UNLEASH INDUSTRIAL ACTION TO DEMAND JOBS FOR ALL! CAPITALIST “DEMOCRACY” IS A SHAM: ONLY WORKERS UNITED WITH ALL OF THE OPRESSED CAN BRING ABOUT REAL CHANGE
Above: The Handover or Phony Hope Shakes the Hand of Blatant Bigotry. A moment that ought to finally dispel anyone’s lingering illusion that capitalist democracy can ever be reformed into a system that operates in the interests of the working class. Obama prepares to calmly hand the administration of the U.S. capitalist state over to Trump just as George W. Bush did for him eight years earlier. The teetering edifice of the capitalist state requires both left and right pillars to keep it from completely collapsing beneath the dead weight of its own contradictions.
November 9 – Hard right-wing candidate Donald Trump – a billionaire capitalist exploiter and extreme racist and misogynist – will become the next president of the U.S.A. In yesterday’s election, he defeated the candidate supported by the mainstream of the American capitalist class, Hillary Clinton.
Like most far-right demagogues (including Hitler), Trump poses as a “rebel” and “anti-establishment” figure. Actually, he is a tycoon who is very much part of the capitalist ruling class and a key part of his economic program is big tax cuts for the rich. His main beef with the mainstream of the racist establishment is that they are not openly racist and economically nationalist enough for his liking. His blatant racism serves to protect the capitalist establishment by dividing the masses and diverting their economic frustrations and insecurity onto minorities and other groups in society who are made into scapegoats for the mass inequalities that capitalism inevitably creates. Similarly, his protectionism diverts anger about job losses onto overseas workers, thus shielding the capitalist exploiters in the U.S. from any blame and making the masses think that they have a common interest with their own exploiters in protecting American business.
Eight years ago when Obama was first elected, Trotskyist Platform actually predicted that the inevitable failure of a small-l liberal led regime to improve the lives of the masses could well lead to the eventual takeover of hard right forces in America (and, indeed, in his language Obama was the most liberal-sounding U.S. president in decades). Here is an excerpt from the article we wrote upon Obama first taking office:
That the Obama electoral triumph, if anything, dulled workers’ class consciousness means that even the present shift away from the conservative right wing is fragile. Without an understanding that it is the capitalist profiteers who are responsible for unemployment, recession and decay the masses will be vulnerable to right wing demagogy when they see that the new Administration is no more able to satisfy their aspirations than the previous one. The conservatives are waiting in the wing. And they will be able to mobilise right wing activists from amongst the all too many bigoted elements who were horrified that a black person should become President. Hence, there is a real danger that the rise of the liberal Obama could turn out to be just a prelude to a right-wing regime more frightening than Bush’s – perhaps led by a Sarah Palin-like figure. While the left rest on their illusory laurels, the frighteningly fascist right are now surely mobilising their forces, stirred up like a wasps’ nest ready to strike!
Only by mobilising their own power to squeeze concessions out of the exploiters can the working class begin to address the needs of the American masses and stop the re-emergence of the right. The working class can through industrial action force companies to avoid shedding jobs. And its power can be mobilised in a campaign to demand free health care for all. In all such struggles of the American workers movement, black workers will be at the forefront. These workers will join together the multiracial workers’ movement with the ghetto poor in the fight for black liberation.
Although Trump’s views and agenda are certainly fascistic, fascism has not yet triumphed in the U.S (nor does it currently hold sway in any other country). Fascism is not just a government of people with a really right-wing agenda but involves the mass mobilisation of the middle class and some of the unemployed (and even politically backward workers) to violently smash all workers’ organisations – like independent trade unions and left-wing parties – and institute a capitalist regime which dispenses with the formalities of parliamentary “democracy.” Such a regime can only be instituted by physically defeating an inevitable degree of resistance from the politically conscious, working class masses. Nevertheless, Trump’s triumph will greatly encourage fascist outfits in the U.S. and will spur the development of fascist militias. American blacks, First Peoples, Hispanics, Asians, gays, women seeking abortion and leftists will face ever more violent attacks.
Regardless of Trump’s particular policies, the normal workings of the capitalist boom and bust cycles mean that in some four to twelve months there will be an economic downturn in the U.S.A and a consequent rise in the unemployment rate. Given the chaotic state of major capitalist economies, this could turn out to be another serious global economic crisis. In that context, mass struggle led by conscious working class and anti-racist forces could weaken the right-wing regime and undermine support for it. However, in the absence of such struggle, the increased economic insecurity could further fuel the flames of fascism.
Trump’s ascendancy will also embolden far-right and fascist forces here in Australia. Hard-right Liberal politician Cory Bernardi as well as the LNP MP George Christensen openly backed Trump. And Trump’s victory was hailed by the fascistic senator Pauline Hanson of One Nation infamy. Indeed, at a fascist rally in the northern Melbourne suburb of Eltham last weekend against a refugee centre, some of the fascist scum were wearing Trump T-shirts.
Trump’s rise will not only boost organised far-right forces but will also incite violent tendencies amongst garden-variety rednecks in Australia. The latter are people who may not be politically active in an extreme right-wing movement but are, nevertheless, simply filled with racial hatred. A couple of months ago, one such redneck murdered 14-year-old Aboriginal youth, Elijah Doughty, near the Western Australia town of Kalgoorlie. Then late last month, Indian-origin bus driver, Manmeet Alisher was cruelly murdered by being set alight with a fire bomb by a man of white Anglo-Saxon appearance, Anthony O’Donohue. O’Donohue, formerly an accountant, was known to harbour fascistic, crackpot conspiracy theories against trade unions. Although the media and cops have done their best to cover up the racist nature of this Brisbane murder the victim’s family are sure that it was motivated by racism. Several people with origins from the Indian subcontinent have told Trotskyist Platform comrades the same thing. They pointed out that the Indian man was specifically singled out. One man of Indian background, in explaining how Manmeet’s killing was a racist murder, told us that while living in the same multi-cultural Brisbane suburb where the murder took place, Moorooka, he had been attacked by racists and once had to literally run for his life to escape from a white racist who was threatening him.
All this underscores the need to build, here in Australia just as much as in other capitalist countries, a mass mobilisation of trade unionists, Aboriginal people, non-white “ethnic” people and all anti-racists to drive the fascist filth off the streets. This is an urgent necessity of self-defence for all the intended victims of the fascists. Although self-defence action against fascist groups will not directly stop the daily and incessant racist attacks and abuse from the innumerable garden-variety rednecks scattered throughout this country, by landing blows against organised fascists we can send a message to the garden-variety racists out there that they had better pull their heads in. These racists must learn that the organised and united multiracial working class has both the will and the power to stand up and defend anyone who is vulnerable to their racist, cowardly attacks.
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On October 28, Indian-born Brisbane bus driver Manmeet Alisher (Bottom Left) was murdered by Anthony O’Donohue (Top Centre). The killer boarded the bus and heinously set the driver alight in what was manifestly a racist attack. The attack by the white terrorist also caused the bus to burn down, threatening the lives of many passengers when the bus (pictured Top Left)was stopped in the multiracial suburb of Morooka. O’Donohue was known to hold fascistic views – including anti-union conspiracy theories. The election of hard right wing racist, Donald Trump, to the U.S. presidency and the ensuing emboldening of far right Australian politicians like Pauline Hanson (Top Far Right – posing for a photo with notorious Sydney Nazi, Ross “Skull” May) will incite further white supremacist terror. Mass moblisations of trade unionists and all the intended victims of the fascists must drive violent racist filth off the streets – such as happened in Brisbane on 2 May 2014 (Bottom Right). On that day a large contingent of unionised construction workers joined tother with anarchists, Trotskyist Platform supporters and other leftists and anti-racists to shut down an attempted march by the fascist Australia First Party.
No to Divisive Protectionism: For a Class Struggle Program of Jobs For All!
Trump’s victory will also encourage various forces here to more rabidly push for protectionism. In fact, economic nationalism was one of Trump’s main points of attraction for the U.S. masses, especially in the Mid-West rust belt. To be sure, when the media reports that working class people in the Mid-West were supporting Trump this can be a bit misleading since, in actual fact, Trump still did not do that well in cities. What they mean by “working class” is people with a lower income rather than in terms of their actual relationship to the means of production. Trump’s support came not so much from currently employed industrial workers as it did from laid-off workers now trying to hustle a living as self-employed contractors or small businessmen or those now in insecure, non-union casual jobs or, perhaps, still unemployed or forced into early retirement. Unionised workers who are brought together at the point of production and united together in unions are, overall, less susceptible to right-wing demagogy than isolated self-employed and unemployed people. And, though it is true that even a portion of unionised workers did vote for Trump, analysis of exit polls actually revealed that the higher the income, the more likely you were to vote for Trump.
We need to firmly oppose economic nationalism here not only because it fuels racism but also because it directly undermines the fight to build actual struggle against the greedy bosses at home. However, we can only successfully oppose protectionism if we counterpose to it a class struggle program of jobs for all – that is, by highlighting the demand that profitable enterprises be forced to increase hiring at the cost of their own profits and then linking this demand to the fight for the ultimate confiscation of the means of production from the capitalist class by the working class. Trotskyist Platform has been emphasising opposition against any form of protectionism and promoting a class struggle program of jobs for all but we will intensify this work by fighting to build more actions promoting this essential perspective.
Unfortunately, much of the Left either themselves embrace economic nationalism – while trying to rid it of it of its openly racist aspects – or just try their best to ignore it. However, any leftist force that capitulates to economic nationalism is an obstacle to the fight for workers’ rights whether it happens to call itself socialist, Trotskyist, Marxist-Leninist, anarchist or any other kind of ist. The protectionist ideology of the pro-Democrats, American union bureaucracy has pushed a section of American unionised workers – and many laid off industrial workers – into the arms of far-right populism. The economic nationalist slogans of the current, pro-ALP Australian union leadership should also not be allowed to push Australian workers into the filthy arms of Hanson’s One Nation and its ilk who, after all, are the most consistent nationalists of all. Challenging the economic nationalist ideology that is currently dominant in the Australian workers movement is key to unleashing a class struggle fightback to defend our unions, protect workers rights and win jobs for everyone.
Implications for the Leninist Program on International Questions
On international policy, Trump has not disguised the fact that he is going to push an even more openly hostile stance towards socialistic China. He wants to draw capitalist Russia into this task by building an alliance with Russia that would bring the world’s two most powerful military powers into a capitalist super alliance. Part of the aim of this perspective is also to weaken the U.S.A’s European NATO allies cum imperialist economic rivals. Additionally, there is ideological affinity between the hard right wing in the U.S. and the Putin government. Putin, as well as being a hero to right-wing , “Third Way” (i.e. “neither socialism nor capitalism”) conspiracy theory types is also a hero to fascist groups throughout the West (the Australian Defence League here, for example, has openly hailed him) as well as to more mainstream right-wing forces (like racist, Islamophobic senator Jacqui Lambi) because of his government’s hard line anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim policies as well as his homophobia.
However, whether Trump and the Far Right’s proclivities for an alliance with Russia will be implemented remains to be seen. Trump’s regime will be, in effect, an alliance of hard line right wingers like himself and more mainstream figures from the right wing of the Republican Party. The latter are less inclined to an alliance with Russia as they believe the U.S. is strong enough not to share its spoils with any emerging power and do not want to allow a new player into the imperialist club. Furthermore, Putin himself would probably play hard to get with Trump since he knows the U.S is a weakening empire. He would also not want Russia to play second fiddle to the U.S. too much and would hold out for as many concessions as possible. Furthermore, the Russian bourgeoisie may be hesitant to be pulled in too brazenly into an anti-China alliance since, despite their hostility to socialism (the Russian government from Putin down were, after all, active in the counterrevolution that destroyed the USSR and brought capitalist class rule back to Russia) they stand to make a fortune from selling oil and natural gas to neighbouring China which has few of these resources itself.
Nevertheless, a U.S.-Russia capitalist super alliance is certainly quite possible and if it does transpire this may affect the position that communist internationalists should take towards events in Syria. Whatever effect a Trump presidency has on U.S.-Russia relations, one thing is pretty certain: the Trump ascendancy will see an intensification of open U.S. hostility to the Chinese workers state. So, despite the bureaucratic deformations and capitalist incursions into China – and we must remember that nearly 60% of her economy is controlled and nearly all of her economy’s commanding heights (that is, the heavy industries, finance, transport, telecommunications etc) are fully owned by the Chinese workers state, a bigger slice of the economic pie than that enjoyed by the Soviet Russian state during Lenin’s time – authentic socialists need to be ready to intensify our struggle to defend socialistic China against imperialist attack and imperialist-backed, anti-communist NGOs.
We live in scary times. The ascendancy of Trump to the U.S. presidency will – in the absence of mass resistance – incite in both the U.S.A and Australia a further escalation of racist attacks on coloured ethnic minorities, Muslims and First Peoples communities. However, we should be aware that the rising of fascistic forces is a sign of the utter decay of capitalism which in its death throes is releasing such noxious fumes. But the system will not die by itself. It needs to be overthrown by the conscious working class-led masses united with all of the oppressed. It is our job to advance the struggle for such a socialist revolution. This is a time when every major capitalist country is seeing the rise of sinister far-right forces: from the U.S.A to Australia to most of Europe to Russia and the Ukraine. In Indonesia a violent racist movement has erupted and targeted the governor of Jakarta purely for his being a member of an ethnic and religious minority. In India a sinister fascistic mass murderer is the prime minister. In fact, the one great socialistic power in the world, Red China, looks rather good by comparison. It is the one large nation where far-right racist forces based on the majority ethnic community are not on the march.
Why, in Australia, must the flower of Aboriginal youth fall victim to murderous, racist rednecks or become prey for a relentlessly systematic kind of brutal “justice” that continues to send young Aboriginal men and women to languish in jail cells or detention centres for years on end or worse? They are victims of the essentially immoral 200 year-old Australian capitalist racket. As are the brave children, women and men who have been held hostage in the Nauru, Manus Island and Christmas Island hellholes. Can anyone seriously argue that if these asylum seekers came from, say, England or Denmark instead of mainly from the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East that they would be treated in the same heartless manner? In fact, the Australian capitalist state’s border control policy provides tacit official sanction to every act of racist violence and xenophobia perpetrated out there on the streets of Australia.
A mighty, radical shift is needed. Any deluded notion of a middle ground that social democrats might be clinging onto is fast falling away beneath their feet and the pieces being greedily gobbled up by the awaiting, wide open fascistic jaws of your Donald Trumps and Pauline Hansons. Now is not the time for sitting on fences. The fence has already collapsed under the combined weight of too many fat, middle class rumps. Increasingly, humanity is faced with a choice between fascism and communism. Behind fascism stands the capitalist, property-rich ruling class which is willing to unleash its nazi dogs as a last resort to protect its ill gotten gains and its global control of immense human and industrial resources. Behind the prospect of communism stands the organised, international working class which is willing and able to seize control of the world’s business from the tiny minority of capitalist owners in the name of all the people and then commence work towards a collective, humane and socialistic organisation of society. A handful of countries have already – bravely and with sometimes seemingly intolerable sacrifice – embarked on the road to a communist future despite the perpetual harrassment and often bloody resistance put up by the imperialist powers. We workers of Australia must offer our sincere respect, our immense gratitude and, most of all, a comradely – critical if necessary but always helping – hand to these frontier workers states because our futures are inextricably linked. Let’s work hard to advance the struggle for communism here too! Let’s promote a class struggle fight for jobs for all workers! Let’s fight to unite the working class masses right around the world by uncompromisingly standing against both racism and economic nationalism! You’d have to be blind now not to see capitalist democracy for what it really is – a filthy, rich man’s game. But the riches of the world have always really belonged to the working many and not to the exploiting few. The exploiters can choke on the racism, hatred and division they sow. The fruit of our labour is of a different sort altogether. Already the workers of the world have begun to unite in order to form a community of kindness which can embrace all of our common humanity without exception. From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs. Friends, the time to mobilise and to strike back is now.
PROTECT THE GREAT BENEFITS FOR WORKERS & THE RURAL MASSES WON THROUGH THE REVOLUTION:
STOP IMPERIALIST FUNDING FOR THOSE NGOs THAT SEEK TO OVERTHROW SOCIALISTIC RULE IN CHINA
6th September 2016: Determined supporters of socialistic rule in China rallied this evening on the steps at the entrance to Sydney Town Hall. In this demonstration called at short notice, participants hailed the gains of China’s 1949 anticapitalist revolution and opposed the U.S. and Australian-backed anti-communist Chinese exile groups seeking to promote capitalist restoration in China.
The 1949 Chinese Revolution was one of the most momentous events in humanity’s entire history. The long-suffering Chinese masses overthrew their exploiters and took power. Tens of millions of downtrodden people participated in this heroic struggle. They achieved victory after a bitter three year civil war. On one side of the war stood the oppressed tenant farmers, workers, working-class women and idealistic students. They were organized by the Communist Party of China (CPC) which was led by Mao Ze Dong. On the other side were the brutal landlords and capitalists. These oppressor classes were served by the Kuomintang (KMT) government of Chiang Kai-Shek. The KMT was heavily armed, trained and advised by the U.S. regime. But still they lost to the Communist-led revolutionaries.
The 1949 anti-capitalist revolution freed the peasants from the tyranny of the landlords, made headway in liberating workers from capitalist exploitation and freed the Chinese people from humiliating subjugation by imperial powers. The revolution greatly uplifted women’s status from the horrific reality they faced under the previous Kuomintang regime – when many women were subjected to forced marriage and the barbaric practice of Continue reading Long Live China’s 1949 Anticapitalist Revolution!→
Above: Activists establish the Redfern Aboriginal Tent Embassy on its first day, 26 May 2014. At the front of the Bottom Left photo is embassy founder, Jenny Munro.
7 September 2015: There was a feeling of satisfaction amongst activists of the Redfern Aboriginal Tent Embassy (RATE) as activists packed up the protest camp over the last few days. The RATE struggle had made headway in securing affordable housing for Aboriginal people in Redfern’s historic Block area. After over fifteen months of hard struggle, RATE has won an agreement whereby 62 new houses will be built on the Block to provide accommodation at low cost to Aboriginal people. Prior to the RATE struggle, it was apparent that not only would the provision of affordable housing on the Block be delayed but it would likely not be provided at all. The Aboriginal Housing Company (AHC) had removed the last of the Aboriginal residents living on The Block four years ago with the promise that they would be able to come back into affordable accommodation in newly built houses. However, by early last year it was confirmed what Aboriginal people in Redfern had long suspected: the 62 affordable housing dwellings that the AHC had promised to build as part of its Pemulwuy project were to become – at best – an afterthought to its plan for the area to be turned by the developer Deicorp into shops, office space and higher-end commercial housing for students.
RATE was established on 26 May 2014 by Aboriginal women and supporters with its central demand that affordable housing for Aboriginal people on The Block be built prior to any commercial development. Amongst those who set up the Embassy were Aboriginal former Block residents. RATE then quickly inspired support from Aboriginal people and other anti-racist activists angry about not only the lack of affordable housing for Aboriginal people but also the brutal oppression Aboriginal people continued to face in all aspects of their lives from racist police violence to the forced closure of remote Aboriginal communities. Aboriginal activists from Gamilaraay country in northern NSW and from far away as Queensland and Western Australia came to do stints camping at RATE while RATE was flooded with statements of solidarity from far flung places. In September last year, the morale of RATE supporters was greatly lifted by a visit to the camp by Palm Island, Aboriginal resistance hero Lex Wotton – the leader of the November 2004 uprising on that island that courageously responded to the racist police killing of Aboriginal man Mulrunji Doomadgee and the subsequent police whitewash of the murder. Those involved in overseas indigenous rights struggles from places as far away as Hawaii also visited RATE to offer their support.
On a few of the days when RATE was facing threatened eviction, dozens of students from nearby Sydney University went down to RATE in solidarity. They showed that they refused to be part of plans to turn The Block into accommodation for Sydney University students when that was being done at the expense of affordable housing for Aboriginal people. Especially crucial was the solidarity given to RATE from trade unions. From the early days of RATE, the CFMEU construction union helped with logistics such as providing RATE with a porta-loo. On the first anniversary of RATE on May 26 this year, dozens of MUA members marched down to the RATE site. As they waved union flags they expressed their determination to stand by RATE and support its demands. A joint meeting that day of RATE activists and MUA unionists stated:
Trade unionists and supporters of the Redfern Tent Embassy (RATE) gathered here on May 26 to express our ongoing solidarity with the action being taken by the Redfern Aboriginal Tent Embassy in occupying Aboriginal land at the Block in Redfern to stop a commercial property development planned by Deicorp and the Aboriginal Housing Company.
Aboriginal housing is desperately needed and should be built before any commercial development is allowed to progress.
Many long-term Aboriginal residents of Redfern/Waterloo are currently living in overcrowded, unsuitable state housing, or are homeless, while Aboriginal land is being taken over for commercial development.
Both the Commonwealth and state governments are refusing to release public funds for any Aboriginal-controlled community housing projects anywhere in Australia. This discriminatory policy has to end. Public funding must be allocated immediately for Aboriginal community housing for the Block and across the country.
We call on trade unions, and Unions NSW, to pass similar resolutions and take political and practical steps to ensure that the proposed development does not proceed before the housing demands are met.
26 May 2015: The Maritime Union of Australia rally at The Block to support the Redfern Aboriginal Tent Embassy on its first anniversary. Although the level of support from the union movement as a whole was modest compared to what it should have been, the support that did come from the powerful trade union movement played a role in assisting RATE to win the gains that it did.
By the last weeks of the RATE struggle, the flags of around a dozen different trade unions were flying on the RATE site showing solidarity with the Aboriginal struggle from the organised workers movement.
The strategy of RATE was powerful yet beautifully simple. By camping on the very site that the commercial development on The Block was to take place, RATE ensured that no such development could take place unless either the AHC/developers/government came to an agreement with RATE or the police unleashed violence to forcibly remove RATE. Seeing how RATE activists had refused to be deterred by either severe storms blowing down tents or by police repression or attacks by thugs and, importantly, seeing the statements of solidarity for RATE from trade unions, the government/AHC/developers calculated that they had no choice but to negotiate a settlement with RATE. After steadfastly refusing to provide any support for the development of affordable housing on The Block, the federal Liberal government reluctantly stepped in at the end to provide a $5 million grant as well as organising for a larger bank loan to fund the affordable housing. The deal done between the AHC, the federal government and RATE commits the AHC to building the affordable housing either before or simultaneously with the commercial development. Thus, if the deal is honoured, the core demand of RATE would have been achieved. The Aboriginal activists who led RATE have emphasised the need to be vigilant in order to ensure that the deal is adhered to and that no excuses are made to delay the building of the affordable housing. Furthermore, activists will need to ensure that the AHC does not knock back the Aboriginal people most in need of access to affordable housing in order to have the housing occupied by more affluent Aboriginal people who the AHC knows will be more “acceptable” to the future upper-middle class occupants of the commercial retail and residential development.
27 August 2015: Key Aboriginal activists spearheading RATE confident as the struggle heads towards securing gains for affordable housing for Aboriginal people.
Of course, given the level of homelessness that Aboriginal people in inner-city Sydney suffer and the extreme level of racist discrimination that Aboriginal people face when trying to rent privately, there is a need for much more than 62 affordable dwellings on The Block. Ideally the entire re-development of The Block should be to provide low rent public housing for Aboriginal people and associated services. Such a re-development would also have better ensured that The Block was retained as a social and political centre for Aboriginal people. However, the fact is that what will likely now be built on The Block as a result of the RATE struggle is a lot better than what was on the cards prior to this struggle.
A Decades Long War on Aboriginal Housing on The Block by Greedy Developers and Racist Governments
Aboriginal people have been living on The Block in low-rent housing since the early 1970s. This affordable housing had been won through a struggle by Aboriginal militants and the militant Builders Labourers Federation trade union. That struggle which triumphed in early 1973 forced the then Whitlam Labor federal government to provide a grant for Aboriginal people to collectively buy up the area. The Aboriginal housing in the area came to be managed by the Aboriginal Housing Company (AHC) which was established by the activists who fought for The Block for the sole purpose of providing comfortable and happy low-rent accommodation for Aboriginal people. Despite facing much racist discrimination – including from banks reluctant to do dealings with an Aboriginal organisation – the AHC’s work in its early days ensured that low-rent accommodation came to be provided for up to 300 Aboriginal people on The Block.
However, like most economic or social organisations – whether black, white, “ethnic” or multiracial – that exist in capitalist Australia without a clear anti-capitalist perspective, the AHC became more and more subordinated to the agendas of powerful economic interests. Specifically, the AHC ended up speaking not for the interests of low-income Aboriginal tenants – as it was originally constructed to do – but became a vehicle for the schemes of wealthy capitalist developers and their mates in government. In the eyes of these developers, The Block was prime inner-city real estate which could be turned into a lot of money. And they were determined to lay their grubby hands on it! They wanted to gain access to the land so that they could eject low-income Aboriginal tenants and build high-end commercial housing and shops that would sell for big bucks. Successive NSW state governments, which like all governments in capitalist Australia serve the interest of the corporate exploiting class, have been happy to sing along to the tune of these greedy developers.
Racist governments had an additional motive for wanting to dilute the Aboriginal character of The Block. The Block came to be not only a centre of Aboriginal culture and a meeting place for Aboriginal people from all over Australia but also a centre of Aboriginal political resistance against racist oppression. Over the years, many rallies for Aboriginal land rights and against racist police violence started, finished or passed through The Block. In February 2004, The Block and nearby Lawson Street saw hundreds of Aboriginal youth courageously hold their ground in a nine-hour pitched battle with racist cops. The youth were 100% justifiably responding to provocations by Redfern police who clamped down on the community after racist cops had murdered 17 year-old Aboriginal youth TJ Hickey. Earlier, in May 1981 and then seven months later, 200 Aboriginal people responded to incessant racist police harassment by barricading Eveleigh Street on The Block and bravely responding to the marauding police by throwing projectiles back at them. There have also been numerous smaller versions of such heroic acts of resistance to racist police violence on The Block.
The developers and government’s agenda was greatly facilitated by the AHC’s journey away from its founding spirit as a community organisation set up by militant black activists. One indication of just how far the AHC has travelled was seen in the way that AHC CEO Mick Mundine held a joint press conference with Redfern top cop Luke Freudenstein in February last year to express his support to Redfern police in their condemnation of a large protest march demanding justice for TJ Hickey on the tenth anniversary of TJ’s killing by racist cops.
1967: Aboriginal activists from the Gurundji stockmen and domestic hands’ strike together with Builders Labourers Federation (BLF) members at a meeting to support the Gurundji struggle for land rights. The leftist-led BLF trade union would later play a key role in the Aboriginal struggle for affordable housing on Redfern’s The Block. The workers’ movement must stand solidly behind the struggle for justice of Aboriginal people.
The AHC’s drift away from its original purpose of serving low-income Aboriginal tenants was the result of the confluence of several currents. One force pushing the AHC away from its stated purpose was simply the pressure of the capitalist “free market.” As an entity that had no stable source of external funding and was meant to operate within the confines of “market principles,” the AHC, as a body without a clear anti-capitalist agenda, inevitably became easy game for whoever had the market power to either promise to deliver housing construction and maintenance at a lower price or on the other hand promised, in exchange for land use rights for commercial development, big money that could be used to subsidise its housing program. In this way, the AHC became associated with and dependent on wealthy capitalist corporations who began to use that influence to set more and more of the AHC’s agenda. Prominent on the AHC’s own website’s list of “Partners” is not only the developer Deicorp but Westpac Bank and the South Sydney Business Chamber. Then there was developers and governments directly influencing the AHC leaders through financial enticements. Some in the Aboriginal community have long suspected this has involved outright bribery of AHC leaders. To be sure, that would hardly be just a problem with the AHC – just look at successive NSW state governments! From developers handing over tens of thousands of dollars in cash to politicians in brown paper bags to business bosses bribing the former premier with an expensive “gift,” the last few years have revealed just a small fraction of the massive corruption that the leaders of this state wallow in. Yet just as the big business bosses can control politicians with more “legal” forms of enticements – like large donations to the respective political parties and invitations to sit in corporate boxes at sporting events – so too can greedy developers and their government cronies bring an organisation like the AHC under its control through more subtle but even more insidious means of buying influence. This could include offering AHC leaders invitations to fancy business/government lunches and functions and seducing AHC leaders into making them feel that they are part of elite circles by allowing them to participate in government/corporate policy discussion sessions.
As the AHC bent to the pressures of the capitalist “free market” and came under the increasing influence of rich corporations and the state government, staunch Aboriginal activists and grassroots tenants who objected to all this were increasingly purged from the organisation and its leadership. This in turn further accelerated the AHC’s path away from its original purpose.
When the pressure of “market imperatives” and corrupting influences was not enough to bring the AHC completely into the developers’/government’s fold, the NSW state government unleashed its “legal” muscle to bring the AHC to heel. Thus, even long after the AHC had sold out its founding principles, the NSW government at first refused to give the AHC planning approval for its Pemulwuy project. The government insisted that there be even less affordable housing for Aboriginal people in a re-developed Block than the AHC had proposed. Indeed, even as Aboriginal people were being squeezed out of The Block, the 1995-2011 NSW ALP government refused, for a whole decade, to give the rebuilding of affordable homes for Aboriginal people planning approval until the AHC agreed to give further priority to the commercial aspects of the Pemulwuy project. To resist such bullying from the government would have taken a campaign of mass protest action. The AHC did very briefly flirt with a diluted version of this idea and even organised a hundreds strong protest rally in Redfern in August 2006 in support of affordable housing for Aboriginal people on The Block. Yet already by then the AHC had strayed way too far into the camp of the enemies of Aboriginal people’s rights to honestly want to sustain such a campaign. What is more, the AHC had by then lost any real credibility with the grass roots Aboriginal people needed to wage such a campaign anyway.
As far back as twenty years ago, the AHC first started in effect implementing the developers’ and government’s plan to drive Aboriginal tenants off The Block. In the mid-1990s, Block residents were enraged when they confirmed that the AHC had drawn up plans to actually abolish all affordable housing for Aboriginal people on The Block and, instead, planned to turn most of the area into commercial office space. Although they later modified this plan, the AHC had already started creating facts on the ground by neglecting repairs on houses so much that tenants could not tolerate it anymore and started leaving The Block “voluntarily”.
Police stampeding around Redfern’s The Block. The Aboriginal community on The Block faced decades of violent police raids and racist bullying.
Meanwhile, police attacks on Aboriginal people in Redfern assisted the ruling class agenda of driving Aboriginal tenants off The Block. This police violence was not solely about kicking low-income people off from prime real estate. It was also motivated by pure racism – by the racist culture that permeates the police force and which, in turn, arises naturally from the police’s role as the enforcers of an unequal and discriminatory social order based on the dispossession of this country’s first peoples and the exploitation of labour by wealthy business owners. However, the big end of town’s agenda to push black people off prime inner-city real estate gave the police attacks added impetus. Aside from daily bullying of Aboriginal youth, almost every year saw a large-scale police assault on The Block. One of the most brutal such raids took place on 8 February 1990.9 It was on that day, just before 4am, that some 135 cops led by the heavily armed Tactical Response Group (whose functions today are largely performed by the Public Order and Riot Squad) smashed into several homes on The Block with sledgehammers and iron bars. Residents woke up terrified as they saw these men bearing shotguns break into their homes and point weapons at them. The police put guns to women’s heads, roughed up residents and abused people. But after all that the police did not charge anyone with a serious offence like a violent crime or even charges of dealing in drugs or weapons. Of the eight charges that they did bring against people, two were for unpaid fines, one was a more than 7 year old warrant for breach of bail, another a warrant for failing to appear at a court nearly six years earlier and another a warrant for a resident allegedly being drunk on a train close to six years earlier! Additionally, three people were charged with having possession of stolen goods because they could not provide receipts for relatively minor items like a TV, a radio cassette player, an electric shaver and unbelievably a pair of goggles! And for this the local community was terrorised and left traumatised. To put it all into perspective, nearly one and a half times as many police were mobilised to find a couple of allegedly stolen TVs and a pair of goggles on The Block as the 92 police who were put on duty in Cronulla on 11 December 2005 when the police knew full well that the violent, white supremacist riot that subsequently took place there was indeed very likely to happen! Police terror against the Redfern Aboriginal community culminated in the February 2004 killing of 17 year-old TJ Hickey by racist police who rammed his bicycle while he was riding on it and impaled the boy on a steel paling.
The incessant police attacks, the demoralising effect of living in houses where repairs were not being done and the daily discrimination that Aboriginal people faced in employment and every aspect of their lives inevitably led to social problems on The Block. These problems were played up by the capitalist-owned media and seized on by the state government to justify their push to drive Aboriginal tenants out of the area. The combined effect of relentless police attacks, the deterioration of the houses, social problems and the AHC’s push to move tenants off The Block meant that by late 2010 there were just 35 people living on The Block – down from a peak of over 300. To get the last of the tenants to move, the AHC on the one hand threatened higher rents and eviction orders and, on the other hand, promised residents that they would be able to move back once the re-development took place. Residents, however, were sceptical about being able to move back and expected that the 62 new affordable houses would still be way out of their price range. What really enraged former Block residents and supporters of affordable housing for Aboriginal people was when last year AHC CEO, Mick Mundine, claimed that it was not commercially viable to pursue affordable housing on the Block. ‘’That’s on the back burner at the moment,’’ he said. ‘’Our first priority is the commercial build’’ (The Sydney Morning Herald, 26 April 2014). It was this confirmation of the fears of many that led Aboriginal activists to establish RATE.
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From 1972 to 2015: The Struggle for Affordable Housing for Aboriginal People on The Block Continues
1970s: Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal BLF union members working on the construction of affordable housing for Aboriginal people on The Block.
The enemies of RATE tried everything to defeat the RATE struggle including a series of violent attacks on RATE activists. Family members of a senior AHC employee staged several of these attacks. In one attack last year, at least one of these family members was amongst a group of four men that came to the embassy and assaulted RATE activist, Raymond Munro. Yet when police arrived, it was Raymond Munro and another RATE activist who had come to his defence that the cops arrested and charged with affray. Police only charged two of the actual four attackers. Also last year, another relative of the senior AHC employee invaded the embassy in the dark of night – bearing a piece of wood – and attacked two women including embassy founder Jenny Munro. Enemies of RATE also seemed to have enlisted criminal elements to stage random attacks on RATE activists staffing the embassy or to enter the embassy grounds with the aim of causing fear and disruption. Amongst the most frightening attack was when occupants of a black, flashy four-wheel drive vehicle passed RATE on two separate occasions and hurled flares at the embassy. They aimed to set the tents on fire.
Alongside the attacks by thugs, RATE faced repression from the organs of the capitalist state. The police arrested four key RATE activists during the duration of the struggle – outrageously all resulting from incidents where violent intruders and provocateurs had invaded the embassy grounds. The arrested RATE activists were then set bail conditions banning them from the vicinity of The Block, thus laying bare the police strategy – to strip RATE of its key activists. Amongst those whom the police arrested – and for a period banned from the Block – was RATE leader Jenny Munro.
Meanwhile, in August, the NSW Supreme Court ruled against RATE and ordered its eviction. In doing so the courts stayed true to form, proving once again that like the police, prisons and entire legal/state machinery they are an instrument for the oppression of Aboriginal people and all the exploited and oppressed by the big end of town. Yet despite all that was thrown at RATE and its activists the struggle made a significant advance. Congratulations to all those who joined the struggle. It was the Aboriginal activists in RATE that provided the leadership and the strong drive that was key to success. The Aboriginal activists spearheading the movement deeply understood not only how the lack of affordable housing has forced many Aboriginal people into homelessness but also the importance of saving the Aboriginal character of The Block given its special significance as a historic centre for militant black resistance against racial oppression. Many non-Aboriginal people also supported the RATE struggle. This included people from various non-white “ethnic” communities – who especially identify with the Aboriginal rights struggle because of their own experiences in racist white Australia – as well as committed anti-racist white activists. Special mention here must be made to activists with links to the anarchist Black Rose collective who did a lot of heavy lifting in terms of staffing and protecting the embassy at night. Trotskyist Platform activists also did regular night and graveyard shifts to guard the embassy. Also participating in the struggle were activists from Socialist Alliance and individuals from a wide range of different anti-racist political standpoints. When RATE held rallies – both on as well as outside The Block– still broader layers of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people joined these actions to express their support.
15 June 2014: Hundreds gather to defend the Redfern Aboriginal Tent Embassy (RATE). RATE attracted broad support from supporters of Aboriginal rights and campaigners for affordable housing.
Just like RATE, Aboriginal housing on The Block was first won in a hard fought struggle. That early 1970s struggle faced even more obstacles than RATE did but, at the same time, was bolstered by a higher level of trade union support than the RATE struggle received. The back drop of the original struggle for affordable housing on The Block was the movement of many Aboriginal people from rural areas to the city in search of work. Many found work at the Eveleigh rail yards (at the site of what is now the Australian Technology Park) where they were paid terribly low wages – much lower than other workers. However, due to rampant discrimination by racist bosses, many Aboriginal people could not get work at all. To compound their problems, discrimination by landlords meant Aboriginal people had trouble getting tenancy in rental properties. In the early 1970s some of the homeless Aboriginal people would squat in unoccupied houses owned by absentee landlords in the area that later became known as The Block. They were often arrested and brutalised by local police who imposed a defacto selective curfew on Aboriginal people. Meanwhile, the racist South Sydney Council ran a campaign against those – including a local church – who would offer shelter to homeless Aboriginal people. As a result, in late 1972 black militants and allied anti-racist white people organised a plan to move homeless Aboriginal people into the unoccupied houses in Louis Street in what is now part of The Block. Those houses had been bought up by a greedy developer called Ian Kiernan (who would later founded Clean Up Australia and was awarded an “Australian of the Year” award). Kiernan had evicted all the previous mostly Aboriginal renters and planned to re-develop and gentrify the area with the aim of renting out the new dwellings at higher rates.
Being greedy capitalists, Kiernan and his firm, IBK, of course objected to the Aboriginal squatters. However, the leftist-led Builders Labourers Federation trade union made it clear to him that no work on his development would take place if the Aboriginal people were evicted. Meanwhile, several trade unions organised for work to be done to renovate the homes which were in a poor condition. As one of the former black militants that spearheaded the struggle for the Block, the late Bob Bellear, put it:
“The now exiled State Builders’ Labourers, through Bob Pringle, were called in to erect doors, fix windows etc., while some members of the Plumbers Union fixed taps, toilets and other plumbing facilities required for a more liveable habitation. The electricians turned on the power …”
– “How the Aboriginal Housing Project Was Born”, Bob Bellear, Koori History website
During the struggle, the black militants and their anti-racist white allies faced constant harassment and almost weekly arrests by the police. They were especially targeted by the NSW Police’s hated 21 Division – elite special operations cops (following police reorganisations its functions today are performed by the police’s Public Order and Riot Squad and its Tactical Operations Unit). One of the 21 Division’s favourite tactics was to send in people to cause trouble and then to arrest as many Aboriginal people and their friends as possible in the ensuring raid on “grounds” like swearing, public drunkenness and resisting arrest. Meanwhile, the ALP-led South Sydney Council also did everything possible to oppose the struggle for housing for the homeless Aboriginal people. The racist Council was encouraged by a local community group formed by racist white residents fanatically opposed to the Aboriginal occupants. One night one of these white residents, a security guard, entered the houses where Aboriginal occupants were living and opened fire with live ammunition!
However, despite all this the Aboriginal militants and their BLF union allies stood firm. As it was clear that the Aboriginal struggle was determined to face down any opposition and with the BLF preventing any capitalist development in the area, the Labor federal Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Gordon Bryant, bowed to demands from the Aboriginal militants to provide a grant for Aboriginal people to collectively buy up the area freehold and renovate the houses to use them to provide affordable accommodation for the most needy Aboriginal people. This victory was achieved in April 1973.
7 November 2008: Flags of the MUA union proudly fly at a 200-strong demonstration in Sydney in support of Lex Wotton – the Palm Island Aboriginal resistance leader who led the November 2004 uprising that responded to the whitewash of the police murder in custody of Mulrunji Doomadgee. The Sydney rally was held to coincide with the sentencing hearing that Lex Wotton had to face in a Townsville court for his part in the heroic struggle. Like the BLF in its work in support of the struggle for affordable housing for Aboriginal people on The Block in the early 1970s, the MUA took industrial action in support of the crucial struggle to defend Lex Wotton
Lessons of the Struggles for Affordable Housing on The Block
Affordable housing for Aboriginal people on The Block was won in a period of much working class and other progressive social struggles. The early 1970s was also a time when the U.S. and Australian capitalist rulers were weakened by the defeats they were suffering in their brutal war against the communist workers and peasants of Vietnam. Meanwhile, just five years before The Block was won, capitalist rule in France had its foundations shaken by the militant May 1968 general strike and factory occupations by millions of French workers. A year later, Italy saw similar convulsive struggles that came to be known as the Hot Autumn. Fearful of the threat of socialist revolution that had been posed by the French and Italian events, anxious about the wave of working class and other progressive struggles, weakened by the defeats it was suffering in Vietnam and terrified at the open support for the Vietnamese revolutionaries by a significant number of Australian leftist workers and youth, the Australian capitalist rulers felt the need to make concessions to the masses in order to stave off events that seemed to be heading in a revolutionary direction. Thus, the late 1960s and early 1970s was a period when not only was The Block won but advances were made more broadly in Aboriginal rights, workers’ rights and women’s rights and headway was made in undermining the racist White Australia Policy exclusion of non-white immigrants. Similar gains were won in this period by the working class and downtrodden in Europe and the United States.
Yet by the early 1980s, capitalist rule had stabilised worldwide. We now saw a right-wing period of union-busting and a Cold War anti-communist push against the socialistic USSR and Vietnam. In the mid-1980s, the Hawke Labor government and Victorian and NSW state ALP governments together smashed the BLF union that had been so crucial to winning affordable housing for Aboriginal people on The Block. In the period from 1989-1992, socialistic rule was destroyed in the former USSR and allied East European countries like Hungary and East Germany. The capitalist ruling classes of the world were greatly emboldened by this and felt they could get away with further attacking the rights of the masses at home. The period of the 1980s Cold War and then post-Soviet capitalist triumphalism has seen unions and workers’ rights diminished, the gap between rich and poor widen, Aboriginal rights and organisations undermined, mandatory detention of refugees introduced and the Left weakened. It is in this context that the decades-long campaign by the developers and NSW government to drive Aboriginal tenants off The Block gathered steam.
The 1980s anti-communist Cold War against the Soviet Union and the subsequent collapse of the USSR was associated with intense union-busting and racist attacks at home. Left: A statue of Lenin is pulled down during the 1991-92 counterrevolution that destroyed the Soviet workers state. Centre: Victorian police brutally arrest members of the Builders Labourers Federation during the late 1980s smashing of that militant trade union. Right: A still from a 1992 video that outraged any decent person. White NSW police officers at a charity function wear blackface and mock Aboriginal people who have been killed in custody. The despicable racist cop shown in the photo said “I’m Lloyd Boney” as he impersonates an Aboriginal man hanging. Five years earlier, Lloyd Boney had been found hung in Brewarrina police station just one and a half hours after being arrested. He was widely understood to have been murdered by racist cops. It was during this period of racist, anti-working class reaction that the campaign by the developers and NSW government to drive Aboriginal tenants off The Block gathered steam.
The world we live in is still affected by the direct and indirect effects of the restoration of capitalism in the former USSR. Yet, in the last several years, we have also seen periods of militant worker and progressive social struggles in Greece, Nepal, Portugal and Spain. Inevitably there will again be a period of a sustained upswing in the class struggle like the late 1960s-early 1970s because the capitalist economic system, which is lurching from one economic crisis to another, leaves the masses no choice but to fight back against the ever greater suffering it imposes on us. However, to be able to open the doors to such an upsurge and, most importantly, to be able to channel it to a decisive victory we should learn the lessons of every struggle of the past. The RATE struggle is especially important in this regard because in a period when most struggles have been defeated or have not been able to make much headway, RATE made gains.
One reason for its success is, obviously, the steely determination of the Aboriginal leaders of RATE and the courage of all who participated in the struggle. Yet, many losing struggles have also had a combination of leaders devoted to the cause and brave activists. Key in the RATE struggle was the fact that the movement’s main strategy was not focussed on appeals to the government or mainstream politicians, legal action or other methods based on trust in one or another institution of the racist rich people’s state. Instead, RATE’s primary focus was to create facts on the ground through mass direct action – that is, by establishing itself at the heart of the area where the commercial development on The Block was to take place so the development could not proceed while the Embassy was still standing. Although the capitalist governments had the power through their cops and courts to physically evict RATE, in the end it calculated that doing so would incite such a firestorm of social protest that it would be better to make concessions. Mainstream politicians would have noted that the many police/legal/thug attacks on RATE had not deterred the movement one bit and realised that any eviction of RATE would have to be a major and violent police operation that would enrage RATE’s many supporters nationwide. They would have been aware of the large size of the protests against the closure of remote Aboriginal communities and have been worried that a brutal attack on RATE would only fuel these protests and increase the authority of the staunch, radical wing of the Aboriginal movement. Furthermore, although the level of union support given to RATE was relatively modest, the social power of the workers movement is so great that its endorsement of RATE was in itself a significant deterrent to the authorities. The ruling class would have been worried that a violent eviction of RATE could have provoked a backlash by sections of the workers movement and they would especially have dreaded the prospect of the CFMEU construction union slapping a ban on the commercial development in the same way as the BLF did in the original 1970s struggle for The Block. Perhaps, most of all, the capitalist rulers would have been very concerned that not only had many workers unions endorsed RATE but that RATE was sending contingents of activists to support an MUA wharfies’ picket line at Port Botany. Most of all, the exploiting class fears steps towards uniting the militancy of the most subjugated sections of the population – like Aboriginal people –with the social power of the organised working class: the enemy knows that this will be a formidable combination.
Federal Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Nick Scullion (Left), was involved in a deal between the Aboriginal Housing Company and the Redfern Aboriginal Tent Embassy (RATE) that saw the latter make headway on its key demand that affordable housing for Aboriginal people on The Block be built prior to any commercial development. Scullion was forced to make this concession to RATE because through mass, direct action and with the backing of trade unions, RATE posed a physical obstruction to future commercial development. Scullion’s concession, finally wrested out of him after 15 months of RATE’s hard struggle, does not change the fact that Scullion is an enemy of the struggle for Aboriginal rights who carried out the racist policy of cutting federal funding for remote Aboriginal communities. Right: 19 March 2015 rally in Perth against the government’s forced closure of Aboriginal communities.
It is important that the gains won by the RATE struggle not be remembered as a case of “if you bang on about something long enough the politicians do start to listen.” Indeed, the involvement of mainstream politicians with the RATE campaign – even to make themselves look good – had been very minimal. A couple of Greens politicians did, on very rare occasions, pop into RATE but as is typical did not widely publicise their claimed solidarity with RATE and made little effort to make it a national issue. When, at the very end, the federal government eventually came up with funding for affordable housing on The Block, a whole fifteen months after the start of the RATE struggle, Minister for Indigenous Affairs Nick Scullion pretended that he was sympathetic to the RATE struggle and was making the grant out of sympathy for Aboriginal people’s rights. This is the same Nick Scullion that cut off federal funding for remote Aboriginal communities! The truth is that the Liberal and ALP politicians accept the current capitalist order and are mates with the greedy developers. Nick Scullion did not have a sudden change of heart but simply wanted to make himself look good while making a concession that he has been forced into. There is no way that Nick Scullion would have made the concession that he did if activists had simply been making submissions and representations to him without the presence of RATE as a physical obstruction to future commercial development. RATE made headway because it was based on mass, direct action by determined Aboriginal activists and non-Aboriginal anti-racists and because it won trade union support. As RATE leader, Jenny Munro, put it:
“I’m old school. My teachers taught me the principles of our resistance – we never ceded our land to anyone.
“The embassy has demonstrated that for our people, resistance is the only way to go.”
The lessons of the RATE struggle not only has implications for the struggle for Aboriginal rights but also for the broader struggle for affordable rental accommodation and for the entire struggle of the oppressed and exploited. To maximize the chance of being victorious, the struggles of the working class and all of the downtrodden demands a strategy based on mass, direct action and not at all upon reliance on the state institutions and mainstream political parties that serve the capitalist ruling class. In order for struggles waged in this way to achieve major victories against a powerful and ruthless exploiting class – and when the opportunity arises to culminate in the seizure of state power by the oppressed masses – the movements need to be buttressed around the strength of the organised working class. However, for the power of the workers movement to be unleashed, the influence of illusions in a capitalist parliament, divisive “Aussie workers first” nationalism and the loyalty to the capitalist order promoted by the ALP social democrats needs to be purged from the workers movement. We need to turn the workers movement into one that only trusts in its own power united with all the downtrodden, that fights for workers of all races, nations and pay levels to stand together truly as one and which champions the cause of all the downtrodden. Let’s be encouraged by the successes of the RATE struggle to work harder for this goal so that victories for the oppressed will not be rarities but will, instead, become commonplace and part of the long march towards a final revolutionary victory.
From the moment the DPRK soccer team arrived in Sydney for the January 2015 Asia Cup Finals, the capitalist-owned media went all out to demonise the team as highly secretive, repressed and without support. This is part of their general propaganda war against socialistic North Korea. The aim of this campaign is to justify to the Australian masses the Australian ruling class’ participation in the relentless Notably, the online instructors have decided to put interesting driving course lessons that are far less boring than classroom education and makes it enticing for new learners to learn about the different aspects of the internet, try what makes sense, then try something else. india cheap cialis Fortunately, various medications are available on the market that works tremendously in curing this problem without possessing buy levitra vardenafil any kind of variation. The best http://appalachianmagazine.com/category/featured/page/50/?filter_by=featured prices for cialis neurosurgeons not only ease the patients into the process but they have to take the drugs whole life, or it may be called they are bound to become slaves to those drugs. These types of drugs are usually cipla levitra available as pills or injections, and the dosage depends on the type of surgery in which prostate gland is removed. imperialist drive to crush the DPRK workers state through military, economic and political pressure. However, the media narrative took a blow when soccer fans coming to watch North Korea’s match against Uzbekhistan as well as Sydney public transport users came across a contingent of supporters of the socialistic DPRK coming to support the DPRK team. The contingent – including supporters of Trotskyist Platform, the Australia-DPRK Friendship Society and the Communist Party of Australia – chanted: “D-P-R-K! Workers State is Here to Stay!”
Above: Democracy in capitalist South Korea? Leftist South Korean parliamentarian Lee Seok-ki shouts as he is escorted into prison by security agents in September 2013. The Unified Progressive Party (UPP) MP was jailed for nine years on bogus charges of inciting a socialist insurrection. Later, the South Korean regime banned the UPP and kicked all its MPs out of parliament. Until it was banned, the UPP was South Korea’s third largest parliamentary party with a vote share equivalent to The Greens in Australia.
“Human Rights” Attacks on Socialistic North Korea & the Trade Union Royal Commission Here:
Both are Campaigns of Lies to “Justify” Attacks on Anyone Standing in the Way of Capitalist Exploitation
22 August 2015: This month, people around the world marked the 70th anniversary of the two most horrific terror attacks on civilians ever perpetrated in the whole of human history. Seventy years ago the U.S. regime, fully backed by the Australian ruling class, was responsible for the nuclear incineration of the people first of Hiroshima and then of Nagasaki. Yet these very same ruling classes have the hide to wage a campaign against the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea) over “human rights.”
Indeed, the DPRK is probably the last country that the Western powers should be raising the issue of “human rights” about. During the 1950-53 Korean War, the U.S. and allied militaries – including those of Australia and South Korea – killed between two to three million North Korean citizens. In the beginning of January 1951, American General Mathew Ridgway ordered the air force to hit the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, “with the goal of burning the city to the ground with incendiary bombs,” which they did in two strikes on January 3 and January 5 (“Consequences of the ‘Forgotten War,’” Bruce Cummings, printed in Le Monde Diplomatique, December 2004). Pyongyang and just about every other city in North and Central Korea was again levelled by U.S. bombing in December 1952. Those North Koreans that survived were by then literally living in caves.
Yet the capitalist powers and the big business-owned media that serve them have never shied away from gross hypocrisy and never been bound by the truth. Recall, for one, their now infamous lie that Iraq possessed nuclear weapons. Such lies are spread for a purpose. In the case of the lie about Iraq it was used to justify the 2003 U.S.–led invasion and conquest of that oil-rich country. Here, the Liberal/National Party regime’s lies demonising our trade unions are used to grease the skids for further union-busting attacks and anti-strike laws.
So why are they lying about North Korea then? Because the workers and farmers of North Korea have dared to adopt a socio-political system that is not based on capitalist exploitation. The masses of North Korea have dared to insist that they will not subordinate themselves to Western imperialism. For this “crime,” the imperial powers have slated the DPRK for destruction. Their outrageous claims about “appalling human rights abuses” in North Korea are used to justify the ongoing stiff economic sanctions on that country as well as the extreme military pressure that the U.S. and its allies exert on the DPRK. Not only are tens of thousands of U.S. troops stationed in South Korea to threaten the DPRK but U.S. aircraft and warships regularly move in and out of North Korean airspace and waters to amplify this threat. Ultimately, the imperialist powers see the “human rights” crusade against North Korea as a means of preparing the population in their own countries for a future, full-scale military assault on that country – something that has to date only been stymied by Red China’s alliance with its socialistic sister, the DPRK.
As part of the big lie campaign against the DPRK, the South Korean Consul General in Sydney – in other words the South Korean government – hosted a week of events in Australia from August 17 to August 21 titled “North Korea Human Rights Week.” These events were timed to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the liberation of North Korea from Japanese colonial occupation on 15 August. The Sydney Branch of the Australia-DPRK Friendship Society protested outside the Opening Ceremony of this “Human Rights Week” at Sydney City’s main cinema strip near Town Hall station. Participating in the snap protest were several Trotskyist Platform comrades as well as supporters of the Australia-DPRK Friendship Society including one member from the CPA and a representative from the Supporters of the Iranian Peoples Fadaee Gureillas. Among the placards we carried were signs that read, “Human Rights” Attacks on Socialistic North Korea Are Like the Trade Union Royal Commission Here: A Campaign of Lies Used to Justify Attacks on Organisation/s Standing In the Way of Capitalist Exploitation and “Human Rights” of imperialism = bombing Afghanistan, torture at Guantanamo, killings of Aboriginal people in custody, support for murderous regimes in Egypt, Israel, Philippines and Colombia. How dare they attack socialistic DPRK, China and Cuba over “human rights.” Some passers-by stopped to express sympathy with the protest. Among these were a woman who knew much about the South Korean regime’s jailing of trade unionists and a woman of South Korean origin whose husband was a political activist murdered by the capitalist South Korean regime.
For the brutal, anti-working class South Korean regime to be talking about “human rights” is truly the height of hypocrisy. Yet its attacks on the socialistic North are totally expected. Whilst the DPRK was founded by Korean leftists who heroically fought the Japanese imperialist occupiers and with the vital assistance of the Soviet Red Army freed the Northern part of the peninsula from colonial rule, South Korea was established by the U.S. using many local collaborators with Japanese colonial rule as their henchmen. Among these U.S. henchmen were rich industrialists and big landlords during Japanese rule who defected from the North after the new socialistic power there nationalised industry and divided big landholdings amongst the impoverished poor peasants. Thus for a long time many amongst the Korean masses viewed North Korea as the real Korea and South Korea for what it really was – a U.S.-occupied puppet state. The South Korean regime and its U.S. patrons could only maintain their rule through the most bloody terror and the support of the occupying U.S. military forces.
14 November 2015, Seoul: Capitalist South Korea’s brutal police unleash water cannon, pepper spray and tear gas to disperse a 70,000 strong anti-government demonstration of workers and civil rights activists.
Against the lies being spread by the South Korean regime and the U.S., British, Japanese and Australian ruling classes, we present here some important facts:
In the DPRK there is full employment. All workers have a right to work. This does not exist in capitalist South Korea and certainly not in capitalist Australia where greedy bosses feel that they can even get away with sacking workers in strongly unionised workplaces by text message!
The liberation in the latter part of World War II of the Northern part of Korea from Japanese colonial rule by the Soviet Red Army and communist-led Korean partisans led to the establishment of a workers state in North Korea. This workers state is, however, weakened by bureaucratic deformations. Thus, although the DPRK defends a pro-working class system based on collective ownership of industry, agriculture and services, the bulk of the working class is kept away from political administration which is in the hands of a relatively narrow bureaucratic layer. There is also a personality cult around leader Kim Jong Un and his late father, previous leader Kim Jong-Il and his deceased grandfather, founding head of the DPRK and former anti-colonial resistance leader, Kim Il Sung. Furthermore, those who form the administrative layer of the DPRK have special material privileges (although these pale in comparison to the extreme wealth of big business owners in capitalist countries). Yet despite these bureaucratic deformations, the existence of a workers state in the Northern part of Korea represents a significant conquest for the international working class. Furthermore, fixing the bureaucratic deformations that weaken the DPRK workers state demands relieving her of the tremendous pressure that is bearing down upon her from the imperialist powers and their South Korean ally.
Working in a society where workers have guaranteed jobs and are proclaimed as the ruling class means that North Korean workers enjoy a relaxed, friendly work environment. Indeed, if Aussie bosses saw how laid back North Korean workers were and how much they like to talk to each other whilst working on a production line then they would truly have a fit!
In contrast to the North, most South Korean workers toil in insecure casual or temporary jobs. Though the trade union movement there has waged many brave struggles for their rights in the face of fierce repression, still workers are forced to work very long hours. In fact, South Korean workers endure amongst the longest working hours in the world and the large number of workers forced to work part-time there means that the statistics, actually, hide the full extent of the reality.
Despite an industrialised economy, in capitalist South Korea, large numbers of homeless people sleep every day in railway subway tunnels. Many frail elderly people are forced to collect recyclables for petty cash since an aged pension barely exists in this country. In contrast, in North Korea, homelessness is non-existent and all citizens are guaranteed heavily subsidised public housing.
Despite being devastated in the 1950-53 Korean War, over the following two decades the DPRK built the second most advanced economy in Asia. Up until the late 1960s, the DPRK not only had much better health care, social welfare and education than South Korea but a higher average level of income. At that time, the U.S. decided to massively subsidise South Korean economic development as the U.S. rulers feared that hatred of the South Korean regime and sympathy for the North amongst the South Korean masses would lead to revolution. Thus, South Korea’s industrialisation was based on huge U.S. backing as well as cruel exploitation of its own workers.
Up until the collapse of the USSR in 1991-92, North Korean citizens continued to enjoy a high standard of living. However, the destruction of the USSR had a devastating effect on the DPRK. Faced with sanctions from the capitalist world, trade and technical exchanges with the former Soviet Union had been the DPRK’s economic lifeline. Furthermore, the USSR acted as a guarantor of the DPRK’s defence. Now, the DPRK had to provide for its own defence (China’s military was, especially at that time, not comparable to the USSR’s and incapable of providing the same deterrent to imperialist threats to the DPRK) at a time when the imperial powers felt more emboldened than ever. This forced the DPRK to divert a much larger proportion of its economy to defence which in turn squeezed her economy. A period of serious hardship in the country followed. However, by the start of the 21st century this started to turn around and especially over the last few years the DPRK economy has picked up. The military encirclement and the sanctions still hurt the DPRK – for example there is a shortage of fuel and spare parts for machinery and automobiles. Yet the North Korean masses are standing strong much like defiant workers who lose wages whilst on strike. Embarking on the struggle against their enemy brings hardships but they stand firm understanding that victory will open the road to a brighter future.
The Australian capitalist regime that attacks the DPRK over “human rights” has overseen the death of over 500 Aboriginal people in state custody since 1980. Some of the more well-known cases of Aboriginal people being outright murdered by racist police or killed as a result of racist treatment while in custody include: Eddie Murray (Top Left) who was killed by police in June 1981 in Wee Waa, northern NSW, within an hour of being arrested (merely for being allegedly drunk); 17 year-old TJ Hickey (Top Right) who in February 2004 was chased by racist police in Redfern who then rammed his bicycle causing him to fly through the air and be impaled on a fence; Mulrunji Doomadgee (Bottom Left) who was barbarically beaten to death by racist police officer Chris Hurley in Palm Island in November 2004 and Julieka Dhu (Bottom Right) who while imprisoned in WA’s South Hedland watch house in August 2011 was repeatedly denied medical assistance by racist police as she cried out for help. When eventually taken to hospital on two occasions she never got to see a doctor as police lied to hospital staff that, “she was faking it.” She eventually died as a result of this torture-like denial of medical assistance 48 hours after being jailed for unpaid fines.
In the above sense, North Korean defectors can be compared to weak workers who sneak back to work during a strike because they are looking for short-term economic security at the expense of the long-term well-being of their fellow workers. Some of these defectors, either out of the quest for fame or because of cajoling from the South Korean and Western governments and anti-communist NGOs, have given harrowing tales of life in North Korea. Yet such tales have often been exposed as lies. These included the tales told by the most famous North Korean defector, Yeonmi Park. Her lies were so blatant that even anti-communist news agencies had to report on it. Meanwhile, hundreds of defectors disillusioned with the cut-throat life in the capitalist South with its unemployment and underemployment have, actually, defected back to the North.
Even despite the hardships that being squeezed by powerful capitalist powers brings, the North Korean masses manage to have their basic needs met. Contrary to the utter lies of the Western mainstream media there is no starvation in North Korea. Indeed, even statistics compiled by Western agencies hostile to the DPRK reveal this. Thus, the list of the percentage of a country’s population under the age of five who are underweight due to malnourishment estimated by the CIA – an institution thoroughly hostile to and biased against the DPRK – shows that North Korea is not only not among the top ten countries with the highest proportion of malnourished children but not even in the top 40! Indeed, not only do India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka have much higher rates of malnourished children but so do other strong Western allies like Indonesia, the Philippines and Papua New Guinea.
Similarly, the UN’s World Health Organization estimates life expectancy in the DPRK at 70 years. This is not only decisively higher than in India, Pakistan and PNG but also, actually, slightly higher than in Russia (suffering as Russia is, of course, from the capitalist counter-revolution that dismantled the world’s first workers state, the Soviet Union, in 1991) as well as the Philippines.
Despite the external pressure it faces, the DPRK has completely free health care and education. As a result, the DPRK has one of the highest literacy rates in the world for both women and men and a highly educated population.
North Koreans enjoy a rich social and cultural life. Peoples’ favourite hobbies include sports, dancing and playing music. As in much of Asia, people love karaoke. A recent craze there are amusement parks which have started springing up all over the country.
North Korea is a sports mad country and you can often see people jogging in the streets, playing in parks or training in the country’s many sports pavilions. At the last Olympic Games in London, the DPRK finished 20th in the medal tally – punching above its weight for a country of its size.
Many North Koreans play musical instruments and sing. Classical Korean and classical Western music, light semi-classical Korean tunes and pop music are all popular. The most popular band in North Korea at the moment, the extremely talented, all-female Moranbong Band plays all these styles alongside Western pop pieces.
North Korean children having fun at a playground near a housing complex. Photo: Trotskyist Platform
In South Korea (the Republic of Korea), the very tough work environment for workers and the cut-throat nature of the capitalist society in general has led to it having the second highest suicide rate in the world. To put this in perspective, the suicide rate in South Korea is more than two and a half times that of Australia’s and nearly four times that of the Peoples Republic of China.
Despite having the hide to attack the DPRK over “human rights,” it is South Korea that has an appalling record of crushing the human rights of workers. The Seoul regime regularly arrests and imprisons trade union activists, including several trade union leaders who were arrested only two months ago .
Many people are persecuted under South Korea’s draconian National Security Law. In 2010 a woman was given a two year jail term for possessing MP3 files of instrumental music that was alleged to have pro-North Korea titles!
Last December, the South Korean regime banned the country’s third largest party in parliament, the left-leaning Unified Progressive Party (UPP), and stripped its MPs of its parliamentary seats. The UPP was accused of organising a pro-North Korea rebellion as the party’s actually quite critical attitude to the DPRK is, however, not hard line enough for the South Korean authorities. The UPP had won over two million votes (just over 10% of the total) in the proportional representation side of the last South Korean elections in 2012.
Capitalist rule in South Korea was consolidated by fanatical right-wing terror. From April 1948 to May 1949, the U.S. military government and their South Korean henchmen killed over 30,000 people on South Korea’s Jeju Island after the population rose up following repeated police shootings of pro-communist activists. Even the South Korean regime’s own commission – some 60 years after the fact – accepted that at least 20,000 people jailed for participation in the Jeju uprising were later massacred shortly after the outbreak of the Korean War.
More broadly, at the start of the Korean War, the South Korean rulers with the connivance of the U.S and Australia killed communists and those suspected of being communist sympathisers in what was known as the Bodo League massacres. Estimates of the number of people murdered ranged from 100,000 to 1.2 million. For decades in South Korea those who even spoke of these massacres were jailed. Although today South Korea flaunts an image of “democracy” and finally acknowledges, in part, the Bodo League massacres, it remains ruled by a brutal anti-working class regime.
In May 1980, the South Korean military and police massacred over 2,000 people in the city of Kwangju after leftist students and workers there staged a rebellion demanding an end to martial law and an increase in minimum wages.
The South Korean regime for decades either pressured or coerced local women to work as “comfort women” prostitutes for stationed American troops. They then stigmatised the women and left them to live in poverty. Over 120 surviving comfort women are now suing the South Korean regime.
The South Korean regime is far from the only hypocrite amongst those falsely attacking the DPRK over “human rights.” So are the rulers of the U.S., Britain, Australia and other Washington allies. In Vietnam, these forces killed over two million Vietnamese people in their cruel but, ultimately, futile and losing war against the heroic Vietnamese revolutionaries. Over the course of the 1991 First Gulf War attack on Iraq, the subsequent starvation-causing UN sanctions on Iraq and the 2003 invasion and occupation, the U.S., British and Australian regimes caused the death of over one and a half million Iraqi people. In 2001, they invaded Afghanistan to replace the fundamentalist cutthroats that they, themselves, had helped bring to power with a new lot of misogynist tyrants that are, however, even more slavish to them. In the process they bombed Afghanistan back to the stone-age and massacred thousands of civilians in countless “accidental” air strikes on wedding parties and civilian travel convoys. In neighbouring Pakistan, U.S. drone strikes unleashed against the wishes of Pakistan’s government kill hundreds upon hundreds of civilians. Meanwhile, four years ago, the NATO imperialists, egged on by the Australian government, violently deposed the then Libyan government. In doing so they not only killed tens of thousands of Libyan people in savage air strikes but turned that once peaceful and affluent country into a nightmarish “failed state” ruled by rival gangs of religious extremists and warlords and caused tens of thousands of Libyans to flee in dangerous boat trips to Europe.
Workers at North Korea’s Taedongang Tile Plant. North Korea has a relaxed and friendly work environment where at least two people are stationed at assembly line node points that would, in places like Australia or Indonesia, have only one worker doing all the work. Photo: Trotskyist Platform
As part of all these neo-colonial wars of conquest, the U.S. and their allies have used torture to advance their goals. There was the notorious torture of Iraqi political prisoners by the U.S. at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, NATO’s torture in Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Base and the ongoing U.S. hellhole prison camp at Guantanamo Bay.
The Australian capitalist ruling class has perpetrated such atrocities not only as junior partners of the U.S. but sometimes from neo-colonial interventions it has itself led. In the late 1980s, when the people of the PNG-controlled island of Bougainville rose up to resist the terrible destruction of their livelihoods by Australian mining company CRA (this company which operated the huge Panguna mine in Bougainville with callous disregard to the local people later merged with British RTZ to form Rio Tinto), the Australian regime and its PNG government henchmen orchestrated a brutal war and naval blockade against the Bougainville people. As a result 15,000 to 20,000 Bougainville people perished – all for the sake of the profits of Australian capitalist bigwigs.
Here at home, the Australian rulers who attack the DPRK over “human rights” continue to preside over genocidal attacks on Aboriginal people, including forcibly closing down Aboriginal communities, stripping Aboriginal children from their families and police killings of Aboriginal people in custody. Meanwhile, refugees arriving in this country are thrown into hell-hole offshore detention camps where they face beatings, torture and in some cases murder at the hands of camp guards.
In the U.S., racist police and white supremacists murder blacks, Asians and Hispanics at an alarming and seemingly ever increasing rate. Meanwhile, the U.S. has the largest prison population in the world – more than the entire population of Brisbane! The rate of imprisonment in the U.S. is close to four times that of Venezuela and nearly six times that of China.
It has been invented in the year of 1998 and for the patent protection; the other company made to order browse for info cialis properien. His example: a discount of 10% on 30% margins requires an increase in unit sales of 67% to viagra sale uk generate the same profit dollars. Contrariwise, of the 13 smallest states, only New Hampshire is canadian viagra samples a perennial showdown state. Boosting cialis 40 mg the Immune System Human studies on the effect of the medicine on the body. People get set for a ride in one of North Korea’s many fun parks. Visiting amusement parks is one of the latest crazes in North Korea. You certainly would not know that from the mainstream Western media coverage about North Korea which seeks to do everything possible to demonise the society. Photo: Trotskyist Platform.
The truth is that the only “rights” that those waging the anti-DPRK “human rights” campaign are truly concerned about is the right of greedy corporate bigwigs to exploit the toil of working class people and the right of their mouthpieces to propagate the “virtues” of such a system. These rights do not, thankfully, exist in North Korea. And let’s keep it that way!
Defend the DPRK workers state! Down with the right-wing campaign of lies about North Korea! U.S. troops get out of South Korea and Japan! End all sanctions against North Korea! Remove the U.S. troops from Darwin and the U.S. spy facilities at Pine Gap and elsewhere in Australia which are used primarily for furthering U.S.-Australian ruling class threats against the DPRK and the Peoples Republic of China!
Apart from facilitating attacks on the socialistic DPRK, the lies about the “human rights” situation in the DPRK are used to distract the masses in South Korea, the U.S.A and Australia from the distinct lack of rights that working class people have in their own countries. So we demand: Repeal South Korea’s fascistic National Security Law! Revoke the ban on South Korea’s Unified Progressive Party! Free all imprisoned trade union activists in South Korea! Free all the refugees in Australia! Down with the police murder of Aboriginal people in state custody in Australia! End the Australian regime’s forced closure of remote Aboriginal communities! For the guaranteed right to a full-time job in Australia – just like people enjoy in North Korea!
Above: In Melbourne, April 2015, fascists (on the left of picture) participating in the ultra-Islamophobic “Reclaim Australia” rally threaten and use violence against anti-racist counter-demonstrators. Fascist forces not only have disgusting views but are people organised to commit violence against Aboriginal people, non-white ethnic communities, leftists and the workers movement. The idea that fascists can be peacefully debated is not a viewpoint based on reality.
WORKING CLASS-BASED MASS DIRECT ACTION vs LIBERAL/SOCIAL-DEMOCRATIC PACIFISM
The first “Reclaim Australia” rallies on 4 April 2015 were the biggest open mobilisations of far-right racists in Australia in a long time. With the notable exception of Melbourne, in most places where they rallied on April 4 the racist extremists outnumbered anti-racist counter-protesters. In Sydney, Australia’s largest and most multiracial city, the April 4 counter-demonstration was particularly weak. Many long-time anti-fascists did not turn up to the anti-racist counter-rally, organised mainly by the Solidarity group, because the rally leadership’s avowed strategy of ruling out any attempt to shut down the white supremacist “Reclaim Australia” mobilisation either positively turned off – or otherwise did not inspire – many staunch anti-fascists.
When the fascists again rallied in cities throughout Australia on the weekend of July 18/19, anti-racists throughout the country were more determined. A somewhat more purposeful intent shown in the building for the July 19 anti-racist counter-action in Sydney – in comparison with the strategy proclaimed for the earlier April 4 Sydney rally – saw anti-racists this time outnumber the extreme right-wing racists by two to one. However, in Queensland the far-right racist rallies again exceeded in numbers the size of the counter-demonstrations. Furthermore, again with the partial exception of Melbourne where a determined picket set up by anti-racist counter-protesters blocked some of the fascists from entering their race-hate rally’s assembly point, the rednecks were still able to hold their actions unimpeded and turn central parts of major cities into de-facto no-go zones for people with non-white skin. Moreover, the July 18/19 “Reclaim” rallies received more mainstream backing than the previous April 4 mobilisation with one sitting government MP speaking at a rally and the police even more blatantly siding with the fascists against anti-racist counter-demonstrators.
In the wake of the fascist danger shown by the 4 April 2015 – and then July 18/19 – “Reclaim” rallies there has been much debate amongst leftists and other anti-racists about how best to counter the far-right offensive. This is not a bad thing. Such debates give an opportunity to clarify the strategy that we need to defeat the threat from extreme racists. The lines of these debates focus on several related questions but a key one is whether the goal of counter-demonstrations should be to simply protest against the views of the far-right racists or, on the other hand, should they also seek to physically stop the fascist mobilisations. Amongst those advocating the former perspective – that is, a continuation of the pacifist strategy that the Sydney 4 April 2015 anti-racist rally was built on – are various small-l liberals including many supporters of the Greens as well as the left groups Socialist Alliance and Solidarity. Strongly defending this outlook is also the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). An article in the CPA’s The Guardian newspaper by Peter Mac, analysing the April 4 racist and anti-racist demonstrations, denounced the Melbourne anti-racist counter-action for being “violent” and continued that:
The likelihood of an eruption of violence was boosted by one group’s declaration that the Reclaim Australia rally provided a golden opportunity to shut it down, that `the neo-Nazis … must be swept off the streets’ and its recommendation to `drive the violent white supremacists out of stolen Aboriginal land!’
As a result during the Melbourne confrontation Reclaim Australia’s chant of `Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi. Oi’ was met with shouts of `Fuck off racists’ by some of the counter demonstrators, accompanied by spitting, punches and bloodshed on both sides.
“Lessons from Reclaim Australia protests”, The Guardian, 22 April 2015
The “one group” that the CPA is here attacking happens to be us – Trotskyist Platform. To properly understand our strategy that the CPA is condemning, one needs to read not just the couple of phrases from our leaflet plucked out by the The Guardian but, at the very least, the entire paragraph which we copy below:
It appears that the organisers of the Sydney anti-racist counter-rally want the event to simply challenge the views of `Reclaim Australia’ and expose its racist nature. That is certainly necessary. However, it is far from adequate. What distinguishes the fascists from mainstream racists is that they have a program of using violence to achieve their aim of a `pure’ whites-only society. These are the same groups that helped incite the notorious 2005 Cronulla Beach white supremacist riot. Their neo-Nazi slogans have helped to foment the wave of violent – and sometimes even murderous – attacks on Indian, Chinese, and most recently, Korean students as well as helping to incite the unceasing redneck violence against Aboriginal people. If these white supremacists get away with openly inciting racist hatred on April 4 it will encourage every garden-variety redneck watching to radicalise their racist stance. If such hate parades continue it will be inevitable that we will see here horrific incidents like that which happened in North Carolina last month when three young Muslim American students were murdered in a racist attack. Furthermore, the organised presence of violent white supremacists in the heart of Sydney – no matter if they are interspersed with less extreme racists who they have sucked into their rally – will intimidate and physically endanger the many Muslim and non-white people visiting the area. That is why the `Reclaim Australia’ action must not only be protested against – it must be shut down! The neo-Nazis pulling the strings in organising `Reclaim Australia’ must be swept off the streets. Let’s drive violent white supremacists out of stolen Aboriginal land!
“Shutdown the ‘Reclaim Australia’ Race Hate Rallies”, Trotskyist Platform leaflet, 28 March 2015
George Christensen (Centre), an MP from the federal Coalition government, spoke at the 19 July 2015 “Reclaim Australia” racist rally in Mackay. Small-l liberal figures and their social democratic promoters claim that mainstream politicians can be won over to the struggle against far-right racism. But, actually, these politicians are a big part of the reason why the extreme racist forces are growing.
Unfortunately, at this point what was warned against in our leaflet is, for the moment, coming to pass. The white supremacists largely got away with being able to foment their race hate on 4 April 2015 (and indeed on July 18/19) and as a result those unorganised racist bigots sitting at home watching became more radicalised. This has contributed at least in some way to the increase in racist attacks on the streets over the last few months. The one partial exception on April 4 (and also on July 18/19) was Melbourne, where the fascists’ ability to hold their race-hate provocation was at least challenged by the large counter-rally and some of the racists were blocked from joining their counterparts at their rallying point. Yet, sounding completely like small-l liberals rather than the communists that the CPA proudly claims to be a party of, Peter Mac’s article condemns the “spitting, punches and bloodshed on both sides” thereby equating the determined and laudable anti-racist resistance of many Melbourne anti-“Reclaim” demonstrators with the thuggery of neo-Nazis attempting to crush any obstacle to advancing their violent racist objectives.
Lenin’s Strategy for Defeating Fascists
CPA comrades, as avowed supporters of Lenin’s communist program, should consider the attitude of Lenin’s Bolsheviks to the Russian far-right racists of Lenin’s time, the Black Hundreds. Ardent monarchists, the Black Hundreds were most notorious for perpetrating violent attacks on Jewish people – usually with the connivance and often even the active support of the Tsarist authorities. As well as espousing extreme anti-Semitism, these rabid Russian chauvinists also whipped up hatred against Polish people and opposed any recognition of Ukrainians as a distinct nationality. Like today’s fascists in Australia, the Black Hundreds also staged mass, “patriotic” demonstrations to denounce the influence of non-Christian, ethnic minority, leftist and liberal groups. Yet, unlike the CPA’s newspaper that condemns those taking action to physically impede fascist provocations in Melbourne, Lenin instead condemned those liberals and pacifist leftists who denounced as “reckless” the calls to organise mass, militant self-defence against the Black Hundreds. Thus, when in June 1906 the Black Hundreds perpetrated a horrific pogrom against Jewish people in the town of Belostok (sometimes spelt Bialystok) in the western part of the then Russian empire (in today’s Poland), Lenin wrote:
… there are those who, seeing these phenomena of Russian social life, think, and say, that somebody or other is `recklessly’ calling upon the people to resort to `extreme measures’! One must be, not reckless, but a poltroon, politically corrupt, to say such things in the face of events like the burning of the People’s House at Vologda (at the time of the opening of the Duma) or the pogrom in Belostok (after the Duma had been in session a month). A single event like this will have more effect upon the people than millions of appeals. And to talk about `reckless’ appeals is just as hopelessly pedantic and as much a sin of a deadened civic conscience, as to condemn the wild cry for revenge that is going up from the battlefields of Vologda and Belostok.
“The Reaction is Taking to Arms”, V.I. Lenin, June 1906, Collected Works, Progress Publishers
The perspective of Lenin’s Bolsheviks to the Russian fascists of their time was thus very far from that of Peter Mac’s attitude to Australia’s Black Hundreds of today. Thus, while Mac speaks of the need to “persuade” Reclaim participants saying that it would be “a grave mistake to assume that Reclaim supporters are incapable of changing their minds,” Lenin’s attitude to those who were inciting and perpetrating physical attacks on ethnic communities and leftists can be summed up by the following call he made to respond to the Black Hundreds. Lenin called for revolutionaries to:
… at once find out who organises the Black Hundreds and where and how they are organised, and then, without confining themselves to propaganda (which is useful, but inadequate) they must act with armed force, beat up and kill the members of the Black-Hundred gangs, blow up their headquarters, etc., etc.
Tasks of Revolutionary Army Contingents, V.I. Lenin, October 1905, Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers
Although that particular call was written during the height of the 1905 Revolution in Russia when the physical clash between opposing forces was at white heat and thus the specific tactical methods advocated are particular to such a period, the call nevertheless expressed an overall political perspective completely relevant to “normal times”: that the fascists need to be shut down rather than merely debated.
The Capitalist Authorities Are Not Allies in the Struggle against Fascism
Sydney, 19 July 2015: Police brutalise anti-racism activists counter-demonstrating against a rally by the extreme racist “Reclaim Australia” movement. Since police serve the same capitalist ruling class whom the fascists and their race-hate ideology truly serve, they are heavily biased towards supporting the fascists in any standoff with anti-fascists.
Since the CPA stance is representative of that of the whole liberal-pacifist wing of the anti-fascist movement it is worth analysing their strategy further. This strategy is outlined in a favourable assessment that Peter Mac makes of an Adelaide anti-Reclaim protest organiser:
Adelaide pastor Brad Chilcott observed with regard to the public’s impression of events: ‘Your audience is not the racists you’re shouting at, but the people watching at home. … [But] those watching at home … couldn’t tell the difference between the good guys and the bad. Then politicians have to condemn the violence on both sides, rather than [giving] an undiluted message condemning bigotry. Person taking this medicine should inform doctor if he has allergy reaction to sildenafil citrate; taking treatment for heart disease, eye disease, lung or kidney disease; taking other drugs that contain nitrates must stop taking this medicine immediately and inform to the doctor if you are using the medicine for the first time and they get use to this medicine as this will give cialis order dangerous. Carry out The medical term for this valve is to protect the food pipe from hydrochloric acid produced order levitra online https://unica-web.com/archive/2013/competition/palmares2013.pdf in the stomach for digestion. You can surprise your partner by coming home from work early; and viagra soft pills https://unica-web.com/watch/2015/rubicon.html you know the rest. Ashwagandha: This particular herb improves the blood flow and also by relaxing the muscles Continued no prescription tadalafil around the penile area. “Lessons from Reclaim Australia protests”, The Guardian, 22 April 2015
So we see that the strategy of the CPA and small-liberals like Chilcott is for anti-racist rallies to be tepid enough to encourage mainstream politicians to condemn bigotry. But it is precisely the policies and statements of the mainstream pro-capitalist politicians that are encouraging the bigots! Barely a week goes by without the right-wing Coalition government heaping a new insult upon Aboriginal and coloured ethnic communities. And barely a week goes by without the ALP Opposition signing onto or otherwise acquiescing to such insults.
How openly the ruling class politicians are contributing to the rise of the fascists was seen when government MP, George Christensen, actually spoke at the 19 July 2015 Reclaim demonstration in Mackay, Queensland. Furthermore, when asked about Christensen’s decision to openly support the event, foreign minister July Bishop refused to make even the faintest condemnation of Christensen or the “Reclaim” movement, deviously claiming that, “I don’t know anything about the organisation. I certainly haven’t been briefed on it.” Even before this outrage, the mainstream politicians had already openly pumped up the “Reclaim Australia” forces. Barely a month after the first set of “Reclaim” rallies, the Senate decided to hold an inquiry into halal certification (under the guise of an inquiry into food certification) thereby giving credence to the looney premise of the “Reclaim” fascists that money paid for halal certification is being used to “finance terrorism.”
Melbourne, 18 July 2015: Police viciously attack anti-racism protesters demonstrating against a rally by the far-right Reclaim Australia/United Patriots Front groups. Police did everything to facilitate the rally by the racist violence-inciting fascist groups.
Sorry, Mr Chilcott and the CPA: the mainstream politicians are a big part of the problem and are not and cannot in the future be part of the solution! Indeed, especially after the global capitalist recession that commenced in 2008, ruling politicians around the capitalist world have brought far-right forces more and more into the mainstream. They have done this through adoption of their ideas, through sanctioning of them as “legitimate” voices to be addressed and even – in the cases of Switzerland, Latvia and Ukraine – through their inclusion in coalition governments. Here, the same trend is happening and it is driven by, more or less, the same economic reality. As the fall in the prices of iron ore and other commodities (from the exorbitant levels with which Australian mining bosses had previously been ripping off Asian neighbours with) reduces the profits of the Australian capitalist ruling class, they are seeking to make up for this by more viciously exploiting the masses. To enable them to achieve this, the ruling class is seeking to kill off the chance of working class resistance by poisoning mass sentiments with a large dose of nationalism.
Reflecting worry amongst their working class base, a very small number of ALP politicians have spoken out – albeit mostly quite meekly – against the “Reclaim” movement. Yet, even in the highly unlikely event that mainstream politicians were to do a U-turn and formally stand en masse against the fascists that would not do all that much to stop actual violent racist attacks. Any legal measures instituted against the white supremacist thugs would have to be implemented by a police force and court system that has proven itself, time after time, to favour the far-right racists against anti-racists. This was seen all too clearly over the 18/19 July 2015 weekend. In Melbourne, police went all out to ensure that the Reclaim racists and their even more extreme United Patriots Front (UPF) breakaway group could hold their racist-violence manufacturing hate rallies. This included indiscriminately unleashing pepper spray against anti-fascist protesters. Police were so gung-ho about attacking anti-fascists with pepper spray that one of their capsicum spray barrages even hit street medics treating anti-racist protesters who had previously been overcome by the spray as well as these same victims of the spray who were receiving treatment. A widely circulated photograph showing the police high-fiving a UPF fascist (!) at the Melbourne race-hate rally, quite neatly and horribly captured the essence of the police stance.
Showing which side they are on! A policeman publicly high-fives a member of the fascist United Patriots Front during their 18 July 2015 race-hate rally in Melbourne. As a core part of the capitalist state, the police in this current system cannot be allies in the anti-fascist struggle but are, instead, a major force impeding the fight against fascism.
Yet, an Editorial in the CPA’s The Guardian issue just after the July 18/19 events promoted the police as a force against the rise of the fascists. This Editorial stated:
Police, including NSW deputy commissioner Nick Kaldas, are worried about the proliferation of right-wing racist and white supremacist groups….
“The deputy commissioner is on the right track about incidents taking place overseas and those in Australia seeking to take advantage of them.
The Guardian, 22 July 2015
This same police force and police leadership that the CPA is praising in its Editorial just days before attacked the Sydney anti-“Reclaim” protest on July 19. Even before the official start time for the anti-fascist event was reached, the police physically and aggressively dragged anti-racist protesters away from their planned rally point so that the fascists could rally there unimpeded. The NSW police arrested five anti-racist protesters. Meanwhile, they devoted many resources to organising protective escorts for extreme white supremacist groups entering and leaving the “Reclaim” rally. One group of anarchist, anti-racist protesters was, on the other hand, roughed up by police after they left the anti-racist demonstration with at least one anti-racist being hurled by police against a telephone booth.
To be sure, the CPA Editorial did also make some very good points about how the “leadership of this wave of intolerance can be found at the very `top’ of society, including in Australia’s parliament” – correct arguments that actually undercut the perspective promoted by Brad Chilcott which was lauded in the earlier article by Peter Mac. However, to promote the police as a force against fascism not only flies in the face of police actions against anti-fascists on the 18/19 July 2015 weekend and the whole ongoing history of racist police terror against Aboriginal people but directly contradicts Lenin’s teachings on the nature of the state. Leninists understand that in a capitalist society, the state – which the police, courts, army and prisons are at the core of – consists of armed bodies of people whose job it is to enforce the rule of the capitalist class over the exploited masses. Thus, the capitalist state organs like the police serve the same class as the fascists do. The police do the daily work of maintaining capitalist rule. The fascists back that up by acting to poison working class unity and intimidating staunch anti-capitalists while the ruling class keeps them as an attack dog on a leash ready to be unleashed when serious threats to capitalist rule emerge. That is why not only have the police been siding with the fascists in the standoffs with anti-racists over the last period but in the future the capitalists’ police can never be an ally in the struggle against fascism. Defeating the growing threat from far-right extremists can only be accomplished through mass, direct action on the streets by the organised working class united with coloured ethnic communities, Aboriginal people and all the other intended victims of the fascists.
Learning Lessons from the Past
In basing their anti-fascist strategy on the hope that either mainstream capitalist politicians or the capitalist state organs themselves can be pushed into stopping the fascists, the CPA is aping the disastrous policy of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) in the period leading up to Hitler’s Nazis’ seizure of power in the early 1930s. Then, as SPD workers and youth began to courageously fight Nazi forces on the streets, the leadership of the SPD, at the time the biggest party based on the German working class, quelled this struggle. They turned the Iron Front for Resistance against Fascism, which the SPD had itself created, into an electoral machine for electing the monarchist capitalist politician Hindenburg whom they hoped would save them from Hitler. The curbing of the struggle to physically stop the fascist forces allowed the Nazis to grow stronger, take physical control of more and more streets and gain much in confidence. Meanwhile, far from saving the SPD from the Nazis, Hindenburg eventually appointed Hitler as chancellor as the mainstream of the ruling class realised that only fascism could save capitalist rule in Germany!
Unfortunately, the German Communist Party (KPD), which had by then degenerated alongside the bureaucratic degeneration (but not destruction) of the Soviet workers state, also followed a bankrupt approach, albeit from more sincere intentions. The KPD first underestimated the danger of the Nazis and, partly in reaction to the very real anti-working class treachery of the SPD, refused to organise united-front actions with the SPD to oppose the Nazi threat to both their organisations. Later, as Hitler’s forces grew stronger, KPD leaders became paralysed and came to see a Nazi triumph as inevitable.
However, Hitler could have been stopped! The murderous beheading of the German workers movement, the Holocaust of Jewish people and the brutality of the Nazi’s war on the USSR could have been prevented! What was required at the time was what the Trotskyist Left Opposition was urgently calling for: a united-front of the working class to physically stop the fascists – something which the most conscious workers felt the need for but which was counterpoised to the reformist capitulations of the SPD leaders and which the zig-zagging KPD could not bring itself to fight for. Understanding that the pacifist SPD leaders would always resist and foot drag on such a strategy and that in the long-run fascism could not be defeated without breaking the rank and file supporters of the social democracy away from their sellout leaders and winning them to allegiance to the communist party – Trotsky (following the program of Lenin’s Bolsheviks) outlined that the basis of united front struggle is not only unity in action but complete political independence of the different components of such a front including full freedom to criticise each other’s programs.
Right now, Australia is not in immediate danger of a Hitler-style takeover. However, the growing fascist forces are already doing harm to workers’ unity and are already perpetrating and inciting the preliminary test-runs of the huge future pogroms that they would like to commit. We need united-front action of the working class right now to physically crush the fascists while they are still crawling out of their eggs.
And that is the point! To tell anti-racists to confine themselves to politely explaining what is wrong with racism in the face of a movement that perpetrates and incites violence is to disarm and damage the anti-racist struggle. It is following the road of the German social democratic leaders who in the lead up to Hitler’s seizure of power were saying that so long as the Nazis do not quit the ground of legality, there is no room for an on the streets fight to physically stop them! That is why as part of the struggle to build a working class-based mass movement to sweep the racist filth off the streets, those activists who understand the need for such a perspective must explain to other anti-fascists why a strategy of seeking to pressure the capitalist authorities to act against the right-wing extremists is, as history itself proves, inevitably doomed to fail.
In September 2010 racist police used the bogus pretext of a noise complaint to brutalise Aboriginal woman, Tisha Hickey, at the end of her own 21st birthday party. The violent police attack caused bruises and cuts to her leg, arms and abdomen. Tisha is a relative of TJ Hickey, the 17 year-old Aboriginal youth who was killed by racist police in Redfern in February 2004. Since TJ’s murder, police have used violence and harassment to persecute his family and relatives for their refusal to give up the fight for justice for TJ. The official violence of the police, detention centre guards and spy agencies emboldens the violent far-right racist groups.
Above: China, May 2013: Prospective tenants visit a new public rental housing complex in Shanghai. In the first nine and a half months of 2015, socialistic China had started construction of almost 7 million public housing units. The Chinese government has planned for 18 million public housing dwellings to be built or rebuilt between 2015 and 2017.
STOP THE SELL-OFF OF PUBLIC HOUSING!
MASSIVELY INCREASE PUBLIC HOUSING JUST LIKE SOCIALISTIC CHINA IS DOING!
On 16 July 2015, a speakout rally was held in the multi-racial working class Sydney suburb of Auburn to oppose the cuts by governments of all stripes to public services. The protest was held under the slogans, Smash the Cuts to Services Working Class People Need the Most! Stop the Sell-Off Public Housing. Massively Increase Public Housing – Just Like China is Doing. No to Abbott’s Squeezing of Public Hospitals and Schools. Rollback the Former ALP Government’s Cut to the Sole Parent Payment.
The demonstration was held because the capitalist big-end of town and the governments that serve them are waging all-sided attacks on the services that working class people need the most. These attacks, alongside bosses’ cuts to workers’ conditions, are making life harder and harder for working class people. Whether we are employed workers, unemployed workers, single mothers, pensioners or students, we are all feeling the pinch.
One of the crucial public services that are under attack is public housing. We need public housing because the greedy private sector developers who determine what is built in the private sector know that they can make a lot more money building expensive homes for the wealthy rather than affordable homes for the masses.
Bulli, 11 October 2014: Members of the Illawara-based Public Housing Union and pro-public housing activists from Sydney – including Millers Point residents and Trotskyist Platform supporters – protest the sell-off of yet another public housing dwelling as yuppy real estate agents conducting the sale look on.
So we need low-rent public housing to alleviate this situation. But what are governments doing? The very opposite! From Millers Point and the Rocks in the inner city to Auburn, Bonyrigg and Claymore in western and south-western Sydney to Bellambi and Wollongong in the Illawara, the authorities are selling off or demolishing public Continue reading SMASH THE CUTS TO SERVICES WORKING CLASS PEOPLE NEED THE MOST!→
Down with Capitalist Australia’s Military Build Up!
U.S., Australian Militaries: Stay Out of the South China Sea!
26 February 2016 – In October 2015, the U.S. warship, the USS Lassen destroyer (pictured above) sailed through waters, not far from mainland China, that are claimed by the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) as its territorial waters. This provocative action in the South China Sea was fully backed by the right-wing Australian government and the ALP Opposition. Moreover, yesterday’s Defence White Paper released by the Turnbull government announced a massive military buildup for the Australian Defence Forces (ADF) which the White Paper could not hide was squarely targeted at China. The government “defence” plan announced that the ADF would have its troop numbers boosted to 62,400 in five years. That means that the Australian military as a percentage of the population will be over 60% larger than the PRC’s military which, in contrast, is in the process of reducing troop numbers by 15%.
The White Paper also announced the ADF’s massive expansion of military hardware including the acquisition of 12 new submarines, 9 warships, 12 patrol vessels, 75 joint strike fighters, two fleets of drones and additional helicopters for special forces troops. Excited by this announcement, racist former defence minister in the Abbott government, Kevin Andrews called for Australia to join the U.S. in sending warships into China’s claimed territorial waters in the South China Sea. Yet it is not only hardline right-wingers like Kevin Andrews who are demanding such aggressive actions. Months earlier, Labor shadow defence minister Stephen Conroy started demanding the same thing(5). Meanwhile, Liberal defence minister, Marise Payne yesterday refused to rule out the possibility that the Australian Navy may take such incendiary action in the future. Continue reading Defend Socialistic China Against Military Intimidation By Capitalist Powers→
Workers at Ausreo’s Western Sydney plant picket the site. After maintaining a picket line for 10 weeks and with solidarity from other trade unionists, the workers, members of the AMWU trade union, triumphed in their battle for improved pay and conditions. Class struggle is the road to defending workers rights.
Casual & Low Paid Workers in Non-Union Worksites Face ExtremeExploitation.
Unions Waging Militant Struggle Can Inspire the Unionisation of Currently Unorganised Workers
13 November 2015 – They often work on gruelling – and sometimes dangerous – night shifts. However, they have been paid as low as $10 an hour for that work. That has been the fate of hundreds upon hundreds of workers at Australis’s biggest convenience store chain, 7-Eleven. Details of this horrific exploitation has emerged in the media over the last five years. This is hardly just a case of an odd rogue franchisee or two. When the company, under pressure to be seen to be correcting its practices, audited its franchises in July, even it had to admit that 69% of the stores were illegally underpaying workers. However, insiders believe that this figure is, actually, closer to 100%.
The scale of the exploitation is truly frightening. Franchises have systematically used a practice where they would pay workers $12 an hour – half the award rate – and then cook the books to look like they worked only for half the hours that they actually did. Sometimes the bosses would then assign the other hours to ghost workers – often their own relatives – to look like the hours have been covered. Most workers were not paid penalty rates for weekend and night work or overtime rates for shifts longer than ten hours.
Many of the exploited workers were on student visas. Draconian measures restricting the rights of those on student visas as well as the racist vigour with which the Australian authorities are known to deport immigrants from Asian, Middle Eastern and African backgrounds greatly assisted the exploiters. Those on student visas ae banned from working over 20 hours a week. However, because 7-Eleven bosses were grossly underpaying their workers – in some case workers received a flat rate of just $10 an hour for shifts which, with penalties, should have earned them $37 an hour – workers were forced to work twice as long as they wanted to. The bosses then used the fact that the workers had exceeded the 20 hours per week limit to threaten to get the workers deported if they complained or … in some cases even if they left their jobs! The worst bosses even refused to pay some workers anything for months. One former 7-Eleven worker, Prakash Kumar, reported that he found a co-worker rummaging in the bins for old sandwiches because he hadn’t been paid for eight weeks (TheSydney Morning Herald, 23 September 2015).
The story of Sam Pendem, an international student from India, is typical of the workers who have suffered at the hands of 7-Eleven bosses. Pendem came to Australia in 2011 with three university degrees. He worked at three different stores under four franchisees in the Gold Coast region. His tale of suffering was reported in an article in TheSydney Morning Herald (29 August 2015) as part of a series of exposés:
“Pendem still has nightmares from his time working at 7-Eleven, where he worked long shifts of up to 16 hours without a proper break.
“He was robbed twice in the space of 18 hours by a man in a balaclava brandishing a long serrated knife. Both times his boss scolded him for not fighting back to stop the robber taking $180….
“Pendem was paid $10 an hour at one store and $14 an hour at another store, which is well below the award rate of more than $24 an hour – not including penalty rates for working nights, weekends or public holidays.”
No wonder a whistle blower within 7-Eleven head office described the company’s operations this way:
“the business is very proud of itself and the achievements and the money it’s made and the success it’s had, but the reality is it’s built on something not much different from slavery.”
The owners of 7-Eleven have tried to claim that it is all the franchisees’ fault. The franchisee bosses have, indeed, proved by and large to be utterly ruthless capitalist bullies. However, the 7-Eleven owners were also up to their necks in it. They knew that their franchisees were ripping off the workers but deliberately allowed it – and very likely organised it as well since franchisees in different parts of the country seemed to all know the same scams. As a whistle blower pointed out about 7-Eleven’s head office bosses on Adele Ferguson and Klaus Toft’s Four Corners investigation: this exploitation “was a fundamental part of their business. They can’t run 7-Eleven as profitably or as successfully as they have without letting this happen.” The 7-Eleven owners encouraged their franchisees to brutally exploit their workers by running the business on the model where the head office takes 57% of gross profit while the franchisees take the remaining 43% out of which wages must be paid. The company owners, in effect, outsourced the super-exploitation task to the franchisees.
The greedy capitalists who own 7-Eleven have made a killing from all their cruel exploitation. Last year, the company made a profit of over $1.4 billion. The owners of the company – Australians Russ Withers and his sister Bev Barlow – are billionaires who, as well as owning 7-Eleven, control the Starbucks café chain in Australia and 300 Mobil stores. Earlier in the year, Barlow bought a seaside mansion in Brighton for over $20 million while Withers main place of residence is a 250,000 square metre property in Victoria’s Yarra Valley wine district estimated to be worth about $10 million.
Where do the fruits of the labour of 7-Eleven workers end up? Paying for the extravagant lifestyle of the owners of this Australian-owned company. Exploiting 7-Eleven workers has made company owners Russ Withers (Top Right) and his sister Bev Barlow filthy rich. In June 2015, Withers upgraded his corporate jet to a Challenger 604. A month earlier, Barlow purchased a $20 million mansion in the Melbourne suburb, Brighton (Above Left). Withers for his part lives in a huge mansion in a large property in Victoria’s Yarra Valley wine district (Above Right).
The massive fees that Australian universities and institutes charge international students has made it easier for Withers, Barlow and their franchisees to exploit their workers. The annual fees for some courses exceed the total income that a full-time worker on the minimum wage would earn in an entire year! Many international students, desperate for any work to be able to pay these fees, have been forced to accept terrible conditions at workplaces like 7-Eleven. Those students who have been forced to work more than 20 hours per week to get by – while somehow trying to pass exams – are then blackmailed by their bosses who threaten to dob them into the racist immigration authorities.
The slave-owner-like bosses have also been protected by the Fair Work regulator’s deliberately soft approach to the illegal practices of the 7-Eleven bosses. This approach was taken both during the time of the current Liberal government and during the administration of the former Labor government. Workers at 7-Eleven stores and union activists first raised the alarm about what the 7-Eleven bosses were doing over five years ago. However, in response, the Fair Work Ombudsman merely asked some franchisees to do a “self audit” and then only looked at the books of a few of the franchisees that did. Fair Work refused the calls from activists to compare store timesheets with the cash register logins which would have helped to detect some of the timesheet frauds conducted by 7-Eleven franchise bosses. No wonder the 7-Eleven bosses felt confident to continue their extreme exploitation of their workers. It was only after the outrage against 7-Eleven had become so widespread that some four years later – in September 2014 – did the Fair Work Ombudsman organise a raid of some stores. Twenty stores were raided and 60% of these were found to be illegally underpaying staff. Yet as we go to press only two franchise bosses are facing any legal action – a drop in the ocean compared to the 225 franchises in existence – the vast majority of which are suspected of illegally underpaying workers. Meanwhile, even in cases where Fair Work has found that workers were being underpaid, many workers are still yet to be reimbursed. As we go to press, one worker, Mohamed Rashid Ullat Thodi, hasn’t even been reimbursed a full four years after the 7–Eleven store in Victoria that was ripping him off was ruled to be underpaying its workers.
It is only due to the brave defiance of some 7-Eleven workers – who risked deportation and having their years of study count for nothing – as well as the support of union activists that the extreme exploitation of 7-Eleven workers has been brought to light. As a result, some workers finally have received the back pay they are due – not that this could adequately make up for the years of suffering and threats they have endured. For these workers to even begin to be properly compensated, their bosses should be made to pay back to these workers several times the amount of wages they had previously withheld!
7-Eleven Outrage Not an Exception but the Tip of the Iceberg
The revelations around the semi-slavery at 7-Eleven have led to the news organisations that broke the story being flooded with similar accounts of extreme exploitation at takeaway outlets, restaurants, petrol stations, nail bars and many high-profile franchise networks (TheSydney Morning Herald, 1 October 2015). Furthermore, it is far from simply international students and those on other temporary visas who are copping 7-Eleven-style exploitation in Australia. Nor is the oppression of workers confined to simply gross underpayment of wages. Alongside the bosses ripping off workers’ labour comes their bullying and intimidation of workers. One former employee at the Subway restaurant in Granville, a Trotskyist Platform supporter, described the arrogance with which the boss, known as “Johnny”, treated workers. “Johnny”made it a habit of humiliating workers by yelling at them in front of customers. On several occasions, he threw the food prepared for customers by workers down on the floor claiming that it was not prepared properly and then proceeded to badmouth the workers to the customers. It is disgusting that any worker should be abused and humiliated in this way – doubly so given that these casual workers already had to put up with terrible conditions where they could be called early in the morning and pressured into doing a shift. Those who refused to heel would simply be punished by having other shifts withheld. “Johnny” was notorious for especially picking on workers of Indian background. As is often the case with oppressors of workers, they have a racist edge to them as well – something that is today encouraged by the racist social climate created by bi-partisan attacks on refugees and racist “anti-terror” laws.
Particularly harsh exploitation of workers in Australia has increased with the growing casualization of the workforce – a phenomenon that has occurred over the last three and a half decades in nearly all capitalist countries. The proportion of workers in casual employment in Australia has increased from 16% in 1984 (Transitions from Casual Employment in Australia, Project 09/05, Hielke Buddelmeyer, Mark Wooden and Suzan Ghantous) to 24% today (Casual employment in Australia: a quick guide, Parliament of Australia Research Paper, 20 January 2015). When we include workers on short term contracts, we find that 35% of the workforce are either casual or on contract (ABC News website, 17 June 2015). That’s a large chunk of the workforce with virtually zero job security.
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It is not only bosses engaged in illegal practices who are especially cruelly exploiting workers in Australia. There are millions of workers toiling for low – but legal – wages as factory process workers, cleaners, hospitality workers, retail workers, farm labourers and childcare workers. Typical of what these workers face can be seen in the work conditions at food processing company, Beak & Johnston. Owned by multi-millionaire CEO David Beak, the rapidly expanding company had a total revenue of 300 million dollars in 2013. Through the efforts of its workers, Beak & Johnston is not only a major supplier of fresh and chilled meat products but is also Australia’s largest fresh soups and ready meals maker. Yet the Australian-owned company makes its workers suffer low pay and poor working conditions. Last year, several Beak & Johnston workers told Trotskyist Platform of the working conditions that they face. One worker who had been there for around five years said she receives only just over $17 an hour – barely above the national minimum wage – even though she and her fellow workers had to toil hard in a cold, uncomfortable work environment. Newer workers are getting only the minimum wage which is currently $586 per week after tax ($656 before tax). To see how low that is, consider this: this weekly wage that many Beak & Johnston workers are receiving is only $176 more than the median weekly rent for units in Greenacre and only $26 more than the median weekly rent for houses in this working class suburb in Southwest Sydney where Beak & Johnston’s main facility is located! The management at Beak & Johnston workers has a reputation for unfairly driving workers to work faster and some managers are known to shout abuse at workers in front of their co-workers. Casual workers are treated especially badly. Workers reported that there was a steady stream of casual workers being hired and then dismissed after a short period. It seems that the company employs a strategy of hiring a certain amount of casuals that they can drive especially hard – knowing that these workers would feel insecure without the benefits of permanent employment. However, once these workers were in the workplace long enough to form friendship bonds with permanent workers and the confidence to resist bullying from the management, they would then be summarily laid off. No wonder David Beak and his henchmen have fiercely resisted efforts to build union coverage at Beak & Johnston. Over the last year however, the Australian Meat Industry Employees Union and the National Union of Workers have made more determined efforts to recruit Beak & Johnston workers to their unions.
Poor working conditions and bullying of workers are prevalent even in sectors where most of the workers are white collar and skilled. Take the IT application and infrastructure business industry. Thousands upon thousands of IT professionals work for companies like UNISYS, Datacom and HP Enterprise in providing data handling and IT support services for major government departments and corporations. One worker at a major firm in this industry, Datacom, told Trotskyist Platform of the work conditions at his workplace. He said that management produce statistics about each worker’s work like the number of customer issues that they address (as is typical for capitalist firms the bosses care about the appearance of quality to their customers and not about the actual quality of work – just look at Volkswagen-Audi!). These statistics are then shown to everyone and those workers not meeting arbitrary performance targets have their statistics shown in red. The statistics are used to drive workers harder through the crude methods of embarrassment and intimidation. Through the pretext of these “performance” statistics, several workers have been sacked while other workers on fixed-term contract have been effectively dismissed through the company refusing to renew their contracts.
It is the sizeable proportion of workers without permanency whose life is made especially stressful by the bosses’ use of “performance measures” to threaten workers. Like many businesses throughout Australia, Datacom likes having workers without permanency as it uses these workers’ understandable feeling of job insecurity to squeeze yet more from them and thus drive down the conditions of all workers. Some workers who have been employed for up to four years have been refused the relative security of permanency – instead repeatedly getting fixed term, six-month contracts. This system of keeping workers stressed and insecure through short contracts, “performance” statistics and occasional sackings – as well as paying their workers low wages relative to these workers’ skills and output – have enabled Datacom to squeeze out a huge profit. Datacom’s 2014 Annual Report showed that it made an annual, after tax profit of over $51 million dollars. That amounted to a whopping 33% annual return on shareholders invested funds. At that rate, Datacom’s main owner, New Zealander John Holdsworth’s $86 million invested in the firm will turn into nearly $350m in just nine years – all without doing a shred of work himself! No wonder Holdsworth was already near the top of the latest NZ rich list with a total wealth of $200 million (see NZ’s National Business Review rich list – http://www.nbr.co.nz/rich-list-2014).
Build Up Our Trade Unions and Turn Them into Organisations of Militant Workers Resistance
The most extreme exploitation and bullying of workers in Australia has often occurred at workplaces where no strong trade union presence exists. One on one against a capitalist boss – who has the power to sack workers – a worker has no chance. It is through unity with fellow workers – and unions are in essence organisations of workers’ unity – that workers gain the power to successfully resist capitalist exploiters. Of course, having every worker in a union is not by itself a guarantee against extreme exploitation. Casualisation of the workforce has spread so much in Australia over the last three decades that even some workers in the most strongly unionised sectors are toiling away without the security of permanency. Thus, in today’s stevedoring industry – a sector where union membership is almost universal amongst workers and which is known for staunch unions – many wharfies working for the major stevedoring firms like DP World do not have permanency. Yet it is through building our unions – and just as importantly through turning these unions into organisations of militant class struggle – that workers can fight back.
11 August 2015: Hutchison Port workers and their supporters picket the company’s Port Botany terminal. The workers while on strike maintained a picket line that successfully stopped all truck flow and ensured no scabbing. To the credit of the workers and the MUA leadership, the strike and picket were maintained in defiance of a typically anti-strike ruling from the “Fair Work Commission.” However, the MUA leadership’s subsequent calling off of the strike, in obedience of a Fair Work Commission arrangement to negotiate with the company, has dissipated the power shown in the initial struggle. Despite the company being held back by workers solidarity from overseas dock workers, If the strike is not resumed, the workers and union will likely be forced to accept some redundancies and/or the turning of permanent jobs into casual ones.
Currently, it is often in the newer sectors of the economy – like IT support firms and call centres – where union representation is weakest. This is because these sectors have developed at a time when the union movement has suffered a number of defeats, has been hit by anti-strike laws and been weakened by the reluctance of its pro-ALP leaders to unleash its industrial muscle. Thus, when they look at what is happening in the rest of the workforce, many often young workers in newer sectors do not understand the potential of unions to win real gains for workers. In contrast, in older industries where a strong union presence already exists, young workers joining firms are given an understanding of the importance of unions through contact with existing, proudly union, workers.
Unions have had some success in organising a few call centres. But what is needed is an aggressive union organising campaign throughout the workforce to organise currently non-union workers. This means already union-conscious workers persistently and patiently discussing the importance of workers organising with their co-workers, it means secret out of work meetings between interested workers and union activists and – when the time and forces are right – open struggle against the bosses for workers’ rights. It is through exposure to hard-fought struggles that workers are often recruited into unions and, in any case, that’s exactly how our trade unions were built up in the first place.
The success that class-conscious workers have in unionising currently non-union workplaces depends a lot on not only what they and unions do in these workplaces but on what happens in currently unionised sites. When workers in non-unionised workplaces and in insecure, casual jobs see unions throughout the country fighting aggressively for workers’ rights, it will raise their level of class awareness and encourage them to build unions in their own workplaces. The problem is that they have seen far too little of unions unleashing powerful industrial action. When militant workers press their union leaders for such action, the pro-ALP officials often respond that they would like such a struggle but the various anti-strike industrial laws prevent such action. Indeed, there are a host of anti-strike laws that have been brought in and maintained by Liberal and ALP governments alike – from laws criminalising secondary strikes (i.e. strikes in solidarity with workers on strike at another workplace) to laws restricting the time periods when strikes can be launched. These often carry with them penalties of hefty fines and even threats of jail. Yet, because it is workers’ very labour that is the source of the ruling class’ profits and wealth, workers when united can force the government to shy away from using its own laws for fear of provoking workers into unleashing still more powerful industrial action. This was seen this August in the early days of the struggle of Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) waterfront workers against the retrenching of 97 workers in Sydney’s Port Botany and Brisbane by port operator, Hutchison Ports Australia. Workers at the two Hutchison terminals responded to the job slashing by walking off the job and, with the help of unionists from other workplaces, picketed the sites. Solidarity statements flooded into the pickets from trade unionists from around the globe – including from Hong Kong port workers who two years earlier had waged a 40 day strike against Hutchison’s Hong Kong terminal. Meanwhile, the Port Botany picket received support from other oppressed groups including contingents from supporters of the Redfern Aboriginal Tent Embassy and activists from the LGBTI community. The pickets at the Hutchison terminals successfully stopped all trucks attempting to bring goods into the struck sites. Importantly, workers maintained the picket in defiance of an order by the industrial court, the Fair Work Commission, to end the picket. However, the government and courts did not dare fine the workers or their union. They knew not only the strategic industrial power that dock workers had but also the level of support the MUA workers were receiving from other trade unionists and embattled sectors of society. After seven days of the solid picket lines ensuring no scab goods entering or leaving the terminals, the bosses’ courts, the Fair Work Commission, realised that it needed to make a partial concession to workers in order to defuse the struggle. It ordered that the sacked workers be reinstated until negotiations between the union and company were held and a future court hearing dealt with the matter.
The power shown by the Hutchison workers’ strike and their defiance of the industrial courts seemed to help trigger a brief period of greater union action throughout the country. For example, in the six weeks that followed the Hutchison pickets, Melbourne rail and tram workers defied loud condemnations by bosses organisations, the Andrews Labor government and the mainstream media to stage five separate half-day public transport strikes. Unfortunately, after the Fair Work Commission was forced to grant the retrenched Hutchison workers a temporary reprieve, the MUA leaders called off the strike and picket even though there was no guarantee that workers would permanently get their job backs. Indeed Hutchison, while continuing to pay the workers that they had previously retrenched, has provocatively refused to give these workers any shifts – a tactic aimed at demoralising and intimidating the workers. As we go to press, Hutchison workers and the MUA are maintaining a protest camp outside Hutchison’s Port Botany site. However, without company profits being hurt by industrial action, the bosses have the upper hand. If strike action is not re-started, the Hutchison bosses seem to be set to get away with retrenching at least some of the workers.
The presence of the anti-strike laws do mean that winning strikes requires that our unions be prepared to go all the way to win. Every threat to use – or actual use – of anti-union laws must be met by a still wider and more powerful mobilisation of workers. Yet it is precisely such upping of the ante that the current social democratic union leadership do not want. They see improvements in workers’ rights coming mainly through ALP governments that would softly-softly seek to gain a concession or two from the capitalist bosses without upsetting them too much. Hard fought strikes get in the way of such a perspective. Yet, this perspective has proven to be a losing one. It is a losing strategy for the simple reason that, especially with capitalism worldwide lurching from one economic crisis to another, the exploiting class is unwilling to grant even the slightest concession to workers without a fight. It is this strategy of trying to improve workers’ rights without overly upsetting the capitalist rulers that has greatly contributed to the workers movement suffering a series of defeats over the last three decades or more. Since the early 1980s, under both right-wing Liberal/National governments and social-democratic ALP administered governments, workplace conditions have worsened, more and more workers are toiling in insecure casual jobs, the share of company income going to the bosses as profits over workers’ wages has skyrocketed and social services that most affect working class people, like public housing, has been eroded.
Lacking a perspective of militant class struggle, the current, pro-ALP leaders often promote the vey false idea that favouring “Aussie workers first” over guest workers and temporary residents can protect local workers’ jobs and conditions. Similarly, they make protectionist appeals to favour Australian corporations over overseas producers in the awarding of contracts – from everything from trains to submarines. Yet, favouring one of group of workers over another – in this case locally based workers over guest workers and overseas workers – is a total violation of the very essence of unionism which is the idea that workers must stand united as one to collectively fight for their rights. It is no different to playing into the bosses’ hands at an individual workplace by playing off long-term workers against junior ones. Getting local workers to favour Australian companies and workers over their overseas counterparts only encourages unions abroad to similarly favour their own local producers against their Australian counterparts. In the end all that happens is that workers are divided and the capitalist exploiters everywhere are laughing all the way to the bank.
We need our unions to be run by a program and leadership that is based on the truth that the only way for working class people to defend their rights is through uniting as a class and allying with all the oppressed in a common fight against the capitalist bosses. Anything that destroys workers unity – like divisive calls to favour local workers over their guest and overseas counterparts – is thus harmful to the struggle for workers’ rights. What we need is not protectionism but some hard fought strikes with solid picket lines and solidarity strikes at related workplaces to smash the ruling class’ attacks on weekend and overtime penalty rates and to, instead, extend the applicability of these rates and demand a big increase in workers’ wages overall. We need to fight for jobs for all by stopping job cuts through industrial action and by forcing company owners to increase their labour force at the expense of their profits. Since anti-strike laws have outlawed the type of full on industrial action methods that are needed – including secondary strikes – our unions need to be prepared to defy those laws. Our unions also need to be willing to defy the rulings of the Fair Work Commission industrial courts which, like the entire current legal system, exists to serve the big end of town capitalists. In meeting threats from the capitalist legal system by raising the level of class struggle we do, of course, understand that the capitalists have a whole state machine – consisting of police, courts, prisons, the military, ASIO and top level bureaucrats – that has been built up to enforce their interests. That is why the struggle of the working class and all the oppressed must finally culminate in the sweeping away of this capitalist edifice and the construction of a new, workers state.
Defending Those Toiling in the Most Insecure, Lowest Paid Jobs is the Duty of the Entire Working Class
When workers in currently non-unionised workplaces see unions throughout society winning gains for workers they will be inspired to build unions in their own workplaces. The union movement as a whole must also defend those workers toiling under the worst conditions in a more direct way: through a nationwide campaign of struggles demanding concrete rights for these workers. Such a struggle would demand that all workers – including part-time, fixed term and currently casual workers – have the rights of permanent workers including a guaranteed weekly number of work hours, restrictions on arbitrarily being sacked and paid holiday, sick and carers’ leave.
The workers movement must also raise demands to address the needs of those groups of workers who are especially exploited. To stop the exorbitant fees that international students pay – as well as the fees that local students pay – forcing desperate students to accept the most grotesque working conditions, we must demand no fees for all local and international TAFE and university students and a genuinely liveable stipend for all students. To stop 7-Eleven style use of threats of deportation to enslave visa-holding workers, our unions must demand that every person living here including international students, 457 visa workers and refugees have the full rights of citizens – including freedom from the threat of deportation. If our unions fought for these demands and also mobilised its members to be in the forefront of the struggle to crush the far-right, racist groups – the ones who have helped to incite the violent racist attacks and abuse that many non-permanent resident workers face in their daily lives – the union movement would quickly win the respect and sympathy of many visa-holding workers.
Women workers suffer an especially high rate of exploitation. The Australian Government’s own Workplace Gender Equality Agency admitted in a September 2015 report that women workers on average earn a massive $284 per week less than male workers. What is more, that gender pay gap has increased from under 15% ten years ago to nearly 18% today – the highest it has been for at least the last twenty years. Meanwhile, women workers are more likely to be working in casual jobs than their male counterparts. This is compounded by the lack of affordable childcare which forces many women workers into insecure casual jobs as their only way of being able to secure employment that may enable them to not be working when they have to meet their kids after school. Therefore, an important task of the workers movement is to struggle for equal pay for equal work, for free, round-the-clock childcare and free and safe, state-provided transport of children from schools to after-school sports and cultural activities and child care centres.
The fight against the exploitation of workers naturally meshes with the struggles of other oppressed sectors – with the fight for the emancipation of women, with struggles against student fees and with the battle against the legal inequality and racism faced by international students, guest workers and coloured migrants. When the working class struggles against their capitalist exploiters it naturally brings them together with Aboriginal people resisting the horrific racist oppression that they continue to face under capitalist rule. Therefore, it is essential that workplace activists at the forefront of the industrial struggle against the bosses be brought together with the most committed activists from other oppressed groups. The organisation that can bring these activists together is a revolutionary workers party. Such a party would ensure that workplace activists do not narrowly focus on only the struggles of their own workplace but see that crucial struggle as part of a broader struggle of the exploited working class and its allies against the capitalist exploiters. This party that we need to build would unite the struggles of the working class and all the oppressed on a united program of opposition to the capitalist system – the root cause of the exploitation of workers, the oppression of women and racist attacks on Aboriginal people and non-white “ethnic” communities. Only when the industry, mines, transport, communications infrastructure and, indeed, the major retail chains have been ripped from the hands of the filthy rich capitalists and placed into the collective hands of the people can we ensure that the 7-Eleven style super-exploitation of millions of low-paid and casual workers in Australia is consigned forever to the dustbin of history. The implementation of such a socialist system would also emancipate the rest of the working class from systematic exploitation and the ever-present threat that exists today of being thrown into unemployment or into an unstable casual job working just a few hours a week for a pittance.
Credit: UNITE union 13 February 2009: More than 100 people protest outside a 7-Eleven store in Geelong, Victoria. The action demanded workers receive unpaid wages and that a worker sacked for making a complaint be reinstated.
DON’T ACCEPT THE ELECTION’S MISERABLE “CHOICE” WENEEDMILITANTCLASSSTRUGGLETOSMASHALLANTI-UNIONLAWSANDWINJOBSFORALLWORKERS
1 May 2016 – Last month the building industry authority launched legal action in the Federal Court against the NSW Branch of the CFMEU construction workers’ union and ten of its officials. Their supposed “crime”: organising strike action, necessarily including action to stop scabbing, in order to force the reinstatement of a union delegate who was sacked by the bosses at Sydney’s Barangaroo site. In launching the legal action, the Australian state’s building industry authority boasted that it now has 108 CFMEU officials before the courts! All these attacks on workers’ rights are being unleashed under the cover of anti- worker laws introduced by the openly anti-union, Abbott/Turnbull government, right? Well, actually no! This repression against the workers’ movement is being conducted under the provisions of the Fair Work Act introduced by the Labor government in 2009. That act formally replaced John Howard’s hated Workchoices but retained nearly all its draconian anti-strike provisions. Meanwhile, the construction sector’s industry “watchdog” that is today feverishly persecuting CFMEU and other union members is the body formed by the previous Labor government: the Fair Work Building and Construction (FWBC) authority. FWBC replaced the Liberals’ notorious ABCC. However, while a few of the most extreme powers of the ABCC were taken away, the FWBC retained the ABCC’s central purpose – to use prosecution to attack struggles for workers’ rights in the construction industry and to obstruct union officials entering worksites. This purpose the FWBC has carried out with crusading zeal, often invoking the star chamber powers that it retained from the ABCC to force trade unionists called before it to answer questions under threat of six months’ jail.
It is not simply that the existence of an openly anti-working class Liberal-National government has given the FWBC and the courts the impetus to attack staunch trade unionists. During the reign of the previous Labor government, authorities were also carrying out legal action against trade unions left, right and centre. In mid-2013, the Federal Court found the CFMEU guilty of contempt of court for its picket lines blockading Grollo construction sites during its August-September 2012 struggle against that company’s atrocious disregard of workers’ safety. It was this court ruling and the civil litigation launched by the FWBC – both during the reign of the Gillard ALP government – that paved the way for the Victorian Supreme Court fining the CFMEU a massive $1.25 million the following year.
All this highlights the miserable “choice” that working class people face at the upcoming elections. On one side are the Liberals who would kick working class people in the stomach and then smirk at workers. Their rivals, the ALP, like to whisper sweet words in workers’ ears. But when the capitalists prod ALP leaders in the back signalling that “it’s time,” they will – like obedient little children – turf the toiling masses into the mud then quickly – with false remorse and fluttering eyelashes all wet with crocodile tears – turn back to these same workers they only just betrayed and beg for forgiveness. This not a “choice” that we need to accept! There is another road! The road of militant industrial action and class struggle to not only stop the return of the Liberal’s ABCC but to smash the ALP’s own FWBC, to demand the repeal of all anti-strike laws and all restrictions on union access to workplaces and to fight to stop bosses retrenching workers. Such a fight must unite with the struggle of all of the downtrodden. It must unite with the struggle against the forced closure of remote Aboriginal communities and must mobilise mass action to defend Aboriginal people against racist police violence and mass incarceration. We must demand free, 24-hour childcare to open the road to women’s full participation in economic life, we must fight for a massive increase in public housing and we must smash all attacks on the poor like cashless welfare and compulsory “income management.”
SOCIAL DEMOCRACY IS A DEAD END
FOR MILITANT CLASS STRUGGLE TO WIN GAINS NOW AND PREPARE FOR THE FUTURE REVOLUTION
There are a few differences between the parliamentary parties. The right wing conservatives launched the union-busting Royal Commission into the unions. The ALP did not support this but it has, treacherously, supported the ensuing legal proceedings against unionists for taking militant action to defend workers’ rights. This is hardly surprising! Victorian ALP leader, Daniel Andrews, hailed the persecution of the CFMEU over the 2012 Grocon dispute, branding the construction workers’ struggle as “appalling.” And, although it has been the Coalition that has plotted for a cut to Sunday penalty rates for workers, the ALP again betrayed working class people when Bill Shorten recently announced that a future ALP government would not try to reverse such a cut if the Fair Work commission ruled in favour of it. Indeed, because it accepts the capitalist system, the ALP shares the Coalition platform on key issues. Both parties are for draconian anti-strike laws, both accept the “right” of capitalists to retrench workers whenever that is necessary to maximise profits, both support the cruel incarceration of asylum seekers. Furthermore, both support the Australian capitalist rulers’ militarisation campaign. This build up is essentially aimed at supporting the international capitalist drive against China, a country which, despite dangerous capitalist inroads, remains a socialistic state dominated by socialistic state-owned enterprises – a huge gain for its people. Medications for Severe ED Coffee is good enough for your health or not in short levitra samples you will to take some preventive measure or some precautions before starting up with the treatment. More to you: Never ignore the problem of PE, because it can make your coming days miserable. free samples cialispurchase viagra It’s necessary to ask the physician to know all instructions of taking the medicine in right possible way. Most skin infections respond well to topical antifungal creams, a number of that square measure out there over the counter, which suggests they do not need a doctor’s prescription to obtain buy viagra without rx the medication means even greater amount of flexibility and independence.
For their part, The Greens promise some progressive social reforms and oppose several aspects of the war on refugees. Yet, The Greens reject the idea of the working class organised as a separate political force independently of the capitalists. It is telling that The Greens responded to Shorten’s announcement that Labor would accept a court ruling slashing penalty rates with – not a promise to push legislation reversing such a cut – but merely a promise to “consider” such legislation adding – with the typical “even handedness” of their middle class base – that they “will wait to see the commission’s ruling.” It is notable, too, that The Greens support the Australian capitalist military’s recent huge purchase of 12 new submarines.
To seize on tiny offerings from the ALP and The Greens as an excuse to campaign for them at the elections as a “lesser evil” can only breed defeatism amongst the masses. It amounts to telling the working class and all of the oppressed that we must simply support whoever promises that they will punch us less hard. Yet the working class united with all of the downtrodden actually has the industrial and social power to challenge the capitalist exploiters because it is workers’ collective labour that is the source of capitalist profits and the whole running of the economy. This power needs to be made conscious of itself and unleashed against the capitalist exploiters. Illusions in salvation through parliamentary elections undermine this self- awareness and, instead, encourage the masses to be passive and dependent upon the mythical “good Samaritans” working in the enemy’s political administration. That is why it is not enough for those who understand this to simply ignore the elections. We cannot ignore them because there are millions of working class people who do have illusions that their road to a better life is through electing the ALP or The Greens (while no class-conscious worker is going to support the Liberals, of course). We need to organise actions that will help convince the masses that support for any of the pro-capitalist, current parliamentary parties is completely counterposed to the class struggle. Every time a class conscious worker is convinced not to vote – either directly or through preferences – for any of the current parliamentary parties because she or he subscribestoa class struggle path instead, the working class is better prepared to organise struggle to oppose the attacks ofwhicheverpartyiselectedtoadministerAustraliancapitalism.
Belief in salvation through the ALP is a big part of what is disorienting the union movement right now. Even while they are sometimes personally persecuted by anti-strike laws, the current pro-ALP union leaders are resigned to largely playing by these bosses’ rules and looking to “progressive” parliamentarians for salvation. Accepting the straightjacket of these laws and of the pro-capitalist framework of the ALP, the current outlook dominating our unions is to recoil from the idea of industrial action to prevent bosses from retrenching workers. Instead, many of our unions hope to protect jobs by calling on bosses to favour “Aussie workers” in hiring instead of overseas workers and by proposing schemes to “save Australian jobs” by favouring Australian companies over their overseas rivals. Apart from harmfully pushing workers into an alliance with their own local exploiters, such schemes do not save jobs. As a workers’ movement in one country calls for local bosses to favour them over overseas producers, workers abroad also start demanding the same. In the end all that happens is that workers are divided and greedy capitalists everywhere are laughing all the way to their respective banks. Especially when we are facing ever more draconian attacks, workers’ unity is indispensable. We must be aware that the capitalist rulers are seeking to divide our side by intensifying racist attacks against Aboriginal people and against Muslim and other coloured ethnic communities. That is why the workers’ movement must mobilise in defence of these embattled communities, must demand freedom for the refugees and must mobilise to decisively crush the violent far right racist groups.
Today is international workers’ day. Basing ourselves on its spirit doesn’t mean just repeating nice sounding platitudes about international workers’ unity on one day of the year only to then put out the call to favour Australian workers over overseas workers the rest of the year! Instead, it means standing as one with our overseas and guest worker sisters and brothers in a common fight for improved wages and jobs for all workers. The way to fight for jobs is to prevent companies from laying off workers and to fight to force wealthy capitalist bosses to increase hiring by accepting lower profits. Of course, they will not do this willingly. We will need to force them and their governments to accept such concessions through militant class struggle. That means we need a union movement that is prepared to build up forces to defy the anti-strike laws and unleash the full power of the united workers’ movement in the face of the bosses, their governments and their anti-worker laws. The capitalists will scream like bloody murder that any loss of profits that results from being forced to hire more workers will inevitably lead to economic collapse. We must then be ready to reply that if you capitalists are incapable of stably running the economy in a way that provides jobs for all then we workers will take the running of our economy into our own hands by confiscating the industries, mines, banks and communication networks from you and putting it all into the collective hands of the people in a socialist economy under workers’ state power.
This is actually the crux of the question – capitalism or socialism? In the end the current parliamentary parties are against the masses’ interests not just because of their respective ideologies but because they all accept capitalist rule. The demands of the capitalist system simply require any party administering it to continually seek to increase the rate of profit sweated out of working class people. Look at what has happened in Greece. A radical left-talking, nominally socialist party, Syriza, was elected to government. Yet, once in office, it has proceeded to administer the brutal austerity demanded by the capitalists who still hold the reins of state and economic power. Whether in Greece, Australia or any other capitalist country, any party no matter how much it pledges commitment to working class people must necessarily betray these same working class people if it assumes office in such a capitalist society. No matter who win elections they will be merely administering state institutions – courts, commissions, police, prisons and the military – that are tied to the wealthy capitalists by a thousand threads. That is why we should be aware, too, that any gains we make today through class struggle will not be secure as long as the capitalists retain state power. Yet the struggles of today are the indispensable preparation for the future revolutionary struggle for the working class seizure of state power. That is provided that today’s struggles are waged in such a manner that they always teach our side to trust only our own united power and never any of the parties and state institutions of the capitalist exploiters. Today, that means fighting to convince the most class conscious workers to reject any electoral support for any of the current parliamentary parties and to, instead, organise militant mass struggles based on unity with all of the oppressed and genuine unity with our overseas working class sisters and brothers.
