Wayne Swan is a working class legend in his own lunchtime. Just ask him. Or rather just read his John Button memorial speech.

Swan is a big, big fan of Bruce Springsteen. He used that as an introduction to a couple of his themes – fighting for the battlers, accountability and responsibility.

Like Springsteen, Wayne comes from battler stock and like Springsteen he talks about being accountable and responsible to those people.

Swan and Springsteen evidently remember their roots, even if neither are now members of the working class. For Springsteen that remembrance and celebration is actually a form of money making. He has grown rich on the commodification and exploitation of a particular image and tradition of the US working class and an appeal to blue collar workers.

But unlike say Woody Guthrie or Pete Seeger, his songs are about the working class, not of them. They are pictures of the past not flames of the future; words, not action. They offer no alternative vision. They do not challenge the status quo.

With that, Springsteen has much in common with Swan. 

Swan is attempting to appeal to blue collar workers, not through his actions in defence of their jobs and living standards, but through Springsteen. 

The longer Labor languish in the 20s and low 30s in the polls, the more the rhetoric of attacking the rich will come to the fore. I think the record’s stuck, Wayne. I think the record’s stuck, Wayne. I think the record’s stuck, Wayne.

Swan is Australia’s Treasurer and has been for 5 years. Supposedly he is in a much more powerful position to change the world for the better for his battlers than Springsteen could ever be.

Managing Australian capitalism is about making sure the exploitative relationship between capital and labour – where labour creates the wealth and capital expropriates it – continues and functions smoothly.

The Labor Party is an important part of this process of managing capitalism. The Party is an expression of the trade union bureaucracy – a group who retail workers’ labour power to the bosses and who balance between but are not part of either of the two main classes.

Because of its relationship with that bureaucracy the ALP in power may be able to impose solutions on capital that benefit the system as a whole even if individual capitalists or sections of capital are disadvantaged.

However over the last 30 years Labor has embraced neo-liberalism. In one sense this is true to form. The ALP adopts the dominant economic ideology not only because that is its nature but to show itself fit to govern to the bourgeoisie.

But as I have written before, this means that the ALP, a capitalist workers’ party, is at the moment more like a CAPITALIST workers’ party.

Swan is at the heart of that neo-liberalism, that open ideology of the bosses. He worships at their altar of profit.

Part of Swan’s speech was an attack on 3 mining magnate – Gina Rinehart, Clive Palmer and Twiggy Forest. Why?

It is spin of course. Gina Rinehart has, under Swan’s watch, increased her wealth from $4 billion to $29 billion. Swan won’t tax her wealth in any concerted way.

He has picked these 3 because they are easy targets – the stereotype of rich miners living off the rest of us. He hasn’t attacked the heads of the 3 biggest mining companies in Australia – BHP, Rio Tinto and Xstrata.

They are the ones he and Julia Gillard did a rotten deal with over the mining tax and replaced a fairly small resource rent tax applying to all resources with the Minerals Resource Rent Tax that applies only to iron ore and coal and at a much lower rate.

Swan was instrumental in knifing Rudd and installing Gillard as Prime Minister to get that rotten deal done.

So when Swan says, as he does, that he is about sharing the wealth, we can rebut that argument with the specific example of the mining tax.

Under Swan’s leadership of the Treasury over the last five years what has been happening to benefit workers? Here are a few facts that can help us discern if Swan is Bruce Springsteen or Alice Cooper.

As I have mentioned ad nauseam the share of national income going to labour is at its lowest and that to capital its highest since records began to be kept in 1960.

Inequality under Swan has increased. The OECD’s Divided We Stand report on global inequality found it had increased across the developed world and said that in Australia this was due to two factors – growing inequality of incomes and less progressive tax and transfer policies and outcomes.

Part of the mechanism for transferring wealth and income to the rich has been restrictions on unions and the ability of workers to strike except in certain limited circumstances.

Labor’s Fair Work Act continued these WorkChoices restrictions, and a report released today basically gives the tick to Labor’s rotten WorkChoices Lite.

If Swan were really a working class hero instead of a rich man’s suck-hole he’d remove all restrictions on the right to strike.

In the building industry, the hated Australian Building and Construction Commission policed workers to make sure they don’t strike or take other action to, among other things, enforce safety on site. The consequence? Deaths on building sites increased after the ABCC came into being.

Labor’s response has been to make the Commission an arm of Fair Work Australia called Fair Work Building and Construction. It retains its powers and funding. If Swan really were a working class hero he’d abolish the FWBC and its anti-union powers.

Unemployment is officially just over 5%. Roy Morgan research puts the real figure at over nine percent. If you throw in the figures for the underemployed who actually want to work longer hours but can’t, the combined figures for unemployment and underemployment are closer to 20%.

Swan wants to win back blue collar workers to Labor. Perhaps then he could unveil a plan for taking over all those big companies like Ford, Holden, Toyota and the others who are sacking workers. nationalise them and convert their plants into renewable energy infrastructure providers and tax the rich to pay for it.

In Queensland Campbell Newman with his old man ideas is sacking thousands of public servants. Welcome to an Abbott government writ small. Where is Swan’s defence of these workers?

If Swan really was a working class hero he’d tax the rich to provide real jobs and better pay for all who want to work. That could include for example a Snowy Mountains style renewable energy vision for Australia with solar and wind power across Australia.

Women workers continue to be paid 17% less than their male counterparts for equal work. The figure increased slightly at one stage under Labor. If Swan was a working class hero he’d legislate to rectify that immediately.

If Wayne Swan was really serious about sharing the wealth we workers create, he’d tax the rich. He’d support workers fighting to defend jobs and win pay increases. He’d legislate for a 30 hour week without any loss of pay or conditions.

He won’t do any of these things because Swan isn’t a working class hero; he’s a puppet of the rich.

Wayne Swan: A Working Class Hero Is Something To Be