Although I disagree with some of what Dr Beljac has written, I do think that this article describes a very important situation in Australian class history, and the outcomes of fifty- and sixty-year processes of fundamental change.

I started working in factories in the mid-sixties, and found from the outset that most of my work-mates were immigrants, Italians, Greeks, Yugoslavs, the odd Turk and German and Britisher, but the leading hands, supervisors and managers were all Australian-born Anglos. I moved around a lot, but everywhere I worked, the pattern was the same. Australian-born Anglos had moved up, and out, of the working class. And clearly, their children would never, on the whole, have to work on the factory floor again.

In some industries it must have been different, the building trades, the wharves, transport. That would have been where the Labor Party got its strength from. But over a couple of decades, as the factory-floor working class became, if anything, more multicultural and less Anglo, and as technological innovations transformed the work they were doing, and the need for labour altogether, and as companies moved their operations off-shore, clearly the children of those immigrants weren't going to obediently go into the factories to do the sh!t jobs and continue - and strengthen - the division between Anglo and non-Anglo workers. Like the children of the Anglo workers a generation earlier, they were off to uni.

As well, the wharves mechanised and containerised. The building trades were transformed into independent tradesmen, a petty-bourgeoisie rather than a working class, people working for themselves. The immigrants moved up and out, onto their own farms and fruit blocks, and into their own shops and businesses.

Clearly the Labor Party has been hollowed out from many sides, its older adherents moving up the professional scale, its factory fodder immigrants moving out and making damn sure their kids did also: up, out and into the professions. Technology transformed work-places, workers became petty-bourgeois and moved away from the Labor Party.

[TBC]

[continued]

Then along come the Greens, to swipe the Labor Party's professional and affluent pseudo-Left supporters. The old principles of equality and justice and internationalism and anti-exploitation have been replaced by preoccupations with same-sex marriage and superannuation. Frankly, I'm surprised that - on the basis of those changes - the Labor Party can muster more than 30 per cent of the vote nationally, and hold power in two States (and, of course, the ACT).

So, what's the middle ground these days, the population which Labor must win over ?

Wouldn't be dead for quids !

Joe

Support for the LABOR party is tepid at best amongst its raison d'être (real Workers) and now can be described as being "anti-nominative deterministic".

I would also go so far as to suggest most "out and proud" Laborites would cross the road to avoid a real worker so as not to catch cooties. The nearest they want to get to Workers is to order a "skim, soy, chai latte mocha-chino (and be snappy about it)". Workers now know it and resent this.

Yes you're right Marko, the left just haven't got any class!

But worse than that, if they shared a single brain between them it'd likely be lonely, or still rattle inside a thimble?

On the bright side, the left're still way out in front as intellectuals, when compared with the always right greens, who as ever, can't see the forest for the trees?

Who nonetheless, still do better than the coalition, who's moist mealy mouths only ever foolishly fundamentally flap, whenever a warm willful wind whistles wistfully from the wicked west?

Where two wigged Wongs wiving in a weaver wigwam, [Wikipedia] don't make a white or even a wosty; just a white woyal whatsit?
Rhrosty.

Marko is right; The decline of class politics has left a large part of Labor's traditional constituency feeling alienated from a Party that no longer talks as much as it used to - to their lives, their interests, their experiences. The Liberals play 'divide and conquer' by playing on anxieties and uncertainties re: identity politics. Labor strategists long thought they could take the working class for granted. And now swinging upper middle class voters are perhaps thought of as being 'more strategically important. (I argue this in light of difficulties I have had arguing for redistributive policies which benefit the bottom 80 per cent to the expense of the top 20 per cent) Perhaps the problem is that Labor is increasingly dominated by its own political class - people who don't get it that $100,000 wages are completely beyond the reach and the experience of most workers. There is a lack of a sense of proportion as to who I relatively privileged in our society and who is not... Today workers want security as they always did. So why not offer Medicare Dental and National Aged Care Insurance? Instead Labor is struggling with its own historic acceptance of 'small government'; and of policies of tactical expediency - 'robbing Peter to pay Paul; "one step forward, two steps back'". Labor has to do better - And its National Conference in July is an opportunity to set a new course....

I can understand a certain nostalgia for the old left. Marx’s emphasis on class war as the main engine of socioeconomic change gave the left an analytical framework for political and economic debate, and a clear moral touchstone. Trouble is, his analysis and prognostications were mostly wrong, and this has affected not just core Marxism but also others who borrowed his ideas.

The collapse of the Soviet Union revealed both the moral bankruptcy of the governments of the communist block, and the self-deluding or cynical failure of the western communist parties to acknowledge the reality of life under communism (the Trotskyists being the notable exception). Every government that claimed to be Marxist or Communist, and that lasted more than a few months, turned out to be a totalitarian nightmare that bore no resemblance to Marx’s utopian visions.

The growing prosperity and comparative economic stability of post-war western economies gave the lie to Marx’s predictions of increasing immiseration under capitalism. Not only are most Australian (and European and American) workers rich beyond the wildest dreams of Marx’s 19th century contemporaries, work has changed so that the physically demanding unskilled labour of the stereotypical working class is now the exception not the rule. Most workers identify as middle class, not working class. The people at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder are mostly those who, for a variety of reasons, cannot work full time; many are those Marx dismissed scornfully as lumpenproletariat.

Identity politics and environmentalism now seem the order of the day for the left, often in direct conflict with the interests and values of the traditional working class. I can’t see that changing any time soon.