A faction too much friction: anti-AUKUS forces drowned out by Marles’ manifesto

Given what AUKUS might be leading us to — involvement in a full-scale global conflict that ends with our major cities destroyed in an afternoon — the valiant but futile effort put up by the anti-AUKUS forces at the recent Labor conference has a certain poignancy.

This is how it would go, you think. We would wave the flag and sing as much of “Australia Will Be There” before we vanish into heat. 

So, too, the anti-AUKUS movement was over almost before it started. A full anti-AUKUS amendment, removing mention of it from the platform, did not make it to the debate stage, according to Zacharias Szumer’s blow-by-blow report, and a milder motion to remove reference to “nuclear-powered” submarines was lost, ploughed under by Defence Minister Richard Marles’ manifesto.

That there was any debate permitted at all was taken as some sort of consolation prize by the anti-AUKUS push, the new “Labor Against War” (LAW) group, and the Electrical Trades Union, parts of the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union (AMWU), and Fremantle MP Josh Wilson. But as everyone acknowledges, the amendment was allowed up, to be defeated, only as a way of showing the media that Labor is some sort of living party. 

Labor is obviously cracked when it crows about the openness of its conferences compared with those of the “Greens political party”. Party conferences should be closed events if they’re real and decide things in actual debate, as the Greens do. Labor proudly shows us the North Korean-style furious agreement, and puts a bit of debate in as a catfish. The media should ask to attend the factional pre-meetings — at which point the party would suddenly remember reasons of confidentiality. 

For the remnant progressive and left forces within Labor, the AUKUS depth-charging has pretty much blown it all out of the water. It’s only by the pitiful standards of internal political opposition of the moment that this political War of Jenkins’ Ear counts as a real opposition. Not only is there no faction of any size that has adopted opposition to AUKUS, the anti-AUKUS forces do not even have control of a subfaction. The real fight was within subgroups such as the AMWU, by activists attempting to turn the organisation to a more solid anti-AUKUS position. Compared to the epic fights of earlier times, that is a reaction within the nucleus of a nucleus.

That is not to diminish the spirit of the anti-AUKUS groups, or to suggest that there is no possibility of building something. If, as Zsumer records, 50 of 800 party branches have passed anti-AUKUS resolutions, then that is all the more impressive, given that the simple fact of being dead is no barrier to participating in Labor branch life. 

But the forces that might have been possible to rally — the “Industrial Left” faction centred on the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union (CFMMEU), the Rail, Tram and Bus Union (RTBU) and a couple of other unions — did not have the goods. And expecting them to do so in the way they once did is to cherish an illusion that will limit the anti-AUKUS forces ability to lay a base for future action.

The fact is that those looking for a revival of a genuine Labor left — now that the National Left faction is simply a subfaction of an enlarged right — will have slim pickings if they try to rely on the once militant character of unions centred on the core industrial working class. Though there was always a division between the radicalism of the leadership and the rank-and-file, the militancy and radicalism — connecting the struggles of the industrial workplace to opposition to the global regimes which enforced it — was real enough.

Now there may well be many workers who individually oppose AUKUS, but there’ll also be some who fervently support it, given that a not-insignificant faction in the CFMMEU is “children of the Ustashe”, it does not suggest itself as a natural anti-war bastion. So there is a bit of sleight-of-hand going on by Labor Against War and other groups. Its anti-AUKUS politics is largely an expression of knowledge class politics of a leadership elite, invoking a phantom rank-and-file as its legitimating mass, bound to turn up any day now. 

That is unlikely to happen, and people within Labor need to face fully the transformation not merely of their party but of the world within which that party sits. Labor, and the labour movement, is now near wholly integrated with the global system of capital accumulation, through running the country as a unified national enterprise, through an industry superannuation scheme that has turned unions into labour management firms attached to the underside of vast zeppelins of money. From that position there is little opposition possible, because there is no “outside”, of any material import, to the system as a whole. 

But Labor has the excuse that the groups it represents do not represent an “outside” to the system, as a relatively unified working class once did. There is no single working class any more; the impact of wage/salary gap expansion, FIFO, casualisation and mega-penalty rates in certain industries, and the resultant uneven distribution of asset accumulation has created two completely different groups — the other precarious, casual and including the benefits-dependent — whose interests do not coincide, and are often antagonistic.

This division is of a different character from the idea of the “labour aristocracy”, a wheezing old notion some leftists are too eager to rely on, so as to pretend that the working-class division does not run right down the middle of the old class. As Australian radical economist-sociologist Lisa Adkins and her floating band of collaborators/male back-up singers has established, reexamining class-by-asset rather than by older notions of specific productive capital and wage, gives a wholly different picture of the present. (Footage of Adkins, Bryant, Cooper and Konings working on class-by-asset can be seen here.)

Labor has made its choice in this new divide, going with the asset-holding class that dominates suburban marginal electorates at the expense of the “others” who currently have no-one else to vote for. The latter get crumbs from the table, as shown by Labor’s largely bogus offers on housing — and by the Greens’ (sorry (nasally voice) “Greens political party”) success in getting real action and money and the question of rent on the agenda. 

Such a social redivision in Labor’s base means it can no longer be a party fusing together left class advancement and progressive social politics in the way it was for four decades — and in the manner in which various Labor grandees imagine it may one day be again. It is now wholly a national capitalist party, with no interior dissenting force of any size or social base. Its deep internal logic is towards integration with systems of power, and to be an enforcer of system discipline directed towards its own base, rather than as a representative of them. 

But nor can it be constructed as a simple “betrayal” mode, as many of Labor’s more rusted, disenchanted supporters would like to portray it. These massive shifts within Labor that have become visible following the 2022 victory are not, or not primarily, the product of personal weakness or pliability in the leaders. The National Left has collapsed as a left (and so has the rival Socialist Left) because there is no longer a logic of opposition, organised around an alternative to the present, within Labor. It’s why the Industrial Left could not step into the space vacated by those groups, quite aside from the whacked-out “Tusk-era-Fleetwood-Mac-of-politics” mood that characterises its cross-union leadership.

To put it frankly, the federal parliamentary left of the Labor Party now consists of Josh Wilson, and not much anyone else. Those still committed to building an alternative within Labor should do so, if they can do no other. But one would suggest that mounting opposition solely within Labor on the old model of “bringing the party to its senses” will simply transform such dissidents into agents of the party’s repressive tolerance, and serve the cause of further integrating its monolithic commitment to the established order. Opposition will have to be unified inside and outside the party to have any chance of effectiveness.  

Those who still love Labor for what it has been will have to ask themselves at what point there supersedes a loyalty to the deeper causes that underlie such commitment. The good news is that things change fast as regards war, alliance etc. The bad news is it could all be over in an afternoon.