Build Mass Mobilisations of Trade Union Contingents, Muslims, Aboriginal People, “Ethnic” Communities and All Anti-Racists to Shutdown the “Reclaim Australia” Race Hate Rallies

28 March 2015 – That man really is a disgusting, racist coward – the one who shoved and kicked a Muslim woman last Monday night on a train between Sydney’s Central and Town Hall stations. His attack began after he looked at the woman’s Islamic head dress and yelled: “you people get in our way.” Meanwhile, last month, a man of Anglo-Celtic appearance, Ben Davidson, walked into a Hungry Jacks in Adelaide’s Rundle Mall and racially abused coloured workers at the store. The redneck customer insisted that, “I want it [his food] made by a white person” and then, after the workers rightly refused to heed, launched a threatening tirade against the workers and against Asians and Africans in general.

The really frightening thing is that these incidents are but a tiny proportion of the hundreds of racist attacks reported in Australia over the last few months. And then there are the hundreds of thousands of similar attacks that go unreported! The ruling class establishment’s racist fear mongering against Muslims, its continued subjugation of Aboriginal people and the hysteria it breeds over refugees have all served to encourage racist sentiments. Furthermore, there are far-right groups that are not only fanning the flames of racism but are consciously seeking to recruit for the purpose of racist violence. These fascist groups, including the Party For Freedom and the Australia Defence League, are behind racist so-called “Reclaim Australia” rallies that will be held across Australia on April 4. The rallies aim to incite hatred and violence against Muslims by stoking the hysterical notion that Australia is about to be brought under Islamic Sharia law and by stirring up a storm in a stupid, racist tea cup about the availability of Halal meat. The white supremacists behind these proposed hate parades have tried to appeal to people outside their right-wing extremist circles by claiming that the rally will not be racist, adding that it is fine to oppose Muslims since they are not a race. Perhaps the openly as well as the closet neo-Nazis in the forefront of organising these actions will also quietly claim that Hitler’s horrific holocaust was non-racist too … because Jews aren’t a race either!

The “Reclaim Australia” rallies are a threat not just to Muslims but to anyone who is not white. Drawing strength from government demonization of Muslims, the fascist outfits driving the actions want to use the cry of opposition to Islam as a battering ram to open the floodgates to their broader white supremacist agenda. Thus, the latest article on the website of the Party for Freedom, one of the groups leading the anti-Muslim charge, rants that Australia’s social services are being assaulted by “entitlement minded third world invaders and their welfare seeking families.” Another fascist group, the Australia First Party, which calls to further undermine Aboriginal people’s access to welfare relief and which wants to whitewash Aboriginal people’s history and culture by demanding that “European-derived culture, heritage and moral values be advanced at all levels of government and society, and be integral to educational curriculum,” violently attacked Brisbane’s 2014 Invasion Day March by Aboriginal people.

The “Reclaim Australia” race-hate provocations are also a threat to the entire working class movement. For they undermine the unity that is indispensable to any struggle for workers rights. Furthermore, the fascist groups seeking to recruit out of their event, since they form the extreme right wing of pro-capitalist forces, are the thugs who would, once they are numerous enough, violently attack workers’ strike pickets and trade union activists – just like their Old Guard and New Guard predecessors did in Australia in the 1920s and 1930s. And if the fascists are called upon to rescue bourgeois rule at a time of extreme capitalist crisis – as were Mussolini’s forces in Italy and Hitler’s Nazis in Germany – they would unleash murderous terror to annihilate the entire union movement and Left.

Encouragingly, anti-racist activists, trade unionists and student groups are building counter mobilisations to oppose the April 4 “Reclaim Australia” rallies. In Brisbane, activists have called to occupy King George Square at 11am to oppose the racist rally there. In Sydney, anti-racist activists have called to rally at 10am at Queens Square (Macquarie Street near St James Station) and then march to near the site of the “Reclaim Australia” demonstration. The Sydney rally speakers include Maritime Union of Australia Sydney branch secretary Paul McAleer, Sydney University SRC president and Aboriginal rights activist Kyol Blakeney and a Refugee Action Coalition representative. Trotskyist Platform urges all our readers to work to make the April 4 anti-racist counter-actions ones that will unite trade union contingents with all the other intended victims of the fascists – Muslims, other people of “Middle Eastern appearance,” Aboriginal people, East Asians, Africans, Sikhs, others from the Indian subcontinent, gays, Jews and leftists – in mass mobilisations powerful enough to shut down the Reclaim Australia hate rallies.

It appears that the organisers of the Sydney anti-racist counter-rally want the event to simply challenge the views of “Reclaim Australia” and expose its racist nature. That is certainly necessary. However, it is far from adequate. What distinguishes the fascists from mainstream racists is that they have a program of using violence to achieve their aim of a “pure” whites-only society. These are the same groups that helped incite the notorious 2005 Cronulla Beach white supremacist riot. Their neo-Nazi slogans have helped to foment the wave of violent – and sometimes even murderous – attacks on Indian, Chinese, and most recently, Korean students as well as helping to incite the unceasing redneck violence against Aboriginal people. If these white supremacists get away with openly inciting racist hatred on April 4 it will encourage every garden-variety redneck watching to radicalise their racist stance. If such hate parades continue it will be inevitable that we will see here horrific incidents like that which happened in North Carolina last month when three young Muslim American students were murdered in a racist attack. Furthermore, the organised presence of violent white supremacists in the heart of Sydney – no matter if they are interspersed with less extreme racists who they have sucked into their rally – will intimidate and physically endanger the many Muslim and non-white people visiting the area. That is why the “Reclaim Australia” action must not only be protested against – it must be shut down! The neo-Nazis pulling the strings in organising “Reclaim Australia” must be swept off the streets. Let’s drive violent white supremacists out of stolen Aboriginal land!

The Organised Workers Movement Has the Clout to Smash the Fascists

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What is also fuelling the most recent wave of bigotry is the nationalism surrounding the Australian regime’s deployment of troops to the Middle East – a predatory move aimed at strengthening U.S. domination of the oil-rich region but sold as a war against Islamic radicalism. Shorten’s ALP also bears much responsibility for inflaming racist sentiments. It has fully supported the Middle East military intervention and has backed Abbott’s further stiffening of the racist, so-called anti-terror laws.  Both the rich people’s Liberal party and the ALP betrayers of the working class stir up racist sentiments because they both support the capitalist system – a system which relies on dividing and diverting the working class with racism in order to prevent workers from uniting and rising up again the capitalist bosses that exploit them. The police force too in capitalist Australia have been created and built up to protect this racist system which is why they can never be relied on to stop violent white supremacist outfits. We saw that all too clearly when the extreme racist groups rallied outside a Penrith Local Council meeting on December 8 to oppose a Muslim community centre development application. Although the neo-Nazis yelled illegal, racist and sexist abuse at supporters of the mosque who were present, the police did nothing to stop them. In contrast, they confiscated several placard holders of the anti-racist counter-protesters and dispensed move-on orders and threats of arrest to two prominent anti-fascist activists.

One singular social force that does have an interest in stopping the fascists is the organised working class movement. For the racist poison that the fascists inject into society is crippling to the inter-racial and international unity so crucial for workers to win battles against their powerful capitalist exploiters. Crucially, the workers movement not only has the need to defeat the white supremacist filth, it also has the power to do so. For trade union contingents at anti-fascist actions embody strength in numbers and the inherent collective ability to act in tight unison and can, importantly, rely upon the threat of retaliatory industrial action if the police attack them. This was famously seen in Brisbane on May 2 last year. It was then that over a hundred construction workers from the BLF, CFMEU and ETU trade unions formed the core of a demonstration of 200 anti-racists that successfully shut down an attempted march by the fascist Australia First Party. The solid, tightly organised union contingents ensured that the cops had to restrain their usual aggressive stance towards anti-fascist mobilisations.
That is why we urge fellow anti-racist activists building the April 4 counter-actions to openly appeal to the interests that workers have in opposing the extreme racists in any leaflets building the counter-rallies. If that puts off some middle-class liberal anti-racists, so be it! It is the working class and not small-l liberals that is the strategic force that will defeat fascism.

Mobilising the working class against the “Reclaim Australia” threat also requires internationalist-minded workers to wage a political struggle within their workplaces and unions against nationalist sentiments within the workers movement itself. As was seen so powerfully in Brisbane last May, the workers movement can spearhead the fight against racism. However, this potential is drained by the economic nationalist slogans promoted by the current pro-ALP leaders of the workers movement.  Thus, in the lead up to today’s NSW elections, union leaders and their ALP parliamentary mates focussed opposition to electricity privatisation not by highlighting the union-busting and anti-working class character of such privatisations but by whipping up xenophobic – and anti-communist – fears that a possible buyer of the privatised network could be a Chinese state-owned enterprise. Let’s fight to purge the workers movement of such harmful nationalism that diverts workers from mobilising against their true enemy – the corporate bigwigs! Let’s strengthen workers’ unity by mobilising our unions against racist forces. Let’s make sure that 4 April 2015 turns out just like 2 May 2014 did in Brisbane!

Whether each of the April 4 “Reclaim Australia” provocations can be stopped will depend upon the relative size of the anti-racist counter-action in comparison with the racist rally, the degree of trade union participation in the anti-racist counter-action and the level of political understanding amongst the counter-action participants of the need to actually shut down the racist provocation. A sober assessment of the balance of forces that will be necessary on the day must also account for the fact that the police will inevitably favour the fascists over the anti-racists. Even if it turns out that the forces do not exist to shut down a “Reclaim Australia” action, those who understand the need for trade-union centred mass actions to crush the white supremacist extremists must still work hard to advocate such a perspective to other anti-racists on the day. For the bitter reality is that April 4 will hardly be the last fascist provocation that we will face.

Let’s Defeat the April 4 Threat and Then Move on from There to Launch an All-Sided Working Class Fightback

Many Aboriginal people and people from coloured “ethnic” communities hate far-right extremists but think: why should I bother stopping them when most of the racist abuse that I suffer comes from everyday racists?” Indeed, capitalist rule has created such a racist society here that most racist attacks are perpetrated not by neo-Nazis but by the many people who do not have a worked out fascist political agenda but who are simply a garden-variety type of racist.  Yet by dealing very public blows to the organised fascists, the workers movement and its allies can send a clear message to every garden-variety racist out there that racist violence and intimidation can be a hazard to one’s health. Conversely, every time that organised white supremacists get away with openly promoting their agenda of ethnic cleansing, it encourages the worst instincts in the average, run-of the-mill redneck.

Furthermore, we cannot ignore that over the last few years, from Britain to France to Hungary to Ukraine and Russia, neo-Nazi forces have been gaining in strength. This is a result of both the deepening decay of capitalism with its mass unemployment and crumbling social services and the failure of the ALP-type social democratic-led workers movements to defeat austerity attacks and lead the masses out of the abyss of capitalism through socialist revolution. In this country too, rising unemployment, casualisation of the workforce and aggressive government racism all provide fertile soil in which fascism can grow. Yet by mobilising to spearhead the crushing of the still widely-hated, white supremacist extremists, the working class can flex its muscles, strengthen its unity, forge a solid alliance with embattled Aboriginal people and coloured “ethnic” communities and, above all, increase its confidence in its own power when mobilised independently of all capitalist institutions.  By waging a struggle to defeat the fascists and to also defeat mainstream racist attacks, the working class movement will thus get a boost in its struggle to defeat the major ruling class attacks on trade unions, social welfare, public health care and public education.

Let’s ensure that the April 4, anti-racist counter-actions provide that shot in the arm to our workers organisations. Let’s build working-class centred mass actions to shut down the “Reclaim Australia” bigot-breeding, racist provocation!