S11 shows: there is an alternative

September 27, 2000
Issue 

BY PETER BOYLE Picture

The September 18 issue of the Melbourne Age carried an article by former left activist John Passant, who warned: "Kim Beazley should be worried. The events in Melbourne last week represent a long-term political threat to the ALP ...

"Politically S11 may become the ALP's One Nation. The issues that S11 has highlighted will be the ones that draw people to the various groups that make up the protest movement — and away from the ALP."

Passant's warning echoed the Australian's international editor, Paul Kelly, who wrote on September 16: "The alarm bells should be ringing for the Labor Party. For Labor there are three ominous messages: that a new Left coalition with potential mass appeal is mobilising on an anti-globalisation rhetoric; that the trade union movement is increasingly ideologically divided from the ALP; and that a Beazley government would face a deep philosophical rift among its institutional supporters."

How far off is the emergence of a stronger left alternative to the ALP? Picture

First, the 20-30,000-strong S11 blockade of the World Economic Forum confirmed a large constituency to the left of Labor which rejects the bipartisan commitment to neo-liberalism.

The Hawke and Keating federal Labor governments began the rampage of privatisation, cuts to social spending and attacks on workers' rights that Howard's Coalition government has since taken further.

Federal Labor has hung on to its commitment to economic neo-liberalism in opposition. In the four states it governs, Labor is relentlessly pushing privatisation and public austerity. So it hasn't rebuilt its image as a "workers party", and the traditional plea of the Labor left to "stay in and change the party" has lost its audience.

Second, S11 showed that this left constituency can act strongly, independently of the ALP, the main institution that the ruling class has traditionally relied on to control social movements.

Victorian Labor Premier Steve Bracks joined in a tag team with Howard and Costello to defend corporate globalisation. In the wake of the Bracks-applauded police violence at S11, a new wave of disgust at the ALP is sweeping Victoria. Resignations are mounting; unions and even Bracks' local branch of the ALP have passed motions of condemnation. Picture

Unions

However, the ALP is closely interlocked with the trade union bureaucracy. This bureaucracy guarantees jobs for the boys and girls — in the unions and, for the few who climb to the top of the greasy pole, there's the prospect of a parliamentary seat. This corrupt machine recruits and trains an army of cynical and self-serving hacks who know that to climb to the top they have to keep the working class under control.

The union bureaucracy kept the union ranks on a tight leash during Labor's 13-year term in federal government, allowing Hawke and Keating to implement the neo-liberal agenda.

Many a progressive movement in this country has been tamed by the ALP. However, in recent years there have been significant if partial break-outs.

The militant movement in solidarity with the Maritime Union in 1998 had elements of this, but the Labor hacks eventually brought it under control and imposed a significant retreat on the waterside workers.

The victorious solidarity movement with East Timor forced a temporary foreign policy about-turn by the Coalition and Labor parties. The leading role in this struggle came from a section of the social movements that had slipped out of ALP control over the 1990s.

The Bracks government tried its best to get the unions to isolate the S11 campaign. It had the capitalist media helping with an intense scare campaign about "violent protests", but still it failed. With some support from the most militant union leaderships — particularly the Victorian branches of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union and Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union — the left, radical environmentalists and militant students organised a three-day campaign of peaceful mass civil disobedience.

The militant section of the trade union movement is still small, but it played an important role in preventing Bracks from getting the trade union movement to distance itself totally from S11.

A critical element of building a left political alternative to Labor will be the strengthening of the militant section of the union movement and the deepening of its ties with the organised left and the rest of the progressive social movements.

Environmentalists

Another element will be the further development of the radical section of the environmental movement. This movement grew strongly in the 1990s but was subject to two conservative pulls. The first was from bureaucratic, government-funded "peak" conservation bodies, and the second from an overwhelmingly electoralist Greens party.

While the sole Greens federal parliamentarian, Senator Bob Brown, supported the blockade and is the most consistently progressive federal parliamentarian, most Greens MPs are much more conservative.

Like their model, the German Greens, the Australian Greens have discarded in practice their original radical charter and have become an electoral party that stands for "greening" capitalism. In response, the more radical environmentalists have tended to abandon electoral politics for direct action.

The global movement against corporate tyranny is fighting capitalism, and the substantial participation of radical environmentalists was a sign that the ranks of this social movement are converging politically with the radical left. The successful Green Left Weekly-Friends of the Earth conference on globalisation in July was another expression of this convergence.

Left parties

A third element is the organised left, which played an important role in organising the blockade, building alliances and fending off the hostile media campaign. However, it was a much broader range of forces that brought the tens of thousands to the S11 blockade, and it is essential that the left understand and deepen alliances with these broader forces.

The left parties in Australia today have only a little over a thousand members between them — though most are recruiting strongly after S11. Only the Democratic Socialist Party has a national spread.

But among the thousands at S11 were also many activists who are socialists although not belonging to any left party. Many experienced left activists have stepped out of parties because of the pressures of life and the demoralising last decade and a half of ruling-class attacks. Some of these people are stepping forward again.

Is the post-S11 green left in Australia capable of building a popular anti-capitalist alternative to the Labor Party? Its internationalist politics has a clear ideological edge over the remnants of Laborite economic nationalism, shamefacedly touted by AMWU national secretary Doug Cameron. Its basic message of people's power against corporate tyranny is popular, but the majority of people are still to be convinced that socialism can work and will be democratic.

Winning mass support

The organised left today is overwhelming anti-Stalinist. But the challenge for the left is not just to disassociate itself from the collapsed Soviet Union and Eastern European regimes but to build mass confidence in the possibility of democratic working-class power.

S11 provided a glimpse of the potential of "people's power" in the mini-democracies at the various blockade points around Crown Casino. These blockades discussed and voted on all key decisions. The S11 Alliance marshals were communicators and facilitators of blockade democracy. This was a modest but significant experience of the possibility and power of democracy.

Winning the economic argument is much harder because there are no easy socialist models. Revolutionary Cuba provides some inspiring examples, especially the public provision of health care and education, but it is a small and poor Third World country under economic blockade by the USA. The corporate bosses' argument that the free market will help the poor will be laughed at, but public nervousness about planned economies remains widespread.

Confidence in the possibility of collective organisation of complex economies can come only from recognition that capitalist production is already the fruit of collective labour, even if it is forced to serve corporate profit. We already make just about everything and provide every service collectively; only the benefits are private.

S11 greatly empowered the constituency to the left of Labor. Our immediate task is to set some new and ambitious collaborative projects among the forces that came into action around the S11 blockade.

[Peter Boyle is a member of the national executive of the Democratic Socialist Party.]

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