David, I agree with your statement that “Abbott will create a strangely tedious but colourful sideshow and he will then lead the Liberals to a shattering defeat which will take many years to recover from.” In that sense, it’s not just a matter of waiting for the Abbott experiment to be over and moving on as if it never happened, which is what some people on other sites have suggested. The Liberal Party will have gone backwards under Abbott.

Need I explain how stupid and obnoxious, and plainly electorally unattractive, this notion is?

His efforts so far throwing out ‘policy possibilities’ has been extraordinarily undisciplined, to a degree that vastly exceeds Mark Latham, and he will end up making the bulk of the electorate nervous but not at all excited. He will hand the mantle of the natural party of government to Labor and make the Liberal alternative seem risky and odd.

Proving what? That the god’s must be crazy?

class and value in its Marxian form is about an ontological relation to the world - where physical labour dominates, and some people own accumulated bits of it and others don’t, then a primordial division deeper than any other categorisation has developed.

when the value form changes (as Marx noted it would, in the ‘fragment on machines’), then the ontological relationship changes. A society dominated by knowledge work and increasingly automated production does not run off (physical) labour value, and the value-surplus-exploitation-division is no longer primordial in terms of group formation. There’s no last instance when a class division is laid bare.

Building a movement predicated on the idea that all the veils will fall away eventually, is a recipe for wasting your life. You’ll end up like the Henry George League, still setting up their table occasionally, ghosts of the 19th century.

Seriously, as a Marxist, doesn’t the phrase ‘nothing has changed in 160 years’ ring a few alarm bells?

You despair because you see very little of any of it and fail to understand that is because these concepts have little relationship to the modern world. They were born out of an industrial era that ended long ago and it is a kind of eccentric antiquarianism to continue using them.

The knowledge worker/physical labourer difference (itself a construct I have some reservations about) fits within that ontological category.

I agree sort of with 3. You can’t predict what Abbott or Joyce or Rudd are always going to do on specifics since capital is itself not a uniform entity, and the relationship between the state and capital is complex, but you can argue that their decisions fit within a continuum of capitalist solutions. As to 4 where is the evidence of these intraclass conflicts.

I have read nothing but the horrors of Abbott from the public intellectual left, so my apologies for reacting with some acerbity to your contribution.

More importantly, I see the pathetic ETS defeated in the Senate (I think the Greens were right to oppose it as worse than useless) and see the Opposition using scare tactics. I despair that there is no mass movement against the reactionaries of Labor and the Liberals on climate change. Nothing.

Struggle in the past has forced our rulers to grant concessions - whether it be the vote, the end of slavery, social welfare, women in the workforce, some concessions to the gay liberation movements etc.

Why pooh pooh that perspective of struggle on perhaps the issue that threatens the very existence of humanity?

I am not suggesting this is Socialist Alternative telling the world to join us to fight climate change. That would be sectarianism of the highest order and completely self defeating.

Indeed, as I suggest on my blog, the Greens have the credibility to move the whole debate to the left through organising mass action against climate change (including civil disobedience and perhaps action by workers), agitating for that action and for greens jobs.

But the whole movement seems stuck in the ice age of change through Parliament. It’s the usual top down approach to change - just vote for us - the greens, the left etc - and we’ll change the world for you. But even on those fairly base and timid terms mass action has the chance of increasing the vote for the Greens.

I see building a mass movement to force our rulers to take real action on climate change as an absolute necessity.Tthat mass movement is not a small group like Socialist Alternative - it is a mass movement of ordinary working people for green jobs, for the environment. The reality is only people with real credibility in society can do that or at least begin that process.

i think the short answer to your string of replies is that class analysis is of some use sometimes, and sometimes has major effects on ‘higher’ levels of action, but 1) simple theories of class as based around physical labour and ownership are superseded in information-dominated societies, and 2) a whole rethinking of what ‘class’ is as an ontological category is required, and 3) any attempt to read off ideological shifts as an expression of class conflict, rather than as action at an autonomous level becomes absurd, and 4) if one is to see class expression in these occurrences, it is largely by the new class conflict between knowledge/culture/policy workers on the one hand, and physical producers on the other.

As for demonising Abbott, I agree - and I’ve written far more about Rudd and Ruddism as a coercive politics than I have about the Libs over the last three months. But we know that Abbott is an aggressive warrior on issues like abortion, etc, so it’s not simply a cultural demonisation, it’s a real line.

But all this stuff about building a new working-class movement, the difficulties etc etc…all i hear is the old voice of left masochism, and an impossible anachronistic politics

But there is some truth I think in your understanding of my view of change. Lenin said that sometimes nothing happens for decades and then decades happen in weeks.

There is a dialectical process of change.

Looking back seems to justify this analysis - Europe after the first World War, Spain 36-39, Australia in 1917, 1931 with the socialisation units, Eastern Europe in fits and starts after the second world war and then in full bloom between 89 and 91, Portugal and its dependencies in 1974, May 68 in France, the late 60s more generally in the US and western Europe, Iran in 78/79 and again in 2009, Bolivia in 2002(?), the process of change (from feudalism to state capitalism) in China, Vietnam and the like, the processes going on in Venezuela now (with revolutionary elements looking for ways to further the prospects for revolution).

This seems to me to show that in fact there are classes whose interests are fundamentally opposed, and oppose din ways that are antagonistic. This doesn’t mean that we socialists can just sit back and wait for the revolution to mature.

It means both building ourselves and our relationship with the working class. But as I have made clear the revolutionary left in Australia is incredibly small (sects in your terms). As I have written on my blog we are corks bobbing on the waves of society.

Any mass upsurge in the near future is likely to sweep over us. But to deny,as you do, that such an upsurge could occur is I believe to see the present as the future.

But in my view all society is in a constant process of change, mostly slow and incremental, and then suddenly bursting forth.

If you say that “stalinists in the 30s opposing a mass leftward moving movement of Labor Party members” does that not imply you believe there was a strong movement towards socialism, and a pre-revolutionary situation, that was impeded by Stalinists in the 1930s? If not what gloss would you put on this statement?

Your tendency to back away from your statements, and the implications of those statements, is rather timid.

Despite your disavowals, your focus on Labor as the main enemy has a clear lineage back to the social fasc*st era of communist thinking. I did not say that you have revolutionary fantasies about the current situation but nevertheless you do have that typical radical left sectarian belief that conditions will change, perhaps suddenly, in a way that will create a vastly more fertile ground for your ideology. Unfortunately for you, but not the rest of us, that is a very dead fantasy. Whatever dire challenges we face in the future Trotskyism, and similar radical left ‘solutions’, will not be supplying the answers.

If you say that “stalinists in the 30s opposing a mass leftward moving movement of Labor Party members” does that not imply you believe there was a strong movement towards socialism, and a pre-revolutionary situation, that was impeded by Stalinists in the 1930s? If not what gloss would you put on this statement?

Your tendency to back away from your statements, and the implications of those statements, is rather timid.

Despite your disavowals, your focus on Labor as the main enemy has a clear lineage back to the social fascist era of communist thinking. I did not say that you have revolutionary fantasies about the current situation but nevertheless you do have that typical radical left sectarian belief that conditions will change, perhaps suddenly, in a way that will create a vastly more fertile ground for your ideology. Unfortunately for you, but not the rest of us, that is a very dead fantasy. Whatever dire challenges we face in the future Trotskyism, and similar radical left ‘solutions’, will not be supplying the answers.

But I do think you mistake the present social reality for an eternal truth. Maybe if you read my blog that might convince you otherwise but I doubt it.

I still think my basic point is valid - the Left’s fascination with Abbott obscures the fact that Rudd in power is Howard without the divisiveness (at least at the moment). On a whole range of policies (climate change, refugees, the Northern Territory intervention, keeping a lid on wage increases and strikes, work choices - now known as Fair Work Australia - gay marriage, women’s wage and superannuation inequality, to use just some examples, Rudd seems to me to continue the Howard agenda.

The Left’s a-historical and anti-materialist demonisation of Abbott (a demonisation that could perhaps slip into anti-Catholic sectarianism) lets Rudd run free.

It is a pleasure to see that you have the old dialectic still working away and that reveals that the only thing stopping the workers driving full speed towards socialism in the 1930s were the nefarious Stalinist who, like a malignant dam, were stopping the onrush of workers revolutionary power. Across the nation Labor Party branches were moving towards transforming themselves into workers soviets and were prevented from doing so by the satanic Stalinists.

It is exciting to think that the ‘masses’ were ready to behave in such an exciting way but, like many derring-do adventure stories, it is almost entirely untrue. But it is not necessary for these fantasies to be true as their main purpose is to keep the utopian fantasy alive in a small number of radical left sects. Theses sects delude themselves into believing that the future belongs to them but their future died many years ago.

I look forward to Guy now applying his analysis to NSW and the catholic leader there to see how useful this approach is. Or even Rudd.

Perhaps you should join us Guy in our attempts to build a mass movement for working class liberation.