Labor’s Oligarchic Temptation

Having passed the phases of decline, decadence and collapse, New South Wales Labor limps towards annihilation in 2011. Not without irony, that year marks a century since the publication of Political Parties, Robert Michels’s classic treatise on “the iron law of oligarchy”. This obscure coincidence is notable, since Michels’s thesis bears directly on the shabby saga in New South Wales, if not on Labor as such. Michels argued, essentially, that owing to disparities in the education levels of their officials relative to their rank-and-file and voters, parties of the Left were prone, over time but inevitably, to be usurped by self-serving functionaries, obsessed with their own power and status:

‘The accumulation of power in the hands of a restricted number of persons, such as ensues in the labour movement today, necessarily gives rise to numerous abuses. The “representative”, proud of his indispensability, readily becomes transformed from a servitor of the people into their master. The leaders, who have begun by being under obligations to their subordinates, become in the long run the lords of these …’

It could have been written yesterday. Michels’s perspectives are handy for those winding through the maze of ambition, lies, back-stabbing, vindictiveness and revenge in the pages of Betrayal, Simon Benson’s absorbing account of New South Wales Labor’s fall from grace. Shell-shocked readers, though, are left craving some explanations. Was there more to it than politicians being politicians? Was it simply fortuitous that so many unprincipled people ended up in the same milieu? Was it an aberration, or an expression of “the way we live now”?

While shoulder-shrugging cynicism is a natural response, the addition of Michels’s analysis to Benson’s lurid detail sheds light on some root causes of the malaise, on the forces which separate political operatives from the national interest, which inflate their egos and embroil them in petty power-plays, and which breed a thinly veiled contempt for the mass of citizens beyond the power game.

Three of Michels’s insights are right on point. The network of affiliated unions, worker groups, party officials and politicians forming a labour movement necessarily erect complex systems of organisation, accompanied by overly bureaucratic norms of behaviour. At some point, the edifice is vulnerable to capture by machine men and women, power-brokers who confuse their own interests with the party’s objectives. Michels explains:

The party, regarded as an entity, as a piece of mechanism, is not necessarily identifiable with the totality of its members, and still less so with the class to which these belong. The party is created as a means to secure an end. Having, however, become an end in itself, endowed with aims and interests of its own, it undergoes detachment … from the class which it represents.

Consider the underlying agenda driving Benson’s fast-paced narrative. Capitalising on their hand in the rise of Morris Iemma as New South Wales Premier and Kevin Rudd as federal Opposition leader, later vindicated by their respective election victories, and flushed with success, New South Wales General Secretary and Senator-elect Mark Arbib, along with his assistant Karl Bitar, hatched a grand scheme to expand their power base from the New South Wales Right to the whole state branch, the country’s largest. Radiating from the new Rudd ascendancy in Canberra, there would be a cross-factional alliance, drawing in Left chieftains Assistant Secretary Luke Foley and federal MP Anthony Albanese. Michels’s dictum comes to mind: “he who has acquired power will almost always endeavour to consolidate it and extend it, to multiply the ramparts which defend his position, and to withdraw himself from the control of the masses”. They needed to overcome two obstacles. Rival cliques in Unions New South Wales and the state parliamentary caucus had to be either co-opted or destroyed. As it turned out, the key to both lay in exploding Iemma’s plan to privatise the power industry.

However crucial Iemma’s agenda may have been for the state’s financial position, infrastructure and broader economy, there was no stopping the destructive struggle for domination of New South Wales Labor. “The bureaucrat,” writes Michels, “identifies himself completely with the organisation, confounding his own interests with its interests.” Unions New South Wales boss John Robertson and ALP State President Bernie Riordan, both from the Electrical Trades Union, were implacably opposed to the sell-off. Ostensibly about jobs, their position had more to do with union power. They bristled at being shunted aside when, in their eyes, the union campaign against WorkChoices put Rudd in the Lodge. Other union bosses felt the same way. Unfortunately for Iemma and Treasurer Michael Costa, the unions controlled the state conference, and could pull the plug on their plan.

Officials like Bitar and Foley were normally expected to broker a compromise between the party’s political and industrial wings. This time they had higher things in mind. Eyeing an opportunity to take control of the parliamentary party, they colluded with the unions and pursued a subterranean campaign to replace Iemma and Costa with candidates amenable to the machine. Their weapons were the stock-in-trade of polling and focus group data. They also hoped to undercut the influence of state MPs Joe Tripodi and Eddie Obeid, who controlled the Right sub-faction which dominated the caucus.

Stretching their tentacles to Canberra, Bitar and Foley, with the aid of Arbib, persuaded Rudd to renege on his pre-election promise to launch national executive intervention should the conference prove obstructive. The promise was made in exchange for Iemma agreeing, despite the inconvenience, to delay his privatisation until after the election. Rudd was also worried that his triumphal entry to the conference would be spoiled. Out of concern that the New South Wales wars could hurt his image, Rudd ducked the first major micro-economic reform challenge of his prime ministership. Michels explains:

Thus, from a means, organisation becomes an end. To the institutions and qualities which at the outset were destined simply to ensure the good working of the party machine (subordination, the harmonious cooperation of individual members, hierarchical relationships, discretion, propriety of conduct), a greater importance comes ultimately to be attached to the productivity of the machine.

And so Robertson and Riordan rolled Iemma and Costa at the conference, and, having struck a defensive deal with Bitar and Foley, Tripodi and Obeid pulled the rug from under them in caucus (and later did the same to Nathan Rees, whom Bitar and Foley had installed as Premier). The government’s standing never recovered, and the public is still waiting on the $15 billion worth of essential infrastructure and services that the privatisation would have delivered.

Michels’s second insight delves into the mind-sets which flourish under bureaucratic oligarchy. Essentially, they are forged by the twin pressures of presenting a benign public face while preventing any one of the jostling factions from gaining the upper hand:

The oligarchy which issues from democracy is menaced by two grave dangers: the revolt of the masses, and … when one among the oligarchs succeeds in obtaining supreme power … The consequence is that in all modern popular parties a spirit of genuine fraternity is conspicuously lacking; we do not see sincere and cordial mutual trust; there is a continual latent struggle, a spirit of irritation determined by the reciprocal mistrust of the leaders …

Benson relates how Iemma and Costa despised and distrusted Arbib and Bitar, and felt the same about Robertson and Riordan; Robertson and Riordan despised and distrusted each other as well as Iemma and Costa; Arbib and Bitar despised and distrusted Costa, Tripodi and Obeid, who despised and distrusted Arbib and Bitar; Tripodi and Obeid despised and distrusted John Della Bosca and Ian McDonald, two MPs who exploited caucus resentment of Tripodi and Obeid; Rudd despised and distrusted Costa, and Costa felt the same about Rudd—in spades. Michels writes:

It may be noticed that in the democratic parties of today, the great conflicts of view are fought out to an ever-diminishing extent in the field of ideas and … they therefore degenerate more and more into personal struggles and invectives, to be settled finally upon considerations of a purely superficial character.

For the most part, other MPs and lower-ranked party and union officials were passive bystanders. For Michels:

The bureaucratic spirit corrupts character and engenders moral poverty. In every bureaucracy we may observe place-hunting, a mania for promotion, and obsequiousness towards those on whom promotion depends; there is arrogance towards inferiors and servility towards superiors.

Nor is Benson’s narrative short of petty-minded and egotistical tantrums. Robertson’s militancy is ascribed to Rudd thanking Arbib on the night of the federal election but not the unions, his “sibling rivalry” with Riordan, and his outrage at looking “stupid” when Iemma and Costa rejected his half-baked, face-saving compromise. We read that Rudd turned off Iemma because he was affronted by Costa’s blunt-speaking ways at COAG meetings, often directed at Rudd himself. And we’re told that Tripodi betrayed Iemma because his demand for the Treasurer’s job was denied. “The consciousness of power always produces vanity, an undue belief in personal greatness,” contends Michels.

Michels’s third insight concerns the oligarchy’s attitude to the outside world. For the self-absorbed players in Benson’s drama, voters may as well be on Mars. “There arises in the leaders a tendency to isolate themselves,” says Michels pointedly, “to form a sort of cartel, and to surround themselves, as it were, with a wall.”

Benson reports that following his downfall, Iemma reflected on the “misguided arrogance” of the caucus, most of whom had never known opposition, and who believed “the good times would keep rolling on”. Michels accounts for such astounding, but apparently commonplace, arrogance this way: “It is on the grounds of the incompetence of the masses that the leaders justify the exclusion of these from the conduct of affairs.” From there, it’s a short step to the point where “the bureaucrat is apt to imagine that he knows the needs of the masses better than these do themselves, an opinion which may be sound in individual instances, but which for the most part is no more than a form of megalomania.”

Whether or not the warring factions of New South Wales Labor, and in the light of recent developments, perhaps federal Labor, finally grasp it, the day of reckoning is at hand. The last word must go to Michels: “If at length the eyes of the masses are open to the crimes against the democratic ideal which are committed by their leaders, their astonishment and their stupor are unbounded.”

John Muscat is a lawyer, ALP member and co-editor of The New City, a web journal of urban and political affairs