Posted by John, August 20th, 2010 - under Uncategorised.

Tags: Election 2010

“This is a knife-edge election result,” Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard told Sydney radio station 2Day FM. “It will be a long, late night on Saturday and every vote counts, absolutely every vote. “So it’s very tough. It’s very, very tight.”

Leaving aside Labor’s tactic of painting themselves as possible losers and thus winning back waverers, why is this election so close? How is it that a rabble like the Liberals, lead by a social conservative like Tony Abbott, can even be close to victory?

Remember this is an Opposition who if they win Government will have Joe Hockey as Treasurer and bumbling Barnaby in a senior role helping set the agenda. The living dead – Phillip Ruddock and Bronwyn Bishop – will be major players.

Worse than that, at a time when the global economy zigs and zags its way to a double dip recession, the Liberals want to slash and burn the Australian economy and deliberately drag it into recession.

The answer to the question of why the conservatives could win this election only 3 years after we threw them out in political disgrace is simple. On all the major issues both parties agree on the fundamentals. They disagree on the detail.

From Afghanistan to same-sex marriage to refugees and the invasion of the Northern Territory, from doing nothing about climate change to propping up private schools and hospitals, the two major parties are remarkably similar.

They both share the same neoliberal word view. Even on issues like the stimulus it is clear their differences are minor. Indeed had the Coalition been in Government in 2008 they would have adopted Treasury advice and spent big to avoid to try and stave of the global recession.

The difference would have been, perhaps, over the size of the stimulus package and its particular targets, not whether it went ahead.

The Labor Party has always been a party that manages the system in the interests of the bosses.

Indeed, because it came out of the trade union movement and represented the political expression of the trade union bureaucracy as the retailers of collective labour power, historically it could more easily rule in the interests of the capitalist system, at the expense, when needed, of sectional interests.

What has changed is Labor’s total embrace of neoliberalism and the market as the solution to the problems of society. While that has always been a strong current within Labor, there had also been social democratic and Stalinist forces in the Party who saw the capitalist state as either some some sort of force for socialism if captured or at least as a moderator of the excesses of the free market.

That is no longer the case and all sides in the ALP – the right and what passes now for the left – agree that the market is the solution. State intervention is only to right the ship of the market and get it back on the even keel of profitability, not to replace it with some alternative form of social organisation.

The turning point was the Accord with the Hawke Government in 1983, when the former left union bureaucrats abandoned any sense of struggle against capital and adopted collaboration with the bosses as the way forward.

The consequences have been a massive drop in union membership, the smallest share of the national cake going to labour ever recorded, the longest working day in the OECD, the destruction of independent rank and file organisation in unions and the the concentration of power in the hands of the officials and the resulting shift in the political climate massively to the right.

The contest is now between two variants of neoliberalism. That is the reason Abbott has a real chance of winning. Why pick the copy when you can have the original?

The main beneficiaries to date of this move to the right have been the Greens who look as if they will win over ten percent of the vote in the forthcoming election. But the Greens are social democrats without the social.

They have no substantial links to the working class let alone a class analysis or philosophy. They too are neoliberals with the whitewash of keynesian intervention where needed to restore and revive the market.

The solution is to rebuild the left; to build a fighting organisation committed in the here and now to immediate reforms that benefit workers and the oppressed in society and in the long term to a socialist society of democracy and prosperity.

That is not and will not be an easy task in the present reactionary climate where industrial action is at its lowest level and the concomitant destruction of the ideas of struggle has left most social movements weak and floundering.

There are no magic bullets to remedy the situation. It will be a long slow process to rebuild a substantial left in Australia committed in the long term to a democratic society where production is organised to satisfy human need and in the short terms to progressive reforms.

History demands we undertake this task for the sake of future generations and humanity.

With a double dip recession a real possibility, with climate change gathering pace, with the imperialist rivalry and competition between the US and China heating up, with invasions and wars around the globe, the choice for us is truly socialism or barbarism.