The fight for the independent interests of the working class cannot be conducted through the old, national-based organisations—the Labor Party and trade unions. After more than 100 years of bitter experience, the working class must draw the necessary lessons and make a conscious political break with the Labor Party and its nationalist program. While Labor was founded in the 1890s as a mass party of the working class, its program has always been based on the defence of the capitalist system. It was Labor that furnished the Australian nation-state with its founding ideology of racial exclusivism, protectionism, and class compromise. With the rise of globalised production over the last three decades Labor’s relationship to the working class has undergone a decisive transformation. Like its social democratic counterparts internationally, the Labor Party has abandoned its old program of limited national reform and become a vehicle for the interests of big business and finance capital, undermining the wages and conditions of working people in the name of productivity, profits, and international competitiveness.
