Labor’s rusted-ons can’t deny the decay any longer

There’s two types of rusted-on now, as regards Labor. There’s the “first-order” rusted-on, the original true believer who sees the first duty of a Labor type as party loyalty. Criticise from within, organise factionally if necessary, but keep the faith with the party wherever it goes, and whether the compromises of its leadership are judicious and necessary or cowardly and ill-judged.

Such rusted-ons are having a hard time at the moment, to put it mildly. The Albanese government leadership are clearly a bunch of people who had, in 2019, their Straussian moment. Having lost to Scott Morrison in 2019, and facing a potential generation-defining loss in 2022, the leadership clearly decided it would have to adopt a veiled, trickster approach.

The approach was to create a program for government which conceded all major positions to capital and power, and would be willing to do whatever they asked, without hesitation, without cavilling. But this conversion would have to be kept from the core voter base, and above all from that remaining part of the membership who were genuine members (i.e. actually aware that they were members, and had paid the fees themselves).

The political stakes for Labor were high in the lead-up to 2022. But the existential stakes for the leadership were higher still. Loss in 2022 would have made their lives not merely failures, but a bit of a cosmic joke. That’s the crossover moment, the 3am waking thought that the laughter would never cease, that looking behind there would be nothing to show, and looking ahead just a few places on super boards, long lunches in Richo’s Chinese restaurant, the long abalone banquet of the soul, and brave-face statements about how you held the line against those terrible stage three tax cuts.

No, no, no. Better to wage a sustained double-level campaign against your own membership. Convince them that you’re faking a total rightward shift to appease prosperous outer ‘burban voters and News Corpse, when you are actually making a total rightward shift, and your members are the useful idiots. 

So it has transpired, and rusted-ons of the first order now face a choice that is barely a choice. They must either, with a metallic rending sound, tear themselves away from the party, and launch criticisms against it from a broader social democratic position that the party was meant to stand for. Or they must become the opposite; use their community credibility and local standing to sell Labor to increasingly sceptical members and supporters, who are watching as the country is handed to the US and the board of the Reserve Bank to have its fate decided.

At that point, a rusted-on becomes a Rubashov, the hero of Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, who decides that his final service to the victorious revolutionary party that now wants to execute him is to commit to the ludicrous trumped-up charges they want to justify such an act with. What else is there to do that makes any sense? And so the rusted-on liquidates their last shred of principle, resistance, dignity, etc, to defend a leadership that long ago separated from them politically and psychologically. 

But there is also a second-order rusted-on, outside the party, and who may well be in a worse position. This is the rusted-on who is rusted-on to criticising rusted-ons, and who maintains that keeping up an endless stream of specific criticisms of Labor policies will constitute a pole of opposition that might assist left forces within Labor to rally and resist.

To which the question must be asked: haha, which left forces internal to Labor? What’s left? This notion that an eternal petitioning of Labor as each new atrocity is waved through, and the party leadership recommits ever more resolutely to absolute and total incorporation into global capital and global US rule, will be of use, is bunkum. 

Will the new budget have enough in it to retain the first- and second-order rusted-ons? Quite possibly, but unless there is a commitment to taxes aimed at corporate profits and capital, any measures will be mitigation of a total commitment to capital. Consenting to the stage three tax cuts was necessary. But for any genuine progressive or social democratic government, that should be done in the wider context of shifting the tax burden to corporations and property.

Barring some incredible surprise, rusted-ons of both orders will have to make a post-budget decision. Are they going to continue as either loyalists, or loyal opposition, or admit that Labor must now be opposed, from the left, on the ground? That demands the harder task of either building the Greens — if it doesn’t become a party that normies find impossible to support — or other, smaller left parties, or starting to build networks on the Indi model in Labor seats. 

That latter process wouldn’t be as hard as it sounds, in certain seats anyway. The reason is the distinct single-member, exhaustive preference system, which acts like a sort of political semi-conductor. Usually it ensures that energy stays with the dominant major party in the seat. But if you can get support above a certain level, then the energy flows away from that party and towards you. You simply have to hit the switch level. 

That could be done from the left in Labor state and federal seats, if one can find genuine community candidates with a left political-economic program and centrist and mildly suburban-conservative social and cultural values. Such values are progressive to a certain extent — yes to same-sex marriage, trans acceptance, the Voice — but otherwise stand with the mainstream, in their beliefs about the centrality of the family, embodied reality, and the legitimacy of a mild patriotism. 

The prospect is that such candidates could get the “full flow”. They would break the Labor primary vote in half, and then draw the preferences of further left and other independent voters, the Greens and a fair tranche of Liberal voters (if they get the language right, and the social and cultural settings are sufficiently attractive). The preferential system means you grow such a movement over two to three elections, gradually building support and credibility. And, really, what else are you going to do? Watch more Netflix?

The risk, of course, is that one will create Frankenstein candidates, who escape and stalk their way across to the Coalition, for reasons of cultural politics, bad preselection, duplicity and connivance, or simple corruption. Such a risk has always stayed the hand of many a Labor-left person, nursing their frustration. 

But if not now, what is going to make you take the risk? How long can many second-order rusted-ons avoid the truth: that endless criticism, without a parallel and accompanying commitment to organisation and contestation, becomes complicit in the maintenance of that power?

I mean, if AUKUS wasn’t the starting pistol, then surely the RBA is. If Labor gives up government power of RBA override on setting rates, then what even is it anymore? The historical drift is with networks and post-party forms; we live in a “centrifugal” society in which all capacity for centrality is being thrown off, by the furious action of its centre, which is capital, technology, and the yet deeper forces which drive them. Why not start now?

Surely rusted-ons, one and two, you can hear the rivets popping? I mean, you are the rivets popping. You’re going to fly off eventually. That is in the very nature of rust, which is, after all, a measure of decay, and decay of both whole and part.