The Australian Left: Beyond Labourism?

Abstract

A decade ago it was popular to argue that the two major parties in Australia were no more different than Tweedledum and Tweedledee. This kind of thinking, if it can be so called, fed on a traditional refusal among the Australian Left to take seriously the problem of labourism. This refusal has now, in the eighties, returned with vengeance, as farce. Many on the Left are now subservient to the very Labor Party which they had earlier derided. Labor itself has developed in particular corporatist directions. Many on the Left have seized on these developments as offering a new beginning, beyond dogmatism, beyond cliched militancy, beyond ultraleftist rhetoric and headbanging. But there is little prospect that any of this will lead beyond labourism. In the Australian case as in the English, labourism encompasses a pragmatic politics where the essential focus is on concrete demands of immediate advantage to the working class and organised labour. Labourist politics in Australia, as in England, of course takes place on, and accepts, the terrain of capitalist social relations. Yet labourism has a magnetic effect on the Australian Left, and this is a tendency which has been strengthened over the last ten years.