Real Radical-in-Chief

When I was a very small child, I would sometimes accompany my Mother to a grocer’s shop owned by a pleasant enough man who everyone knew was a member of the Communist Party.  

One day, she asked him why his party had so little support. His reply was immediate: “The people don’t know what’s good for them”.

This statement sums up the fundamental nature of Marxism-Leninism. Lenin’s party was a vanguard party which cemented rule by an elite. Communist totalitarianism fused together an elitist messianic impulse with a conspiracist fear of opposition and contempt for ordinary people.

The post-communist left is sustained by the same messianic impulse that drove the pro-communist left during the Cold War. The difference now is that the Labor Party has largely surrendered to this impulse with the collapse of the old Labor Right, which helped to sustain long-term state Labor Governments and resisted pro-communist encroachments during the Cold War. Now largely separated from its former blue-collar base, Labor has forged a symbiotic relationship with the Greens.

Is it any wonder that the post-communist “watermelons”, to use James Delingpole’s term, prefer nature to people? Is it any wonder that Lee Rhiannon’s transition from Moscow loyalist to Greens Senator was seamless?

One tires of the fiction, propagated by the Canberra press gallery, the ABC and the Fairfax Media, that Gillard was forced to break her election promise on the carbon tax. Never were there more happy captives than on the day the Carbon Tax legislation was passed in the House of Representatives. When it came to the recent media inquiry, the Gillard Government happily surrendered to the Greens.

The truth is that the Greens would have had no leverage with the Labor party of yesteryear. Bob Brown and his colleagues had little choice but to give tacit support to Labor. Unless Gillard is a fool, we are left with the inescapable conclusion that she is truly the radical-in-chief, more intent on radical transformation than on winning the next election. That she forced through legislation in the face of popular opposition is testament to her own radical nature, clearly evident in her former leading role in the Socialist Forum, a curious medley of Labor Left and former communists. Bob Brown provided convenient cover.