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In the
last post I argued that the deep crisis of the Gillard government is also a
crisis of the Greens and the Left more generally. By effectively entering a
“Left” government the Greens have replicated the disastrous strategy of Italy’s
main party of the Left, Rifondazione Comunista, in joining a centre-Left coalition
in the late 2000s.
In 2010 I wrote the
following:
To understand the role of the
Greens, one must consider how the party has both inspired and frustrated the
Left in the last decade. But it is also important to understand what its
disappearance or rapid shift to the Right would mean in today’s
circumstances. For all their weaknesses, the Greens have served as a
generalised political focus on the Left. In the absence of a serious, more
radical alternative, that remains preferable than either a return to the major
parties or a fragmentation of progressive aspirations among many smaller
formations or individuals. Nevertheless, it is also true that simply waiting
for something external to push the Greens to the Left gives too much ground to
the conservative limitations of the Greens project.
This has been proven correct.
The Greens have shifted
dramatically since when Bob Brown came down to reinspire picket lines that had
been attacked by police at the S11 protests in 2000, or when Kerry Nettle’s Senate
office was the virtual nerve centre of massive anti-war protests in 2002-3.
Not in government but
responsible for it
The Greens have not only pledged to support the ALP on
supply and confidence, they have striven to be seen as part of the government. The agreement between the parties
commits the Greens to very little politically; it is not until the sixth of
seven sections that policy matters (rather than issues of process) are raised
— mainly around the creation of the carbon price committee, with lesser
demands over dental care, a parliamentary debate over the war in Afghanistan
and a study into high-speed rail.
Yet there is a widespread view, not just on the hysterical
Right but among many Greens voters, activists and MPs, that the party actually is in government and responsible for its
future, even when this is not technically the case. In particular the main
campaign the party has mobilised its activist base around in recent months has
been promotion of the government’s most unpopular policy — the carbon tax.
That otherwise sensible left-wing politicians like John Kaye
have felt the need to publicly
butt heads with the Liberals over competing sets of economic modelling about the impact of the tax
suggests a major disconnect from reality. As if such modelling
— invariably done by the same people who once assured us the GFC could
never happen — has ever been worth the paper it’s written on.
The Greens have also tempered their attacks on the ALP in
other areas. Left Flank has previously pointed out the Greens MPs have effectively
acceded to the arguments for an age of austerity, budget surpluses and public
sector cutbacks. It doesn’t matter that the Greens propose worthwhile
alternatives (e.g. a higher mining tax, cuts to corporate welfare). Bob Brown
has made clear that he will only push new spending within the constraints of
the government’s fiscal approach; that it would be irresponsible to demand
“unfunded” policies be implemented. In his Budget
reply speech he argued:
This is not a Greens budget; it
is a Labor budget. The Greens will deal responsibly with all budget legislation
on its merits. We will not block the budget or supply, but we will look to
improve it where we can in a fiscally responsible manner. However, in order to
ensure stability in government, the Greens will not be supporting any
opposition move which aims to wreck the budget.
On the issue of Australia’s continued involvement in wars
against Muslim nations, the Greens have muted
criticisms of the US-Australia Alliance, been largely uncritical of Obama’s
foreign policy, and most disturbingly been enthusiasts
for the NATO intervention in Libya.
And even though they have been critical of Gillard’s obscene
Malaysian Solution, they’ve modified their language in terms of trying to politely
provide workable progressive alternatives. The longer the alliance has
persisted the less outraged has been the tone employed by Sarah Hanson-Young,
despite her proven record in moral shrillness. Such niceties finally
crumbled last week as Bob Brown complained “I’ve bitten my tongue for quite
a while on this.” He added in frustration, “But here we have Julia Gillard
moving herself to the right of Philip Ruddock and John Howard in a repressive
attitude towards the rights of asylum seekers to be processed on-shore in
Australia.”
But why has it taken so long for Brown to talk tough? Why have
the Greens acted in this way? Their strategy was summed up by Hanson-Young in a
recent Fairfax column:
With this new position in the
political landscape and our new seats on the Senate benches comes even greater
responsibility to deliver achievements for the community and stability for the
Parliament. We will work hard to improve legislation and to keep presenting
innovative ideas to be adopted by government and opposition. But, just as
importantly, we must make sure we deliver more constructive than destructive
solutions to the topics that land on our desks. Working to secure our nation's
future prosperity requires more leadership than just saying “No”.
Yet this is a government in deep crisis, unable to deliver
on “stability” precisely because it is trying to implement a legislative agenda
it believes will “constructively” deliver for the needs of Australia’s elite,
while abandoning any commitment to progressive reform. The central planks of
Gillard’s approach have been an intensification of austerity measures,
capitulation to the mining billionaires, the further marketisation of
Australia’s public health system, a punitive agenda for Australia’s unemployed
and disabled, continuation of the NT intervention, possibly the most
reactionary asylum seeker policy of any rich country, continued military
intervention in Afghanistan, and of course a neoliberal
climate policy that is likely to be not just regressive but
make little impact on emissions.
In the above-quoted
press conference last week, Brown explained the constraints the Greens have
decided to operate within:
I get asked on this immigration
question, as with others, well, why aren’t we bringing this government down?
Because you get Tony Abbott. And I am not going to take the Andrew Wilkie
course of threatening instability in government because we’re not getting our
own way. … We are committed to stability in government and three-year term
elections. So responsibility requires that you have some probity and some
forbearance and you keep working until you get what you think are good policies
through. Threatening to bring down the government on any issue where you get
stuck is not something the Greens will be doing.
This is self-imposed political impotence, because on asylum
seekers Brown’s strategy is to “fight this right the way through the
parliamentary process,” yet he is unwilling to use the only serious parliamentary
leverage he has — threatening the government’s “stability”.
This also helps explain why the Greens have been unable to
win over left-leaning Labor voters disenchanted with the government. On Labor’s
left flank there is simply no reason to break to the Greens when they have been
unwilling to use their numbers to actually challenge government policy. In the
one area, climate change, where the Greens have won some of their agenda, the
policy reeks of economic rationalism that is widely reviled in the electorate.
It is the commitment to such reforms, and their lack of a clear break with the
neoliberal economic agenda more generally, that has meant the Greens are
unattractive to working class voters as an alternative to the ALP.*
What about the
movements?
The other parallel with the Italian experience is the
Greens’ claim to be the expression of social movements within the parliamentary
arena. In an interview soon after he
was elected, Melbourne MP Adam Bandt said, “One of the things that [the
Greens] place a priority on is giving a voice to social movements and to that
undercurrent of progressive public opinion that is not being represented.” In her
maiden speech as a Senator, Lee Rhiannon, argued that, “History
demonstrates that while parliaments make the laws, people are the driving force
for social change.”
Yet Rhiannon added, “I believe one of the great strengths of
the Greens is our constructive parliamentary work, combined with our commitment
to amplify in this place the voice of progressive people's movements.” Here she
was implying that struggles from below stand in relation to parliament in an
uncontradictory “both/and” kind of way. While this may be a useful counterpoint
to those on the radical Left who reject any participation in official politics
on principle, the relationship between the narrow politics allowed in Canberra
and the politics of mass struggle is not simply one of synergy. Rather, they
can pull sharply against each other.
Over the last few years the Greens have played more of a
role in amplifying the conservative logic of official politics within the
“progressive people’s movements” than they have in bringing the logic of those
movements to Canberra. With their greater commitment to parliamentary process
since gaining official party status in 2007, they have increasingly shaped
their policies and program around what is possible within the narrow
constraints set by the vicissitudes of parliamentary politics.
I raise one significant example for now. After rejecting the
CPRS in late 2009, the Greens waged an argument inside the climate movement to
get it to adopt their plan for an interim carbon price. They won this argument
at the 2010 Climate Action Summit, which voted to accept their proposal as the
way forward in an election year. Christine Milne won the ear of leading radical
climate campaigners to convince the disparate movement to focus on getting what
was at best a very limited measure.
It is worthwhile examining the public trajectory of Damien
Lawson, a key Melbourne-based climate campaigner, a leading figure in the
anti-capitalist, refugee and anti-war movements of the early 2000s and a former
staffer with Kerry Nettle. In 2009 he wrote a strategic perspectives document
for grassroots climate campaigners that, quite reasonably, argued,
[W]e
will need a public mobilisation that dwarfs any that Australia or the world has
seen. This means far more than a change in government.
Yet the strategy of most environment NGOs in 2006–08 seemed to be one
of mobilising the community to elect a Labor government, and then talking
softly to the new government behind closed doors, rather than continue the
mobilisation.
He added that campaigners must remember that “we are
activists not policy advisers”. Yet by the 2010 Summit he
had shifted to arguing that activists must not have “an aversion to
elections” and that the movement needed “common goals”. But this was not about
opening out the debate, rather:
The carbon tax debate kicked off
by The Greens is an opportunity to develop a strand of that common agenda. We
should use this opportunity to form a common goal across the whole climate
movement of supporting a good carbon tax plan
By the 2011 Summit he was a policy adviser to Bandt, who was
himself prosecuting
the case for the tax, making the unlikely argument that activists should
get “tens of thousands of people marching down the street” to demand a high carbon
price of $70 a ton.
Whatever independence and vitality the grassroots climate movement
once had, it is now effectively moribund, reduced to attending GetUp! rallies
cheering the carbon tax. As Guy Pearse has made clear in his
scathing assessment of the mainstream environmental NGOs, the movement and
the Greens have largely collapsed into ensuring “that
the only carbon price Australia will adopt is one that largely defeats the
purpose of a carbon price.” Those activists and organisations still holding out
against this pragmatic “incrementalism” — for example Friends of the Earth
— have been marginalised. GetUp! organisers even felt confident enough to try
to get climate activists opposed to market measures to take down their placards
at various rallies earlier this year. Such crushing unanimity is exactly what
Lawson warned against in 2009, but of which he is a part in 2011.
Some senior Greens, like Milne
and her long-time staffer Tim Hollo, have argued that it was the weakness of
the environment NGOs and climate movement that left the party with little room
to win more ambitious gains. Such an argument is disingenuous because the
Greens’ strategy was to win more radical and independent climate campaigners to
the party’s narrow carbon price policy; one designed for pragmatic negotiations
in Canberra and not the building of a mass movement to pressure government from
without. But it is also an abrogation of political responsibility because it pretends
that the conveyor belt of political ideas and action runs only in one direction
— from movements to parliamentarians, as if the latter cannot argue for greater
ambition for the purpose of building movements. Yet the Greens did lead within
the grassroots climate movement: They led it to conservatise and narrow its
priorities, to “unite” around a parliamentary logic rather than its own needs
(let alone the needs of the planet).
Where to for the Left
now?
This all brings to mind the
words of Polish Marxist Rosa Luxemburg on the participation of socialists
within capitalist governments:
The government of the modern
state is essentially an organization of class domination, the regular
functioning of which is one of the conditions of existence of the class state.
With the entry of a socialist into the government, and class domination
continuing to exist, the bourgeois government doesn’t transform itself into a
socialist government, but a socialist transforms himself into a bourgeois
minister.
The Greens have not formally entered government and so
retain somewhat more political independence than if they had. This is in
contrast to their rotten
role in the Tasmanian ministry. But the cost of the Greens’ strategy has
nevertheless been great, and its full effects haven’t yet played out. This is
especially worrisome because Liberal
hardheads and sections of big business are eyeing their opportunity to push
through a radical right-wing agenda on the basis of Labor’s unpopularity.
Bob Brown may want to save us from Abbott, but the longer he
politically defends a Labor
government carrying out a right-wing agenda little different from that of the
Liberals, the bigger the mandate Abbott will be able to claim — much as Berlusconi did in Italy.
The disarray of the political Left, however, is not the same
as the death of all resistance to the Right. Last week’s magnificent strike and
35,000-strong rally against O’Farrell’s attacks on NSW public sector workers
demonstrated that growing anger against austerity cannot be kept in check
indefinitely, despite the weakness of the traditional institutional structures
of the working class and the Left. But the question of official politics is not
one that can be ignored by such movements forever (even if union leaders dodged
ALP sectarianism towards the Greens by not allowing any politicians to speak from the stage on Thursday). The Left
needs an alternative, positive approach to political questions — but one
that starts from rejecting the notion that participation in “constructive”
parliamentarism of the sort the Greens have championed is the way forward.
There will be a great temptation for activists to simply
argue that we should build the movements and not worry about politics. The
kernel of truth in this is that one strike of the sort we saw last week is
worth much more than any election in politicising and cohering
politics-from-below. But the other kind of politics will inevitably reassert
itself in debates activists face. How to address it without repeating the
current mess should be at the forefront of our minds.
* Some recent polls (one
federal and one
in Queensland) show that around two-thirds of voters believe that the party
has too much influence over the
government.
