Laborism: From Social Democracy to Social Managerialism

On the reverse polarity visible in former social democratic and labour parties, and what it means for the rise of the far right.

Cover: 1921 KPD poster depicting a German social democrat shaking hands with representatives of capitalists and authoritarians. Accessible here: https://germanhistorydocs.org/en/weimar-germany-1918-1933/poster-social-democracy-or-communist-party

cf. https://classautonomy.info/intervention-by-council-communists-at-the-founding-party-congress-of-the-kpd-against-participation-in-elections/

Godfrey Moase || I recently resigned my Australian Labor Party membership.

I came to the conclusion that it was impossible to work within the party to change it. Operational primacy was placed with parliamentarians, and the dominant culture amongst this cohort is to view themselves as neutral actors in the class struggle.

I had been a member for over twenty years, and I was treated as an outsider. I witnessed the cartel within the party, and unless you play by its rules of patronage you are nothing. And if you accept the cartel, you sacrifice your humanity to it.

Labor has gone from a party of workers to a party of managers.

It consistently produces outcomes that suit corporate interests. This goes beyond the compromises of social democracy in the pre-neoliberal era. Social democracy used to stand for attempting to represent worker interests within the legal confines of a given political system. Of course, these two outcomes would inevitably conflict with sometimes cataclysmic results (I’m looking at you World War I).

This contradiction, however, has been resolved in favour of reinforcing the political system. It is as if a switch had been flipped from attempting to represent workers within the confines of the political system to confining workers to the limits of the system.

Reverse polarity and social organisations

In direct current systems, reverse polarity describes a current running backwards causing motors to spin in an opposite direction. Applied to social organisations, reverse polarity describes a situation where its alignment is flipped so its outcomes become the opposite of its founding purpose.

Socially, this phenomenon of a current flowing backwards is visible in labour and social democratic parties throughout the Global North. For such parties, it is a shift from representing the interests of workers within a broader capitalist social system to managing workers as one of many “stakeholders” (as Tony Blair put it). Social democracy devolves into social managerialism. Workers are objects to be managed not subjects to be represented.

This is starkly evident in Australia with Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s repeated public statements about his ambition to turn the Labor Party into “the natural party of government”.

There are those who are reading this piece who will have a shopping list of policy achievements from the governments of leaders like Starmer, Albanese or Ardern ready to go. Considered on their own such achievements as limited pro-worker industrial relations reforms, bringing private railway operations into public hands and encouraging renewable energy investment are improvements. These outcomes, however, require context. They occur within the framework of attempting to maintain a decaying neoliberal settlement of working-class precarity, overwhelming oligarchical and corporate influence, and fidelity to American imperialism.

This dynamic can be evidenced in the way both UK and Australian labour party administrations offer up their people, power and land to Silicon Valley profits.

Starmer and Albanese governments pass reforms so things can stay the same.

To the extent that these outcomes are tangible they bear close resemblance to social policy achievements of Tory and conservative governments in the 1950s and 60s. They are a record of managing competing interests within the framework of a given regime where primacy is given to maintaining that regime.

The social democratic void and the rise of the far right

This shift of social democratic and labour parties into social managerialism has two immediate political consequences. It takes away the space centre-right parties once occupied as the default managers of a regime, and it opens up a void on the social democratic left across the Global North. In the context of an economy pushing more and more working-class households to the edge and beyond, workers also no longer feel represented by mainstream political parties.

These two currents clash to form a dangerous maelstrom in the form of the rise of radical right and outright fascist parties. The radical right feeds on the decaying body of the centre-right and presents itself as the only means atomised working-class households have to register their displeasure.

How to escape this maelstrom has become the pertinent question for all those not seeking a return to 19th century racism, sexism and living standards. What I have learned from my lived experience of decades in Australian Labor is that change will not come from playing by the rules set by the cartel and in a field where the cartel can simply change any rules not working for them.

One only needs to see the footage of Labor members being forcibly evicted by the Police from the NSW Labor conference for unfurling a Palestinian flag to understand how the spaces once open for democratic debate have been strangled.

Globally, groups such as the Democratic Socialists of America and the UK Greens are filling the social democratic space. Perhaps with enough external shocks even some social democratic and labour parties will return to the ground they have vacated.

Here’s the rub though: the state itself is nested within a broader range of social relations. Any transformative social project must be rooted in the everyday lives of the people, in their workplaces, their neighbourhoods and social circles. For without the working-class daily exercising its power any political project to hold on state authority will be short-lived or devolve into a cult of personality.

The road to a new future neither begins nor ends in Westminster, Washington or Canberra.