The new Isocracy committee for 2015-2016 has a fairly active member of the Labor Party as a president, and now a fairly active member of the Liberal Party as vice-president. For some people on the left this would be an anathema - imagine having a member of the Liberal Party of Australia, the chief conservative and often reactionary party on the committee of a body that espouses libertarian socialism. How can this be possible?
As one can imagine, the Liberal Party member is one that comes from the Deakinite tradition, an Australian form of social liberalism. Social liberalism, unlike the neoliberals and their right-wing 'libertarian' extremists, acknowledges the need for public investments, and social welfare. People like John Stuart Mill argued that in time capitalist property relations would even be replaced with worker's cooperatives:
the relation of masters and work-people will be gradually superseded by partnership, in one of two forms: in some cases, association of the labourers with the capitalist; in others, and perhaps finally in all, association of labourers among themselves.
- Principles of Political Economy with some of their Applications to Social Philosophy Book IV, Chapter VII ('On the Probable Futurity of the Labouring Classes')
One can recall (Wahl and Jun) that "anarchism combines a socialist critique of liberalism and a liberal critique of socialism", or the remark (David Goodway), "understanding anarchism is to recognize its thoroughly socialist critique of capitalism, while emphasizing that this has been combined with a liberal critique of socialism". Such a position cannot be achieved without a conversation between people from socialist and liberal positions.
It may be argued that the Liberal Party has much to do with liberalism as the Labor Party does with socialism; which doesn't quite mean nothing at all, but it does mean that both groups are a historical core but contemporary minority tendency without both organisations, which are dominated by more politically pragmatic (read opportuistic) power seekers. In contrast, the Isocratic position of revolutionary reformism is an act of deep and open entryism, audaciously honest.
It is from the best ideas of socialism and liberalism that anarchism has arisen. It is through engaging directly with the mainstream political process that immediate pragmatic reforms can be achieved towards the principled and transformative objectives. Whilst this looks like mainstream political bipartisanship - but is in fact an admixture of nineteenth and twentieth century ideologies for the twenty-first and beyond.