En Passant

There is a continuity in our politics. We have two parties of neoliberalism who argue over the detail. The first and arguably most successful governments of neoliberalism (most successful from the point of view of the bosses) were the Hawke and Keating Labor governments. Hawke and Keating and their neoliberalism made Howard acceptable. Rudd and Gillard and their neoliberalism made Abbott acceptable. Shorten and co and their neoliberalism are making Abbott potentially re-electable.

While we are focused on the non-threat from the ‘other’, in this case asylum seekers, the bosses can put their hands deeper into our pockets. The immediate task for the left and for others concerned about Labor’s attacks on the most vulnerable must be to relate to the anger many decent Australians feel and help build the demonstrations scheduled over the next week and make them as militant as possible. As Martin Luther King has said “One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” To that I would add unjust actions of government. That can only come about through mobilising people now in the fight and making the arguments for seriously challenging the injustice that is this rotten Labor government policy of deporting asylum seekers.

Not having future chats with his uncle Kevin Rudd isn’t something Van Rudd, the activist artist, is too concerned about. The corporate media, he reckons, place far too much emphasis on blood relations and not enough on human relations – the way society is structured more generally. His concern with the latter leaves him with little time for the ALP and the people leading it.

As the Opposition bays for the blood of refugees and Labor delivers a foul disgusting anti-asylum seeker policy and ramps up its anti-refugee rhetoric, I wonder if the Christian Kevin Rudd and the practising Catholic Tony Abbott got the Pope’s message of love and welcoming for all refugees.

So while the reality may be, as I have argued elsewhere, that it makes no difference which Labor leader is selling us the shit sandwich of neoliberalism, in the short term it does. The swing to Labor under the newly recycled Rudd expresses workers’ hopes for a better world. Time, and the reality of capitalism, will destroy that illusion but at the moment many of us appear spell bound by the magician whose tricks give us hope.

It is false hope to be sure but it will take workers time and the experience of Rudd in power for longer than a few weeks second time round to understand that.

Kevin Rudd is once again leader of the Labor Party writes Mick Armstrong in Socialist Alternative. But the ALP remains an absolute disaster zone. Labor is still likely to face a devastating defeat in the upcoming elections – defeat at the hands of Tony Abbott, one of the most despised Liberal Party leaders ever. If Labor can’t beat a disgusting reactionary like Abbott, whose whole social outlook is completely out of kilter with the mass of workers in Australia, then it should immediately be put out of its misery.

It is because Labor’s policies have been the policies of neoliberalism, of kowtowing to the rich and powerful, with occasional rhetorical flourishes of class war merely showing how far removed we are from it, that it offers no class analysis of society and the way forward for workers that Tony Abbott will be the next Prime Minister.

Rather than this being a rupture it is a continuation of Labor’s politics of neoliberalism. As Hawke and Keating led to Howard, so Rudd and Gillard are now leading to Abbott.

The solution for workers seems clear enough. Fight both brands of neoliberalism, not with television advertisements but with strikes.

The farcical Punch and Judy show in Canberra is a consequence of the lack of fight from the trade union movement over the last 30 years. Victorian nurses are showing a different way, a better way, to win better pay and conditions and by doing that challenging the bosses’ industrial laws. Nurses in Victoria can win their demands, if they keep the industrial action going. They could even defeat the Fair Work Act penal powers and strike restrictions. The sideshow in Canberra won’t produce real change. Strikes can.

Labor is now a party of political prostitutes and nothing other than mass working class struggle and a sharp turn to the Left can get these pimps out of their bourgeois bordellos.

The battle between Gillard and Rudd is a fight over who is the best executioner to lead Labor. The electric chair or lethal injection are the choices facing the ALP in this ‘leadership’ struggle.