Class Struggle

An acquaintance of mine is a staunch supporter of the Labor Party because it is the party of the working class person. I almost laughed when he said that, because I have for some time seen it as an amalgam of unionism & socialism - an uneasy alliance. He, however, believes that, by definition, the Party is there to fight for the rights of the common worker, etc, & that the fight is far from over.

On the other side of the coin, the Liberal party is an uneasy alliance between the landed conservatives & the middle class greasy pole climbers.

This is where it gets interesting.

Those who support the Labor Party expect structure - bureaucracy - layers of society or administration, where they start at the bottom, & some lucky few can be hoisted to the heights of political recognition. This takes a party headquarters that works like a war office on the basis that unions are always heavily organised, & therefore the party structure has local & regional gatherings, etc, layer upon layer.
Labor party members believe in their structure. They believe that there needs to be structure. They believe in the public service because it's just another structure. They believe in a sizable government, because that's what it takes to run a country.

Those who support the Liberal Party don't like structure. They believe that it holds them (personally) back, oppresses them, stunts their growth as human beings, impinges on their freedom of expression. They believe that the party structure should be flat, & that government should be small.
As a consequence, they believe that they know better than any structure, because they are cleverer than the working class, & don't need structure to protect them from big bad business.

The independent thinking of a semi-educated middle class will always be its own downfall. Fundamentally, they don't know better, & they refuse to be taught.

I am reminded of C S Lewis' "Forbidden Planet" series, where one of the characters is writing for the newspapers. He only needs to write for papers that aim at the middle class. There's no point writing for the upper class, because they can't be told anything, & writing for the lower class won't be understood. The object was to write in such a way that the middle class was convinced that it was coming up with the ideas for itself, & then they would embrace the notion as their own.

This is the basis of shock-jocks, who are always right wing - they convince middle-class people of what they are thinking, encouraging a particular point of view (only), as if it was a ground-swell of awareness, rather than a version of broadcaster push-polling.

So, my acquaintance is correct - the Labor Party, in all its unionist bureaucracy is the party of the working class - the kind of party that workers can believe in, because it is the kind of structure that they need to believe in, producing the kind of government that they expect to make decisions for them.