse promised a “positive vision for our union”, pledging to build a “vibrant, fighting union” that would challenge employers and government over wages, workloads and workplace respect. It promised transparency, member participation, better communication and more accountable leadership.
All worthy objectives. But there was nothing about socialism, working-class political power, the socialisation of industry, abolition of the Fair Work Act, opposition to militarism or imperialism or the need to transform society.
The deep irony is that the incumbent VAHPA Unity leadership had itself emerged from a campaign presented as a victory for the rank and file. In 2012, Craig McGregor and his team won control of Victorian HSU Branch 3, which became VAHPA, following the scandal surrounding the Health Services Union and the criminal conduct of several of its senior officials.
The union’s own 2013 account celebrated the result as a victory for the rank and file. McGregor is a former member of the Democratic Socialist Party, a forerunner of Socialist Alliance, and a socialist activist. VAHPA was also among the earliest union supporters of the Victorian Socialists project in 2018.
As Liz Walsh reported in Marxist Left Review – the theory journal of Socialist Alternative – in her account of the launch of Victorian Socialists, McGregor and VAHPA provided early financial support for the project.
What has been achieved politically? There is no reason to diminish the importance of union democracy or the members’ right to elect their representatives. But it demonstrates precisely why union election victories cannot be treated as a measure of socialist advance. They are more about the churn of the intermediate layer that the union full-timers represent.
The same problem applies to the British example of Sharon Graham’s election to lead Unite, which comrade Friedman has raised. Ostensibly a ‘militant’ who will ‘hold Labour to account’, Graham has championed investment in Britain’s defence industries and military production as a means of protecting jobs and industrial capacity. Whatever the merits of particular industrial campaigns, this is not a socialist challenge to militarism or imperialism. It demonstrates how easily industrial interests can be framed within the priorities of the existing state and its military-industrial economy.
The recent United Workers Union election provides another example. Much of the socialist press presented the Members First ticket, led by Tim Kennedy, as a rank-and-file insurgency against an entrenched bureaucracy. The incumbent United for You ticket, led by Jo Schofield, was cast as the baddies.
While there were genuine elements within Members First seeking renewed militancy and less capitulation to the ALP machine, this was better understood as a contest between competing layers of the union leadership and careerists than as a struggle between socialist politics and the bureaucracy. Members First made some worthwhile proposals about member participation, strike funds and greater transparency, but it did not represent a political alternative to the existing union leadership in any meaningful sense.
In this case, the United for You incumbents retained the national leadership, despite Members First making significant gains in several electorates.
Indeed, the re-elected leadership is now campaigning for a four-day working week on the same pay. This is a completely supportable demand for socialists to champion. It illustrates the danger of reducing union politics to a contest between supposedly progressive and conservative tickets. Political positions must be assessed on their merits, not according to which faction happens to hold office. Militant rank-and-file movements must hold union leaders to account and support them to the extent they fight for the long-term interests of the working class as a whole.
The union bureaucracy has its own interests
Friedman suggests that by winning control of the United Workers Union, the public service CPSU and even the conservative SDA ‘shoppies’ union, the left could secure control of the ALP. This is no small undertaking. But even if it were achieved, on what political basis would this new left operate?
It should not go unmentioned that the ‘actually-existing’ ALP Left faction already has control of the ALP national conference and national executive, not least a man in the Lodge. Yet this has done nothing to prevent the ALP leadership from being an increasingly conventional managers of capitalist government that supports US imperialism.
The problem is that Friedman treats the trade union movement as an institutional lever that can be pulled by the left, without analysing the material interests of the people who occupy its leadership positions. With an independent class instrument to hold these people to account, they will pursue their own interests.
Trade unions are essential organisations of the working class. But their leaderships are not automatically representative of the political interests of the working class as a whole. Over time, a layer of full-time officials, organisers and union careerists develops its own material interests in maintaining its position within the industrial and political establishment.
This is not simply a question of individual corruption or bad leadership. It is a structural feature of the relationship between the union bureaucracy, the employers and the state.
Union officials can become more concerned with preserving their institutional influence, maintaining relationships with government and securing their place in the ALP than with advancing the independent political interests of workers.
Friedman’s strategy risks reproducing precisely this layer of union bureaucrats, only with different political affiliations and perhaps more militant rhetoric.
He proposes that the left take control of unions and use their resources and delegations to secure socialist pre-selections. But what guarantees that the new union leaderships will remain accountable to a socialist program once they have acquired the positions, resources and institutional interests of their predecessors?
There is no answer.
Trade unions are, fundamentally, bourgeois institutions of the working class. They exist as defence organisations and bodies to negotiate the price of wage-labour within capitalism. The layer of officials, which has become increasing incorporated into the operation of the capitalist state, has become a mostly permanent layer between the working class and the capitalists and their state.
This layer has its own material interests, connected to, but separate from the working class itself.
The lessons of history
Friedman invokes the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) as an historical example of the strategy he advocates. He is right to point to the extraordinary industrial influence the CPA once exercised. At its height, it commanded significant support in the ACTU and led many of the country’s most important industrial unions.
Further, the CPA gained a significant foothold within the ALP at times.
Communist unionists played a major role in building the labour movement, organising industrial struggles and winning important improvements in workers’ conditions. Beyond that, the led unions in political campaigns against imperialism, against war, for Aboriginal liberation, against apartheid. Their achievements should not be dismissed.
But the history is more complicated than Friedman suggests.
The CPA’s influence in the unions did not automatically translate into the development of a mass political movement capable of challenging capitalist power. As the politics of the CPA degenerated to reformism, its role in the unions diminished also.
Nor was the party’s union work free from bureaucratic practices and factional manoeuvring. The CPA sometimes used anti-democratic methods to maintain its positions in unions. The allegations of vote rigging surrounding the 1949 Federated Ironworkers Association election, whether or not they were true, contributed to the loss of communist influence in that union.
But the CPA was a mass party of the working class. From the 1920s until its long death by a thousand opportunist cuts, it organised the cream of the working class. It mobilised resources, presented a vision that, while inadequate, challenged elements of labourism and the automatic ‘common sense’ of the working class.
However, even with such an organisation, the CPA could not break this labourite monopoly. This was partly because of its reformist and ‘Stalinised’ politics. Even so, despite its inadequacies, there no organisation today that comes close to being able to mobilise such forces that the CPA did. Without such an independent political organisation that is grounded in the working class and represents at least a layer of our class, achieving control of a few unions through ‘broad rank-and-file’ tickets is a fantasy strategy.
A more recent example is instructive.
The Socialist Party of Australia (SPA), a 1971 pro-Soviet split from the CPA now known as the Communist Party of Australia, developed a broadly correct position in opposition to the class-collaborationist Prices and Incomes Accord negotiated between the ACTU and the incoming Hawke Labor government in 1983.
The Accord subordinated workers’ independent industrial interests to the economic priorities of the Labor government. It sought to contain wage demands in return for promised social wage benefits, integrating the union movement into the management of Australian capitalism, and heralding in global neoliberalism, albeit with a ‘social democratic face’.
The SPA opposed this arrangement. Yet some of its most prominent union leaders, particularly in the Building Workers Industrial Union, the Seamen’s Union and the Waterside Workers’ Federation, baulked at implementing the party’s position. They argued that doing so would jeopardise their influence within their respective unions.
Among them were Pat Clancy and Tom McDonald of the BWIU, who broke with the SPA over the issue and formed the short-lived Association for Communist Unity.
These people were political and industrial giants compared to most of today’s union leaders. They advocated for socialism in their unions. But even they broke with their party’s political position to protect their positions within the unions.
This shows how committed socialist union leaders can become subordinated to the material interests associated with their positions in the trade union bureaucracy.
Bennism and Corbynism
Friedman also points to Tony Benn and the British Labour left as evidence that unions can provide a path to political power. The Bennite movement achieved significant victories in the early 1970s, including winning control of Labour’s National Executive Committee and securing important changes to party democracy and policy. However, it shared Friedman’s touching faith that the capitalist class and the monarchy would accept a parliamentary majority that sought to take its property.
Despite Benn’s towering influence the parliamentary party and the state remained beyond its control. The left’s influence over party conference and the NEC did not amount to control over the capitalist state. Corbyn’s later leadership, despite its enormous popular appeal and the mass membership mobilisation around it, demonstrated similar limitations. A left leadership of a parliamentary party can be isolated, undermined and ultimately removed without having transformed the institutions of capitalist power. Had Corbyn won an election, no doubt the various star-formation defence systems would have come into play.
The farcical end of Corbynism through the still-born Your Party underlines this as a dead end.
The experience of Allende in Chile is an even more devastating example of the limits of an electoral strategy that does not prepare the working class to confront the coercive institutions of the state.
If you think the capitalist class will give up its power and property peacefully, you are dangerously mistaken.
What is the alternative?
Friedman is right about one thing: the Australian left needs to rebuild its organisational capacity. His article points, perhaps unintentionally, to the central problem. He identifies the historical importance of the CPA, its industrial organisation and its capacity to intervene in the ALP. What is missing from his proposal is the political organisation that could give such activity a coherent socialist purpose.
We need the re-emergence of a serious communist organisation in Australia. That is the priority and focus for us in Labor Tribune.
We need a mass communist organisation, built on open political debate, democratic organisation united under a coherent Marxist program. Such an organisation must be capable of working in the ALP, the trade unions and broader working-class movements while maintaining its political independence.
A socialist government cannot simply take office and expect the existing institutions to obediently implement its program. Without a strategy to break the political and coercive power of the ruling class, the working class will be left exposed to the same forces that defeated Gough Whitlam in 1975 or worse, Allende in 1973.
This is why Labor Tribune prioritises arming the left with a political program that can prepare the working class for real power. This takes revolutionary patience and building a mass communist organisation – not seeking short cuts for bureaucratic power through the unions.
There is a rich history of socialists contesting power within trade unions and the ALP. We should learn from it, including its failures. Trade union democracy, rank-and-file organisation and industrial militancy are essential components of working-class politics. But they cannot substitute for a mass political organisation committed to the overthrow of capitalism.
Friedman’s strategy offers a shortcut to political influence through the acquisition of union positions and ALP delegations. At best, it risks reproducing another layer of union bureaucrats. At worst, it could leave a generation of socialists politically disarmed when the real struggle for power begins.
Unless we have a disciplined mass party and organisation openly based on Marxist revolutionary socialist politics, simply trying to grab hold of the union levers of power in localised fights for power, without openly winning the masses of the working class to an understanding of their own role in society and our power to change it, this is a doomed and dangerous strategy.
Socialism cannot be delivered from on high to the working class, whether by a parliamentary majority, a union executive or a conference resolution. It can only be achieved through the conscious political activity of the working class itself.
Daniel Friedman’s strategy wants to commit us to repeat the mistakes of the past, albeit at a lower level without a militant and mass communist organisation worthy of the name.