Posted by John, September 6th, 2009 - under Nathan Rees, NSW Labor.

Tags: Australian Labor Party, Australian politics, Democracy

I have three words to say to those who support fixed parliamentary terms – New South Wales.

Here is a totally incompetent Government who fell into another term only because the Opposition was viewed rightly as even more incompetent.

Having won Government again, New South Wales Labor then began to really unravel, with the trade union movement rightly booting out Premier Bland, Morris Iemma, for attempting to privatise electricity generation.

This influence of the trade union bureaucracy shows that the ALP is qualitatively different to the Liberals.

Labor is, as Lenin so presciently wrote 96 years ago, a bourgeois workers’ party. More bourgeois now perhaps, but still the only political party in Australia with real, even if grossly distorted, links to working people.

But I digress.

The Rees Labor Government in New South Wales remains in power only because of the legislated fixed four year term provisions and the lack of class consciousness among significant sections of the working class.

A democratic society would have swept this rabble away long ago – not through Kerr coups and the like but through replacing them with new representatives, on a daily basis if needed.

Workers’ revolutions extend democracy.

It has been a consistent hallmark of workers’ revolution that their representatives were paid the average wage and were subject to immediate recall. From Paris to Russia and Germany, from Hungary to Poland, in revolutionary times workers have set up democratic workers’ councils to run society.

Workers would meet daily in their workplaces to debate their positions and elect their representatives to the workers’ councils for decision making. They would mandate what positions their representatives were to take on the particular issues of the day.

If they didn’t like what their representatives had done, they would replace them immediately.

Imagine that in New South Wales.

No more Rees, Della Bosca, O’Farrell and the like. In would come ordinary working people whose sole certainty of tenure was that they were in the council that day.

Every major working class revolution from the Paris Commune on has established workers councils – organs of rule that extend the limited democracy we enjoy under capitalism into a richer and fuller democracy, into all facets of social life, including production. Marx described this fuller democracy in his book the Civil War in France:

The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at any time. The majority of its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class…. The police, which until then had been the instrument of the Government, was at once stripped of its political attributes, and turned into the responsible, and at all times revocable, agent of the Commune. So were the officials of all other branches of the administration. From the members of the Commune downwards, the public service had to be done at workmen’s wages. The privileges and the representation allowances of the high dignitaries of state disappeared along with the high dignitaries themselves…. Having once got rid of the standing army and the police, the instruments of physical force of the old government, the Commune proceeded at once to break the instrument of spiritual suppression, the power of the priests…. The judicial functionaries lost that sham independence… they were thenceforward to be elective, responsible, and revocable.

The ability to recall representatives instantly is one of the key elements of workers’ democracy.

Compare that to the piddly vote we get every 3 or 4 years for one lot of capitalist cronies who then lord it over us, virtually unaccountable.

What a paradox. The Rees government of today shows us the past; the Paris Commune of yesterday shows us the future.

Four year fixed terms are not about democracy – they are about entrenching the dictatorship of capital in the interests of capital.

They give a Government virtual unlimited power (or so the bourgeoisie hope) to impose their policies and outcomes on ordinary working families.

The certainty they provide is the certainty of absolute rule in the interests of capital.

These fixed parliamentary terms deny citizens their right to participate fully in all aspects of socialised life.

The sacking of Morris Iemma shows that with the Labor Party, at least occasionally, that capitalist ‘certainty’ can be challenged and defeated, although only withing the overarching rule of one party and in a bureaucratic, backdoor way rather than directly through automatic recall of representatives.

To sweep away Rees and the like before 2011 and make sure this institutionalised dictatorship of vicious anti-worker bourgeois mediocrity doesn’t happen again (as it undoubtedly will under the Liberals and O’Farrell) we workers need to sweep away the whole rotten edifice of bourgeois democracy and set up truly democratic institutions of rule.