Trotskyist Platform:
What We Stand For

(published 28 November 2024)

Purpose

1. Trotskyist Platform (TP) stands against the capitalist system. We struggle towards a socialist world where exploitation of labour, unemployment, racism, oppression of women and imperialist subjugation of “Third World” countries will become things of the past.
   
   With decaying capitalist rule in Australia as well as in the rest of the world causing unaffordable rents, rising poverty and homelessness, a lack of secure jobs for new generations, ever greater racist subjugation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and racist attacks on other people of colour, the terrifying growth of violent far-right forces, increasing misogynist violence against women, genocidal terror against the Palestinian people and bloody wars waged by the imperialist Western powers to enforce their tyranny over the world, the need to sweep away capitalist rule is more urgent than ever.

2. In five countries, the toiling masses have already seized political power and established economies in which the backbone sectors are under socialist public ownership. These five socialistic states are China, Cuba, Vietnam, the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK, i.e. “North Korea”) and Laos. Under enormous hostile pressure from a mostly capitalist-ruled world, the transition to socialism in these countries is, in different ways, deformed and uncertain. Nevertheless, the continuing existence of socialistic, working class rule in China, Cuba, Vietnam, the DPRK and Laos is a terrific conquest. We must defend socialistic rule in these states to the hilt.
   
   
3. To fight for socialism in Australia we need to build a party like Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party that led the October 1917 Socialist Revolution in Russia. That revolution has been to date the only successful overturn of capitalist rule in what was an imperialist-type, capitalist country, which is what Australia is today (an imperialist country is a richer capitalist country where the local capitalist ruling class not only exploits workers in its own country but substantially exploits and subjugates the masses of other, poorer, capitalist countries in an even more extreme form).

The Working Class is the
Spearhead Force for Liberation

4. It is workers’ collective labour that produces the profits for the capitalists (the bourgeoisie). Workers who work for a wage/salary (the proletariat) and whose labour is exploited by the rich capitalists, thus, have no interest in defending this capitalist system against a viable socialistic alternative under collective, workers’ control. It is the united working class that has both the consistent interest and the power to spearhead the struggle against capitalism.
   
   
5. Since the working class can only rule society through a system based on collective ownership of the means of production – that is a socialist system – the struggle for socialism means the struggle for workers’ rule.
   
   The principal task of TP is to raise the unity, political consciousness and the level of organisation of the working class and all of the oppressed to the level needed for them to be able to conduct a socialist revolution to take political power. Given that the exploiting class pour poisonous ideologies into the masses to try and divide and divert us, a key part of fighting for working class unity is to uncompromisingly oppose white supremacist racism, reactionary Australian nationalism, male chauvinism and homophobia within the workers movement.

The Need to Wage a
Political Struggle against Laborism

7. The Australian Labor Party (ALP) is a party with a working class base but which is headed by careerist bureaucrats who gain a privileged position by keeping the masses subservient to the capitalist order. The dominance of the ALP and its ideology over the workers movement must be challenged in order to unleash working class resistance against capitalist exploitation. In direct contrast to the ALP, TP insists that workers and their capitalist exploiters have absolutely no common “national interests” whatsoever.
   
   
8. As part of our struggle to oppose the grip of the ALP over the working class, TP opposed a vote – either directly or through preferences – to any of the current parliamentary parties, including the ALP, at the last federal elections in 2022 (as we had in all elections since our 2005 formation). As we put it in our 25 April 2022 pre-election statement:
   

   “The more that the working class understands that their position will not be advanced through supporting any of the current parliamentary parties, the more determined they will be to build the mass struggles needed.”

9. We say: Support and participate in every struggle by workers for immediate gains! At the same time deepen the demands of such struggles and enhance their intensity! When strikes occur, fight for mass picket lines to protect the strikes from scabs. And fight for extending the strikes to more work sites, companies and industries.
   
   
10. We demand: Turn all gig and causal jobs into secure, ongoing jobs with all the rights of permanency.
    
    
11. TP proposes immediate measures to address the masses’ grievances in such a way as to advance the working class towards understanding the need to take power and build a system based on social ownership:
    • To combat unemployment, ban layoffs by any company making a profit; and implement measures to force profitable companies to increase hiring of permanent workers at the expense of their profits.
    • Against unaffordable rents, massively increase public housing, restrict the number of homes that the rich can own and confiscate the vacant homes of the ultra-rich and transfer them into public hands.
    • For truly free, universal public health care, dental services, aged care and disability services.
    • To fully fund free health care, aged care and disability care, free school and tertiary education, free childcare and a massive increase in public housing, expropriate – that is, collectively reclaim – Australia’s immense natural mineral wealth from the tycoons and transfer them into public hands.
    • To drive down exorbitant electricity costs and to facilitate the transition to zero carbon, confiscate the energy resource sector and the power generation and retail companies from the capitalist magnates.
    • Nationalise the finance sector.

Turn Our Workers Unions into
Organs of Militant Class-Struggle Resistance!

12. Defends our unions from all attacks by the bosses and their state! Do so regardless of what pretext the capitalist class and their state may use to attack a workers union. Fight to strengthen our unions!
    
    
13. End all anti-union laws, all laws restricting industrial action and all laws curbing union access to workplaces.
    
    
14. The current attack on the CFMEU construction workers union by the capitalist ruling class, its ALP servants and the conservative and Far-Right parties must be unequivocally opposed by the entire working class and all its allies. The capitalist rulers’ hyping up of claims of “corruption” within the union (which to the extent that there is actually any truth in them should be 100% handled within the union and the broader workers movement) is a smokescreen they are using to weaken and de-fang the Australian union that fights hardest to protect its members’ workplace safety and conditions. For all-out strike action by CFMEU construction workers, supported by other unions, to rebuff all interference in the union by the capitalist state. Kick the administrators out!
    
    The takeover of the CFMEU by the capitalist regime is the biggest assault on the entire union movement since the then Hawke-Keating Labour government deregistered Australia’s then most militant union, the Builders Labourers Federation, nearly four decades ago. We condemn the leadership of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) for their criminal support for this attack. The ALP and pro-ALP ACTU leaders’ support for the attack on the CFMEU shows once again that they are traitors to working class people. Their stance has been met with outrage by large swathes of the working class.

15. Disgust at the ALP/ACTU leaders over their backstabbing of the CFMEU and their countless other betrayals of the working class masses must be leveraged to eject the ALP/ACTU leaders out of the leadership of the working class movement and replace them with a new leadership based on a new agenda. This new agenda must be a program of mobilising our unions in hard-fought class struggle against the capitalist bosses to fight for what workers need, irrespective of what the capitalists and their politicians, media, economists and ideologues say is in the “national interest”. This militant program can only be brought to our unions through political competition with the pro-ALP current leaders of our unions. While winning the ascendancy of this class struggle program, a new revolutionary leadership of our unions will be built.
    
    
16. Capitalists have weakened Australia’s unions through converting formerly wage-earning jobs in areas like maintenance and courier driving into contract or franchisee work. Fight to win these exploited toilers improved rights and force the bosses to convert their jobs from contracting ones to wage-earning, worker positions.

No Alliance with Any
Faction of the Capitalist Class!

17. There is a reactionary right-wing of the capitalist class and a more liberal, “progressive” wing. But all wings are equally intent on maintaining capitalist ownership of the means of production and capitalist rule over society. Reject any search for a political alliance with any faction of Australia’s capitalist class!  
    
    
18. In Australia, the main body representing the “progressive” wing of the capitalist class is the Greens. Because of certain Greens socially progressive policies and the ALP’s craven loyalty to the capitalist class, some left-leaning workers and youth have now thrown their support behind the Greens. However, such cross-class hook ups are inevitably held together by the lowest common denominator: it is the usually the more left-leaning Greens who end up having to compromise to keep the party together. This was seen by the fact that the Greens bought into the propaganda surrounding the Albanese government’s placing of the CFMEU into administration. Although the Greens ended up voting against the ALP’s laws instituting the state takeover of the union, at the same time they made it clear that their No vote was the result of the ALP choosing not to negotiate with them to get the bills pushed through the Senate but, instead, to do a deal with the Liberals to make the laws even more extreme.
    
    Although we can certainly be part of particular actions that the Greens also participate in, we must reject making any common platform with the Greens whether it be for a particular campaign or for an overall agenda. Oppose any electoral support to the Greens under any circumstances! Any common platform with a bourgeois party prevents struggles from assuming an anti-capitalist character and undercuts working class understanding of the need to wage class struggle against the capitalists.
    
    
19. The strategy of building “popular front” coalitions between workers parties and formations from the “progressive” wing of the capitalist class has been the main cause of the defeat of countless opportunities for socialist revolution across the globe over the last more than 100 years. No to “popular front” alliances! For the independence of the workers movement from all organisations of the capitalist exploiters!

The Marxist Orientation
to the Intermediate Class

20. In between the capitalist and working classes is an intermediate class which Marxists refer to as the petit bourgeoisie. This diverse class is made up of people who are neither exploiters of labour nor people whose labour is directly exploited by capitalists. The capitalists divert the self-employed petit bourgeoisie’s frustrations onto the working class and other oppressed groups. However, communists offer an alternative course for the petit bourgeoisie. We seek to direct the petit bourgeoisie behind the working class on a working class – that is an avowedly anti-capitalist and pro-socialist – agenda.

For a Revolutionary Strategy!

21. Although governments in Australia and other “Western democracies” are elected, in practice it is the wealthy capitalists, in great disproportion to their small numbers that have the means to shape public opinion and hence steer election outcomes. Moreover, due to their tremendous wealth and control of the economy, the capitalists can ensure that all the key state institutions remain tied to them by thousands of threads irrespective of which political party is elected to govern. Therefore, in Australia, as in all nominally “democratic” capitalist countries, the form of “democracy” masks the reality that the system is in fact just a form of the dictatorship of the capitalist class.
    
    The pro-capitalist nature of Australia’s state organs means that the workers movement and all movements on the side of the oppressed must fight to gain complete independence from all the institutions of the state.
    

22. Unions must immediately organise a divorce to remove police associations, prison guards and state prosecutors from our workers unions.
    
    
23. Drive out all interference from the capitalist state in the workers movement and the Left!
    
    
24. Since the state organs in capitalist Australia themselves serve the capitalists, even if a party committed to socialism were elected to office, it could not change the system. The only way that the road to socialism can be opened is through the working class and its allies pushing out of the way the existing capitalist state through a socialist revolution. The understanding of this truth is the main theoretical difference that separates communists from even the most left-wing social democrats. The latter claim that the existing capitalist state can gradually be transformed into an instrument of socialism through the election of socialists to office. But the truth is that there is no parliamentary road to socialism.
    
    
25. Given this truth, a true communist party must refuse to be part of – even as a junior coalition partner – any government in a capitalist country at either the national, provincial or local level.
    
    
26. In every struggle of the working class and other oppressed groups that we are able to participate in, it is our duty to ensure that the strategies that we propose and the slogans that we raise never promote illusions that capitalist state organs can be made to aid progressive causes. Instead, we must intervene in these struggles in such a way as to guide the masses to distrust the capitalist state and all of its organs.
    
    
27. We oppose any appeals to the capitalist state or any of its organs to, at its discretion, use its power in such a way as to benefit the masses. We refuse to place such confidence in the exploiting class’s state! In response to, say, the rental affordability crisis, the ripping off of the people by the supermarket giants or the racist state killing of Aboriginal people in custody, we do not call for royal commissions, or other inquiries conducted by an organ of the capitalist state, nor do we call for state-controlled oversight bodies. Instead, we propose strategies based on mobilising working class people alongside other oppressed groups – independently of all the capitalist parties and all the institutions of the capitalist state – to resist injustice.
    
    
28. The biased nature of the Australian state means that the workers movement is under no moral obligation to submit to the political laws of this state. If these laws are adhered to, it is hard for workers to win strikes. Our unions must fight to win strikes through defying anti-strike laws and mobilising such widespread solidarity strikes that the capitalist state will baulk at unleashing its own laws against the strikers.

Oppose the Growing
Attacks on Democratic Rights in Australia!

29. Defend and seek to extend every democratic right that the capitalist rulers have conceded to the masses!
    
    
30. Chop off the overlordship over Australia of Britain’s conservatizing and genocide-tainted monarchy!
    
    
31. Scrap Australia’s authoritarian “Foreign Interference” Laws that aim to intimidate into silence those within Australia’s Chinese community and beyond who would express positive views about Red China.
    
    
32. Free the political prisoners in Australia who are being persecuted alongside this new Cold War witch-hunt. Free Di Sanh Duong and Daniel Duggan! Drop the charges against Alexander Csergo!
    
    
33. Free whistleblower David McBride who is imprisoned for having provided information that had the effect of exposing some of the large number of war crimes committed by Australian troops in Afghanistan.
    
    
34. Scrap the hardline anti-protest laws that have been enacted in NSW and other Australian states. Down with increasing police repression against leftist protesters!
    
    
35. Oppose the Australian ruling class’s repression of pro-Palestine supporters. Lift the regime’s ban on Hamas and Hezbollah!

Resist the Growing Fascist Forces!

36. Wage a remorseless struggle against the rise of fascism!
    
    
37. To eliminate the threat of fascism, capitalism needs to be swept away.
    
    
38. To defend those targeted by fascist gangs today, we need mass direct action mobilisations of the workers movement united with all the intended victims of the fascists.
    
    
39. We salute the courage of anti-fascists who seek to resist the fascist gangs in numerous localised confrontations. However, to effectively combat fascist forces requires a strategy of mass mobilisation centred on the power of the union movement.
    
    
40. No appeals to the capitalist state or any of its organs – including its courts and its local councils – to act against the fascists. Not only will this in most cases be futile, in the rare cases when state organs act against the fascists the “victories” will be pyrrhic. Any damage to the fascists will be far outweighed by the damage to the consciousness of the workers movement and anti-fascist movement by the illusions it breeds that the capitalist state can be allies in the struggle against fascism.
    
    
41. Implementing the strategy of mass mobilisation against fascist gangs will strengthen the ability of the working class to challenge the entire capitalist order in the future.

The Need for a Workers State During the
Transition from the Overthrow of Capitalism
to Full Communism

42. Having swept away capitalist rule, the triumphant working class and its allies will have to establish a new state, a workers state to enforce its rule and prevent the deposed exploiting class from reconquering power. Since it will be the proletariat holding state power and using the state to hold down the overthrown capitalist class, Marxists call this form of state the dictatorship of the proletariat.
    
    
43. An additional related task of the workers state is to guide the petit bourgeoisie to support the new socialist-based economy.
    
    
44. The form of the dictatorship of the proletariat that we seek to build is one based on workers democracy. That will involve the active workers administering power through elected councils of workers or soviets, which draw in other sections of the oppressed. Invented, spontaneously in the course of struggle, by the collective genius of the Russian revolutionary working masses at the beginning of the 20th Century (and not to be confused with its degenerated form in the later history of the USSR workers state when it was but a shadow of its former self), the soviet, proletarian form of democracy is distinguished from bourgeois “democracy” not only by the fact that it is an instrument of the opposite class but also by its transparency, its responsiveness and its inclusivity – all of which make it a particularly well-suited organ of workers’ power.
    
    
45. In a workers state, the political rights (but not personal rights) of capitalists and former capitalists must be restricted to prevent them utilising their superior wealth and connections to reclaim power.
    
    
46. As socialist rule strengthens, capitalism is defeated worldwide and societies of equality and abundance are created, the workers state will, as Marx and Engels have predicted, wither away as it has no purpose. A communist society will then be achieved.
    
    
47. The type of society which we communists aim to build is little different from what left-wing anarchists aim for. Our key theoretical difference with left-wing anarchists is that they argue that even immediately following the overthrow of capitalist rule no workers state will be needed to protect the transition to communism.

For Internationalism!
Oppose Protectionism in Australia!

48. Oppose all protectionist demands that call to prioritise the interests of local workers over our overseas worker sisters and brothers.
    
    
49. Ensure that any overseas crew working on shipping routes within Australia receive at least the same wages as local workers. Demand that all visa workers employed here be hired on at least the average wage received by local workers for the same work (and not just the minimum award wage for that type of work). Demand that they be granted the full rights of citizenship – including the right to remain here if they lose their jobs.
    
    
50. The working class of Australia must support the struggles for liberation of the working class and oppressed around the world.

The Working Class Must Champion the
Struggles of All the Oppressed

51. The working class must support the resistance struggles of all other oppressed groups, which in Australia includes Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders, people of colour from Asian, African, Middle Eastern and Islander background, women and LGBTQI people.
    
    
52. The working class must defend the victims of oppression no matter which class they may be from. However, even those members of the capitalist class – and their enforcers – who are victims of special oppression cannot be a useful part of the fight against the type of oppression that they face. Therefore, in the struggle against all the forms of special oppression created by capitalism, there must be no alliance with any wing of the capitalist ruling class, not even those members of the capitalist class that are from these specially oppressed groups.

Fighting for the Liberation of Aboriginal People

53. Mobilise the working class, beginning with its most politically advanced layers, behind the Aboriginal people’s struggle for liberation! The power of the workers movement must be mobilised to deter Australian state authorities from killing and persecuting Aboriginal people. This will be through union industrial action that hurts the profits of the capitalists that the state forces serve. Such actions must demand justice for the victims of the state murder of Aboriginal people and the jailing of the killer cops or prison guards. Workers’ action must also resist the stealing of Aboriginal children from their Aboriginal families, oppose laws that discriminatorily target Aboriginal people (like compulsory income management rules and curfews in heavily black areas), support the struggle for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land rights and demand the equal provision of basic public services in majority Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander areas.
    
    
54. In February 2004, Aboriginal people in Redfern waged a heroic pitched-battle resistance struggle against heavily armed police in response to the racist killing by police of 17 year-old Aboriginal youth TJ Hickey. Then, in November 2004, after a policeman killed Aboriginal man Mulrunji Doomadgee in Palm Island, hundreds of Aboriginal people waged a brave resistance struggle that burnt down the local police station and court house – the centres of racist state brutality on the island. Trotskyist Platform unequivocally supports these – and any future similar – militant Aboriginal, anti-racist resistance struggles and insists that such struggles are 100% justified.  We fight to mobilise the workers movement to support such militant Aboriginal, anti-racist resistance and defend any militants who are persecuted by the racist state for their participation in the struggles. A positive example of this was when staunch Aboriginal activists, leftists and trade unionists waged a campaign in defence of Palm Island resistance leader, Lex Wotton that culminated in Sydney MUA (Maritime Union of Australia) dock workers taking stop work action against the state persecution of Lex Wotton for his spearheading of the resistance struggle. This resulted in the racist ruling class having to impose a lighter prison sentence on Wotton than what they had been planning to hit him with.
    
    
55. Trotskyist Platform completely supports the brave and international headline-making, 21 October 2024 protest by independent senator, Lidia Thorpe, against Australia’s visiting head of state, King Charles, when the Djab Wurrung, Gunnai and Gunditjmara, Aboriginal woman shouted: “You committed genocide against our people…. F_ck the colony!… You are not our king!” We defend Lidia Thorpe against the resulting racist backlash and the intensified attempts of pro-ruling class parties to silence her voice from parliament that she has suffered as a result of her inspirational protest and her staunch opposition to White supremacist attacks in parliament against people (and parliamentarians) of colour.
    
    
56. Where capitalist rulers propose sham “concessions” that give Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people no additional power or rights, counterpose the demand for a new, elected First Nations peoples chamber to the Australian parliament with the full veto and review powers of the current Senate.
    
    
57. Alongside the need to fight for demands specific to the Aboriginal people’s liberation struggle, Trotskyist Platform understands that the struggle for the rights of all working class people has particular importance to the fight against the racist oppression of Aboriginal people. This is because much of the Aboriginal population in Australia is held down as the most disadvantaged section of the masses. Ensuring secure jobs for all will make it harder for bosses to discriminate against Aboriginal people in hiring; while massively increasing the supply of low-rent public housing will discourage landlords from knocking back tenancy applications from black people.
    
    
58. The most powerful forces opposing the liberation of Aboriginal people are the mining magnates and the pastoral bosses and other owners of agricultural land – assisted by a tiny layer of black bourgeoisie (like Warren Mundine, Jacinta Price and Noel Pearson). Since these super-rich tycoons’ wealth comes from the colonial theft of Aboriginal land, they are determined to maintain the subjugation of Aboriginal people out of fear that Australia’s first nations’ peoples will one day reclaim the lands that their forebears occupied prior to their dispossession by colonial conquest. Therefore, the struggle for the liberation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanderpeople is closely connected with the fight to break the power of the mining magnates, pastoral bosses and big agricultural landowners through confiscating their holdings and placing them into the hands of the masses.
    
    
59. The mining magnates, pastoral bosses and big agricultural landowners are also the richest and most influential section of Australia’s ruling class, tied to the entire capitalist establishment through a mire of connections. Therefore, to truly break their power requires breaking the power of the entire capitalist class. Moreover, as long as the capitalist exploiting class rules Australia, they will have a need to scapegoat Aboriginal people. Therefore, the complete liberation of Aboriginal people from the intense White Australian racist subjugation that Aboriginal people face will require the overthrow of capitalist rule.
    
    The struggle to confiscate the holdings of the mining, pastoral and big rural capitalists is not only needed to behead the most powerful forces standing against the liberation of Aboriginal people and to ensure land rights for this country’s dispossessed First Peoples, but is also a key part of the fight to properly fund the social programs needed by all the masses. Similarly, opposing the capitalist ruling classes’ racist scapegoating of Aboriginal people is needed not only to defend Aboriginal people but, also, to unite the working class and to ensure that we are not diverted away from our struggle against the capitalist exploiters. Therefore, opposing White Australia capitalist rule and the smashing of the racist subjugation of Aboriginal people that Aboriginal people so badly need is also what the working class needs for its own liberation.
    
    It is the multi-racial working class that has the numbers and the means to sweep the racist capitalist class from power and, in doing so, the working class would then hold the reins of state power in its hands. As the most downtrodden section of the working class – facing oppression today both because they are a first nations people whose land was brutally stolen by a settler-colonial ruling class and because they are a black people used as a scapegoat by a white supremacist ruling class – Aboriginal proletarians and Aboriginal militants would necessarily play a disproportionately large role in the revolutionary overturn of capitalism and the leadership of the revolutionary movement. These Aboriginal militants – and to a lesser degree non-white workers of African, Asian, Middle Eastern and Islander backgrounds – will constitute an important glue linking the multiracial revolutionary workers movement with the radical Aboriginal liberation movements.
    
    
60. A socialist revolution in Australia would seize the unoccupied mansions of the super-rich. It would also confiscate the massive mansions that capitalist tycoons live in. As a powerful symbol of the revolution’s commitment to the liberation of Australia’s First Nations people, these confiscated huge properties would then be divided up into more reasonably sized homes and could be mostly provided to those Aboriginal people who had suffered the most under White Australia capitalist rule, such as the families of victims of black deaths in custody along with those who, as children, had been cruelly ripped from their families by the state.
    
    
61. The Aboriginal masses may end up being directly mobilised for the future revolution by radical Aboriginal activists somewhat separately from – but allied with – the leadership of the broader multiracial revolutionary workers movement. Therefore, although the revolutionary workers party that must be built must have in its ranks and leadership a large number of Aboriginal leftists, we do not see Aboriginal militant organisations as rival tendencies on the Left, as we do pseudo-Marxist, left-social democratic groups. Rather, we see the most militant Aboriginal activists as future partners in mobilising the revolution. Trotskyist Platform supports the most militant section of the Aboriginal activists – those that are most hostile to the Australian ruling class and its state. We do so while maintaining and always advocating our own communist line. We especially seek to promote the need for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander resistance movement to oppose political alliance with any faction of the capitalist class (including the Greens), the need for an alliance with the workers movement on an anti-capitalist basis and the need to maintain independence from, and opposition to, all agencies of the capitalist state. Our aim is to nurture a future united front between a communist-led workers movement and the radical Aboriginal Peoples-led, First Nations national liberation movement that will topple capitalist rule in Australia.
    
    The communist-led workers movement – with Aboriginal and other people of colour workers necessarily at its forefront – would then immediately petition Aboriginal peoples’ particular revolutionary organisations for a treaty on the subject of the relations between the multiracial proletarian movement and the newly liberated Aboriginal nations in the new society – which the latter may choose to accept in the form of a Treaty, a Unity Agreement or some other form of agreement that they consider best or, alternatively, choose to forego as unnecessary given the trust inevitably built up between the multiracial revolutionary workers movement and their own movements during the blood, fire and heroic sacrifices of their joint victorious revolution against the, commonly hated, racist capitalist rulers.
    
    
62. Drawing on the lessons of Lenin’s early 1920s internal struggle within the Bolshevik Party against insensitive attitudes towards brutally oppressed peoples, we assert that non-Aboriginal – and especially white – leftists should not simply insist that left-wing Aboriginal activists abandon efforts to organise separately from non-Aboriginal activists. Similarly, it is misplaced and harmful for non-Aboriginal-based groups to stridently criticise militant Aboriginal activists as being “Aboriginal nationalists” if they display a degree of – what is, after all, on balance somewhat justifiable (given the rampant White supremacist racism that exists within all layers of Australian society and given that several predominantly white, half-baked, nominally leftist groups have only a half-baked opposition to this country’s racist social order) – suspicion towards white leftists and the broader white population. The way that non-Aboriginal, and especially white, leftists must build genuine unity with radical Aboriginal activists is through their own deeds. In particular, through mobilising the multiracial working class in defence of Aboriginal people, they must prove to staunch Aboriginal activists that the generally non-Aboriginal working class masses truly can be their sincere ally.
    
    Capitalism settled upon the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s country with no regard for the original inhabitants, their will, their culture and their authority. A future workers state will be bound to fall at the first hurdle if it follows even a smidgen of this sad, sorry history of brutal disregard and racist subjugation. A future workers state must struggle tirelessly to right all the wrongs of the oppressors’ overthrown capitalist state.  Thus, the successful workers revolution should rally behind the red, black and gold flag of Aboriginal land rights, which is the symbol of Aboriginal people’s resistance against oppression and uphold this as the true banner under which the soviet socialist workers state of Australia will be born. We must say to the militant Aboriginal resistance in Australia: We stand by your flag!
    
    
63. Mandated by a Unity Agreement or Treaty – if the revolutionary organisations of Aboriginal nations indeed choose to enact one – after the working class has established state power it will continue to be necessary to have special representation for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s representatives. The exact structure and form of this First Nations representation will arise organically from the revolutionary struggle. Among the means through which specific Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander representation in the administration of the workers state could be brought to bear is through a sizable number of seats in the working class people’s soviets being allocated for delegates elected from the First Nations masses – in addition to the participation of Aboriginal workers in the broader workers’ soviets. To protect the class character of the workers state, rules excluding capitalists and their enforcers from the soviets will also apply to Aboriginal people’s representatives. To help ensure that the new workers state aggressively implements the measures necessary to liberate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples and as a powerful acknowledgement of the high regard a future Australian workers state would hold for this country’s original inhabitants, the revolutionary workers state may institute a Council of First Nations Peoples as an additional organ of power. Consisting of elected Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples’ representatives, such a council would be a review body sitting above the workers and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People’s soviets, like an upper house to the soviets with full veto powers.
    
    In the end, however, the particular form through which Aboriginal people’s power would be exercised in a future workers and Aboriginal people’s government should reflect the actual agenda put forward by the staunch section of the Aboriginal resistance movement at the time of the immediate lead-up to the anti-capitalist revolution.
    

Against Racist Attacks on
People of Colour in Australia

64. Mobilise the working class against all racial oppression of people of colour in Australia. Expose all the attempts by the ruling class – and its social-democratic servants – to blame migrants or particular Asian, Middle Eastern, African or Islander communities for the masses’ hardships. Mobilise mass joint action by the workers movement, people of colour organisations and other anti-racists to oppose acts of racist discrimination by Australian regime agencies, capitalist business owners and landlords.
    
    
65. Other than for many of the attacks committed by state agencies, the acts of racist bullying and violence against Asian, Aboriginal and other people of colour groups in Australia are often too random in their occurrence and too dispersed in their location for the majority of such acts to be opposed in an organised way. However, through dealing painful blows to any open, organised racist provocations by conscious white supremacists, mass action can send a stern message to the much larger number of garden-variety racists that they had better pull their heads in and stop their violent and bullying racist behaviour.
    
    
66. Demand that the refugees imprisoned by the Australian regime in offshore and onshore detention be immediately freed, brought to the Australian mainland and given full rights of citizenship! Demand that all migrants, visa workers and international students residing here be given the full rights of citizenship!
    
    
67. TP welcomes solidarity amongst people of colour communities against White Australia racism as both a healthy response to oppression and as a sentiment that could feed into the overall resistance against the capitalist order. We do so with one absolute proviso: that any people of colour consciousness is not used to facilitate any political alliance or accommodation with people of colour members of the capitalist class. Instead, TP works to direct people of colour solidarity into advancing the workers revolution that will sweep away the racist capitalist order.
    
    
68. People from Aboriginal, Asian, African, Middle Eastern and Pacific Islander backgrounds are destined to play a disproportionately large role in Australia’s future socialist revolution. This should be reflected in both the composition and leadership of any authentic communist party in Australia.

For Women’s Emancipation!

69. Achieving the emancipation of women requires ensuring that all women have complete financial independence and have the time to be able to fully participate in economic, social and political life. Winning this will then nurture a new gender equality culture to express and reinforce these new economic and social realities. We demand equal pay for women workers with their male counterparts and laws banning the retrenchment or demotion of women who have taken, or are about to take, maternity leave.
    
    We communists struggle for measures that will enable society to take up domestic work tasks and a good part of the work involved in childcare so that women will not be compelled to do this important work for free at the expense of their own financial independence, skills development and participation in economic, social and political life. TP fights for:

• The granting of each household the right to have two free, state-provided professional cleanings of their home each week.
• The establishment of at least five, large non-profit and subsidised, community canteens in each suburb of each city – as well as each rural town – that will provide a variety of very cheap, good quality meals.
• The provision of free nutritious lunches at all schools.
• Free, around the clock, quality childcare available for all children.
• Free pre-school education available for all children aged 3 to 6.
• Transport, provided for free, to safely take children from schools to after-class sporting, music and other cultural, scientific and hobby activities; and then back home or to childcare afterwards.

70. Implementing the measures listed above clashes head on with the capitalists’ drive to maximise profit. Therefore, to achieve the full emancipation of women requires the overturn of capitalist rule and the creation of a socialist economy.
    
    
71. Mobilise the entire workers movement behind the struggle for women’s liberation! Working class women will necessarily be at the forefront of leading the workers movement behind the struggle for women’s emancipation as part of the struggle for socialist revolution. This strategy is counterposed to one that seeks to unite women of all classes to combat women’s oppression; since that means politically embracing bourgeois women whose class interests lie with both opposing the measures needed to win women’s financial independence and opposing the overall struggle against the women-oppressing, capitalist system.
    
    
72. Oppose the inherently women-oppressing, “family values” culture that is imposed upon society by the capitalist ruling class! Stand with all the most direct victims of this culture – single mothers, elderly single women, sexually active women, LGBTIQ people and sex workers against the discrimination that they face!
    
    
73. For all sex workers to be offered decent paying jobs and fully paid training in other fields to provide them with the economic basis to move away from sex work should they choose to. Like all other workers, sex workers that do not have residency rights in Australia should be granted the full rights of citizenship to ensure that a lack of the rights available to citizens and the hardships that causes is not forcing them into sex work.
    
    
74. For women to have the unrestricted right to safe, free and widely accessible abortion on demand. In order to ensure women’s full right to choose, abortion care must become a free and widely available service provided by the public health system.
    
    
75. Defend LGBTIQ people against all bigoted attacks! Oppose all measures that discriminate against LGBTIQ people; or that seek to silence or delegitimise their public expressions of their sexual or gender orientation!
    
    
76. Oppose anti-trans agitation and defend trans people against bigoted attacks! Oppose all attempts to exclude trans people from the wider community’s cultural, educational, sporting and social events!
    
    
77. For the complete separation of religion and state! Accept people’s right to privately practice their religion or attend collective religious ceremonies. However, religious groups should receive no state financial backing – including tax concessions or land and property grants.
    
    
78. Women have attempted to fight back against the domestic violence, piggish misogyny and sexual violence that they face in Australia – including through mass protests against attacks on women by former partners and through actions connected with the Me Too movement. Stand in basic solidarity with these expressions of resistance! Do so while recognising the flaws and misdirection of the current movements and their inability to achieve their stated goals given their lack of an anti-capitalist perspective. However, rather than denouncing these, often brave, attempts by women to organise against the misogyny that they face, TP seeks to intervene into these movements and redirect them onto a path of working class-led mobilisation to win the complete financial independence of women. Particularly crucial for any struggle against domestic violence is the fight for a massive increase in both the number of free women’s shelter places and the amount of low-rent public housing.
    
    
79. Combating the Far Right is part of the struggle against the oppression of women. When fascist far-right forces organise actions to target women – through, for example, by trying to harass women entering abortion clinics or organising intimidating rallies outside the homes of women who have dumped their male partners – they should be stopped by mass mobilisations of class-conscious workers, women’s rights activists and other anti-fascists. However, most of the attacks on women that the Far Right help to incite occur in a spur of the moment way at millions of different locations. It is, thus, impossible to directly oppose all these tyrannical acts. But by, in a very public and high-profile way, crushing with an extremely high degree of ruthlessness those planned attacks on women by Far Right misogynists that we can organise against, opponents of women’s oppression can send a powerful message to the more numerous, garden-variety misogynists that those who commit acts of violence against women will face painful retribution.
    
    
80. Trotskyist Platform has a special orientation toward politically engaging with and organising amongst working class women; and to promoting communist women to the forefront of the revolutionary movement.

Down with Australian Imperialism!

81. Stand in solidarity with all struggles by the peoples – and in some cases governments – of the neo-colonial and semi-colonial countries against imperialist exploitation by Australia’s capitalists! For example, support militant protests that have periodically erupted in PNG against economic subjugation by the IMF and Australian rulers and protests by East Timorese people against the theft of their gas resources by Australian energy giants and the Australian regime. Fight for the wages paid by Australian business owners in their Pacific, Asian, African and Latin American operations to be brought up towards those of their local operations, while opposing any job slashing by Australian capitalists in their overseas operations. In mining operations, demand that Australian corporations adhere to local people’s concerns, properly dispose of mine tailings and greatly increase safety measures. Fight for local peoples to get as high a share of the mining profits extracted by Australian corporations as can be won!
    
    
82. Oppose all interventions by the Australian regime in this region, or elsewhere in the world, no matter what their pretext. Reject any appeals to the Australian ruling class to “bring human rights” to another country! Demand: Australian troops and cops get out of PNG, East Timor, Solomon Islands, Fiji and the rest of the South West Pacific! Australia’s judges and high-level bureaucrats implanted in Pacific Island countries’ administrations get out too! No to the Australian military’s training of troops and influence operations in the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia! Australian military get out of Malaysia’s Butterworth air base!
    
    
83. TP fights to expose to all the predatory purposes behind the Australian regime’s “governance” aid to South West Pacific, Southeast Asian and other ex-colonial countries and to unmask the imperialist aims behind the “aid”. Although we do not make a blanket call for ending all Australian foreign aid, we certainly do not call for increasing the regime’s overseas aid. Instead, we demand the immediate axing of all Australian aid that involves the “capacity building” of local troops, police, judges, bureaucrats, journalists and “social policy” institutes.
    
    
84. Not one person, not one cent for the Australian imperialist military!
    
    
85. Oppose the U.S.-Australia alliance that strengthens both U.S. and Australian imperialism! Demand the closure of the joint U.S./Australia Pine Gap spy base near Alice Springs and all other U.S. bases! U.S troops get out of Darwin! No to joint U.S./Australia military exercises! Torpedo the AUKUS nuclear submarine deal!
    
    
86. In any conflict between, on the one hand, the U.S./NATO imperialists and/or their Australian imperialist allies and, on the other, forces in a colonial, semi-colonial or imperialism-dependant country, stand for the defence of the imperialist-resisting force! That means, for example, in the event of a clash between U.S./Australia imperialism and imperialist-constrained Iran, we must stand for the defence of Iran. Take this clear side in such military conflicts without offering political support to the imperialism-opposing force – such as, for example, the reactionary capitalist government of Iran – unless they are a communist-led or pro-working-class force.
    
    
87. From the time that it became clear that the war in Ukraine had become a proxy war of imperialism against Russia, weeks after Russia’s February 2022 intervention, TP has stood for the defence of Russia against the Western imperialists and their Ukrainian proxies (despite the reactionary capitalist character of Russia’s ruling class). We especially demand an end to all Australian military supplies to Ukraine and an end to all Australian and other Western sanctions on Russia and her Belarus ally.
    
    
88. Stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people’s resistance – including armed resistance – against the Israeli occupiers and their imperialist backers! All Israeli troops and fascistic settlers get out of all of Gaza and all of the West Bank! For the complete right of return of Palestinian refugees! For the destruction of capitalist Israel, through joint action by the oppressed Palestinian people and that section of the Jewish working class that manages to break from Zionism. Racial supremacist Israel must be replaced by a secular, socialist Palestine in which people of Muslim, Christian and Jewish backgrounds can all live together in equality. Standing in the way of this goal is the massive backing that Israel receives from U.S. imperialism and its allies. For communists in Australia, our key means of supporting the Palestinian people is to oppose the Australian ruling class support for Israel’s genocidal tyranny. For joint action of the workers movement and supporters of Palestine to demand: Close Pine Gap! U.S./Australian troops get out of the Red Sea region and all of the Middle East – stop the attacks on Yemen’s Houthis! End U.S. and Australian military supplies to Israel!
    
    
89. Resolutely oppose the U.S./Australia war drive against the PRC and DPRK workers states! Demand: U.S./British/Australian forces get out of the South and East China Seas! Stop your provocations against the PRC over Taiwan! Down with the imperialist military build-up targeting the PRC! No long-range anti-ship missiles for the Australian military! No warships for the Australian military and no submarines!
    
    
90. U.S. troops out of South Korea! End the U.S./South Korean/Australian exercises on North Korea’s borders! Down with the Australian regime’s enforcement of the cruel UN sanctions on North Korea! Lift the sanctions now!
    
    
91. Oppose all other sanctions that imperialist countries have imposed against non-imperialist countries! Down with the U.S. blockade of socialistic Cuba! Lift all Western sanctions against Iran, Venezuela, Syria and Zimbabwe!
    
    
92. Dispel the myth that Australia is “oppressed” by U.S. imperialism! Highlight the imperialist character of Australia’s capitalist ruling class!
    
    
93. Some on the Far Left call for “Australia to have an independent and neutral foreign policy.” We reject making such calls when Australia is under capitalist rule – even as a transitional demand. It diverts away from the necessary struggle against Australian imperialism. For, although the U.S.-Australia alliance should be broken in order to weaken the Australian imperialist ruling class, even if Australia’s foreign policy was made more independent of the U.S., the innate needs of Australian capitalism at its current stage would mean that Australia’s foreign policy would necessarily remain a predatory imperialist one. Indeed, some in the ruling class want a more independent foreign policy precisely in order to ensure that more of the Australia regime’s focus is on upholding Australia’s imperialist tyranny in this region and targeting socialistic China rather than being wasted on distant U.S. wars in the Middle East. Moreover, after a socialist revolution, an Australian workers state should not have a “neutral” foreign policy but one aligned with the PRC and the other workers states; and a policy of actively encouraging the struggle for socialist revolution around the globe.
    
    
94. TP completely rejects the notion that “globalism is the enemy that must be fought”. We say instead that each of the capitalist ruling classes – especially the imperialist ones – are the enemy that must be fought and we need proletarian internationalism to effectively fight against them.
    
    
95. The Australian working class and Left must support the Kanak people’s just struggle for independence from brutal French colonial occupation. Independence for Kanaky (“New Caledonia”)!
    
    
96. Stand for the independence of all the other colonies of imperialist powers! Stand for the independence of Puerto Rico and Guam from the USA!
    
    
97. Support the struggle of the Irish people to complete their liberation from Britain and achieve national unification! Britain: Get out of Northern Ireland!

The Experience of the Soviet Union
and the Lessons from Her Defeat

98. Russia’s October 1917 socialist revolution greatly inspired the working class and all the downtrodden all over the world. However, left isolated, suffering severe scarcities after years of war and under intense hostile pressure, a privileged bureaucratic caste was squeezed to the top of the Soviet workers state and took over its political administration in the mid-1920s. Nevertheless, the Soviet bureaucracy still had to base itself on the workers state and socialist property forms that arose from the October Revolution. Revolution co-leader, Leon Trotsky and his Left Opposition led a struggle to restore to the Soviet Union the internationalism and workers democracy that the Bolsheviks had fought for when making the revolution. However, they were crushed by fierce repression from the new bureaucratic administrators. Eventually in 1991-92, weakened by decades of bureaucratic rule, the Soviet workers state collapsed in the face of massive imperialist pressure. These are the key lessons we must draw from the experience of the Soviet Union:
    • The improvements made to the lives of the Soviet Union’s peoples through socialistic rule showed the tremendous potential of a system based on working class rule and collective ownership.
    • The collapse in living standards and explosion of fratricidal wars resulting from capitalist counterrevolution proved just how progressive was socialistic rule in the Soviet bloc countries compared to capitalism. This illustrates not only the need to fight for socialism in the currently capitalist countries but the need to fight relentlessly to ensure that socialistic rule is never overthrown in China, Vietnam, the DPRK, Cuba and Laos.
    • The destruction of the Soviet bloc workers states shows the extreme difficulty of holding onto proletarian rule – let alone progressing all the way to full socialism and then communism – in a few countries when the richest countries in the world remain under capitalist rule. That is why to defend and progress socialistic rule in China and the other workers states requires the extension of socialist revolution to the currently capitalist countries.

Permanent Revolution: The Program for the Peoples of the Ex-Colonial Countries to Liberate Their Lands from Imperialist Subjugation, Poverty and the Brutal Oppression of Women

99. Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution outlines that in the colonial and semi-colonial countries subjugated by imperialism (like Indonesia, India, Brazil, Philippines, Mexico, Nigeria and Egypt today) to achieve full economic and political independence from imperialism, to free the peasants from the tyranny of the agricultural landlords and to ensure legal equality for women, requires the working class, leading the mass of poor peasants and all the toiling people, to take state power. In doing so and in seeking to fortify its dictatorship of the proletariat, the working class cannot stop with simply achieving these national liberation and democratic tasks. Rather, the proletariat will be compelled to move over to the socialist task of confiscating the means of production from the exploiting classes and bringing them into collective ownership.
    
    This perspective of Permanent Revolution is counterposed to the strategy that many leftists subscribe to of “two-stage revolution”. Under that latter schema, the working class in a colonial or semi-colonial country is required to unite with the “national” bourgeoisie in order to first achieve national liberation and democracy under bourgeois rule. Only then, after a lengthy period of rule by the national bourgeoisie would the working class be ready to seize state power and take socialist measures. However, in 1949, the Mao Ze Dong-led Communist Party of China (CPC) led a massive toiling people’s revolution that established a proletarian state in China. Although the CPC did not formally subscribe to the strategy of Permanent Revolution, that is what they actually carried out by establishing a workers state and through this single state carrying out both the national-democratic revolution and then moving on quickly – and to some degree simultaneously – to begin the construction of socialism. The same was achieved in the other workers states in the former colonial countries. The events of the last century have proven in numerous ways that the strategy that the masses in the colonial and semi-colonial countries need to fight for to achieve their liberation is the strategy of Permanent Revolution.

100. Although the Chinese Revolution established a proletarian state, the revolutionary fighters and the CPC that led the revolution were neither dominated by, nor led by, proletarians. It is true that the revolution was given crucial military assistance by the Soviet workers state and also supported in its decisive stages by workers’ uprisings in key cities. It is also true that the revolution’s most loyal base was drawn from agricultural workers and rural semi-proletarians. However, the great mass of the movement was made up of individual peasant farmers – especially the poorest tenant farmers. The scattered, individualistic nature of peasant farming meant that the CPC’s tenant farmer base had to be held together from above by the more politically aware communist cadres. As a result, the workers state produced by the 1949 Revolution was bureaucratically deformed from its inception. Despite this, the establishment of a workers state was a magnificent advance for China’s workers, peasants and women. The 1949 Revolution also inspired many movements in the colonial and semi-colonial countries that attempted to emulate it.
     
     
101. Where significant Maoist-inspired guerrilla movements continue to exist, communists must defend these movements and their fighters against state repression. At the same time, communists in these countries should not recruit for these movements. Rather, they should build working class-centred movements that seek to draw in behind the proletariat all the toilers in a fight for Permanent Revolution. Such movements should offer any peasant-based communist guerrilla movements a united front. They must say to such Maoist-style movements: “We are fighting to mobilise the proletariat, centred on the cities, and drawing in all the downtrodden masses behind them, to fight for liberation from imperialism and capitalism. At the same time, you are kicking arse in the countryside by mobilising the peasants against the landlords and the comprador capitalists. Let’s join our forces together to overthrow the regime that serves the imperialists, the landlords and the capitalists!”
     
     
102. In some of the countries subjugated by imperialism, the local capitalist ruling elites themselves subjugate certain minority nations within their countries’ borders. Among the oppressed nations are the Kashmiris and Sikhs of India, the Bangsa Moro people in the Philippines, the people of West Papua in Indonesia, the Tamil people in Sri Lanka and the Kurdish people of Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria. Although each of these national questions have their own particularities, communists must defend national liberation movements of the subjugated nations in clashes with the oppressor state. The exception is when the forces of the subjugated nation become manipulated by the imperialists to the extent that they become used by one or another imperialist power to advance their predatory agenda against the entire country that the oppressed people live within. In such cases, although the right to self-determination for the subjugated nation remains of crucial importance, it is temporarily suspended in order to further the over-riding goal of opposing imperialist (direct or indirect) intervention.
     
     
103. Leftists in the countries subjugated by imperialism must adhere to the central tenet of Permanent Revolution which mandates that no bourgeois faction, no matter how much they promise “democracy” and anti-imperialism, is worth giving political support to. That means that when mass resistance inevitably arises against a hated ruler, communists must not join all-encompassing opposition movements. Rather, as a step towards implementing Permanent Revolution strategy, communists should seek to split any opposition movement on a class basis to form a new movement that is exclusively pro-working class, anti-imperialist and pro-women’s rights. Such a movement would not only refuse to support any rival capitalist faction opposed to the current rulers but would ensure that its demands are so clearly anti-bourgeois that no capitalist faction would want to participate in it. Communists would advocate Permanent Revolution within the movement and would push for the working class-led united front to begin to vie for power with not only the existing regime but with its bourgeois rivals.
     
     
104. While insisting on the perspective of Permanent Revolution, when clashes arise between the forces of the bourgeoisies of semi-colonial or otherwise imperialist-dependant countries on the one hand; and imperialist-proxy forces on the other, we must stand with the former. For example, today, in the violent clashes in Venezuela between the security forces of the Maduro government and the coup-seeking pro-imperialist opposition forces, Venezuelan leftists must stand with Maduro’s forces against imperialism’s proxies. At the same time, Venezuelan communists must maintain political independence from all wings of the bourgeoisie and reject any electoral coalition with Maduro’s political party. Instead, communists should build united-front – which should also be offered to the parties politically supporting Maduro – direct action of the workers movement and other anti-imperialists toilers to crush the violent protests of the pro-imperialist opposition. If victorious over the extreme anti-imperialists, such a movement could then open the path for the thereby energised and emboldened working class to lead all the toilers in the seizure of state power.
     
     
105. Understand that imperialism is the main enemy in the developing world! In those dependant capitalist countries whose rulers are currently in the crosshairs of the imperialists, like Iran, communists must be extra wary of not playing into the hands of the imperialists and their local allies who want to topple the existing regime in order to bring to power a new one that is more subservient to the imperialists. Therefore, communists must be doubly vigilant to ensure that any forces funded or backed by imperialism are strictly excluded from any participation in the pro-working class, pro-women’s rights and anti-imperialist united-front opposition mobilisations that communists should seek to build within such countries. Part of how this can be achieved is by making the anti-imperialist content of the united front’s slogans so strong that it is clear that the movement is fighting for a new political order that will be more strongly and more consistently opposed to the imperialists than the current one. Secondly, the movement must be careful to not only oppose the existing capitalist regime but to oppose with even greater vigour those opposition blocs that are backed by, or otherwise soft on, imperialism.
     
     
106. The masses in the countries subjugated by imperialism should act to ruthlessly expose and politically obliterate all imperialist-funded political NGOs operating in their countries.
     
     
107. As communists residing in Australia, we understand that the main way that we can support the struggle for toiling people’s liberation abroad – especially in the neo-colonial and semi-colonial countries – is through opposing the predatory imperialism and overseas interventions of our “own” imperialist rulers here.
     
     
108. Given that Australia has many migrants from the countries squashed by imperialism, protests here against the capitalist regimes ruling these countries are common. Where such protests advance the necessary worldwide struggle against imperialism and capitalism, TP supports such actions. When we join these protests, we always emphasise the need to oppose the imperialist ruling class at home and oppose any positive illusions in it.
     
     
109. However, when such protests have as their main slogan opposing a regime that Australia’s imperialist rulers are hostile to at the given moment – like, for example, Iran today – then such demonstrations have an objectively reactionary character. Therefore, even when such protests are organised by avowed leftists, TP refuses to participate in them. Demonstrations in Australia against the rulers of a neo-colonial, semi-colonial or imperialist-dependant country that the Australian rulers are presently hostile to – like Iran – can only have a supportable character if the slogans opposing the particular rulers are sub-slogans to an overwhelmingly main slogan standing with that country against the hostility of the Australian imperialist rulers. Additionally, any demonstrations here must not only strictly exclude any groups that accept any funding or backing from imperialism, they must also exclude any other groups that collaborate with these pro-imperialist groups.

Unconditionally Defend
Socialistic Rule in China!

110. In the advent of a military conflict between, on the one hand, the U.S., Australian and other imperialist rulers and on the other, the PRC workers state, the interests of working class people and most middle class people in Australia and the world stand very clearly with the victory of the PRC proletarian state. This will be the case regardless of what the pretext of the conflict is and who fires the first shot. TP will resolutely stand by the interests of the working class masses of Australia and the world by standing unconditionally for the defence of the Chinese workers state.
     
     
111. Completely oppose all the efforts by the Australian ruling class to sabotage the mutually beneficial cooperation between Asia-Pacific countries and China! Australian imperialists get your grubby hands off the South West Pacific and Southeast Asia! Red China please come in more! The Australian workers and Left must support and encourage the PRC’s mutually beneficial cooperation with Asia-Pacific countries.
     
     
112. Reject the false notion pushed by many on the Australian Left that the Australian capitalist class is being dragged reluctantly into supporting the U.S.-led campaign against China! In fact, the Australian ruling class is just as rabid as its U.S. counterparts in its hostility to Red China. Indeed, on some occasions, it has been the Australian imperialists who have been pulling their U.S. counterparts into a more extreme anti-PRC stance.
     
     
113. No imperialist arms sales to Taiwan! The PRC is completely justified in wanting to reunify China by reincorporating the rogue province of Taiwan. The mistake of the PRC leadership is that they promise to accommodate Taiwan’s capitalist class in doing so under the “one country, two systems” formula. Instead, we say that the PRC must foment socialist revolution in Taiwan in order to liberate the island’s cruelly exploited working class. For one China under one socialist system!
     
     
114. Unconditionally defend PRC sovereignty over Hong Kong! Condemn any solidarity in this country with those who have been jailed in Hong Kong for their anti-communist, anti-PRC activities! No support to Jimmy Lai, the jailed, anti-Red China, Hong Kong media billionaire – who is known as Hong Kong’s Rupert Murdoch for his hard right agenda! Down with calls for Western-style “democracy” in Hong Kong, which are an underhanded means to ensure the continued domination of Hong Kong by the capitalists and their affluent upper-middle class sidekicks! The PRC should immediately bring socialistic rule to Hong Kong by confiscating the region’s ports, banks, hotels, shopping malls and property enterprises from the billionaire tycoons and bringing them into public hands. For one united socialist China!
     
     
115. End the Cold War witch-hunt in Australia! Stop the ASIO interrogations! Resist the attacks on social organisations friendly to China! Stop the vilification and marginalisation of Australia’s Chinese community!
     
     
116. TP sharply criticises those Left groups that claim that the PRC is another “capitalist” state. In making such an “analysis” such groups are capitulating to imperialism’s Cold War against China. They are convincing themselves that China is “capitalist” in order to find an excuse to avoid the politically difficult task of defending the PRC.
     
     
117. While insisting on the continuing proletarian character of the PRC, we are not naive about the threats facing socialistic rule in China. Four and a half decades of the “Reform and Opening Up” policy has created a sizable capitalist class that would love nothing better than to grab state power in China. Opposing them are politically conscious Chinese workers and pro-communist intellectuals who want to defend proletarian rule and strengthen its socialist foundations. The fate of China will be decided by the balance of forces between these two basic sides acting in China: the pro-capitalist side and the socialist, pro-working class side. The imperialists are doing all they can to strengthen the former side. Authentic communists in both China and the rest of the world must do all we can to strengthen the socialist, pro-working class side. We must do so by taking actions to oppose the imperialist pressure on the PRC workers state and to embolden the socialist, pro-working class side within the PRC. We must aim for these forces to be strengthened to such an extent that they will be able to conclusively defeat the pro-capitalist side and decisively weaken the capitalist sector within the PRC. In doing so they will fortify the workers state, advance her towards fuller socialism and embolden the revolutionary socialist struggles to overturn capitalist rule in the currently capitalist countries.
     
     
118. The main slogan that those pushing capitalist counterrevolution in China – and their imperialist backers – proclaim is “pro-democracy”. The imperialists know full well that under a parliamentary “democratic” setup, their immense wealth and media resources will enable them to intervene into any “free elections” to swing the vote in favour of pro-capitalist parties. Moreover, conscious capitalist counterrevolutionaries know that in such “Western-style democracy”, local wealthier individuals will be able to have a disproportionate say in any “free elections”. TP completely opposed the late 2022 “A4” movement that used frustrations over the inconvenience of necessary COVID response measures to demand “democracy” and foster hostility to the PRC workers state. We oppose all movements that call for bourgeois “democracy” in China – understanding that this is an underhanded call to facilitate capitalist counterrevolution. That is, we oppose all movements that call for “democracy” in general in China without insisting that it must be a specifically proletarian democracy. 
     
     
119. Oppose all U.S. and Australian ruling class support for political groups and political NGOs conducting operations within China! Counter the Australian activities of exiled Chinese anti-communist groups!
     
     
120. The imperialists’ claim that “China is brutally persecuting” the predominantly Muslim Uyghur ethnic group who live in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) is a lie. It turns out that the group of regimes alone in accusing China of “brutally oppressing” Uyghurs is an almost carbon copy of that actively supporting Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinian people. The truth is that the Uyghur people’s rich culture is flourishing in socialistic China. There is some opposition to PRC rule within the XUAR but it is not mainly driven by national oppression. Rather, the political battle taking place within the XUAR is a contest between, on the one side, that small proportion of Uyghurs who are either consciously pro-capitalist or religious fundamentalist opponents of women’s rights, together with their imperialist masters and their anti-communist Han Chinese allies; and, on the other side, pro-women’s rights, pro-communist Uyghurs and their pro-communist Han Chinese allies. Improvements in the lives of the Uyghur people and the solidifying of ethnic relations within the PRC requires the further advance of China in the direction of socialism and the weakening of China’s private sector and the inequality it has fostered. Capitalist counterrevolution in either Xinjiang or all of China would be an absolute disaster for most Uyghur people.
     
     
121. Expose the agenda and funding sources of imperialist-funded groups that pretend to stand for workers’ rights in China but actually seek to channel workers grievances into supporting capitalist counterrevolution there! These outfits must be crushed! Any leaders or employees of imperialist-funded pseudo-“labour rights” groups who face state repression in the PRC must not be supported by the workers movement in Australia.
     
     
122. Pushed by class conscious workers and pro-communist intellectuals, the PRC leadership has famously cracked down on numerous wealthy capitalists. Communists must demand that such crackdowns go much further.
     
     
123. For urgent measures in the PRC to decisively strengthen the socialistic state sector at the expense of the private sector. China’s internet, big retail and light manufacturing sectors should be confiscated from the capitalists and be brought into public hands. Any private sector enterprise whose owners or top managers have been found guilty of bribery or other corruption should be confiscated and brought into public hands!
     
     
124. The serious threat of a future capitalist counterrevolution in China mobilised under the slogan of classless “democracy” does not negate the need for proletarian democracy in China. Censorship of the Chinese media should be loosened so that all voices who are not seeking to weaken proletarian state power or undermine the backbone role of the public sector in the economy should be able to critically scrutinise government policies. However, we should not be naive. Given the presence of powerful capitalists within socialistic China and given the dominance of capitalism worldwide, any freeing up of political debate within China, even within the scope of workers democracy, would be exploited by the capitalists and their allies.That is why any moves towards workers democracy in the PRC must be accompanied by a struggle to weaken the power of the capitalists within the country. For starters, all exploiters of labour must be expelled from the CPC (as some were allowed to join following the institution of former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin’s Three Represents policy in the early noughties). They must also be booted out of all state representative bodies like the national, provincial and local peoples congresses. Here too, we also come back to the need to confiscate large chunks of the enterprises owned by the capitalists. Indeed, the main route to implementing proletarian democracy in China is through pro-communist workers building mass organisations that will, in alliance with sympathetic PRC state institutions, strike decisive blows to weaken China’s capitalists’ economic power, drive out any soft-on the West, soft-on-capitalism elements out of state and official organs and fortify the explicitly pro-communist and pro-working-class ideological orientation of PRC state institutions. In the course of such a mass struggle to strengthen the workers state and reinforce its proletarian character, the pro-communist workers will, in passing, establish administrative control over China’s socialistic system through their elected councils or soviets (a control which, though it may have been difficult to achieve in the predominantly peasant-based Chinese society of 1949, is now undeniably on the order of the day in today’s rapidly urbanising, proudly proletarianized and technologically advanced 21^st century Peoples Republic of China). The proletariat, now in real administrative control of their state, will then reshuffle the bureaucracy and ensure its obedience to the organs of proletarian democracy and to the goal of complete victory over the capitalists on both the national and international arenas. Such an outcome is only possible in conjunction with promising – and especially victorious – struggles for socialist revolution within the capitalist countries. 
     
     
125. Although a key goal – the administration of the workers state by a regime of proletarian democracy led by an authentic communist vanguard – of the reform of socialistic China that is needed today is similar to the goal that the restructuring of the Soviet workers state that Trotsky and the Fourth International stood for in the mid and late 1930s, the methods required are very different. Thus, the call for workers political revolution to oust the Soviet bureaucracy that Trotsky called for from 1933 onwards is not appropriate for today’s PRC – especially not with the strident emphasis that Trotsky gave to this slogan when he wrote the Fourth International’s 1938 Transitional Program. This is because the main internal dangers that the PRC faces today are quite different to those confronted by the then Soviet workers state. In today’s China, the main internal danger to socialistic rule comes directly from the capitalists within China, whereas in the 1938 Soviet Union it came from the danger that the, then rapidly right-moving, bureaucracy would devour the workers state. Furthermore, the character of today’s PRC and its bureaucracy are very different to those of the 1938 Soviet Union, when the bureaucracy was playing an especially reactionary role – including through killing many of the country’s best communists during the horrific Great Purge. Moreover, to raise the call for political revolution to oust the PRC bureaucracy as a slogan in today’s Australia, a country whose ruling class is at the forefront of hostility to the PRC, is especially harmful. We must not simply apply Trotsky’s 1938 slogans towards the then Soviet Union to today’s very different PRC workers state that exists in a very different world! Those who do this will end up assisting the imperialist enemies of the Chinese workers state.
     
     
126. Beijing’s policy of “non-interference in the affairs of other countries” has been a failure. What it has resulted in is one-sided interference from the imperialist countries into socialist China. Instead of hoping that the imperialists will stop undermining the PRC and start truly practicing mutual coexistence, which is never going to happen, PRC leaders must advance the struggle to extend socialism into the currently capitalist countries. This includes by disseminating propaganda supporting the struggles of the working class and all the oppressed in the imperialist countries and condemning the imperialists’ rule of exploitation, racism and neo-colonialism.
     
     
127. For communists in Australia and other imperialist countries concerned about the wellbeing of socialistic rule in China, our central task is to relieve the immense hostile pressure being exerted on China from the capitalist classes that rule our “own” countries. The best way to do this is by advancing towards the removal from power of these imperialist ruling classes by the revolutionary action of the working class. On the way to doing so, we must do everything possible to counteract the hostile external capitalist pressure bearing upon China and ,thus, encourage committed Chinese communists in their endeavours to defend socialistic rule. TP is proud of the many actions that we have organised in Sydney to fight for these goals.
     
     
128. To the extent that small-scale dissension within the Australian ruling class about AUKUS causes hesitation in the bourgeois camp about its rapid anti-PRC military buildup, we welcome it. However, opponents of Australian imperialism and defenders of the PRC workers state must never tailor our demands in search of an alliance with this wing of the capitalist class.
     
     
129. TP participates in the ongoing protests in Australia against AUKUS. We seek to steer them into a movement that will oppose all aspects of the imperialist military pressure against China and that will also oppose the imperialists’ political, propaganda and economic campaign against the PRC, which inevitably serves to “justify” their military escalation. We fight for a movement that will appeal to the clear class interests that workers in Australia have in defending a workers state in China.

Build a Revolutionary Internationalist
Workers Party

130. Against capitalist rulers that have perfected methods of hanging onto power, working classes and their allies can only triumph if they are so conscious of their mission, so organised, so united and so aware of all the bobby traps set by the enemy that they can overcome all the barriers placed before them by the capitalist exploiting classes. To bring this very high level of consciousness, organisation and unity needed to working class people requires the intervention of a revolutionary, internationalist workers party that has been assembled from the most politically aware and determined elements of the proletariat and its allies in each country.
     
     
131. The Bolsheviks were able to make the October 1917 Socialist Revolution because Lenin had insisted on splitting his country’s Left and building a workers party that was solely composed of authentic revolutionary internationalists. Similarly, in Australia and all other imperialist countries, we must build workers parties that consist solely of revolutionary internationalists. No subordination of revolutionaries to “unity of the Left” coalitions with anti-revolutionary socialists! For a Lenin-style political struggle against reformist socialists and the centrist socialists that conciliate them.
     
     
132. The above does not mean that revolutionaries cannot join in common united-front action with other tendencies on the Left for particular goals. However, the united front is a tactic and not a principle. That means that whether or not, and how, to implement a united-front strategy depends on if and how such a strategy serves the overall aim of advancing the struggle for socialist revolution.
     
     
133. Trotskyist Platform works hard to contribute to the building of a revolutionary internationalist workers party in Australia. We do not stand on the past tradition of any of the existing far left groups in Australia or internationally and we do not consider ourselves to be a split from any of the existing socialist groups in Australia. Rather, we base ourselves on the principles of Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party that led the only successful socialist revolution in an imperialist type of capitalist country and on the principles of the first four congresses of the Communist International (that were held between March 1919 and December 1922). TP also stands on the struggle of Trotsky’s Left Opposition that continued to fight for authentic Bolshevism after the Soviet Bolshevik Party moved in a right, revisionist direction in the early-mid 1920s.
     
     
134. TP also stands on a good part of the work of the Trotskyist Fourth International until its final degeneration in the early 1950s. We especially stand on much of the work of the pro-Fourth International groups and then the Fourth International itself – in the period before Trotsky’s death in August 1940. We do so while acknowledging that even during this period, the Fourth Internationalist groups had flaws.
     
     
135. The final degeneration of the Fourth international was a huge setback to the struggle for socialist revolution. But we do not despair from this fact but instead draw its lessons. However, there are no silver bullets as far as avoiding political degeneration is concerned. Every communist party and every communist is constantly faced with degenerative pressures from capitalist society. However, there is another factor that works in the exact opposite direction. That is that the realities of capitalist exploitation inevitably push fresh layers of the toiling masses to participate in class struggle resistance. These struggles necessarily inject any party that dares to stand on an authentic communist platform with new energy. It sustains the party’s cadres, inspires them with new hope and lifts them to new feats of courage in their quest to mobilise working class people against capitalist rule.
     
     
136. Ever since most of the nominal “Trotskyists” took the side of imperialism in the 1980s Cold War II, it is no longer true that people that call themselves “Trotskyists” are necessarily closer to authentic Bolshevism and thus authentic “Trotskyism” than those that consider themselves anti-Trotskyist, “Marxist-Leninists”. The bottom line is that any socialist today must be judged mainly by their actual actions and political positions and not mainly by the particular “ism” (whether that be Trotskyism or Stalinism or Maoism or anarchism or some other “ism”) that they claim to stand by. Nevertheless, flawed political principles based on a flawed political tradition will eventually lead to flawed political positions. Political clarity on what type of socialist workers parties must be built is absolutely essential because the history of the last more than 100 years is a history of blown opportunities for socialist revolution. We therefore insist on Leninism-Trotskyism as the perspective needed to ensure that the working class seizes all the revolutionary opportunities that history inevitably creates for it. We believe that the principles and program that TP stands on is the authentic Leninism and Trotskyism of today.
     
     
137. In between the Bolshevik politics of Trotskyist Platform on the one hand and the ALP and the Greens on the other, stand a number of other nominally Marxist socialist groups. However, we are neither frustrated by the presence of these other nominally Leninist groups nor are we exasperated that the “Left in Australia is so divided right now”. For in truth, the Far Left is divided in every country and has always been so. For example, in the lead up to the October 1917 Russian Revolution, the revolutionary Bolsheviks were competing against a myriad of other leftist factions. Indeed, in the face of a very powerful ruling class that has perfected its means of both physically and ideologically controlling the masses that they exploit, it is inevitable that while some in the masses will rise to a complete and consistent opposition to capitalist rule, others will only be able to develop an opposition to the exploiting class in some areas while adapting to the capitalists in others. This truth, in all capitalist societies at all times, is the root cause for the different shadings in politics of the Far Left and thus its division into separate groups. The problem is that those left groups that are incomplete in their opposition to the capitalist rulers will, nevertheless, because of their partial opposition to the ruling class, attract radicalised oppositional elements of the masses. But they will hold back these rebelling elements from developing a truly consistent, revolutionary opposition to the capitalist order. Therefore, political struggle against the wavering sections of the Far Left is an important part of the work of an authentic communist party. We are neither “infuriated” by having to engage in this struggle, nor do we do see it as a “distraction” from the “real” work of directly opposing the capitalist exploiters. Rather, it is a part of the normal work of an authentic Bolshevik party in advancing the struggle for socialist revolution. It is just as important and inevitable as, say, competition with the ALP and the Greens for the hearts and minds of politically aware workers and leftist youth.
     
     
138. It is neither possible nor desirable for a revolutionary workers party to be built purely on the basis of recruitment through its propaganda. Such a party would be hollow. That is why an authentic communist group must both actively participate in working class and other progressive struggles called by others and, to the extent of their forces, initiate their own actions. TP is very proud of our record of doing both these things.
     
     In actions called by others that we participate in, TP not only supports the progressive content of the action but seeks to shape the strategy of movements so that they align with the struggle of the working class against capitalism and reject all illusions that justice for the oppressed can come from any capitalists, their political parties or the organs of their state. We further work to shape progressive movements such that they will intransigently oppose Australian imperialism, stand in defence of the PRC workers state and seek common interests with the workers of the world and with all oppressed racial and other groups within Australia.

The Type of Cadre That TP Needs

139. Those who strongly agree with the principles and program of Trotskyist Platform can apply to join our group. Membership is open to proletarian wage workers, unemployed workers, working class youth and pensioners. Membership is also open to petit-bourgeois individuals who not only come over fully to TP’s proletarian political standpoint but also pull themselves away from the individualistic mindset that the petit bourgeoisie’s relation to the means of production can engender and embrace the collectivism of the best elements of the working class.
     
     
140. Members of TP are required to fight for our communist program with dedication, courage and sincerity.
     
     
141. Humility in conduct of political work is a quality that we value. Arrogant people with over-sized egos will not be tolerated within TP. They damage collective organising and are rightfully met with disdain by the masses.
     
     
142. Unlike the practice of some Far Left groups, TP encourages our members to socialise with people outside the group and outside the broader Left. If our comrades only know people who think the same as us, or who are also avowed leftists, then they do not know the world. And if we do not know the world, we cannot change it! Therefore, comrades are encouraged to get to know people outside the Left milieu through participating in sporting, music, artistic, social, cultural and hobby clubs and associations.
     
     
143. During the conduct of political work, comrades must not seek personal gain for themselves as individuals. All our political work must be done with the sole aim of advancing the struggle for the liberation of the exploited and oppressed and the progress of humanity through socialist revolution.
     
     
144. Today, the world is at a crossroads. Capitalist rule in Australia and around the world is bringing ever more poverty, job insecurity, economic stress, social division, racist oppression and imperialism-driven wars. At the same time, socialistic China’s mutually beneficial cooperation with developing countries and the example of continued socialistic success that she provides both present a medium-term existential threat to imperialist domination of the world. Moreover, the working class masses in the capitalist world are more and more discontent. However, right now, the absence of genuinely revolutionary socialist parties is allowing the dangerous Far-Right wing of the capitalist classes to gain in strength. Increasingly, the choice facing humanity is either the liberation of communism or the nightmare of the fascist form of capitalism. It is therefore urgent that politically conscious workers and other leftists build an authentic revolutionary, internationalist workers party in Australia. TP is working hard to build such a party. We encourage those who agree with our principles and strategy and want to selflessly and energetically fight for them to join our group. With the world’s contradictions coming to a head, the entire fate of humanity may well be decided within the next two to four decades.
     
     28 November 2024

Click Here for the Earlier May 2008 Version of What Trotskyist Platform Stands For