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December 17, 2010
Michael Thompson's No place in Labor for people like me in The Australian has a simple argument: the middle-class progressives are killing the party to which he once belonged. The rot set in with Gough Whitlam and has continued until today with the alliance with the Greens.
Thompson's "authentic" Labor Party is that of socially conservative working class. However the working class is awake to the betrayal of its values by the middle class progressives (he means lawyers, schoolteachers, public servants and academics) and will be looking about for a new political home. He says:
Several things post-election have led me to this realisation: Labor's alliance with the Greens; public pronouncements by party officials; the media and books on the ALP; terms of reference of the review launched in the wake of the election debacle; along with reflections on the paucity of working-class candidates preselected to stand for seats in low-socioeconomic electorates.
By socially conservative working class he means a blue collar working class who upholds the socially conservative values and aspirations of their working-class parents and grandparents. These values include aspirations for jobs for their children (not pie-in-the-sky green jobs) and a chance to improve their lot in life.
So where will the politically aware, disaffected socially conservative (industrial) working class go to find their political home? They are the 'Howard battlers' and Thompson adds:
Tony Abbott, with his instinct for saying what he thinks, has appeal for these same voters (when not making gaffes such as saying he was too jet-lagged to visit Australian troops in Afghanistan, or advocating an expansion in middle-class welfare that would add to the call on scarce public funds), and should he court them as part of a new, grand Coalition electoral strategy, not merely at election times, the chickens from Labor's alliance with the Greens would come home to roost.
Thompson fails to see that the ALP, like the Liberal Party, is a mass party that is a broad church. It has to be because its left of centre constituency is diverse and changing. It is diverse and changing because capitalism is changing and so is the class structure.
Update
Thompson says nothing about today's industrial working class being composed of far more than workers in traditional blue-collar factory jobs and their households. It necessarily includes many workers often theorized as post- industrial, information age, or service economy workers. Not only does he say little about the rise of service sector employment in recent years, or the emergence of neo-liberalism over the last three decades and its attack on the welfare state, he ignores that the working class was politically defeated, across the Western world in the final decades of the last century.
The experience of defeat is important because it colours the political landscape today. Capitalism has come to be seen as the natural order of things, whether we like it or not – something to be bemoaned, perhaps, but not transformed. An entire generation has now been brought up with dramatically limited political horizons, a fact reflected in widespread disengagement from politics. It is the environmental critique of capitalism that calls for the transformation of capitalism, not the socially conservative working class.
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In the lead-up to Christmas there is quite a lot happening politically at the Federal level:
Banking "reform";
Medicare "reform", and
Superannuation "reform".
We have also seen privatisations in Queensland (railway) and NSW (power) in the immediately pre-Christmas period.
It looks like the sly strategy of sneaking unpalatable stuff through during the holidays is alive and well. And of course no MSM journalist is sober enough to notice.