Above Left: Australia’s Labor prime minister Anthony Albanese meets with Australia’s unelected feudal, head of state for life, King Charles III a few days before the British monarch’s coronation on 6 May 2023. Above Right: Albanese arrives with his partner for King Charles III and Queen Camilla’s coronation ceremony. Albanese pledged allegiance to the new monarch.
Photo credit: AP

LIKE THE DEPOSED, MUCH HATED,
RIGHT WING MORRISON GOVERNMENT,
ALBANESE HEADS AN ADMINISTRATION
SERVING THE CAPITALIST EXPLOITERS!

HIS MAJESTY’S LABOR GOVERNMENT
MARCHES THE SAME PATH AS
HER MAJESTY’S LIBERAL GOVERNMENT
… ONLY WITH LESS ODIOUS REGALIA

27 January 2023: After nearly nine years of conservative administration, Australia’s working class masses, progressive youth, Aboriginal people and much of this country’s Asian, African, Islander and Middle Eastern-based migrant communities had been hoping that the defeat of the hated Morrison government in last May’s elections would finally bring at least a modest degree of relief from years of reactionary attacks on their rights and living standards. However, eight months later, it is clear that little of substance has changed. Moreover, the new Labor administration headed by supposed ALP “Left” Anthony Albanese has no agenda to substantially alter the course that the former right-wing government was on. As a result, the masses’ living standards continue to plunge. Workers’ wages only rise slowly, while food, gas and electricity prices are surging and petrol prices remain obscenely high. Millions of gig economy and casual workers continue to endure jobs with no security and harsh employment conditions that can be made still tougher at any time at the whim of the boss. Just look at how the 15,000 riders delivering food for Deliveroo were thrown out of work with no notice, zero entitlements and zero payout after the delivery platform wound up in Australia two months ago. Especially hard hit are the large number of low-income households that rent. Last year rents soared by more than 10%. Moreover, with so little affordable rental accommodation available, low-income households are not even able to move into cheaper dwellings to get by. As a result, not only are many unemployed workers being forced into living rough on the streets but more and more casual, part-time and other low-paid workers are being reduced to sleeping in their cars or their friends’ lounge rooms to get by. Many more are trying to make ends meet by skipping meals, foregoing essential dental visits or enduring cold winters without using the heater at all.

There are a couple of areas where the new government has moved to end especially extreme anti-working class measures imposed by the previous right-wing government. It has wound back the powers of the union-busting Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC). Yet, at the same time, the ALP government has committed itself to maintaining all the laws restricting workers’ strike action and union access to workplaces. The government did follow through on their promise to end the compulsory use of the cashless debit card that had been imposed on welfare recipients in some communities to control how they could spend their money. However, the Albanese government insists on continuing to subject unemployed workers to grinding poverty by refusing to make any real increases to the paltry Jobseeker payments [update – At the May 2023 budget the government did announce that JobSeeker, Youth Allowance and Austudy payments would increase from September onwards … but only by an insulting $2.60 a day!]. Albanese and his treasurer Jim Chalmers are simply not prepared to spend any of the public budget to lift these most vulnerable people out of poverty. Nor are they prepared to use public revenue to maintain funding levels for public hospitals – let alone boost them. Last October’s budget saw the federal government incredibly announce that it will cut the funding that it gives to the states to run public hospitals by $2.4 billion over four years. This is at a time when the public hospital system is so overwhelmed that patients are waiting years for surgeries deemed “elective”, ambulances are queuing in ramps outside hospital emergency departments for sometimes hours before they can get their patients admitted and nurses are being battered with ever more unsustainably high work loads due to short staffing. Yet if required to expand the wealth of the rich, ALP leaders are quite happy to drain down the public budget. Thus, Albanese and Chalmers dismissed opposition from Labor ranks and went ahead with their promised tax cuts for the wealthy.

The main difference between the current ALP government and its right-wing predecessors is merely in style and rhetoric. Morrison and Co. would oversee skyrocketing rents, falling real wages, and rising profits and then arrogantly tell us that this is all fair and we ought to work harder if we don’t like it … or buy a house if we are tenants who think that rents are too high! On the other hand, the ALP as a party with a mass working class base is careful to acknowledge “that many working people in Australia are hurting” and that “real wages need to rise.” Yet, the more sympathetic demeanour does not help workers to pay for their surging food and electricity costs and their ever-increasing rents that result from a government that continues to put the interests of the capitalist bosses ahead of the needs of the working class masses… just like their predecessors!

The divergence between the style and substance of the Albanese government is especially apparent on the issue of workers’ wages. When the Fair Work Commission (FWC) was about to make its annual setting of minimum wages last June, the Albanese government made a submission to the FWC calling for a minimum wage increase in line with the then inflation rate. This is what the FWC basically did, granting an increase in the minimum wage of 5.2% and a below inflation increase of 4.6% for other award workers. The Labor government boasted about its role in the decision and contrasted its stance to that taken by the previous Liberal-National government. The currently pro-ALP, ACTU leadership of our unions also stated that they were “really happy” with the outcome. However, the Albanese government and the ACTU tops knew all too well at the time that the inflation rate was expected to sharply rise and that by the Labor government only calling for a minimum wage increase that matched the then inflation rate, they were in effect calling for a pay cut. Seven months down the track this is all too clear. Prices have soared in this period. Annual official inflation is now 7.8% – the highest in over three decades. Most notably, food prices surged by 9.2% over the last year. As a result, the rate of price increase of non-discretionary items like food and fuel, which is what low-paid workers spend most of their money on, has surged even faster than the overall inflation rate – rising by 8.4%. Therefore, the June Fair Work Commission wage decision, so cheered on by Albanese, has in effect turned out to be a 3.2% pay cut for minimum wage workers and an even larger cut for other award workers. For many gig economy workers – like food delivery workers, Uber drivers and taxi drivers – the loss of income is even greater. Not only are they not even granted award wage increases, they have to pay out of their own pockets for the super-high fuel costs.

The reason that workers’ living standards are plummeting can be seen by comparing changes in wages with that of business profits. The latest figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) show that while wages only increased by 3.1% on average over the last year – that is a 4.7% cut in real wages – company profits increased by 8.5%. The profits of unincorporated businesses – overwhelmingly small businesses – increased even more sharply, surging by nearly 16%. In other words, workers are getting poorer because capitalist business owners – both big and small – are seizing as profits an ever greater share of the fruits of workers’ labour.

Australia’s capitalist bosses have been increasing the rate at which they exploit their workers not only over the last year but over the last nearly four decades. This is revealed in an index published by the ABS called the Unit Labour Cost, which shows the relative amount that bosses pay workers in wages, super and other benefits for every dollar of output value added by their workers. That Unit Labour Cost has plunged by over 21% over the last 36 years, representing the staggering increase in the rate at which capitalist business owners are exploiting their workers. This has been presided over by Liberal, Labor and Labor-Greens governments alike. Whether under the Coalition, Labor or indeed Labor-Greens defacto coalitions, the rich capitalist exploiters have gotten richer while the working class masses got poorer.

With no program to close the ever expanding income gap between the rich capitalists and working class people, the Albanese government inevitably seeks to divert the masses’ frustrations onto racial minorities by upholding the xenophobic and reactionary nationalist policies of the previous government. Thus, although the Labor government made a sop to its progressive supporters by finally ending the unpopular persecution of the Murugappan Biloela-based Tamil family, it continues to cruelly incarcerate over two hundred Asian, Middle Eastern and African refugees in off-shore detention in Nauru and PNG. To show how deeply it shares the racist refugee policy adhered to by the Coalition, immediately upon taking office, the Albanese government deported the asylum seekers who had arrived by boat on election-day from Sri Lanka. In fact, even as it slashed funding for public hospitals in its recent budget, the Albanese government increased annual spending on enforcing its offshore detention policy by a further $150 million. Meanwhile, the government has refused to offer permanent residency to those brought here for medical treatment from off-shore detention in Nauru and PNG (the “Medevac refugees”). As for their promise to grant permanency to the thousands of refugees living here on temporary visas, eight months into office this has not been implemented. This has left thousands of refugees in limbo. On top of the stress of having to reapply for these temporary visas every three or five years and not knowing if they will end up being deported at the end of a visa period, these temporary visas deny refugees the right to bring their spouses or children living abroad, the right to travel abroad, the right to have full access to social security payments, the right to university education and in the case of SHEV visa holders the right to live and work in urban areas.

Meanwhile, like its predecessors, the Labor government defends a system that continues to cruelly oppress Aboriginal people. This was signified in the ostentatious way that the government mourned over the death of Queen Elizabeth, the monarch under whom Aboriginal people were brutally subjugated and under whom generations of Aboriginal children were heinously stolen from their parents in order to be cut off from their culture and heritage. Albanese and Co. deeply offended Aboriginal people and all those opposed to colonialism by hailing uncritically the dead, war-criminal queen and by embracing the coronation of her unpopular son as king. They went event further. Seemingly trying to outdo right-wing conservatives and monarchists in adulation for the queen, the supposedly “republican” prime minister, Albanese, even decided to grant a special public holiday to mourn the passing of Australia’s unelected head of state for life. While upholding the social order that oppresses Aboriginal people, the ALP proposes to insert a token “recognition” of Aboriginal people into the constitution and to set up a powerless Aboriginal advisory body (“Voice”) to the parliament. This scheme is aimed at giving the regime the appearance that it is listening to Aboriginal people’s voices. Although the hard right-wing section of the Australian ruling class cannot stomach any recognition that Aboriginal people lived on this land for tens of thousands of years before colonial invasion, much of the ruling class see the proposed scheme as being useful because they hope that it will dampen the Aboriginal rights movement that has become more vigorous in recent years. They also think that the planned changes will persuade the broader population into having greater faith in the supposed “fairness” of the present Australian social order and, therefore, be more willing to support the ruling class’ more aggressive military and political interventions into the Asia-Pacific; as Australia’s capitalist rulers seek to, on the one hand, maintain their neo-colonial plunder and paternalistic control of the South Pacific and, on the other, play a frontline role in the Western imperialists’ Cold War drive against socialistic China. Those sections of the White Australia capitalist ruling class pushing the new scheme also want to ostentatiously display “constitutional recognition” and a nominal Aboriginal “Voice” for international consumption. They want to deflect widespread global revulsion at the Australian regime’s brutal oppression of Aboriginal people, which they know undercuts their ability to unleash (usually bogus) attacks on their enemies over “human rights.” However, most staunch Aboriginal activists have seen through the proposed measures. They have been enraged by the window-dressing nature of the “embrace” of an Aboriginal “Voice” and have skewered the tokenism of the proposed constitutional changes. At yesterday’s January 26 Invasion Day rally in Sydney, every single Aboriginal activist that addressed the issue of the “Voice” and “Constitutional Recognition” – including leading activists Gwenda Stanley, Lizzy Jarrett and Lynda-June Coe – condemned and opposed the sham plans. Nearly all the speakers at the Melbourne and Brisbane protests took the same stance. As Gumbainggir man and veteran Aboriginal militant, Uncle Gary Foley, powerfully told the Melbourne rally, the Voice would “only be cosmetic”. “Like lipstick on a pig. It will not address the deep underlying issues that still pervade Australian society and that primary issue is white Australian racism,” Foley pointed out.

The stance taken by staunch Aboriginal activists is especially valid when the government that is pushing the proposed constitutional changes not only hails the blood-soaked, white supremacist monarchy but does nothing to stop regime personnel from killing Aboriginal people in custody and continuing to remove Aboriginal children from their families; while doing little to ensure decent housing and services for Aboriginal communities and absolutely nothing to genuinely return stolen land to Aboriginal people. Since the ALP took office, young Aboriginal people continue to die in state custody at a horrific rate and police and prison guards responsible for killing Aboriginal people continue to get away with these crimes. This has only encouraged violent white supremacists on the streets. The sickening beating to death by white racists of 15 year-old Aboriginal boy, Cassius Turvey, while he was walking home with his friends from a school in suburban Perth is a product of the White Australia capitalist “order” upheld by the Liberals, One Nation, the ALP and the Greens alike.

CLASS STRUGGLE IS THE ONLY ROAD
TO DEFEND WORKING CLASS PEOPLES’ LIVING STANDARDS

With the ALP’s working class base increasingly angry at their falling living standards, ALP leaders have been at pains to look like they are trying to lift wages. They pushed through new laws ostentatiously called the “Secure Jobs, Better Pay Bill.” As well as claiming that it will lift wages and improve job security for casual workers, Labor says that the bill will help reduce the gender pay gap. However, any benefits to workers from this bill will at best be modest and on balance it may do as much harm for workers as good. One positive aspect of the legislation is that it somewhat increases the scope for workers employed by different businesses in the same industry to collectively bargain for their rights. This partially winds back the measures introduced by the Keating Labor government in the early 1990s that restricted workers to bargaining with their bosses at a single enterprise. That system of enterprise bargaining, by curtailing the number of workers who could be united together to fight for a particular deal, reduced workers’ power and has been part of the reason why the capitalists have been able to increase their rate of exploitation of workers over the last few decades. To the extent that particular aspects of the new law undo the enforced limitation of workers bargaining to the enterprise level – that is, undo the damage done by a former Labor government – these aspects should be defended. However, we need to fight for the extension of the right to multi-employer bargaining that is far, far more wide-ranging than those very modest measures prescribed in the current law. For example, not only does the new law give small business bosses the power to refuse to be part of multi-employer deals with workers, it also gives this same power to capitalists who already have an enterprise agreement with their staff. Moreover, the legislation excludes multi-employer deals done with unions that have been involved in “repeated breaches of industrial law” – effectively preventing construction workers, mine workers, wharfies, seamen, offshore energy workers, ferry drivers and others represented by the more militant unions like the CFMMEU from engaging in multi-employer bargaining. Furthermore, in typical social democratic fashion, the ALP caved in to ruling class opposition to the pro-worker aspects of the bill from bosses’ organisations and the yuppy cross-benchers, thereby weakening them further. Thus, the extension of industry-wide bargaining prescribed in the original legislation kept on getting narrower and narrower. In the last few days before the bill was passed, the ALP government bowed to cross-bench senator David Pocock and excluded businesses with fewer than 20 employees from being compelled by the majority of their workers to engage in multi-employer bargaining, rather than the previous threshold of 15 employees. Additionally, the Albanese government agreed to changes that will make it much easier for bosses of businesses with up to 50 employees to escape multi-employer bargaining by workers.

Moreover, there are aspects of the so-called, “Secure Jobs, Better Pay Bill” that will actually help capitalist bosses to intensify their cuts to workers’ employment rights and real wages. For one, the new law includes new impediments on workers’ already very restricted right to take strike action. Workers must now go through a momentum-slowing, compulsory period of formal conciliation with the bosses before taking any industrial action. If they take action involving multi-employer bargaining they must give the bosses a full five days notice. And in a measure aimed at quashing long-running union industrial action, workers must now go through the complex process that they already need to engage in before taking industrial action – involving a time-consuming, momentum-sapping secret ballot of employees – every three months. Moreover, a measure in the bill to give the “Fair Work Commission” (FWC) the power to resolve disputes between bosses and workers through arbitration where there is no reasonable prospect of agreement being reached, will in the long run do far more harm to workers than any good. Yes, in places where workers’ unions are weaker and in the context of the workers movement having been on the back foot over so many years, it is perhaps possible that compulsory arbitration could allow some workers in the short term to receive a tiny few more crumbs from their bosses than they otherwise would. However, when the workers movement rises in a class struggle fightback – as it must – then increased arbitration powers for the FWC, which are after all the courts of a capitalist bosses-serving state, will be used to quell workers’ struggles and prevent workers from winning substantial victories through action. Furthermore, in a concession to lobbying by business groups, the ALP has introduced a measure in the legislation that will weaken the requirement that deals between workers and their bosses leave the workers nominally better-off than previous arrangements. Instead of this Better Off Overall Test (BOOT) being applied for specific changes, bosses can claim that they have met the BOOT because they have made improvements to workers’ conditions in some areas that supposedly offset cuts to workers’ rights in others. The new measure is set to open the way for business owners to drastically undercut workers’ conditions at those workplaces where workers have less bargaining power – for example, where workers’ union organisations are weaker. Indeed, secretary of the Retail and Fast Food Workers Union, Josh Cullinan, described the new law (when it was still at a bill stage before its better aspects were weakened further) as one containing “calamitous attacks on working people.” The union secretary further insisted that the (then proposed) law “does nothing to improve the job security of casual workers. In truth, it only attacks them.”

With the last eight months having proven, once again, that the ALP in government is not willing or able to stand up to the rich and powerful capitalist bigwigs that the conservative parties openly represent, it is clearer than ever that the only way for the working class masses and all the oppressed to defend their living standards and rights is through determined class struggle. Let’s build up our unions and make them infinitely more militant. We need hard-fought strikes and other struggles to win massive pay rises for workers. We must not only make up for rampant inflation but for the years of falling real wages. To clear the legal obstacles to such struggles we must simultaneously fight for the repeal of all anti-strike laws. For the unrestricted right of unions to engage in industry-wide and nationwide bargaining with the bosses! Reverse Labor, the Liberals and the capitalists’ gutting of the Better Off Overall Test in workplace agreements! We also need to ensure that all those currently working as casuals and gig workers have their positions converted into secure jobs with all the rights of permanency. As part of fighting for this and in order to ensure secure jobs for all unemployed workers, we must force companies to increase hiring of permanent workers at the expense of their fat profits. To stop landlords being able to jack up rents ever higher because they know that renters have nowhere else to go, we must take action to demand a massive increase in low-rent housing. To facilitate women’s full participation in economic life and complete economic independence, we must struggle for free 24-hour childcare. We must also fight for Medicare to fully cover all specialist fees, essential medicine, dental, “elective” surgeries and all aged care. The public budget will only be able to afford such free childcare, healthcare and aged care if we bring these sectors completely into public ownership so that a large part of the public budget for these social services does not end up, as it does today, in the pockets of the wealthy capitalists that own profit-driven childcare, aged care, pathology, X-ray, medical centre, pharmacy and other health service firms. We need funds to employ more public sector nurses, paramedics, doctors and aged care workers and not high profits for health sector profiteers. To help provide the urgently needed resources for public health, aged care, public housing and education and to drive down surging living costs we must fight for the confiscation of the oil, gas, coal and power companies and their transfer into public ownership.

To wage such struggles against the powerful capitalist class that runs this country, working class people need tight unity across racial and ethnic lines. Such unity can only be built if the workers movement consciously combats the efforts of the exploiting class to divide the masses with reactionary nationalism and if it actively mobilises against racist oppression. The workers movement must unleash its power to oppose racist state killings of Aboriginal people in custody and to oppose the disproportionate imprisonment of black people in Australian jails. We have to resist the rampant white supremacist violence in this country – whether it comes from rabid rednecks on the streets, as in the beating to death of Cassius Turvey, or from the regime forces, as in the crushing to death of 26 year-old Aboriginal man, David Dungay, by racist prison guards. There also needs to be united mass action of our unions, Aboriginal people, Asians and other people of colour to sweep violent far-right racist outfits off the streets. If we can strike blows against such organised white supremacist forces, we can send a message to the more numerous garden variety rednecks out there – of the type that in Kalgoorlie deliberately ran over and killed 14 year-old Aboriginal boy Elijah Doughty, who murdered Indian-origin, Brisbane transport worker Manmeet Alisher by throwing a firebomb into the bus that he was driving and who have brutally bashed numerous Chinese and other East Asian people over the last few years – that they had better pull their head in. We can not allow racist terror to intimidate and, thus, marginalise from broader society and social struggle Aboriginal people and other people of colour. We also need to ensure that migrant workers are not bullied out of participation in class struggle resistance by the threat of deportation. That means that we must fight for the rights of citizenship for everyone who is here. We must demand that all refugees on temporary visas, all guest workers and all international students are given permanency and the rights of citizenship. Let us also demand that all the asylum seekers incarcerated in PNG and Nauru are brought here with the full rights of citizens.

THE ALP DID NOT EVEN PROMISE TO STAND UP
TO THE WEALTHY BUSINESS-OWNING CLASS

That the ALP government is kowtowing to the big end of town is hardly a surprise. Even during the lead up to the elections they made clear that they were not going to challenge the capitalists. Fearful that the billionaire oligarchs would utilise both their ownership of the media and their power to decide which political forces that they direct their massive financial resources to in order to campaign against Labor, Albanese’s team went out of their way to assure the wealthy ruling class that the ALP would look after their interests as diligently as Morrison’s conservatives. To their working class base, on the other hand, Albanese and Co. promised that they would reverse the plunge in real wages, fix the crisis in aged care and address the lack of affordable housing. Yet they promised to do all this by merely managing the existing capitalist system more rationally than the Liberals and by doing away with the most extreme reactionary of the latter’s policies. Rather than measures to curb the power of the corporate bigwigs, the ALP tops advocated “win-win” policies that brought together workers and their unions on the one hand and worker-hiring business owners on the other. However, such talk of “win-win” between workers and the capitalists is a cruel hoax. Workers are getting poorer precisely because capitalist bosses are increasing the proportion of the fruits of workers’ labour that they seize as profits. The interests of workers and those of the business owners that extract profit from their toil are counterposed. To refuse to stand with workers’ interests against those of their capitalist bosses means to accept the status quo of ever-increasing capitalist exploitation of workers.

Yet, despite all the ALP leaders’ efforts to please the capitalist ruling class, the latter do not come easily to accepting a Labor government. The ALP is, after all, a party whose rank-and-file are workers and is a party organically tied to the union movement. The exploiting class worries that this base could push an ALP government into enacting measures to defend workers’ interests. Therefore, in “normal” times, the oligarchs prefer their own parties, like the Liberals and the Nationals, to administer government, especially at the federal level. However, when the working class start to get restive or when the ruling class wants to herd the masses into supporting measures that could be unpopular – like a major war – the ruling class turn to the ALP. They hope that with the ALP’s greater authority amongst the working class and with its ties to the union leadership, the Labor Party is better able to pacify the working class masses and more effective at lining up the masses behind major campaigns of the capitalist elite than the openly, pro-business owner conservatives. In this way, the ruling class will look to ALP social democracy to come to their rescue when they are in a difficult position, even while having misgivings that an ALP government could irritate them by throwing some sops to its working class base. This was the case in the lead up to the 2007 elections when the working class masses were angry after more than eleven years of right-wing Coalition government and when workers had in the previous two years participated in mass nationwide stopwork actions against the Howard government’s anti-worker Workchoices legislation. At the time, even the main national, NSW and Queensland newspapers of hard-right billionaire Rupert Murdoch called for a vote to Kevin Rudd’s ALP. Murdoch even personally praised Rudd. Then, in the lead-up to last May’s elections, after nearly nine years of corrupt Coalition rule has discredited Australia’s present social order in the eyes of the masses and with working class people grumbling over plunging living standards, decisive sections of the ruling class started to seriously consider whether it would be better to get the ALP into government. This is especially the case because the capitalist rulers are worried that the disgruntled working class masses could refuse to get behind their Cold War drive against socialistic China.

However, before they were willing to accept the possibility of a Labor government, in the months and years leading up to the federal elections, the various factions of the capitalist class subjected Albanese’s Labor to a number of tests to see whether this nominally workers’ party could be trusted to run the federal government. The big end of town utilised their control of the media and think tanks and their numerous personal connections with politicians to demand reassurances from the ALP on key issues.

For one, they wanted to be sure that the ALP would not loosen anti-strike laws and would not encourage class struggle by pushing any policies that would openly redistribute wealth from the rich to the masses. The capitalist bigwigs were quite satisfied with Labor’s response. Not only did the ALP pledge to uphold anti-strike laws, some of which they had themselves instituted on previous occasions that they were in office, the ALP also pointedly refused to make even the most modest promises to redistribute income away from the super-rich. Indeed, ALP head offices openly instructed branch members not to make any negative references to the “big end of town” that the Labor Party had sometimes used in the lead up to the previous elections in 2019. The big end of town also demanded that the Labor Party abandon any plans to enact even minimal measures that would curb the returns of the rich from buying up multiple properties for speculation or for renting out as landlords. Here too Albanese’s Labor duly obliged. Thus, long before the elections, the ALP ditched the agenda that it took to the previous two elections of limiting the scope of negative gearing tax exemptions and reducing the amount of discount on capital gains tax payments. The supposed ALP “Left” Albanese has ostentatiously positioned himself even further to the right than his ALP Right faction predecessor, Bill Shorten. Even when promising resources for lower-rent “social housing”, the proposals of Albanese’s ALP are so modest that they would not be enough to pull down rents across the market – music to the ears of multiple-property owning, rich landlords shaking down ever greater rents from their tenants. Moreover, even the ALP’s modest plan for more “social housing” that it took to the election will not increase badly needed public housing but rather promises funds for just a modest increase in “community housing”, notorious for its private operators who skimp on repairs and shun the most hard-up, would-be tenants. Thus, even in making a sop to the needs of low-income renters, the ALP was careful to show that there would be a lot in the plans for the capitalists – in the form of expanded opportunities to profiteer from running partly government-funded “community housing.”

THE BIG END OF TOWN’S KEY RED LINE: ANY GOVERNMENT MUST
FULLY PARTICIPATE IN THE COLD WAR TO STRANGLE SOCIALISTIC CHINA

Perhaps the most important assurance that the ruling class demanded of Labor in the lead-up to the elections is a guarantee that it continue to support the U.S.-led Cold War drive to “contain” and squeeze socialistic China. They want Labor to follow through on the conservatives’ agenda for an increase in the U.S. military presence in Australia, for an aggressive Australian military build-up in support of this anti-China war drive and for a continuation of political support for those forces seeking to undermine socialistic rule in China from within – whether they be pro-capitalist, pseudo-“pro-democracy” activists or the dwindling number of anti-communist and fanatically anti-women’s-equality, religious fundamentalist forces based on the, more European-looking, Uyghur minority in north-western China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. The capitalist class also want Labor to do a more skillful job in aggressively interfering in Australia’s South Pacific “neighbourhood” in order to sabotage socialistic China’s south-south cooperation with the region. To be sure, the capitalists also want Labor to somehow conduct this Cold War in a way that simultaneously maintains workable diplomatic relations between Canberra and Beijing so that the tens of billions of profit that they get from Australian exports to China is not disrupted too much.

This begs the question: why are Australia’s capitalist bigwigs risking harm to their immensely lucrative trade with China by antagonising the latter? The answer to this question is entirely related to the fact that China is a workers state as opposed to being a country under capitalist rule. China’s toiling classes grabbed state power in a giant anti-capitalist revolution in 1949. To this day, China has an economy centred on a property system that favours working class people: that is, socialist, public ownership of key economic sectors. Even though the current Beijing leadership does not seek to challenge Western imperialism’s domination over the world, the mere existence of China as a socialistic power is slowly undermining the grip of imperialism over the ex-colonial countries. China’s mutually beneficial cooperation with the Global South is allowing countries in the Pacific, Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America to access capital, modern technology, training and a large market in China without having to subordinate their country to the imperial powers or their agencies like the IMF. This is what is driving Australia’s capitalist rulers mad as countries in the South Pacific like the Solomon Islands and Fiji slowly exert greater independence from their Australian imperialist overlords.

Furthermore, the capitalist powers are terrified that even though Beijing does nothing to explicitly promote socialist revolution, the mere example presented by the most populous country in the world continuing to adhere to a socialistic course, while successfully lifting her people out of poverty and providing rapidly rising real wages, wide access to low-rent public housing and ever improving infrastructure, public transport and cultural opportunities for her masses, will encourage working class people in the capitalist world to themselves start agitating for socialism. That is why the Western ruling classes see the rise of socialistic China as an “existential threat.”

For the very same reason that capitalist exploiting classes fear and loathe the socialistic PRC, the working class must hail and defend its existence. For the very existence of working class rule in China, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba and North Korea – in however a fragile and incomplete form – gives confidence to the toiling classes in Australia and other capitalist countries that they do not have to accept capitalist rule and all that it brings – bullying bosses, plunging real wages, skyrocketing rents, growing racism and all-round economic insecurity and chaos. That is why the workers movement and Left must unconditionally stand with socialistic China and the other workers states against every form of attack that they face – whether that be military, economic or propagandistic.

Yet, diametrically against the interests of its working class membership, the ALP is right behind the capitalists’ drive to strangle socialistic China. Thus, while in Opposition, the ALP supported every one of the former Liberal government’s Cold War moves against the PRC – from the discriminatory banning of Chinese tech giant, Huawei, from participating in the building of Australia’s 5G wireless network, to the introduction of McCarthyist, so-called “foreign interference” laws aimed at intimidating Australians of Chinese descent that are sympathetic to Red China, to the enacting of the AUKUS anti-China deal for Australia to acquire nuclear submarines from the U.S. and Britain. Indeed, in the lead up to the elections, Albanese’s ALP even sought to position itself as more extreme in its opposition to the PRC than the right-wing Coalition. Thus, the ALP joined the hysterical, anti-China denunciations of the deal leasing part of the civilian port of Darwin to a Chinese company. Moreover, ALP leaders criticised the Morrison government for not bullying enough the Solomon Islands into renouncing their security cooperation with China. At the same time, the ALP tops canvassed to the capitalist class that they could do a better job than their rivals of dragging South Pacific countries back into the Australian ruling class’ tight hold. They argued that they would restore the Australian regime’s damaged credentials in the region through taking a more rational verbal position on issues – like climate change – knowing full well that Pacific island countries vulnerable to rising sea-levels are only too aware that Australia’s carbon emissions per person are among the highest in the world and nearly two and a half times larger than China’s. Australia’s capitalist rulers have been more than convinced. As far as they are concerned, the ALP passed with high distinction their test requiring that any prospective government commit to zealously pursuing the anti-communist Cold War against China. Moreover, Labor’s assurances that they could do all this while simultaneously restoring full trade relations with China through dialling down the ferocity of Canberra’s anti-China rhetoric also impressed the corporate elite.

THE STANCE THAT MARXISTS SHOULD HAVE TAKEN TOWARDS THE
ELECTIONS IN ORDER TO ADVANCE ANTI-CAPITALIST RESISTANCE

Before finalising their decision not to throw their massive economic might against the election of an ALP government, there was one final important requirement that Australia’s capitalists vetted the ALP over. They wanted to be sure that Labor would be all the way with Canberra’s Western allies in waging the West’s defacto war against Russia via their Ukrainian proxies. To be sure, initially the war was mainly a squalid battle for territory between the respective capitalist classes of Ukraine and Russia. In such an inter-capitalist war, the working people of both countries had no side except opposition to their own respective rulers. However, even from the very start of the war, an important additional aspect of the conflict was Russia’s just struggle to keep the nuclear-armed NATO warmongers from its Western border, on the one hand, and, on the other, Kiev’s kowtowing to the interests of Western imperialism. Before long, this second aspect of the conflict became the dominant one. The U.S. and its British, EU, Australian and Canadian allies poured into Ukraine such huge amounts of weapons, military advisers, intelligence assistance and propaganda backing, that in a matter of weeks this conflict ceased to be primarily a Ukraine-Russia war and effectively became a conflict between the Western imperialists and Russia with Ukraine acting as the proxy for the former. The U.S. imperialists want to subordinate Russia and reduce her to the humiliated status that she had in the first decade and a half after the early 1990s capitalist counterrevolution devastated her and the other lands of the former USSR. They want to ensure that Russia does not obstruct their predatory designs on the resource rich Caucuses and Central Asian regions. Moreover, the U.S.-led imperialists cannot tolerate Russia or anyone else being an independent, nuclear-armed power, especially if that power has failed to sign up to their Cold War drive against Red China. To be sure, the Australian ruling class’ reasons for opposing Russia are very different to their opposition to socialistic China. Most notably, unlike the PRC, Russia is a fellow capitalist country. Moreover, Russia has few interests in the South Pacific and Southeast Asian region. She is not obstructing Australian multinational corporations from plundering this region. Nor do the Australian capitalists have any significant interests or ambitions within either Russia or its neighbouring regions that would enable them to gain some direct economic benefit from any subordination of Russia. That is why, in previous years, Australian regime officials had privately complained to Washington that it is expending too much energy countering Russia when it should be devoting all its efforts to suppressing Red China. However, once the U.S. and its other allies entered the recent war in a decisive manner, the Australian ruling class fell in behind its allies. It wants the power and prestige of the U.S. and the overall West to come out strengthened rather than damaged from the war. This is a matter of self interest for Australia’s capitalist rulers. It is Australia’s alliance with U.S. – and to a lesser extent British – military and economic might that enables Australia’s capitalists to subjugate the peoples of the South Pacific. If the powerful allies of Australia’s exploiting class are weakened, then its own tyranny in this region becomes endangered.

Here too on the question of the war in Ukraine, the ALP proved its credentials to the capitalist class. It enthusiastically backed the Morrison government’s imposition of sanctions on Russia and its sending of hundreds of millions of dollars of military equipment to the authoritarian regime in Ukraine. With the ALP thus on board on all the issues of greatest strategic concern to the capitalist class and with the latter having serious concerns about the corrupt Morrison government’s ability to hold back mass struggle in the context of plunging real wages, much of the ruling class chose to either back Albanese’s ALP in the elections or to be indifferent as to whether the ALP or the Coalition won. This is shown by the fact that just like the openly pro-boss Liberals, far-right parties, “Teal independents” and Greens, the various branches of the Labor Party received tens of millions of dollars in donations from both ultra-wealthy individuals and from corporations in the months and years leading up to last year’s federal elections. Moreover, significant sections of the capitalist-owned media sided with the ALP in the elections. Take, for instance, Nine Entertainment Holdings which owns Channel Nine TV, the 2GB radio station and the vast suite of newspapers that formerly belonged to the, now defunct, Fairfax Group. Nine Entertainment is owned by right-wing billionaire, Bruce Gordon, and the chairman of the corporation is none other than former federal treasurer and Liberal Party stalwart, Peter Costello. The flagship newspapers of the corporation, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, both editorialised for a vote to Albanese’s Labor at the elections. Also calling for a vote to the ALP was the “progressive” liberal, Guardian Australia online newspaper, a publications that has relied on massive financial contributions from wealthy capitalists to operate – including a huge initial investment from filthy rich, Australian tech tycoon Graeme Wood (at the nudging of Liberal Party then future prime minister Malcolm Turnbull) and large contributions to the British owners of the publication from foundations controlled by some of the most powerful American capitalists in history, including Bill Gates, the Ford family that control the Ford car company, the Hilton family owning the Hilton hotel chain and the Rockefeller family known for their vast oil, banking and property empire and their one-time advocacy of despicable fascistic “theories” like Social Darwinism and Eugenics. To be sure, the hard-right Murdoch family’s main newspapers like The Australian and the Daily Telegraph supported the Liberals at the elections. Yet, Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch were unperturbed enough about the prospect of a Labor government to recoil away from enforcing a uniform, anti-ALP election line on their outlets, unlike the uniform positions that they often enforce for questions that are important to them – like support for particular Western military interventions abroad. Thus, the Murdoch newspaper in the Northern Territory, the NT News actually editorialised for a vote to Labor.

With major sections of the capitalist class either backing, or being unconcerned by, an ALP election win, to call for a vote for the ALP at the elections would have been a call for upholding the overall interests of the capitalist class. To do so would have been harmful to the interests of the working class and oppressed just as would obviously have been any support for the reactionary, openly anti-union Coalition. As we put it in a Trotskyist Platform leaflet issued in the weeks leading up to the election:

“… the Labor Party (ALP) “alternative” is hell bent on proving to the big business owners, the people who really hold the power here, that an ALP administration will enforce capitalist interests as reliably as the Coalition does. Albanese’s ALP even proclaimed that a Labor government will not increase the paltry JobSeeker payments. So, at the upcoming elections, no vote should be given to either the Coalition or the ALP and Greens “alternatives” and obviously not to the racist One Nation or the other nationalist far-right outfits like the United Australia Party. Instead, we need hard-fought strikes and other mass actions by the workers movement and its allies to turn back the capitalists’ exploitation of workers, to resist their oppression of Aboriginal people, women and coloured ethnic communities and to oppose “their” regime’s military buildup. The more that the working class understands that their position will not be advanced through supporting any of the current parliamentary parties, the more determined they will be to build the mass struggles needed.”

Trotskyist Platform, For Militant Class Struggle Against Australia’s Capitalists!, 25 April 2022

Most of the other far-left groups rejected such a stance. They called either openly, or more often backhandedly through preferences, for a vote to the ALP. However, events since the Albanese government’s election have confirmed the correctness of our opposition to supporting either the Coalition or the ALP or indeed any of other current parliamentary parties. Since coming to office, the Labor government has upheld all its commitments to the big end of town, while delivering few of the meagre promises that it made to its working class base. Thus, the Albanese government has given tax cuts to the rich, maintained tax exemptions for wealthy property speculators, cut public hospital spending and maintained – and even strengthened – anti-strike laws. Its measures to lift wages are so limp and state Labor and Liberal governments so draconian in their determination to keep state public sector pay rises well below inflation, that not only are real wages falling even faster than they were during Morrison’s reign but even treasurer Jim Chalmers quietly concedes that real wages are expected to continue to fall until … at least, 2024!

Meanwhile, as promised to the capitalist bigwigs, the ALP has continued the Australian regime’s obsessive participation in the imperialist campaign to strangle socialistic rule in China. Indeed, it was literally just hours after Albanese and his cabinet had been sworn into government by “Her Majesty’s” representative (the Governor General) that Albanese and foreign minister Penny Wong flew off to a Quad meeting in Tokyo to advance the Cold War measures of the U.S.- Australia-Japan-India, anti-China alliance. That Albanese briefly met Chinese president Xi during the G20 summit is hardly a sign of an easing off of the Australian regime’s determination to participate in the anti-PRC Cold War. The government and the capitalist class that it serves wants to have a relationship with the PRC somewhat like the Japanese, German, New Zealand and French regimes, who are all fellow, zealous Cold War opponents of socialistic rule in China but maintain diplomatic relations with Beijing at the level just above that which causes trade to be seriously affected. Albanese and Penny Wong thus seek improvement in diplomatic exchanges with Beijing from Morrison’s time. This is especially because the inflation-plagued Australian economy is faltering. Yet, while seeking to reduce the temperature of diplomatic disputes with Beijing, Canberra is following through on its commitment to the capitalist class to continue to pile on the pressure on socialistic China. Since, the Albanese government took office, Australian warships and military aircraft have continued to provocatively traverse waters and skies claimed by Beijing in the South China Sea, thousands upon thousands of kilometres from Australia. Moreover, not only is the ALP government following through on the deposed conservative government’s plan to acquire long-range naval missiles and nuclear submarines, late last year it was revealed that the Albanese government was planning a still more threatening move against China – allowing the U.S. to deploy nuclear-capable B52 bombers at a base south of Darwin. Then, three weeks ago, it was revealed that the Albanese government would be buying the expensive, long-range HIMARS missile system from the United States. All this is part of an aggressive military build-up aimed at contributing to Cold War military pressure against the PRC. Meanwhile, in the South Pacific, the new government has followed through on its promise to intervene more aggressively in the region in order to shore up the interests of Australia’s capitalist class through sabotaging the efforts of regional countries to cooperate with the PRC. Indeed, Albanese and Penny Wong have intruded so coercively into the Solomon Islands that the Solomon Islands government responded to one such act of meddling last September with a defiant statement slamming Canberra’s move as “an assault on our parliamentary democracy” and “direct interference by a foreign government into our domestic affairs” (a brave act by the Solomon Islands government given that Western powers had stoked riots against them a year earlier and given the degree to which not only the upper levels of the country’s bureaucracy have been infiltrated by Australian officials and “advisers” but broader sections of the island nation’s civil institutions and media have been ensnared in the Australian ruling class’ influence operations).

Moreover, the new ALP government has taken over the baton from the previous government when it comes to participating in Western imperialism’s joint propaganda war against Red China. Three weeks ago, the government joined a very small number of other countries – including the U.S. and Britain – in imposing a requirement that travellers from China and only from China get a pre-departure COVID test. They forced through the new rule in spite of Australia’s chief medical officer and most other experts advising against the move! Clearly, the Australian government’s measure has little to do with protecting the Australian population from COVID and everything to do with trying to build negative perceptions of China by denigrating her COVID response, despite the fact that the PRC has so successfully protected her people from the pandemic that her COVID death rate per resident is currently 15 times lower than Australia’s. After having supported last November’s small anti-COVID-response protests in China – that were the Chinese version of the Far Right-instigated COVID “Freedom” protests in Australia and other Western countries – that opposed China’s mask mandates and PCR testing of COVID-affected regions, the Albanese government and its Western counterparts have now done a 180 degree flip and want to portray China’s recent relaxation of COVID controls as reckless. This is despite the PRC being in a much better position to protect her people from COVID deaths after reopening than Australia was when it opened up a year ago because the anti-viral medications that are now widely available in China – both from Western pharmaceutical firms and from Chinese ones – were not available at the time Australia opened up; and because China’s community-based COVID response (which involves doctors and nurses seeing patients in makeshift clinics within neighbourhoods and neighbourhood committees and local volunteers regularly checking up on the health condition of elderly and other COVID-vulnerable neighbours, while delivering medical kits and pandemic information) is very effective in ensuring that vulnerable COVID-infected people get prompt enough access to anti-viral medication and are speedily triaged to top-level hospitals.

Meanwhile, just like its right-wing predecessors, the Labor government has continued to claim that China is persecuting her Muslim Uyghur minority that live in the country’s northwest – a claim that not only have countries representing around 85% of the world’s population refused to sign on to during UN debates and motions (including every single Muslim majority country in the world other than for tiny U.S.-dependent Bosnia) but which the organisation of Islamic Cooperation, most Muslim-majority countries individually and much of Africa, the Middle East and Asia have denounced as a lie and instead emphatically praised China’s treatment of Muslim Uyghurs after sending fact-finding inspections to the country’s northwest.

The Albanese government has also more than delivered on its promise to the imperialist ruling class to continue the Morrison government’s support for the Washington-led proxy war against Russia. In July, Albanese exceeded the former prime minister’s level of support for the war by personally visiting Ukraine and meeting with its authoritarian president. Albanese announced during his trip that his government would provide Ukraine with an additional 34 armoured vehicles valued at $100 million. As Albanese has boasted many times, the Australian regime is now the largest non-NATO provider of military aid to Ukraine… or rather to the proxies of Western imperialism. This backing reached a new level last week when 70 Australian soldiers departed for Britain to participate in a British-led training program of Ukrainian troops.

THE LABOR PARTY HAS ALWAYS BETRAYED ITS WORKING CLASS BASE

Although none of the Labor Party’s working class supporters thought that the Albanese government was going to seriously redistribute income and power from the big end of town to the masses, even their most modest hopes of progressive change are gradually being dashed. Yet this is hardly a new experience for Labor supporters. The ALP has always betrayed its base. This is not merely a matter of a lack of resolute, selfless leaders or a matter of the leadership not living up to the “principles” of the Labor Party. Mostly, it is because the social democratic strategy that the Labor Party commits itself to is incapable of delivering major, lasting benefits for its mass base. Social democracy seeks to improve the lives of the masses without fundamentally challenging the tremendous economic and political power of the capitalist class … or by “postponing” constructing that challenge to the distant never reached “right moment”. This becomes a recipe for resigning oneself to the domination of society by the big end of town and capitulating to their demands on the most decisive issues. By thereby accepting the supremacy of the capitalists, while negotiating with the latter on terms of their dominance in society on the nominal behalf of the working class masses, social democratic politicians, union leaders and NGO heads gain a highly respectable position in society as well as privileged incomes compared to their support base. They also acquire personal links with the big end of town that facilitate future lucrative careers in the corporate world. All this entices them to bow down even more subserviently to the capitalist bigwigs whenever the latter get angry that social democratic leaders are demanding “too much” on behalf of their support base.

Any working class based political party in a capitalist country faces not only the direct pressure of the capitalists but also the pressure of the state institutions. Despite the state being a body that nominally “treats everyone equally”, in practice, in capitalist societies the government departments, the bureaucracies, the courts, police, army and secret police all act as upholders of the interests of the racist, capitalist exploiting class. Just look at what has been revealed during the course of the Royal Commission into the former Morrison government’s despised “Robodebt” scheme, in which the regime’s computers, supposedly checking for “over-claiming” by welfare recipients, automatically sent messages to nearly half a million of this country’s most economically vulnerable people unlawfully demanding payments of non-existing debts, in some cases of up to tens of thousands of dollars. What testimony during the investigation showed is that it was not just Morrison and his ministers who were driving the Robodebt scheme. So were many highly-paid, senior government bureaucrats who shared the anti-working class Liberal government’s determination to suck every cent that they could out of low-income welfare recipients. Indeed it was bureaucrats from the Department of Human Services rather than Coalition ministers that first proposed Robodebt. Later, after the harm caused by Robodebt became widely known, calls by lower down staff for the scheme to be seriously overhauled were met with hostility by upper bureaucrats.

Meanwhile, two months ago, there were revelations of just how intense racism and hostility to leftists is within Queensland Police ranks. In recordings taken at the Brisbane city police watch house, a large number of cops engaged in discussions expressing their extreme hatred of black Africans, Muslim people, Aboriginal people and leftist protesters and also their contempt and concocted “fear” of being overwhelmed by Africans, Chinese, Indian and Muslim people and migrants more generally. Chillingly, some officers even discussed the possibility of beating to death and burying black Africans and expressed their wish to violently attack anti-racist, climate change and refugee rights protesters.

Given the racist, anti-leftist and anti-working class character of bureaucratic organs in Australia and other capitalist countries, any party that comes into government promising progressive, pro-working class measures would face sabotage of their agenda from the state agencies nominally under their “control”. Understanding this, we communists understand that in order to implement thoroughgoing, progressive social change, the working class, united with all the oppressed, must first grab state power by replacing the existing capitalist state with its own organs built to defend the interests of the working class masses and all the downtrodden. On the road to such a workers revolution, the exploited and oppressed can win immediate gains and concessions from the ruling capitalists through class struggle and other mass actions provided that they maintain complete political independence from all institutions of the capitalist state. In contrast, the approach of social democrats – whether of its most right-wing practitioners like the ALP or it’s most avowedly pro-socialist, left-wing elements – is to seek to wield the existing capitalist state in the service of the masses. Yet given that this state has been built up and maintained to enforce the interests of the capitalist ruling class, social democrat-administered governments, aware of the resistance that they would face from their own state agencies, almost always recoil from implementing the more progressive aspects of their agendas, even in those cases where pressure from their working class base pushes them to promise a more radical program.

In very rare cases when a social democratic party in government still insists on following through on a more explicitly pro-working class agenda, their government ends up being overthrown by the state institutions that they nominally head. Most infamously in September 1973 in Chile, the elected Socialist Party-led government of then Chilean president Salvador Allende, which had nationalised some industries and sought to improve workers’ living standards, was overthrown in a coup by the Chilean military backed by the country’s police. That the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) helped the American CIA to conduct a destabilisation campaign against Allende in order to foment the right-wing coup underscores the intensely pro-capitalist political character of Australia’s state organs. A few months before the coup, the then newly elected ALP government led by Gough Whitlam found out about the ASIS operation in Chile. Whitlam did order the ASIS operation to be disbanded. But this was only because he feared that it would be politically damaging if the plot was exposed. Indeed the ASIS chief at the time made clear to fellow spies that “personally he [Whitlam] would have wished to approve” the operation. Moreover, while ordering the end of ASIS’s role in the destabilisation plot, Whitlam facilitated the ongoing CIA operation against the elected Allende government by choosing not to expose it. This did not stop the CIA from carrying out a covert destabilisation campaign against Whitlam’s own administration! That culminated in the November 1975 overthrow of the Labor government in a right-wing coup executed by the British monarchy’s representative and long-time participant in CIA front organisations, then Governor General John Kerr. Although Whitlam was far more conservative and far less principled than the avowed Marxist, Allende, the American regime felt that he was still not a reliable enough backer of the critical Pine Gap U.S./Australia spy base in the Northern Territory. That the most progressive Labor government in Australian history was overthrown in such a coup shows the impossibility of realising even the rather modest aims of the Laborite project. That Whitlam had earlier stabbed his fellow social democrat Allende in the back by keeping him in the dark about the CIA destabilisation operation and by refusing to publicly expose the American interference plot only shows how the social democratic perspective of seeking to govern with the tolerance of the capitalist bigwigs and their state agencies inevitably means betraying the interests of the working class.

WHEN IT IS USEFUL TO GIVE CRITICAL ELECTORAL SUPPORT TO A
SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY AND WHEN TO DO SO WOULD BE A BETRAYAL

Despite the political bankruptcy of social democracy, there are certain times when mass working class based social democratic parties, like the ALP, could be pushed by their base to stand on a more explicitly pro-working class platform. This would be at a time of left-wing radicalisation of the working class and during a period of greater class struggle. Leaders of social democratic parties may then use the strengthened activity of their base to try and pressure the capitalists into granting some concessions to their base in order to dampen their mobilisation. At the same time, social democratic parties may put forward more overtly pro-working class demands and push to the fore more left-wing elements of their parties in order to maintain the authority of their base, so that they will be able to contain the radicalising working class and prevent them from heading in a revolutionary direction. In such circumstances, especially if the social democratic party has been out of government for a lengthy period, the working class masses could have serious expectations that should the party win office they would institute major pro-working class reforms. Although, in the event of a working class radicalisation, the worried capitalist class will be looking to social democracy to save their system from a resurgent working class, the demands that a social democratic party may be pushed to put forward could be too much for the capitalists to accept. In such scenarios, the capitalists as a whole may choose to actively campaign against the election of the social democratic party to government. If that were to happen, it may be worthwhile for communists to give electoral support to the mass social democratic party in order to deliver a political defeat to the capitalists and, thereby, embolden the anti-capitalist sentiments of the working class mases. Moreover, given that major pro-working class measures can only be implemented against the resistance of the capitalists through the powerful push of class struggle mobilisation, having a social democratic party in government when it actually stands on an anti-capitalist agenda can help intensify class struggle. However, any electoral support given by communists to a social democratic party like the Labor Party would be given with unyielding criticism of that party. We would point out that the social democratic party is incapable of realising its more worthy promises because it always ultimately seeks an accommodation with the capitalist exploiting class and because it is loyal to the capitalist state that enforces the interests of the exploiting class. Communists would warn the working class masses that the social democrats in government would inevitably betray them. We would insist that only class struggle action that is based on maintaining complete political independence from all the arms of the capitalist state can ensure major advances for the working class in the present; and that such gains can only be secured and reach decisive levels if the working class is able to lead all the oppressed in the seizure of state power. Thus, even in situations where it would be appropriate to give electoral support to a social democratic party, communists would be, in the words of Russian Revolution leader V.I. Lenin, seeking to support the social democratic party “in the same way as the rope supports a hanged man.”

When Lenin wrote the above words in April-May 1920 he was outlining why he believed that communists in Britain at the time should call for a vote for the British Labour Party while explaining to the masses that a Labor government would inevitably betray its working class supporters. Since then, nominally Marxist, left social democratic groups have seized on Lenin’s words to advocate giving electoral support to mass social democratic parties in every election, irrespective of the platform that those parties may claim to stand on. However, when Lenin advocated giving critical electoral support to the British Labour Party, the latter was claiming to stand on a program very different to Albanese’s Australian Labour Party today. With the most politically advanced layers of the British working class inspired by the socialist revolution in Russia two and a half years earlier and demanding a struggle for socialism in Britain, the leaders of the British Labour Party at the time knew that they would need to show some socialist credentials if they were to retain the loyalty of the British working class. In February 1918, notably just three months after Russia’s socialist revolution, the British Labour Party wrote into its constitution a commitment to socialist public ownership of the economy. They adopted Clause IV into their constitution, which stated that: “To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.” In contrast, not only does the ALP today not even pretend to stand for nationalisation of the economy and socialism, it is known by the politically engaged masses for having supported privatisation. Indeed, it was the 1983-1996 Hawke/Keating ALP governments that unleashed the privatisation wave that has swept Australia over the last four decades. That Labor government sold off the Commonwealth Bank and Qantas. Then, in 2002, the Carr NSW Labor government and the Bracks Victorian Labor government joined with the then Howard federal Liberal-National government to privatise the bulk of Australia’s rail freight operations. Meanwhile, state Labor governments have sold off public housing and state-owned electricity generation and retail with almost as much vigour as their right-wing opponents.

Another major difference between the British Labour Party of 1920 and today’s ALP was in their respective attitudes to the capitalist war drive against the then biggest workers states of their times. To be sure, in 1920 the leaders of the British Labour Party were as hostile to Soviet Russia (the only workers state then) as the ALP leaders are today towards socialistic China. However, Britain’s Labour Party heads also knew that there was considerable sympathy for the Soviet workers state amongst the most politically active ranks of the British working class. This sympathy combined with war weariness (following World War I) and pacifist sentiments led to a number of protest actions against the British government’s military intervention in Russia that was supporting anti-communist forces that were waging a civil war to overthrow the young Soviet workers state and restore capitalist-landlord rule. There were even a series of daring mutinies by British forces in Russia who demanded to be sent home. Meanwhile, within Britain itself, troops staged mutinies against plans to send them to Russia. Then during the very weeks in April-May 1920 when Lenin was writing the book, “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder, where he made that call for British communists at the time to give critical electoral support to the Labour Party “in the same way as the rope supports a hanged man”, there were two very powerful actions by British workers in opposition to the government’s shipment of arms and munitions to the capitalist Polish regime that was waging a war against Soviet Russia. In one, seamen sabotaged barges carrying munitions to the Polish troops causing the barges to sink. Then dock and coal workers refused to load and supply the ship Jolly George that had been scheduled to send munitions to Poland. In these various actions and munities, rank- and-file Labour members participated. Aware of this, when the British government weeks later announced that it would be sending troops to Poland to help fight against Soviet Russia, the Labour Party leaders and pro-Labour trade union heads called for protest actions to oppose the intervention. They built Councils of Action across the country to oppose the expedition to Poland, organised a series of massive protests and even threatened a general strike should the intervention go ahead. As a result, the British government had to abandon its plans to openly support the Polish regime’s war on the Soviet workers state. How different was the stance of the British Labour Party in 1920 towards the war drive against the Soviet workers state from the policies of today’s ALP towards the war drive against socialistic China! Today, even before the elections, Albanese’s ALP vowed to prosecute the rapid anti-China expansion of the Australian military, expand the presence of U.S. forces in Australia aimed against Red China and continue the Australian navy’s participation in provocative Western military incursions into China-claimed waters off her coast.

None of the above changes the fact that Britain’s Labour Party in 1920 was just as much an enemy of the fight for workers revolution then as the Australian Labor Party is today. The British Labour Party was fresh from having criminally led workers into supporting their “own” capitalist exploiters in the horrific inter-imperialist slaughter that was World War I. Labour Party leaders even took up cabinet posts in a wartime coalition government led by the Liberal Party. It was for good reason that Lenin had labelled social democratic parties like the Labour Party a “stinking corpse”. The British Labour Party leadership’s pro-socialist posturing was largely about maintaining its hold over a radicalising working class. In 1919, British workers had unleashed a massive strike wave that continued into 1920. Labour parliamentary and union leaders while nominally supporting the strikes worked overtime to ensure that they did not reach the level that would threaten the stability of the capitalist order. This is despite the unions representing the miners, railways workers and dockers and other transport workers having earlier formed themselves into a Triple Alliance promising to stand as one to fight for their demands. However, when each section of workers was facing major disputes with their bosses in 1919 and 1920, the pro-Labour Party union leaders refused to call out their members to strike as one as the Triple Alliance promised. Labour leaders held the same attitude to the promises of Clause IV as they did to the Triple Alliance. Clause IV existed to express a sentiment that would maintain the allegiance of pro-socialist workers to Labour but provided no program of action as to how an economic system in Britain based on “common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange” was going to be actually achieved. This was because the social democratic Labour leaders were unwilling to mobilise the revolutionary struggle needed to win such a system.

However, for most British workers it meant a lot that the leaders of the party that they saw as their party was promising to nationalise the mines and railways, greatly increase the provision of public housing and significantly redistribute income from the capitalists to the workers should they win the next election. To be sure, Lenin pointed out that the most politically advanced section of the British working class already distrusted Labour Party leaders and their commitment to deliver on their stated agenda. They had been convinced of this through communist propaganda and theory. However, the majority of workers could not be educated in this way. They needed to be shown through their own experience that social democracy is incapable of bringing a fundamental redistribution of power and wealth in society towards the working class – let alone open the road to socialism. Thus Lenin argued that it was necessary to get Labour elected to government and be put to the test. At the same time, communists must explain to the mass of British workers that communists are helping them to get the Labour Party elected in order to prove to them that the Labour Party will surely betray working class people. Communists would say to the British workers: we will prove to you that only our communist program can bring you lasting improvements in living standards, public ownership and socialism.

Yet such a tactic only made sense because British workers at the time could have genuine illusions that the Labour Party would nationalise key industries, seriously redistribute income towards the workers and make steps toward socialism. No politically engaged worker in Australia could have had illusions before last May’s elections that Albanese’s ALP was going to do any of these things. For not only did the ALP never promise any nationalisations, it was careful to not even speak about redistributing wealth from the capitalists to the masses in even the mildest way. Indeed, while the ALP did promise to stop the decline in real wages, it also promised to follow through on implementing the Coalition’s planned tax cuts for the rich – a promise that they dutifully kept!

Lenin’s advocacy of the tactic of critical support was also shaped by the attitude of the British capitalist class towards the Labour Party. Openly declaring his fear of a Labour victory, then prime minister from the capitalist Liberal Party, Lloyd George, compared the Labour Party to the Bolsheviks! He was of course completely wrong! However, such statements from capitalist leaders could only reinforce illusions amongst politically conscious British workers that the Labour Party would advance the country towards socialism. Moreover, the anti-Labour rants of Lloyd George and his then secretary of state for war, Winston Churchill, showed the then gulf between the agenda that the Labour Party had been pushed by their base to promise and the level of pro-working class reforms that the capitalist class were prepared to accept. In such a situation, an electoral victory for the Labour Party against the openly capitalist parties would be seen as a victory for the working class over the capitalists that would raise the fighting morale of anti-capitalist workers. This situation definitely did not occur in Australia around the May 2022 elections. A gauge of what the big end of town thought about the triumph of Albanese’s ALP in the last federal elections can be seen by comparing Australia’s stock market index immediately before and after the May 21 election. Not only was there no dramatic fall but the index actually rose slightly. This proved that much of the capitalist class were either mildly sympathetic or ambivalent towards the Labor victory over the conservatives. There was certainly no fear amongst wealthy investors that a Labor election would lead to a major reduction in the rate of capitalist profits.

The most important reason why Lenin and the other Bolshevik leaders, like Trotsky, thought that British communists should give critical electoral support to Britain’s Labour Party is because, at the time, that party had never previously led a national government. That meant that the majority of Labour’s working class base still had many illusions that should the party take over the government, this would lead to a substantial improvement in their living standards and major advances towards socialism. Many workers held the social democratic illusion that since workers make up the majority of the population, they could take over society through “democratic elections”. These hopes were reinforced by the then still expanding suffrage in Britain that was expanding the right to vote to workers who had been previously disenfranchised by laws restricting the right to vote to those who owned more than a specified amount of property. It was only in 1918 that all property requirements for male voters were scrapped granting the right to vote to the 40% of males hitherto denied suffrage because they lacked sufficient property; and that the right to vote was at long last extended to a large number of women (provided that they were over 30 and had some property – it took until 1928 for British women to be granted the same voting rights as men). British working class people expected that this expanded suffrage for working class people, the prospect of a future expansion of suffrage to low-income women lacking property and to younger women and the hoped-for scrapping of laws allowing business owners and other, mostly wealthy, individuals to vote twice, would open the way for workers to finally bring their numbers in society to bear in the political field. Lenin and the other leaders of the Communist International understood that it would take the experience of Labour in government to dash the hopes of the mass of politically engaged British workers that there could be an electoral road to socialism.

More than a century later, when workers in both Britain and Australia have been subjected to many Labour/Labor governments over the decades, such illusions amongst workers have been disappointed many times over. Indeed, over the last four decades, the Australian Labor Party has headed the federal government for a full half of this period. Therefore, right now, working class people in Australia do not have unrealistic expectations that a Labor government would fundamentally restructure society in their interests. That means that for communists to today consider applying the tactic of critical support towards the Labor Party, the ALP would need to stand on a far more emphatic pro-working class agenda than would have been required for communists to apply critical support in the period before the ALP first headed a majority government or in the period when it had been out of office for several decades (as was the case when the Whitlam Labor government was elected in 1972). The leaders of the anti-revolutionary ALP would only proclaim such an agenda if they were pushed to do so by a huge surge in militancy and left-wing radicalism of their working class base. Yet when the socialist consciousness of working class people reaches the next level – when the majority of the politically active section of the toiling masses is not only intent on resisting capitalist exploitation but desire the sweeping away of the entire capitalist order – then the time for electoral tactics becomes superseded; and communists will need to immediately organise a direct struggle for the working class seizure of state power. Therefore, while it still exists, the window, in terms of working class consciousness, in which the tactic of critical support to mass social democratic parties is applicable is narrower than it was a century ago.

What is called for before determining whether the tactic of critical support should be applied towards a particular social democratic party is a careful examination of what the party is claiming to stand for, what attitude the capitalist class is taking towards that party, what the sentiments of the working class are and what the general state of the class struggle is. What is definitely not needed is to mindlessly campaign for the victory of mass social democratic parties at every election based on what Lenin advocated towards the British Labour Party more than a century ago ‒ a position that was based on the particular circumstances at the time where that party had never previously led a government and, pushed by the striking growth in pro-socialist sentiments amongst their base following the October 1917 Russian Revolution, was proclaiming its intent to nationalise key industries and oppose its own rulers’ war moves against Soviet Russia. Those far-left groups that advocated a vote for the ALP at last year’s federal elections when the ALP was not even pretending to stand on an anti-capitalist program achieved the very opposite of Lenin’s tactic of supporting a mass social democratic party “in the way that a rope supports a hanged man.” Instead of helping to break the working class masses from allegiance to the ALP in the direction of support for communism, their call for support to the ALP pushed the masses, disgruntled at the Labor Party’s subservience to the capitalist bigwigs, back towards the Labor Party. No matter what else they said, by calling to support Albanese’s ALP, these pseudo-Leninist groups sent a message to those that they have influence over that no matter how much the ALP upholds the domination of the big end of town at home and the international agenda of that class abroad, workers have “no choice” but to support the ALP as “a lesser evil”. This can only breed despair and demoralisation amongst the working class. It harms the building of class struggle resistance to the capitalist exploiters.

WHAT ABOUT THE GREENS?

Given how small are the differences between Labor’s agenda and that of the Liberals, the Greens have gained a growing following amongst progressive-minded youth and the small-l liberal, middle class. They are attracted to the Greens by some progressive policies that the Greens advocate. This includes the Greens platform calling for dental to be covered by Medicare. Unlike the ALP, whose plan to grow “social” housing only involves a small increase in privately owned, “community housing” rather than any increase in public housing, the Greens stand for actually increasing public housing, albeit at a modest pace. However, to implement such reforms, let alone really substantial anti-poverty measures, requires standing up to inevitable resistance from the majority of the capitalist class. The Greens cannot do this because they reject a class struggle outlook. This is because the Greens actually embrace wealthy capitalists in their own party and a dominant role in their party is played by upper-middle class elements who gain part of their income from capitalist share investments. For example, one capitalist investor, Duncan Turpie, has personally donated over a million dollars to the Greens over the last few years. Therefore, lacking both the will and ability to challenge capitalist power, any Greens in government will inevitably bend to the demands of the powerful capitalists.

That is why in the early 2010s, when the Greens had two ministries in the then Tasmanian government, they were part of a joint government with Labor that cut nursing jobs and public housing maintenance. Federally, as part of a defacto coalition with Labor from 2010 to 2013, the Greens helped oversee the final privatisation of Telstra begun under John Howard. Today, they back the rest of the capitalist class’ drive to strangle socialistic rule in China. Indeed, while opposing the AUKUS nuclear submarine plans, the Greens are even more rabid than either Labor or the Coalition when it comes to spewing the lying “human rights” tirades against China that “rationalises” such military escalation. In this the Australian Greens are similar to their German counterparts who today form a key part of Germany’s coalition government alongside the Social Democratic Party and the avidly neoliberal, Free Democratic Party. The leader of Germany Greens, Annalena Baerbock, is that country’s foreign minister. While preferring to wrap their meddling imperialist agenda in more “human rights” packaging than their right-wing counterparts, Germany’s Greens are so extreme in supporting both Western imperialism’s proxy war against Russia and its Cold War drive against socialistic China that they would make neoconservatives blush! A future Greens role in the Australian government, either as a coalition with Labor or alone, would similarly see them act as imperialist warriors with a “progressive” face. Although the Greens call for lowering defence spending to 1.5% of GDP that would still be much higher than the likes of Canada and Japan and, on a per person level, nearly five times higher than China’s. The Greens international agenda is to support essentially the same imperialist interests of Australia’s capitalist class that Labor and the Coalition uphold, while pushing to supplement military might with greater use of “human rights” propaganda, increased support for pro-Western opposition movements in countries targeted by Western imperialism and deeper utilisation of Australian government aid as a means of political manipulation.

The Greens unwillingness and inability, as a party, to resolutely stand up to the rest of the capitalist establishment has sometimes even been evident when their own members have been targeted by other sections of the ruling class. Greens politicians are frequently pilloried by Far-Right parties, right-wing Coalition MPs, the Murdoch media, conservative think tanks and other organs of the hard right-wing of the capitalist class. Copping such, often vicious
and personal, attacks is indeed part of what gives the Greens credibility with progressive-minded people. A favourite target of the rabid right-wing is the federal Greens First Nations portfolio head – DjabWurrung Gunnai Gunditjmara Aboriginal woman and senator from Victoria, Lidia Thorpe. Before becoming a Greens senator, Thorpe had been well known as a staunch activist for Aboriginal rights. Thus, her entry into the Greens gave the party increased authority amongst many Aboriginal people and leftists. In May 2017, at the Uluru Aboriginal convention where supporters of constitutional recognition created their petition calling for the establishment of a First Nations “Voice” enshrined in the Australian Constitution, Lidia Thorpe was one of the staunch activists who walked out of the convention in protest at the direction it was heading in. She stated at the time, “We as sovereign First Nations people reject constitutional recognition. We do not recognise occupying power or their sovereignty, because it serves to disempower, and takes away our voice,” insisting that, “We need to protect and preserve our sovereignty.” When the new Albanese government announced its intention to push for the implementation of the advisory “Voice”, Thorpe made clear that she was not going to simply roll over and accept the scheme that was being championed by small-l liberals, social democrats, “progressive”-liberals and many mainstream conservatives. Lidia Thorpe insisted that a Treaty between the government and Aboriginal people, a Truth Commission to lay bare all the genocidal crimes that have been perpetrated against Aboriginal people, the stopping of Aboriginal deaths in custody and providing proper compensation for Aboriginal people who were stolen from their families when children, all took precedence over the “Voice”. As a result of this stance, the centrist and “progressive” sections of the ruling class establishment joined their right-wing counterparts in setting their political gunsights on Thorpe. It was, indeed, the supposedly centrist-“progressive” ABC News that led the renewed witch hunt against Lidia Thorpe. They sensationalised an “exposé’” about how Thorpe had once briefly dated a former Victorian leader of an “outlaw” bikie gang. Quickly, the rest of the racist establishment joined the beat up claiming that Thorpe had a potential conflict of interest because she sat on a parliamentary “law enforcement committee”, even though the person she dated had years before left the motorcycle group and had no criminal convictions and despite the committee having not even inquired into outlaw motorcycle groups during Thorpe’s time as a member. Indeed, the man Thorpe briefly dated, who is a strong supporter of Aboriginal rights, seems to be a saint relative to the greedy, often corrupt and frequently racist capitalist exploiters that most parliamentarians associate with. Yet, less than an hour after the ABC unleashed this revamped witch-hunt against Lidia Thorpe, Greens leader Adam Bandt cowardly forced his First Nations portfolio head to resign as the Greens deputy leader in the Senate. Bandt also publicly condemned Thorpe for showing a “significant lack of judgement”, while saying nothing against the obvious beat up against her. A party that cannot even defend one of its own leaders against a ruling class witch hunt, moreover one laden with large amounts of racism and misogyny, is incapable of standing up to the rest of the capitalist ruling class more generally. The Greens should be given no political support – including at election time!

Several socialist groups that stood to the left of the Greens also ran in the May 2022 federal elections. Unlike the Greens, these parties proudly proclaim themselves anti-capitalist organisations. Among these groups is Socialist Alliance. Whereas the Greens advocate maintaining the U.S.-Australia alliance – only calling for it to be “renegotiated” – Socialist Alliance rightly demand an end to the alliance. Moreover, while the Greens leadership refused to defend their own First Nations portfolio head, Lidia Thorpe, from the reactionary witch hunt unleashed against her five months after the elections, Socialist Alliance had the decency to condemn the attack upon her. However, Socialist Alliance tied their 2022 electoral campaign to the Greens. They called not only for directing preferences to the Greens but for a vote to the Greens in seats where their own party was not standing. This is despite Socialist Alliance and other pro-Greens socialists sometimes acknowledging the capitalist essence of the Greens. By advocating a vote for the Greens, Socialist Alliance and other pro-Greens socialists are undermining class struggle by, in effect, promoting the false notion that a wing of the capitalist class – represented by the Greens – can improve workers’ lives. This is as harmful to the building of militant unions as the false notion at the workplace level that workers can improve their lot by helping “nicer” managers to become their top bosses.

The tailing of the Greens by the likes of Socialist Alliance not only reflects their failure to insist on the independence of the working class movement from all wings of the capitalist class – including the “progressive”-liberal wing represented by the Greens – but also the fact that these reformist socialist groups share not only the Greens’ progressive positions but also share its reactionary loyalty to the key global strategic agendas of the Australian capitalist class. Thus, Socialist Alliance, like the Greens, are avid supporters of the U.S.-NATO-Australian regimes’ proxy war against Russia. An 18 September 2022 Socialist Alliance resolution even supported the supply of arms to Ukraine by these Western regimes. Still more harmfully, Socialist Alliance apes the Greens in lining up behind the principle strategic goal of the U.S. and Australian imperialist ruling classes: to destroy the Chinese workers state. Socialist Alliance excuses this position by ridiculously claiming that China is just another “capitalist” country and, what’s more, one dominated by “authoritarian nationalist politics.” With these rationales, Socialist Alliance, while rightly opposing the U.S.-Australia military build up against China, fervently support the Western imperialists’ anti-communist propaganda assaults on Red China over “human rights”. They also support all the forces attacking socialistic rule in China from within – from the pro-colonial, upper-middle class, anti-communist opposition forces in Hong Kong to the Taiwanese capitalist ruling class seeking to guarantee its rule of exploitation through securing independence from socialistic China to last November’s Chinese version of the Far Right-instigated, anti-COVID response “Freedom” protests. Unless Socialist Alliance both dumps their support for the imperialist-driven campaign to undermine the Chinese workers state and breaks free from the orbit of the “progressive”-capitalist Greens, they should not be given even critical electoral support – including at the upcoming NSW state election.

WHAT THE MAY 2022 ELECTION RESULTS SIGNIFIED

The Greens gained significantly during last May’s federal elections. With an increasing share of the vote, they boosted their numbers in the Lower House from one seat to four seats and their Senate numbers went up by to twelve seats from the nine held previously. Although the Coalition were badly defeated, the ALP’s first preference vote actually fell slightly. The loss in Coalition vote in affluent areas was in good part siphoned off to so-called Teal “independents” that advocated greater action against climate change, gender equality and more small-l liberal social policies. Their success represented a rebuff by the liberal sections of the upper class and upper middle-class to the Liberal-National’s increasingly extreme, rightward course on social policies, resistance to action on climate change and male chauvinist internal culture. These “independents” grabbed six formerly safe Liberal seats in urban and suburban areas in addition to those that they held prior to the elections. However, these Teal independents are as committed to anti-working class, neoliberal economic policies as the conservatives. Their campaigns relied on lavish funding from corporate bigwigs and other wealthy individuals. Some of this went directly to TEAL candidates and the rest was funnelled through campaign groups like Climate 200, which alone provided nearly $6 million dollars to TEAL candidates. Among those making donations well in excess of $1 million to the TEALs and Climate 200 were Australia’s fourth and fifth richest capitalist exploiters – Atlassian cofounders Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar – and the CEO of trading outfit VivCourt, Rob Keldoulis. Also providing big bucks for the TEALs is Climate 200 convenor, Simon Holmes à Court, a capitalist investor and one of the heirs to the wealth of his father, Australia’s first billionaire, ruthless corporate raider Robert Holmes à Court. On the opposite political flank of the Coalition, the Liberals and Nationals lost votes to the Far-Right parties. The parties to the right of the Coalition increased their vote by nearly 60% relative to the previous elections. That means that last May’s elections saw one in eight people vote in the Lower House for a range of extreme right-wing parties including the racist Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and Liberal Democratic parties and billionaire Clive Palmer’s ultra-nationalist, United Australia Party. This reflected the dangerously growing right-wing extremism of a chunk of Australia’s disgruntled middle class and self-employed layers – a result of their economic insecurities in the context of the decaying capitalist order and the present failure of the workers movement to provide a powerful anti- capitalist alternative that could channel the legitimate component of middle-class grievances. The splintering away, in either direction, from the main parties of the capitalist class, the Liberals and the Nationals, ultimately reflects the crisis of confidence that the capitalist class feels internally as it agonises over the economic and social crises of its own system, on the one hand, and on the other, panics over the implications posed by the successes of socialistic rule in the world’s most populous country.

Given that there was no mass workers party running on an anti-capitalist platform in last May’s elections, the most crucial aspect of the election results to examine was the proportion of people who did not cast valid votes. It turns out that the number of people who risked a fine by neither showing up to vote nor filling out a postal ballot increased by 25% from the previous elections – reflecting fading hopes in the supposedly “democratic” political system. Over one in ten voters did this. More interesting still is to analyse the number of people who turned up to the ballot boxes to get their names ticked off to avoid a fine and then did not cast a valid vote. Some of these people even wrote messages criticising the political parties instead of numbering the boxes. More than eight hundred thousand people in this way “voted” Informal at last May’s federal elections. Although a very small proportion of these people may have simply filled out the forms in error, for the most part, their Informal “vote” represented distrust of all the political parties running in the elections.

Such anti-establishment suspicion could come from a number of different standpoints. In the worst case it could reflect people’s adherence to any number of crazy, inherently right-wing, conspiracy theories or to the fact that each extreme right-wing party was not on the ballot in every seat where there were people who wanted to vote for them. However, the greatest share of the Informal vote came from working class voters – often from people of colour backgrounds – who would never dream of voting for the Liberals or Far-Right parties but are understandably disillusioned with the ALP for not standing up for their interests. This is proven by the big disparity in the Informal “vote” between the wealthy electorates and the strongly, pro-ALP working class electorates. Thus in the rich Sydney electorate of Wentworth, which includes plush suburbs like Bellevue Hill, Point Piper, Rose Bay and Vaucluse, just 2.5% of people “voted” Informal. Wealthy residents trust the political system and their casting of valid votes reflects their understanding that they have a voice in how the system operates. In contrast, the opposite sentiment is significant in working class areas. Thus, in the Sydney electorate of Blaxland, which largely consists of heavily Asian, Middle Eastern, African and Islander working class suburbs like Auburn, Bankstown, Chester Hill and Villawood, the Informal “vote” was well over four times higher than it was in wealthy Wentworth. Nearly one in nine voters showed up to the ballots in Blaxland only to cast an Informal “vote”. Indeed, in particular voting booths in Sydney’s multiracial southwest, the Informal vote was even higher. In the Blaxland polling booth in Auburn West, nearly one in five voters cast an Informal “vote”. In the Villawood North polling booth in the seat of Fowler and the Fairfield Heights booth in the McMahon electorate, the Informal “vote” was also more than 18%. By contrast, a ten times lower proportion of voters cast an Informal “vote” at the polling booths in the wealthy Double Bay and Bellevue Hill South areas. Some mainstream political commentators, eager to cover up the distrust in the “democratic” system amongst the working class masses, patronisingly claim that the much higher Informal “vote” in migrant, working class areas is due to poor education and lack of English ability causing people not to know how to vote properly. However, while such problems caused by socio-economic disadvantage is a minor factor, it is not the main one. This is proven by the reality that the Informal “vote” in the Senate, where people have greater choice in the parties that they can vote for, is more than a third lower than it is in the Lower House vote. The fact that the Informal “vote” mostly represents a conscious choice to reject all the parties running in the elections is further proven by the fact that the Informal vote fluctuates widely from election to election. After all, if unintentional errors in filling out ballot papers were the cause of the Informal vote it should not swing so wildly from election to election.

Indeed, the narrow defeat of high-profile Labor candidate Kristina Keneally to a local independent in the multiracial, working class, southwestern Sydney electorate of Fowler can be, in good part, put down to the fact that well over one in ten voters – no doubt mostly potential Labor voters – turned up to the ballots to get their names ticked off and then cast an informal “vote”. Indeed, when a Trotskyist Platform supporter in this electorate explained to Labor election day canvassers why he would be “voting” Informal, the reaction of the Labor activists was along the lines off: Oh no, not you as well, please don’t waste your vote like so many other people! This indicated that many others in the electorate were “voting” Informal as a conscious rejection of all the parliamentary parties and in particular as a rebuff of the party that they see as the party which should represent them but which they rightly understand has betrayed them – the ALP.

WORKERS DO NEED A PARTY – BUT ONE BUILT TO ORGANISE
INTRANSIGENT RESISTANCE TO THE CAPITALIST CLASS

That proportion of working class people who would never support the conservative or Far-Right parties but are disillusioned with Labor can be a key force for organising class struggle action to fight for the rights of working class people and all the oppressed. However, that is only if their disappointment with Labor and the whole system does not lead to them becoming skeptical of the possibility of achieving change and cause them to become depoliticised. Especially when plunging living standards and economic insecurity constantly impel people into political activity, political demoralisation can sometimes be people’s first step to turning towards the Far Right whose stock in trade is, after all, to turn despair at the possibility of resisting the big end of town into scapegoating of the most downtrodden layers of society.

That is why it is crucial that there be built a working class party that will provide a genuine alternative to the many disillusioned former Labor supporters. However, such a party must be completely different to the ALP. We do not need another party vying for administrative leadership of the capitalist system in order to try to tweak the system to serve the masses’ interests, which is the mission impossible that the ALP seeks to fulfil (at least in the most generous evaluation of the party’s ethos). What we need instead is a workers party that is committed to organising intransigent mass resistance to the capitalist exploiting class and their system. Right now, the potential to mobilise such class struggle resistance is especially evident in Europe where the masses living standards are plunging particularly rapidly. Angered by surging inflation and crumbling public services, hundreds of thousands of French transport workers, teachers, oil refinery workers and others went on strike last Friday against French president Macron’s moves to raise the age at which people can get the aged pension. Meanwhile, workers in Britain have unleased the biggest wave of industrial action there in decades. In the last two months, rail workers, bus drivers, teachers, nurses, paramedics, postal workers and others have waged a series of strikes against falling real wages. To mobilise such struggle here and, most importantly, to ensure that the struggles are both raised to the level of intensity and guided to the direction that can ensure victory (which is a challenge also acutely faced by the rebelling workers movements of France and Britain given their social democratic misleadership), it is necessary to not only positively motivate the need for such actions but to knock down the serious political obstacles impeding militant class struggle resistance.

One such obstacle is the widely held illusion that a Labor government is, in some way, a workers government. A more left-wing version of this myth is the idea that even though an ALP government is far from ideal, the ALP in office can be made to serve the interests of the masses through political pressure and campaigning. Unfortunately, such illusions are being reinforced by many Far Left groups – due to their social democratic skew away from authentic Marxism. This includes the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). Thus, an open letter sent last June by the CPA’s National President to prime minister Albanese praises his government’s stance on a number of issues while politely urging him to take a more progressive stance on others. The letter begins by expressing warm solidarity with the new government:

“Dear Prime Minister Albanese, The Communist Party of Australia wishes to congratulate you on the election of a Labor government and the more diverse Cabinet of MPs and Senators. We recognise you will face many challenges from the nine years of the corrupt, dysfunctional Coalition government with its anti-worker, union-bashing record.”

The Guardian, Issue #2012, 27 June 2022,
https://cpa.org.au/guardian/issue-2012/open-letter-to-the-prime-minister-of-australia/

The CPA letter then covers up the Albanese government’s failure to seriously push for real wage rises and its backing of a minimum wage increase that it knew would not be sufficient to match the widely predicted increase in inflation in the following months by cheering that “We warmly welcome your government’s swift action to support a cost-of living increase in the minimum wage. The outcome is a start to arresting the decline in real wages experienced by low and middle-income workers over recent decades.” Well it wasn’t even a start! Real wages have plummeted at an even greater rate in the seven months since! The CPA letter even praised the Albanese government’s stance on the Palestinian issue by stating that: “We congratulate your government on its stand at the United Nations in not supporting the US-led opposition to an inquiry into human rights abuses by Israel in the occupied territories of Palestine.” Yet, even then it was clear that the new government had no intention of reversing the Australian regime’s long-standing support for Israel’s brutal oppression of the Palestinian people. Indeed, over the last few months, the ALP government has been amongst just a small number of other governments around the world to oppose UN motions aimed against the Israeli regime’s tyranny over the Palestinian people and other Arab peoples in its neighbourhood.

The most harmful aspect of the CPA leadership’s warm open letter to the head of Australia’s capitalist regime is the false notions that it promotes amongst the party’s supporters that the Albanese government deserves some level of support and can be pressured to take a basically progressive course. Such ideas are completely wrong. The Labor Party is, to be sure, a party with a working class base. However, its leadership and program support the capitalist order. Moreover, the Albanese government heads a state machine that has been built up to enforce the interests of the exploiting class. As the last eight months of plunging real wages, skyrocketing rents and continued military build-up against socialistic China proves, the Albanese government is an enemy of the working class and oppressed. Although the CPA and other reformist Far Left groups say that “grassroots campaigning and direct action” is necessary to “push Labor to the left and force progressive policy on key issues”, their semi-favourable portrayal of the ALP government and their sugar-coating of its actions acts to deter the building of truly intransigent class struggle. For it reinforces the false notion that militant anti-capitalist struggle – whether aimed against reactionary policies of the Labor government or against particular capitalist bosses – should currently be avoided, lest it undermine a Labor government that should be given some level of support. Today, the wide acceptance of this idea by politically active workers and progressive youth is the main reason why, despite working class people’s plummeting living standards here, the Australian workers movement and Left has yet to unleash, even, the level of class and other progressive social struggle seen in the likes of France and Britain.

Another widely held misconception holding back class struggle right now is the idea that the new Albanese government has won a “mandate” through its election and should not be opposed in the first half of its term, at least when it is carrying out policies that it took to the elections. However, under capitalism, such “mandates” are not truly “democratically” chosen by the people. For in capitalist societies, any elections and the political discourse leading up to them do not express the interests of the majority of people – the working class masses. For starters, this is because it is capitalists who thoroughly dominate ownership of the media and, thus, ensure that it is only the policies that serve their class that are being promoted by the news media. Moreover, through their incredible wealth, it is the capitalists who are, in great disproportion to their numbers, able to dominate funding of political parties, buying of political advertising, hiring of lobbyists and establishing of those supposedly “independent” think tanks and “movements” (like the right-wing Advance Australia) that have such a great impact on public opinion. Disclosures about political donations in Australia are not yet available for the 2021-22 financial year when the federal elections were held and, thus, when the biggest donations would have been made. But records do show that in the previous financial year, a whopping $177 million dollars flowed into Australia’s political parties – most of it through undisclosed donations and receipts. From the records of the small portion of donations that are disclosed, we do know that in the last two financial years for which records are available, 2019-2020 and 2020-2021, Australia’s fifth richest person with a total wealth of $24.3 billion, Anthony Pratt and family (owners of packaging and paper giant Visy Industries) donated nearly $2.9 million to the Coalition. Meanwhile, in the same period, Australia’s seventh richest person, Clive Palmer, donated nearly $6 million to his United Australia Party, which helped it win a Senate seat in Victoria at the recent federal election. And if you are wondering why the Coalition and Labor keep on allowing the bank bosses to ruthlessly plunder from their customers despite these corporate bigwigs admitting to rip-off practices like charging customers account management fees for no service, here is some part of your answer: from 2019 to 2021 the four big banks donated a combined $580,000 to each of Labor and the Coalition. With such huge money flowing into the “democratic process” from the corporate elite, what chance do the working class masses struggling to pay bills have to significantly shape the “mandates” of the dominant parliamentary parties? The fact is that these “mandates” primarily represent the will of the super-rich capitalist exploiting class. We should not be bowing down before any such “mandates”!

In all the imperialist countries, at all times, among the biggest obstacles to working class resistance is the notion that the capitalist class on the one hand and working class people and other downtrodden sectors on the other have substantial common interests. This false notion is continuously drummed into the working class masses by the currently social democratic, ACTU leadership of our unions. The capitalist ruling class also actively promotes this lie. In large part they do this through whipping up nationalism and the false notion that accompanies it: that all people of the nation regardless of their class position have a common “national interest”. In actual fact, it is the very opposite that is true: that the rights of the working class and all the downtrodden can only be advanced at the expense of the immediate economic interests of the capitalists … and vice versa! This was true even a century ago when Britain’s Labour Party promised substantial reforms benefiting working class people without challenging the capitalist order. However, it is even more so today. For capitalism has reached a still more senile and diseased state than it was in a century earlier. Even by a century ago, the capitalist system had outlived the period when it could still provide some progressive benefits to humanity. The appalling slaughter of World War I where the rival capitalist powers sent the masses of their own countries and their colonies to kill each other for the sake of their competing claims over spheres of exploitation showed this all too clearly. By 1921, Britain and the rest of the capitalist world was in the midst of a sharp post-war recession. Yet, in a longer-term sense, capitalism today is afflicted by a still more severe malaise. The economic collapse in the capitalist world during the late noughties Great Recession was the clearest indicator of this. Most major capitalist economies had never fully recovered from this plunge when they were buffeted by new crises associated with first, COVID and now, out of control inflation. The latest available figures (for 2021) show that since the eve of the late noughties Great Recession, average incomes (adjusted for inflation) have plummeted by 8% in Britain, 9% in Italy, 15% in Brazil and 37% in Greece. The real incomes of the working class section of the population in these countries have fallen still more steeply. If Australia did not suffer to the same degree from the Great Recession and its aftermath, it is solely because China’s booming socialistic state-owned enterprises bought up an ever greater amount of exports from Australia. Indeed, much of the capitalist world has only been saved from still greater disintegration by the rapid growth of the market provided by a socialistic country, in China, combined with the inflation-lowering impact of imports from Red China. To be sure, the wonderful capacity of us humans to innovate occasionally injects some vitality into the shrivelled up veins of late-stage capitalism. However, the system is unable to deliver the benefits of such innovation to the masses. Instead, the capitalist bosses’ only “effective” means to prop up their system is to ever more steeply increase the rate at which they exploit their workers. In by far the biggest capitalist economy, the U.S., real wages are today what they were 50 years ago. In Australia, real wages are lower than they were 12 years earlier. With their system mired in economic and social stagnation and decay, the capitalist bigwigs are even more loathe to grant concessions to the masses than they were a century ago. It will take very intense class struggle to win any substantial gains for the exploited and oppressed masses.

If it is to be able to build large-scale resistance against the ruling class, the workers party that we need will have to oppose nationalism and consciously dispel the myths about the possibility of “win-win” collaboration between the capitalist exploiters and the exploited workers. It will have to convince the masses that every setback for the capitalist rulers strengthens the struggle to advance the rights of working class people and all the downtrodden. That means that such a party would resolutely oppose the extreme exploitation of PNG, East Timor, Fiji, the Solomon Islands and other South Pacific nations by Australian-owned corporations; while opposing the neo-colonial meddling in the region that the Australian regime engages in to facilitate such plunder. Understanding that any setbacks for the U.S./NATO/Australian proxy war against Russia in Ukraine can only make the Western ruling classes more vulnerable to resistance from their masses, a class struggle workers party would stand for the defence of Russia in this conflict – despite the reactionary, capitalist nature of Russia’s ruling class. It would demand an end to all weapons supplies to Ukraine and the immediate dropping of all economic sanctions against Russia.

Whereas the ALP and its allies in the ACTU leadership limit their demands to what it thinks the capitalists will reluctantly tolerate, the new workers party that must be built will fight for what the working class and all oppressed actually need. Given that the crisis-ridden capitalist system cannot satisfy the masses’ aspirations, the ultimate task of such a party is to lead the working class masses to depose the capitalist exploiters from power and take state power into their own hands. This is not an easy task. The capitalists have enormous wealth, control of the economy and the physical power of all the current state institutions. Therefore, to be able to organise the eventual defeat of such an immense force, the members of the revolutionary workers party that we need must be made to adhere to much more rigorous obligations than that of the Labor Party. In the ALP, many join due to a combination of, on the one hand, wanting to advance the interests of working people and, on the other, wanting to build lucrative and socially respectable careers in politics. For the ranks of the party it is more the former that motivates them. However, for the personally ambitious and pushily, careerist-minded people who shove themselves into Labor leadership positions, it is the latter that is often more important. Furthermore, the longer the careers of such leading ALP members progress and, correspondingly, the more evident it is to them that the party’s strategy is incapable of delivering the gains for the masses that may have once primarily motivated them, the more cynical that they become and the more shamelessly that they subordinate their principles for the sake of personal advancement. In contrast, for a party seeking to accomplish so difficult a task as the defeat of the powerful capitalist rulers, the political activity of all members will need to be solely motivated by the goals of liberating the exploited and oppressed and advancing the well-being of humanity. Thus, in working hard to contribute to the building of such a party, we in Trotskyist Platform insist that our members must not seek any personal financial advantage whatsoever out of their involvement in the party’s activities, other than the benefits that they would share with the rest of the masses due to participation in victorious struggles – for example through party members at a workplace being part of industrial action that wins higher wages for all workers at the site. Similarly, members of a revolutionary workers party must not seek even non-material forms of particular personal benefit from their political activities, whether that be fame, ego, sex appeal, social networks or even excitement, although a number of these things, to some degree, may arise as a by-product of their involvement in the struggle. Most crucially, members of a revolutionary party will need to make enormous personal sacrifices for the sake of the struggle and show great personal and political courage.

Despite the enormous power of the capitalists, the working class and other oppressed have one huge advantage over these filthy rich exploiters – there is a lot more of us than them! Moreover, it is the manual and mental labour of the workers that creates capitalist profits. In other words, the working class is potentially a lot more powerful than the capitalists. Indeed, for between a century and a century and a half, the working class in much of the world has had the objective power to overturn capitalist rule. What has been lacking is the consciousness of the need to accomplish this task amongst the mass of workers and a workers’ leadership that is prepared to fight tenaciously for socialist revolution. Even as its own system decays, the capitalists have become increasingly expert at messing up the political consciousness of the working class masses and at poisoning it with nationalism, racism and illusions in the “fairness” of parliamentary “democracy”. Moreover, they are very adept at intervening into the contest within the Left and workers movements between reformists that uphold the capitalist order and revolutionaries opposed to the capitalist system in order to boost the former. The ruling class do so in various ways. First they give enormous financial and other backing to the social democratic reformists. It is not only the bank bosses doing this. The bosses of retail conglomerate, Wesfarmers, and banking and asset management giant, Macquarie Group, each gave around $220,000 to the ALP during the two financial years from 2019 to 2021 – the same amount that they each gave to the Coalition. Meanwhile, in this same period, the bosses of Bluescope Steel which gave Labor $108,000, accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers which gave $254,316, oil and gas giant Santos that gave Labor $88,000 and mining giant Fortescue – owned by Australia’s second richest person Andrew Forrest – that gave nearly $70,000, all gave more to the ALP in this period than they did to the openly capitalist Liberal/Nationals. The corporate bigwigs also skew the political battle between Laborite social democrats and revolutionaries, within the Left and workers’ movements, in other ways. The media that they own and the think tanks that they fund promote the most capitalism-loyal elements within the workers movement, while denigrating and witch-hunting revolutionary elements and more militant union leaders. Meanwhile, their courts, DPPs and police target for persecution the more revolutionary elements of the Left and the more radical officials and delegates within the trade union movement. Within workplaces, capitalist bosses victimise militant union delegates and unionists. The bosses seek to break the spirit of such left-wing workers by giving them the worst, most undesirable workplace tasks. More sinisterly, they prosecute disciplinary actions against these workers by concocting claims that these workers have “violated” workplace rules in order to intimidate these workers with the threat of being sacked. In contrast, capitalist bosses look after those union delegates that are seen as compliant, or open to being co-opted, by giving them special treatment at the workplace. Yet, despite how slanted is the competition for the hearts and minds of the working class masses between the Laborites and other social democrats, on the one hand, and the revolutionaries, on the other, the latter have one massive advantage that tilts the contest back the other way: it is we whose program actually represents the historic interests of the working class and all the oppressed. And as capitalist Australia enters a period where falling economic growth and rising job insecurity melds with the high cost of living, plummeting real wages and dangerously rising imperialist militarism that we have already been copping, it will be easier for revolutionaries to motivate a program that is opposed to the entire capitalist order.

Indeed, even the capitalist rulers themselves know that their system is in crisis. In a January 18 interview, none other than the head of the French capitalist regime, Emmanuel Macron, openly expressed his fears for the stability of capitalist rule and for the precarious state of Western capitalist “democracies”:

“First, there’s a crisis within the global open financial capitalist system. This system is experiencing a deep crisis, because, by acquiring capital, it has caused inequalities to skyrocket…. Therefore, our democratic system is in crisis, because it no longer spontaneously generates progress for all – once again, it creates inequalities between social classes.”

As surely as the sun shines, capitalism will create the conditions that will impel the masses into large-scale struggles. The strike wave that we are seeing today in Britain, France and other parts of Europe is testament to this. The only question is: will the Left be up to the task of intervening in and guiding these struggle towards an eventual assault on the crisis-ridden, inequality-skyrocketing, capitalist order? If we fail in this task, the crisis of capitalism will be exploited by the fascist wing of the capitalist class as it was in the 1930s. The terrifying rise of the Far Right in Europe, the 60% growth in the combined Far Right vote at last May’s Australian elections and the expansion of violent fascist, extra-parliamentary forces in Australia, illustrates this all too clearly.

All this is why now is the time to work extra hard and make still greater sacrifices to advance the struggle against the capitalist system. The final assault on the capitalist order can only be prepared and the masses schooled for this task by training the working class masses in all sorts of partial struggles right now to defend their living standards, oppose racist attacks and make immediate improvements in their rights and conditions. So let us unleash the power of our workers’ unions and build militant class struggle and other progressive struggle actions to win higher wages, the rights of permanency for all gig and casual workers, a massive increase in public housing and the confiscation of the oil, gas, coal and power sectors and their transfer into public ownership. Let us fight for the full rights of citizenship for all visa workers, refugees and international students and build mass actions uniting our unions, Aboriginal people, other people of colour and leftists to drive violent racist outfits off the streets. We must also mobilise these forces to oppose the racist state murder of Aboriginal people in custody, stop the continuing removal of Aboriginal children from their families, win full and genuine land rights for Aboriginal people and ensure decent housing and services in Aboriginal communities funded for by confiscating the wealth of the mining and pastoral bosses. Let us also demand: Down with the racist, right-wing and small-l liberal witch-hunt of Lidia Thorpe! Crucially, to advance the struggle against capitalist rule in this country, we must defend the anti-capitalist conquests that have already been made abroad. Most importantly, that means that we must defend the working class rule – as imperfect and insecure as it may currently be – in China that was born out of her earth-shattering, 1949 anti-capitalist revolution. To unleash all these struggles and ensure that they have the greatest chance of victory, we need to work relentlessly to knock down the political obstacles that impede and limit these struggles. Let us destroy the myth that workers and their capitalist exploiters have a common “national interest.” Let us convince the masses that Albanese’s ALP in power is a capitalist government ‒ just like its right-wing predecessors. And let us point out that “democracy” under capitalism is only truly a democracy for the rich and that the “mandate” that the ALP government has to maintain anti-strike laws, institute tax cuts for the rich, keep unemployment benefits at their present paltry level, avoid increasing actual public housing, shun measures to crack down on housing speculation, continue the military build up and propaganda war against socialistic China and support the Western imperialists’ proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, is not a “mandate” that the masses should, in the slightest, respect. To most effectively bring such understanding to the working class masses, let us build a new workers party that is linked to the new class struggle leadership of our unions that we need. A party composed of those people who understand that workers and their capitalist exploiters have no common “national interest” and are willing to make great sacrifices for the cause of socialist revolution.