DON'T VOTE

Paper for Victorian CAPU Conference, 'JUSTICE UNDER LABOR'
May 10, 1986

Albert Langer

Introduction

A 'Don't Vote' campaign is being launched with the
declared aim of bringing down the Labor Government. This
is primarily an  electoral tactic and does not claim to
solve any wider strategic problem than what to do at
election time. This electoral tactic obviously contradicts
the tactic of joining the ALP and fighting to make it more
left wing, although many who have joined the ALP and have
fought to make it more left wing may find themselves
attracted to it. The 'don't vote' tactic also partly
contradicts and partly overlaps with the tactic of running
alternative candidates.

The problem we face is that views to the left of the ALP
Government are at present completely marginal and
irrelevant in Australian politics. We can say what we
like, but nobody really needs to listen. This is not the
result of any conspiracy by our opponents, but reflects
the overall bankruptcy of 'left' ideologies, not only in
Australia, but throughout the western world. We do not at
present have any clear vision of what kind of society we
want, let alone a strategy for getting there. Nor do we
even have any adequate analysis of the society we are
living in or the forces at work within it. That
necessarily leaves us in a passive position where we
cannot take any significant positive initiatives.

This means that leaving aside the fake left, or 'pinks',
who participate in mainstream politics as liberals or
conservatives, the left currently has no role in
mainstream politics. Our political discussions generally
revolve around what stand to take, rather than how to
achieve any concrete political objective. We are engaged
in propaganda, and rather dull propaganda at that, rather
than politics.That problem cannot be resolved by any
electoral tactic, including a 'Don't Vote' campaign. But
any electoral tactic we do adopt should at least start
from a recognition of the real situation and contribute
towards ending that situation. As a minimum, it should aim
to achieve some concrete political objective that furthers 
the goal of establishing the left as an independent
political force able to influence mainstream politics in
accordance with its own program and strategy.

The concrete political objective of a 'Don't Vote'
campaign, is to bring down the present ALP Government,
which in practice means replacing it with a Liberal or
Liberal/National Coalition Government. It is not a
'protest' vote and would not be aimed at Labor party
strongholds. It would be concentrated in marginal Labor
held seats and the measure of its success would be the
number of seats that it cost the ALP.

That is clearly a concrete political objective, but is it
feasible, and would it further the goal of establishing
the left as an independent force able to influence
mainstream politics in accordance with its own program and
strategy? How on earth could the election of an even more
reactionary Government than the ALP actually benefit the
left?

Before considering that in detail, let us examine the main
alternative proposals.


Joining The ALP

The tactic of joining the ALP presumably has as its
concrete political objective, turning the ALP into a
substantially different kind of political party, which
would then implement left policies. An obvious problem is
that this tactic has been tried many times before and is
still being tried now, with no signs of success. Even the
more limited objective of splitting the ALP to provide a
substantial base for a new party has got precisely
nowhere.

The repeated failure of this tactic is not accidental and
is not the result of too few people giving it a try. The
tactic has failed in the past, is failing now, and will
fail in the future, because it does not recognise reality,
although its advocates often claim to be more 'practical'
than others on the left.

The reality is that the ALP is and always has been a
liberal capitalist party. People join it and vote for it
because they believe, and correctly believe, that social
progress is possible within the present capitalist social
system and that the ALP is more liberal and progressive
than its conservative opponents. The ALP is not
'betraying' its socialist principles, it never had any. If
the ALP is now becoming a conservative party rather than a
liberal and progressive party, that is a problem for its
liberal and progressive supporters, a problem for the
'pinks', not a problem for the left.
In a bourgeois democratic society, progressive liberals 
have a perfect right to form progressive liberal parties,
just as conservatives have a perfect right to form
conservative parties. It is fundamentally undemocratic and
elitist for people who claim to be on the left to try and
take over the political party of an entirely different
political tendency. Genuine ALP supporters naturally
resent these attempts at manipulation and defend their
party and its liberal capitalist principles against alien
intruders.

The result is a massive diversion of energy with people
who claim to be on the left actually spending all their
time 'getting the numbers' at meetings attended only by
themselves and their opponents, instead of engaging in
real politics out among the people. In many respects the
ALP is not really a political party, because it does not
go out to the people and try to win them to its
principles. It is just an electoral machine striving to
'get the numbers' at election time. But this applies even
more to the ALP left than to the party generally. While
many in the ALP left are also involved in social movements
outside the ALP, their participation in the ALP does not
strengthen that. It provides another, more comfortable
world, where getting some resolution adopted or defeated
in some party organisation, or taking a 'principled' stand
against their opponents who win the numbers, makes it
easier to avoid facing up to the fact that they are unable
to actually convince anybody inside or outside that world
to change their views about anything.

Given the absence of any organised left movement with a
real mass base at present, it may not be surprising that
the ALP left finds their world more comfortable than the
bitter recognition of the left's isolation and impotence.
But it remains an entirely unreal world completely
divorced from real struggle and real politics.

If by some miracle the ALP left was one day to actually
'get the numbers', the only result would be that genuine
ALP supporters would regroup in a different organisation
with the same mass base. More likely if there was the
slightest danger of a 'left' takeover, there would be a
development like the formation of the Social-Democratic
Party in Britain, and consequent return of the British
Labour Party towards its traditional liberal progressive
or 'Laborist' principles.

The point is that people are not so stupid as the ALP left
imagines. ALP voters do not support their party out of
blind organisational loyalty but because they agree with
it, or at least prefer it to its opponents. When the left
does develop a vision of the kind of society it wants, its
strategy must be based on winning people to that vision
through their own experience of struggle. The sort of
social change we want requires a high level of
consciousness from large masses of people who will
transform society while transforming themselves. It can
only be achieved if that consciousness is raised, not by
taking over organisations that reflect their existing
level of consciousness.

If any sort of social change could be achieved by
infiltrating and taking over an existing mainstream party,
it would not be a progressive change but a victory for
manipulation by bureaucratic manipulators.


Running Alternative  Candidates

Undoubtedly there will be more alternative candidates at
future elections, whether there is also a 'Don't Vote'
campaign or not. In the medium term we can expect the
eventual formation of a new mainstream party as far to the
left of the ALP as the Australia Party or even the Liberal
Party is to its right, which is not all that far. Perhaps
it will be something like the 'Greens' in West Germany or
perhaps it will result from a split with conservatives in
the ALP.

This could be of some benefit in opening up the political
situation and setting the stage for greater instability
and further developments. But running candidates or
forming new parties could not at present further the goal
of establishing the left as an independent political force
able to influence mainstream politics in accordance with
its own program and strategy.

This is because the crisis of the left is a crisis of
reformism and any new political party or tendency formed
now could only be a reformist party or tendency, not a
revolutionary one. It would not be an independent
political force with its own program and strategy and it
would have little influence on mainstream politics.

Reformism, as opposed to liberalism, asserts that social
progress within capitalism is not enough, and the
capitalist system itself must be transformed, legally,
gradually and peacefully, into some sort of socialist
system not based on wage labour and the private ownership
of the means of production.

The reason liberal parties like the ALP, the U.S.
Democratic Party and the various European Social-
Democratic parties are strong, while reformist parties are
weak or non-existent, is that reformism is not a
realistic, practical prospect in advanced capitalist
societies, while liberalism, like conservatism, is
perfectly realistic and practical. Historically, reformism
has capitulated to liberalism and any new reformist
tendency would have to do the same. The Democratic Party
is supported by reformists in the U.S.A. for much the same
reasons that the ALP is supported by reformists in
Australia - reformism has been unable to sustain an
electorally significant party of its own.
The problems we face in advanced capitalist societies allrevolve around the fact that they are advanced capitalist
societies. It is the mode of production based on private
property and wage labor that has to be changed and that
requires a social revolution in which the class that
produces the wealth seizes power and uses that power to
take the wealth from those that own it and to abolish wage
labor. Taking the wealth from those that own it is not
something that can be achieved peacefully and legally
through such measures as taxation and nationalization.
Taking people's property is stealing, which is a very
serious crime. They would certainly call the police and if
it was happening on a large scale or with Government
connivance they would call the army. After all, what are
the police and the army for if they are not to prevent
wholesale stealing of private property?

As long as a minority ruling class owns the means of
production, infringement of its property rights can only
result in the economy jamming up and going into deeper
crisis - if such attempts are not treated as criminal and
suppressed by armed force as in Chile. The 'property
question' is not on the agenda in mainstream politics
precisely because deep down people know that it cannot be
resolved peacefully, gradually and legally. That is why
reformist parties attract little support and an important
reason why the left, which has not advanced beyond
reformism, has basically gone from crisis to collapse.

Of course at present revolution is just as unrealistic and
impractical as reformism, and revolutionary ideas have
even less support than reformist ideas. But that simply
confirms that any new party or tendency that could be
formed now would not be revolutionary. It does not prove
that revolution will remain impractical and unrealistic as
the crisis of capitalism deepens and the currently
dominant political forces exhaust their potential.

When we do have a clear vision of the kind of society we
want and a strategy for getting there, it will have to be
a revolutionary vision and a revolutionary strategy. When
a revolutionary party is eventually formed it will
certainly need to be involved in electoral tactics as in
every other arena of struggle. But every previous attempt
to establish a revolutionary party in an advanced
capitalist society has failed, and in particular those
parties that have developed successful electoral tactics
have without exception ceased to be revolutionary. Nobody
is seriously attempting to establish a revolutionary party
in Australia at present and those that pretend to be are
just posturing.

Meanwhile running alternative candidates without a
revolutionary party will not achieve any worthwhile
political objective because it avoids facing up to the
fact that we don't have a vision and don't have a
strategy. Whatever platforms the alternative candidates
run on, nobody will seriously believe, including the
candidates themselves, that society really could be
transformed according to their platforms. They will 
simply be another form of protest propaganda rather than a
serious political intervention aimed at a concrete
practical objective.

To the extent that alternative candidates withhold their
preferences from the ALP, their campaign will overlap with
the 'Don't Vote' campaign and contribute to the same
practical political objective - bringing down the ALP
Government and replacing it with a Liberal/National
Government. To this extent they will be open to exactly
the same objections from ALP supporters as the 'Don't
Vote' campaign itself - namely that the opposition is
worse than the Government and they are helping it to get
in.

But they will have less impact in overcoming these
objections than the 'Don't Vote' campaign because they
will tend to be campaigning for the quite unrealistic
prospect of electing the alternative candidates, rather
than for the more controversial, but also more practical
objective of bringing down the ALP Government, and will
therefore not be answering the doubts of their potential
supporters. Moreover most alternative candidates will tend
to run in Labor strongholds or for the Senate as a
'protest' vote rather than in marginal electorates where
they could actually cost the ALP some seats.

To the extent that alternative candidates direct their
preferences to the ALP, or fail to direct them away from
it, their only impact on the actual results of the
election will be to confirm the ALP in office. Without
actually campaigning to bring the ALP down, people who
believe the ALP is better than the Opposition will
continue to give their preferences to the ALP whether they
'protest' or not. Thus alternative candidates will not
establish a force politically independent of the ALP, but
will confirm again that there is no such force.


Bringing Down The ALP Government

There is no basis yet for a new party that could agree on
a platform, whether reformist or revolutionary, to
seriously challenge the ALP directly. But a much lower
level of unity and organisation is all that would be
required to challenge the ALP indirectly through a 'Don't
Vote' campaign. The Nuclear Disarmament Party has shown
that very significant numbers are already sufficiently
alienated from the ALP to break from it when the issue at
stake is not whether the Liberal Party could come into
office. Even if the numbers who are not intimidated by the
prospect of a Liberal Government are much smaller, they
could easily be sufficient to cost the ALP a few marginal
seats and thereby cost it office. Large numbers already
voted informal where NDP candidates were not available in
the last national election, even without an organised
campaign, and this could not have been just because ALP
supporters are too stupid to be able to understand the
ballot paper, as claimed by their 'leaders'. Quite small
numbers would be sufficient to tip the balance in marginal
seats.

At public meetings of People Against ID Numbers and the
People's Tax Summit, proposals to run 'Don't Vote'
campaigns in marginal ALP seats have been adopted
overwhelmingly. The main opposition came from a handful of
'Communist' and 'Marxist-Leninist' supporters, and not
from ALP supporters. At the recent Mayday march, leaflets
advocating the 'Don't Vote' campaign were generally well
received. The only difficulty was that some people would
not take them because they were headed 'How to vote LABOR'
so they thought they would not be interested! A number of
social movements are finding that the direct enemy
oppressing them is the ALP Government rather than the 'New
Right' and there seems to be a mood developing favourable
to bringing that government down. The 'New Right' itself,
seems to be largely a reaction to the Liberal Party's
great difficulty distinguishing itself from the ALP and
the view that there is little to choose between the
Government and Opposition is now commonplace. Many ALP
supporters are looking for ways to show their disapproval
of Government policy.

Thus whether or not it is desirable, the objective of
bringing down the ALP Government is at least feasible,
unlike the objectives of turning the ALP into a left party
or electing alternative candidates. This in itself
establishes the basis for a very different kind of
campaign from the usual left 'protests' that are not
expected to achieve any particular concrete objective.

There is considerable scope for raising the slogan 'Bring
Down the ALP Government' in all sorts of extra-
Parliamentary social movements and not just in the
electoral 'Don't Vote' campaign. This would sharpen up any
struggle in which it was raised by clearly identifying the
Government as an enemy to be defeated rather than a friend
being petitioned.

Whether this feasible objective is achieved or not, merely
attempting it would be a significant breakthrough from the
present political climate. Just raising the banner of a
left tendency explicitly hostile to the ALP rather than
tacitly aligned with it, could in itself alter the terms
of political debate in Australia.

With all the traditional 'left' tendencies now engaged in
frantic ecumenical activity rather similar to the
Christian churches, it is about time for some atheists to
point out that the decline of the 'left', like the decline
of Christianity, is due to its bankruptcy and will not be
reversed by ecumenical unity. A real debate, over a
concrete political initiative, will do far more to clarify
where people really stand and what is wrong with where we
stand, than any amount of propaganda about things we all
agree with, or disputes about events in the past history
of other countries.

The principal objection to the 'Don't Vote' campaign is
simply that the Opposition is worse than the Government
and would be the immediate beneficiaries of bringing down
the Government. That objection is not easily answered, and
its strength is the reason why we can only expect a fairly
small minority to support the 'Don't Vote' position
initially.

But it is a objection that can be answered and the process
of answering it, and forcing ALP supporters and other
'pinks' to justify their position will in fact be the main
benefit of the campaign. The numbers of  people who become
convinced that the differences between the ALP and the
Opposition are not significant enough to justify actually
supporting a reactionary conservative ALP Government can
only grow in the course of this debate. There is no chance
that we would come out of it with less support than we
went in with.

The other main objection will be that it is a purely
negative, destructive campaign that does not present any
positive alternative to the ALP and again highlights the
fact that the left has no serious program of its own. That
too is an actual advantage. We can only frankly admit the
charge and it is essential that we do frankly admit the
real situation in order to change it. We cannot develop a
vision of the kind of society we want or a strategy for
getting there until everybody has clearly understood that
we really don't have one at present. At least we can get
across the idea that there is a force in Australian
politics, capable of influencing actual events, whose
politics are not expressed by the ALP or the opposition
and that wants to develop such a vision and such a
strategy.

This would suit the interests of both those who want to
build a new reformist party and those who would eventually
like to see a revolutionary communist party emerge. An
essential precondition for either is that significant
numbers of people declare their political independence
from liberalism by refusing to support the ALP merely
because it is more liberal or less conservative than the
Liberal Party.

If the ALP is brought down simply by the bankruptcy of its
own policies, we will probably see another period of the
'left' pretending that all the problems of capitalist
economic crisis can be blamed on 'Howard' just as they
were previously blamed on 'Fraser' and are starting to be
blamed on 'Hawke'. (Indeed organisers of the 'Broad Left'
conference have already started pretending that various
attacks on existing conditions result from pressure by 
the'New Right', conveniently ignoring the fact that the
Government which is carrying out these attacks is their
own).

If a 'Don't Vote' campaign is partly responsible for
Labor's fall, the same nonsense will emerge, but it may be
much weaker. There is a real difference between the
atmosphere that would result from the Opposition being
elected because the pendulum has swung back to
conservatism, and that which would result from them being
elected because a new force has emerged to the left of the
ALP and hostile to it.

Certainly there would be a real polarisation on the left
and thus some opportunity for the political situation to
open up and new tendencies to emerge. With all the ALP
supporters and other 'pinks' screaming 'treachery' and
desperately trying to convince people that the differences
between the ALP and the Liberal Party are terribly
important, there would be some scope for genuine
ideological confrontation instead of the boring futility
of most political discussions at present.

As for the effect on conditions generally, it is not a
matter of advocating 'the worse the better', but of
recognising that it is the level of people's struggle that
determines what Governments can get away with.

In some areas, such as social welfare, the Opposition will
undoubtedly be worse than the ALP, but the resistance to
their policies may also be stronger and better organised.
Perhaps some funding of community groups would be slashed
more savagely than they are by the ALP. But the Liberal
Party would also fund community groups for the same reason
that the ALP does - to keep people off the streets and
divert them from building a genuinely independent
movement. The left was much stronger during the anti-
Vietnam protests before the Whitlam Government, without
any funding, than it has been since. It may not be such a
bad thing if some of the 'pinks' did have their funding
slashed.

In other areas, such as attacks on unions and ID cards,
the Opposition would have much less possibility of
succeeding with reactionary policies than the ALP does. In
many areas, like foreign policy, there would be no
noticeable difference because lets face it, despite all
the ravings from the ALP left, the Opposition are not
fascists but just conservatives like the ALP. Whatever the
overall balance sheet, the mere assertion that there is a
left, politically independent of the ALP and able to
influence events by its own strategies, would outweigh any
possible disadvantages. We don't have that now and we need
it desperately.


Afterword
The above paper is over seven years old but I still can't
see anything wrong with it. Am I in a time warp or does
the current political situation in Australia (with the
names of a few politicians etc changed), really call for
an identical analysis and tactical proposals to those I
put forward seven years ago? If I got it wrong, I would
like to see my errors explained and alternative proposals
for electoral tactics put forward. If I got it right, how
come there hasn't been much action on these proposals over
seven years? In either case, why hasn't there been some
noticeable change in relevant aspects of the political
situation over seven years, or if there has been, why
haven't I noticed it?

It seems to me that the ALP Government at least is still
seriously concerned about the potential damage that could
be inflicted on it by these proposals, and has good reason
to be. It 'won' the March 1993 Federal Elections by a
total margin of less than 2000 votes after dishonestly
sneaking legislation through Parliament during the end of
session rush to prohibit advocacy of an informal vote.
Without that legislation, the minimal publicity that even
a piss weak campaign could have obtained in the mass media
would certainly have been enough to influence more than a
couple of thousand ALP voters in marginal seats and
therefore enough to have cost them the election. If there
had been a more vigorous campaign and significant numbers
of people had been able to make an issue of the ban
itself, the ALP would have been defeated despite (or
partly because of) that legislation (s 329A of the
Commonwealth Electoral Act).

Challenges to the constitutional validity of s 329A and of
the rigged elections that were 'won' using it are
currently wending their way through the High Court but
won't be resolved until 1994. However there hasn't been
much mobilization about the quite outrageous attack on
basic democratic rights involved in threatening six months
gaol for advocating a lawful vote and 'winning' an
election by those means.

Nor was there much mobilization in 1987 when the ALP
Government's Australian Electoral Commission stooges
claimed it was illegal to advocate an informal vote even
though there was no legislation to back them up. As a
result they got away with effectively fining Harry van
Moorst $12,000 for exercising his right to campaign
against all candidates in the 1987 election, by
threatening to sell his house to pay for court costs from
resisting their injunction. (The court rejected the AEC's
demand for an injunction restraining advocacy of an
informal vote, but granted an injunction against
advocating no vote at all, with costs, on the basis that a
'Don't Vote' campaign might encourage voters not to comply
with Australia's compulsory voting laws, even though the
campaign was urging voters to turn up and record their
informal votes rather than staying at home apathetically. 
Subsequent campaigns were renamed 'Vote Informal' to avoid
any possible confusion on this point - so the ALP brought
in s 329A to make that illegal - and similar State
legislation in South Australia.)

A vigorous effort could have brought the Government down
already. Even a minimal effort now could make them pay
dearly and help ensure their defeat in the next elections
(which may not be a full three years away). It would also
help consolidate democratic rights and involve people
concerned about the ALP's increasingly vicious attacks on
those rights. Anyone interested in helping should contact
the Vote Informal Campaign, 111 Bradley Grove, Mitchell
Park, SA 5043 (phone 08 374 1446).

I would also appreciate it if somebody not interested in
helping could explain just why this doesn't grab them. Why
is there only a (small) functioning campaign in Adelaide
now and nothing in Melbourne where activity was strongest
in 1987? Are $12,000 fines and threats of six months gaol
for exercising elementary democratic rights not worth
bothering about? Is fear of the Coalition deeper now that
it was in 1987? Or is it just general demobilization and
demoralization?