Study of Marxism-Leninism is the key to understanding the role of the ALP and unions

Written by: Nick G on 29 August 2024

 

The magnificent response by construction workers to the attempted destruction of their union has included disgust at the perceived betrayal of workers by the Labor Party. That disgust has extended to all but a few in the leadership of the union movement for failing to show solidarity with, and to support, the CFMEU.

We understand the labelling of Albanese and McManus as class traitors.

People who have to work for a living and who join the ALP believing it will advance their interests are entitled to feel betrayed. Union members who are organised by their union to spend hours door-knocking for Labor in the lead-up to an election, or who loyally stand at polling booths handing out Labor “how-to-vote” cards are entitled to feel betrayed.

It all fits a pattern.

For such people there is hope for parliamentary means of achieving “fairness” through a Labor (or Greens) party. The sentiment behind this hope is quite resilient. 

Despite all the betrayals by Labor governments, some people seem unable to break out of a cycle of hoping for a better deal than they are going to get from the Liberals, and then losing heart every time Labor wins office and backtracks on its promises to the point where it seems indistinguishable from the more open party of big business. We respect this sentiment, but do not share it. We need to break out of its dead-end cycle. 

As a Marxist-Leninist Party, we believe that study of revolutionary theory is the key to really understanding the role of the Labor Party and of unions.

We could (and do) refer interested readers to the writers of the classic texts of this theory.

But at the present time of Labor’s attacks on the CFMEU, and of the failure of most unions to repel those attacks, we strongly recommend two texts that are immersed in the reality of Australian conditions. They are embedded in the reality of the need to understand the Labor Party and of the unions associated with it.

In 1965, one year after the founding of our Party following a split in the original Communist Party of Australia (CPA), our founding Chairperson Ted Hill wrote Looking Backward: Looking Forward (Revolutionary Socialist Politics Against Trade Union and Parliamentary Politics).

Hill disputed the view then dominant in the CPA that the Labor Party was a “two-class” party, that it was simultaneously a party of the working class and a party of the capitalist class.

He examined the circumstances under which unions had created the Labor Party.

It was born from the defeat of the prolonged strikes of the early 1890s when workers looked for other ways to take on the capitalists.

“They wanted to use the bourgeois parliament to enact measures that would satisfy the workers’ demands to improve their own lot.”

There was insufficient experience to understand that the state was an apparatus for the suppression of the working class by the capitalist class, and insufficient experience to understand that parliament was a part of that state apparatus and not a neutral institution independent of the capitalist state.

“Thus, they accepted capitalism in two ways: (1) their demands accepted the social system of capitalism, (2) their methods of achieving them accepted the social institution of capitalism – parliament.”

These acceptances meant that although born from and based in communities of working class people, the character of the Labor Party was not “two-class” but “one class” - that it would be a party of capitalism and would work to make capitalism more acceptable to the working class on one hand, and the working class more acceptable to capitalism on the other hand.

That latter function of the Labor Party is the reason for its attempted destruction of the CFMEU.

The reluctance of unions affiliated to the Labor Party to embarrass it in any way, to endanger its chances of winning office, or, in in office, of retaining it, explain their collusion with a party of capitalism that attacks the working class.

But it is more than that. Unions are required for their legal existence to be tied in a thousand and one ways to industrial rules set up by the capitalist class. And they become part of capitalism through their accumulated assets, including investments and property, all of which they hold on the condition that they do not break the rules, that they accept the decisions of bodies created by the capitalist class to play the role of “independent umpires”. 

All of this is the subject of Looking Backward: Looking Forward.

In October 1974, while the Whitlam government was still in office, and had the task of taking the country out of the stultifying era of conservative party rule, Hill wrote The Labor Party? Dr Evatt – The Petrov Affair – The Whitlam Government. 

It drew on Hill’s collaboration with Evatt as a lawyer representing the Communist Party at the Petrov Royal Commission, and the first years of Whitlam’s government, to make a closer examination of the nature of the ALP as a party of capitalism.

In our introduction to a 2023 pdf of the book, we wrote: “Since this book was written, additional experience has arisen of Labor in office, including its attacks on the workers through the Accord, its pioneering of neo-liberalism under Hawke and Keating, its keeping the unions under control through Fair Work Australia, its further opening of Australian territory to the US military under Gillard, and the continuation of that treachery via AUKUS under Albanese, Wong and Marles. All these later phenomena can be best understood by learning from the example set by Hill in his analysis of the Labor Party.”

For interested readers, Looking Backward: Looking Forward (which we have just republished) is available as a pdf and an e-book here: Books & Pamphlets — E F HILL .

Hill’s The Labor Party? is available as a pdf here:  EFHs+The+Labor+Party+FINAL2.pdf (cpaml.org)

 

 

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