Tag Archives: China

Massively Increase Public Housing! Expand Rental Supply Now – Confiscate Vacant Houses of the Ultra-Rich!

Photo Above: Six years ago, scores of current and former public housing tenants, trade unionists from the Maritime Union of Australia, Trotskyist Platform supporters, staunch anti-fascist activists and other supporters of public housing carried out a powerful occupation of vacant public housing dwellings at 78 to 80 High St, in inner city Sydney’s Millers Point to oppose the slated sell-off of these properties to wealthy speculators and capitalist developers. The powerful 6 August 2017 occupation demanded that these vacant public housing dwellings be made available to those on the public housing waiting list or the homeless. We urgently need such actions now on a huge scale to not only oppose all privatisation of public housing but to fight for the confiscation of the vacant homes of the ultra-rich so that they can be used for low-rent public housing.

Drive Down Rents by
Massively Increasing Public Housing!

Expand Rental Supply Now –
Confiscate Vacant Houses of the Ultra-Rich!

16 June 2023: Skyrocketing rents in Australia are driving working class people into poverty. Over the last year, rents for new leases surged by an incredible 20% in capital cities. Alongside the prices of food, electricity and fuel rising much more quickly than modest wage increases, surging rents are forcing millions of people to skip meals, stop buying fresh food, forego visits to dentists and specialists and avoid using heaters during the frigid winter, just to try and get by.

Unaffordable rents are the result of the capitalist “free market”. Developers shy away from building affordable homes because they know that they can make more profit by building expensive homes for the affluent or for wealthy investors looking to buy up houses for speculation. As a result, there is such a shortage of affordable rentals that not only are landlords able to jack up rents but low income tenants are not able to move into cheaper homes to escape soaring rents in their existing tenancies. A recent rental affordability snapshot found that just eight out of every 1000 available properties were affordable for a single person on the minimum wage lucky enough to have a full-time job! At the time of the 2021 census, over 122,000 people were homeless in Australia. Since then, the number of homeless people has skyrocketed – many of whom have jobs. Meanwhile, more and more low income women who are financially dependent on abusive partners are being hit with the terrible “choice” of either dumping their abusers and becoming homeless or trying to endure the abuse just to keep a roof over their – and often their children’s – heads.

The inevitable failure of profit-driven developers to provide affordable accommodation is compounded by the policies of federal and state governments. Not only have they favoured landlords and investors over low income tenants, they have instituted tax policies that have skewed the housing market towards speculators. Most damagingly, these governments have gutted public housing. As a result, the percentage of people in public housing in Australia has nearly halved over the last 25 years! By 2021, the proportion of public housing had plunged to just one in every 36 dwellings.

Some of the public housing sold off by governments has been turned into “community housing”. Still, over the last 25 years, Australia’s governments have slashed the total amount of “social housing” – which includes both public and “community” housing – by a quarter. Moreover, “community housing” is not public housing. “Community housing” landlords are private entities notorious for their high-handed bullying of tenants. Furthermore, because “community housing” operators are driven to either make a profit or, if they are a charity, “break even”, they bias their tenancy allocation towards those who can afford higher rents. Thus, the proportion of well-off people housed in “community housing” is nearly three times higher than in “public housing.” On average, “community housing” operators allocate one in eight tenancies to those who are in the highest 60% of income earners – many low income households thus  missing out when public housing is converted into “community housing”. Moreover, the proportion of community housing” that is tenanted by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people is 20% lower than in public housing. We say: No to privatisation by stealth – Stop the sell-off of public housing to private “community housing” operators!

Bulli (NSW South Coast), 11 October 2014: Supporters of public housing from the Illawara and Sydney protest the sell-off of yet another public housing dwelling as real estate agents conducting the auction look on. The bottom slogan (which is slightly obscured in this photo) of the Trotskyist Platform banner reads: “MASSIVELY INCREASE PUBLIC HOUSING – JUST LIKE WHAT CHINA IS DOING”.
Photo credit: Adam McLean

What is needed is to massively increase the amount of low-rent public housing. This does not only mean greatly boosting the public housing budget. Currently, at every level, capitalist contractors engaged to build and maintain public housing leach off as profit a big part of housing budgets. State-owned firms must be set up to take over these tasks so that more public housing can be built for the same spending. However, all this alone will no longer be able to relieve the hardships of those hit by soaring private rents. Not only is the public housing waiting list too huge, many others eligible have not put their names on the list only because they know about the ten plus years they may need to wait to finally get a tenancy. Moreover, the criteria to even get on the list is so stringent that many who desperately need public housing can’t even get wait listed. Thus, a full-time, minimum wage worker is not even close to being eligible for public housing. To immediately boost the supply of public housing, some of the more than one million unoccupied homes (!) in Australia must be requisitioned. Many of them are owned by the super-rich who use them as holiday homes or as speculative investments. We say that any dwelling owned by a household with more than five million dollars worth of property assets that is either unoccupied or underutilised for one month – or for a total of more than two months within a year – should be confiscated and turned into public housing. Since such dwellings are often large mansions, they can be turned into dwellings for multiple households. And to the extent that the ultra-rich will let out their properties to avoid such confiscation that will, at least, reduce the demand – and hence rents – for other dwellings.

For Working Class Protest Action to Win Low-Rent Housing for the Masses

To institute the housing measures that are urgently needed, it is not only the right wing Liberals that stand in the way. All the parties currently in parliament are complicit in undermining public housing. In just the five years up to 2021, the state Labor government in Victoria slashed the proportion of public housing dwellings there by nearly 14%. For their part, the Greens, in a coalition with Labor in Tasmania in the early 2010s, were part of a state government that drastically cut the proportion of public housing dwellings, alongside slashing public housing maintenance.

Parramatta, Western Sydney, May 2012: Rally opposes the undermining of public housing by the then Labor-Greens federal government and the right-wing, Coalition state government. The demonstration instead demanded a massive increase in public housing. From our first action on the question held on 5 November 2009 outside the office of the then federal housing minister in the Rudd government (Tanya Plibersek) onwards, Trotskyist Platform has, over the last 13 years, initiated several protests (mainly in Western Sydney) opposing the erosion of public housing by successive Labor, Labor-Greens and Liberal federal and state governments. Today, with decades of erosion of public housing having done much to cause the present rental affordability crisis, the urgency of fighting for public housing is now understood by broader sections of the Left and workers movement.
Photo credit: Trotskyist Platform

Today, with a widely acknowledged rental affordability crisis, the ALP and the Greens are now keen to portray themselves as supporters of “social housing”. Labor promises 30,000 new “social and affordable” housing dwellings over five years. However, the new “social housing” will not be public housing but “community housing”. The “affordable housing” component involves subsidising landlords to offer rents 20% lower than the market rate. Yet with market rents so obscenely high, such “affordable” homes will remain out of reach for most low-paid workers and part-time workers, let alone unemployed workers and students. Moreover, as the Greens have rightly pointed out, the 30,000 “social and affordable” dwellings that Labor pledges, will not even meet half the increased need for low-rent accommodation during the next five years. The ALP’s plan is a recipe for driving even more low income renters into poverty – albeit at a slightly slower pace! The Greens plan offers more, promising $2.5 billion a year on low-rent housing. However, this is still wholly inadequate to address the huge shortfall in low-rent accommodation. This is especially so given that the Greens, as a party which accepts the dominance of the capitalist economy, has no plan for bringing the actual construction and maintenance of public housing under public ownership, thus allowing a big chunk of the housing budget to continue to be gouged away by the bosses of capitalist contracting firms. Moreover, the Greens plan is not exclusively for public housing but also for “community” and “affordable” housing. Thus, in good part, the Green’s proposals, like the ALP government’s entire plan, will see public money handed over to private landlords – money that should be used to build up public housing. The Greens do call for a freeze on rents – a measure that we support. However, such rent controls will only work if they are accompanied by measures to restrict landlords from removing properties from the rental market and skimping on repairs – measures that the Greens do not advocate. Most notably, the Greens do not even promise the housing measure that is most urgently needed: the confiscation of the vacant homes of the ultra-rich and their transfer into the public housing stock.

Ultimately, all the current parliamentary parties have no program that can truly solve the rental and homelessness crisis because they all uphold the big end of town’s “right to dispose of their property as they see fit”. To win the housing measures needed, workers, unemployed workers, low income youth, activists opposing domestic violence against women and leftists must all unite in militant protest action. There need to be mass protest occupations to stop any privatisation of public housing and to requisition the vacant homes of the super-rich into the public housing supply. In recent years there have been some actions that can inspire us on this course. On 6 August 2017, scores of current and former public housing tenants, trade unionists from the Maritime Union of Australia, Trotskyist Platform supporters and staunch anti-fascist activists carried out a powerful occupation of vacant public housing dwellings at 78 to 80 High St, in inner city Sydney’s Millers Point to oppose the slated sell-off of these properties to wealthy speculators and capitalist developers. Although after about five hours, van loads of riot police brutally broke up the action and arrested four of the activists involved, including two main organisers of the occupation – a respected long-time Millers Point tenant who had then recently been cruelly evicted from public housing there and one of our own Trotskyist Platform comrades – the action scared the then NSW Coalition government enough to temporarily restrain their broader state-wide public housing selloff. This can be seen by looking at the numbers of public housing dwellings in NSW over the last decade (see Table 18A.3, Report on Government Services 2022, Australian Government Productivity Commission). They show that during each year, the number of public housing dwellings either decreased or barely changed. The one exception is for the financial year that includes the eleven month period that followed the August 2017 Millers Point occupation – when total public housing numbers in NSW increased by over 1,100 homes. Then just last week, about two dozen people occupied the common areas of a public housing block in 82 Wentworth Park Rd, Glebe to oppose the NSW state government’s plan to demolish the block and turn the site into a larger “mixed” housing block with the public housing turned into privately-run “community housing”. The protest action, which was deemed legal by the authorities because none of the vacant units were occupied, lasted five days. It was organised by Action for Public Housing and the Anti-Poverty Centre and was supported by various socialist groups as well as by left-wing anarchists and other staunch antifascists who did much of the hard work of staffing the protest site during the nights. The action had an impact. The housing minister in the new NSW state Labor government has now promised that the site will remain entirely devoted to public housing (but without any evidence of an actual change to the formal development plan activists are rightly sceptical of this promise). 

9 June 2023, Glebe, Inner-city Sydney: Supporters of public housing protest the NSW state government’s plan to demolish the public housing complex at 82 Wentworth Park Rd, Glebe and replace it with “mixed housing” in which the existing public housing would be privatised into “community housing”. The day before, several activists began a legal, five-day occupation of the common areas of the site to help press the protesters demands.
Photo Credit: Action For Public Housing Facebook page

Yet, given the severity of the long-brewing rental affordability crisis, we need mass action on a scale and intensity much greater than anything we have seen. In particular, the power of the organised working class movement must be brought to bear. Class-struggle action to win the measures needed to provide low-rent accommodation must be combined with demands for a big increase in workers’ wages, for the conversion of casual jobs into secure ones with all the rights of permanency and for the confiscation of the power and fuel sectors and their transfer into public hands in order to drive down unaffordable living costs. To unleash the kind of struggle needed, it is not enough to energetically advocate for it. We must knock down the political obstacles that stand in the way of such struggle. Chief among these is the reality that the current leadership of the workers movement are supporters of the ALP. Especially with an ALP federal government and wall to wall Labor state governments across the mainland, they are reluctant to organise truly concerted struggle against any government policy. Instead, they tell their working class base that the ALP in office is the best that they can hope for and nothing should be done that could damage the ALP’s re-election prospects. These officials sell their ranks the lie that the ALP’s program of seeking “win-win” collaboration with the big end of town is workers’ only effective path to improving their lives. Currently, many workers grudgingly accept these claims. That is why, the struggle to mobilise determined action against soaring rents must be accompanied by a political campaign to explain that, when in government, the ALP, in the end, operates a state machine hard wired to the capitalists that is programmed to serve the big business and big property owners. In opposition to the program of the Labourites, we must win the most politically advanced workers to the understanding that the interests of working class people can only advance at the expense of the economic interests of the capitalist big-end-of-town.

Hopes in the Greens are also an obstacle to the struggle that is needed. Since the Greens do at least loudly advocate for public housing, such illusions in the Greens do exist – especially amongst progressive-minded youth. Should the Greens want to support a particular protest action in defence of public housing, they are of course free to do so. However, activists must point out not only the Greens’ own tarnished record on public housing when they have been in coalition government with the ALP in Tasmania and federally in the early 2010s but the fact that this is inevitable for any party that seeks to manage the capitalist order. Most importantly, the demands and direction of struggles must not be curtailed to win the acceptance of the Greens. We must not shy away from militant protest occupations that impinge on official capitalist “property rights” or recoil from raising the urgently needed demand to confiscate the vacant homes of the ultra-rich because we know that both these courses will scare off the Greens, who after all include wealthy capitalists amongst their ranks and their donors as well as plenty of upper middle-class, multiple property owners. Just as importantly, we must not avoid openly framing our housing struggle as one that is being waged in the class interests of working class people against the class interests of the super-rich, big property-owning class for fear of “putting off the Greens”. If we were to in this way dilute and shroud the class-struggle content of our movement it would make the movement less attractive to militant workers – the very people whose participation is key to winning victories. For the movement against unaffordable rents to acquire the pro-working class orientation, militant character and anti-capitalist demands that can make it a serious factor, the movement must be freed from all subordination to the agenda of the “progressive” wing of the big end of town, represented by the Greens. All promotion of the Greens by groups within the movement – for example, by advocacy of a vote for the Greens at elections – must be challenged.

There is another, very sinister, political challenge that faces any movement to drive down unaffordable rents. That is the fact that the capitalist class, including most blatantly the capitalist media and Peter Dutton’s Liberal Party, are increasingly seeking to blame migration for the rental affordability crisis. Their claims are a complete pack of lies. The lack of affordable accommodation is solely the result of the capitalist free market in housing and decades of government policy favouring landlords and speculative investors over tenants and low income home buyers. The ruling class wants the masses to blame anyone but themselves! We cannot let them get away with this! To the extent that the masses buy the capitalist rulers’ propaganda, it will not only divert away the movement against unaffordable rents but by inciting racist hostility to migrants and people of colour, it will divide and weaken the workers movement and its capacity to resist capitalist attacks on its living standards. That is why the workers movement and all supporters of public housing must not only oppose any scapegoating of migrants for the housing crisis but must positively mobilise to defend targeted communities against any racist, and other bigoted, attacks. We must demand freedom for and the bringing here of all refugees from PNG and Nauru. We must build mass action to defend Aboriginal people, Asians, other people of colour and the LGBTIQ community against violent far-right forces. And to stop people, vulnerable because of their insecure visa status, being especially ripped off by greedy landlords, which helps push up rents for everyone, we must fight to win the full rights of citizenship for all visa workers, international students and refugees.

The Example of Socialistic China’s Housing Policy:
“Houses Are for Living, Not for Speculation”

Those opposing an emphasis on public housing and strict controls on the housing market argue that such an agenda does not work in practice. They say it is outdated and goes against the world trend of privatisation, “user-pays” and neo-liberal deregulation. There is a huge problem with that argument, however. In Australia’s largest trading partner, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the direction over the last decade and a half has been explicitly towards public housing and strict regulation of the housing sector. In the decade from 2008, the PRC provided 70 million additional public housing dwellings for her low and lower-middle income people. Proportionate to population size, China delivered in ten years, one and a half times the amount of public housing as what the Greens promise to provide in low-cost accommodation over twenty years. As a result, today, the percentage of China’s urban population in public housing is nearly ten times higher than Australia’s. Moreover, the PRC’s public housing drive continues. Last year, the PRC provided an additional two and a half million public rental dwellings for her people. In percentage terms, this is equivalent to 45,000 dwellings here. That means proportionate to population size, Red China in just one year provided one and a half times as much public housing as what the Albanese government promises to deliver in privately-owned “social and affordable” housing over five years. And unlike here, China does not have a homelessness crisis. Despite China (which is still trying to pull herself up from her impoverished pre-1949, capitalist days) having a per capita income some three to five times lower than Australia’s, Chinese international students entering Australia, the U.S. and Western Europe are shocked at the level of homelessness in these richer countries compared with their socialistic homeland.

Beijing, China: Tenants of a public housing complex in the Chinese capital hang out.
Photo credit: Zhu Yumeng

The PRC’s public housing drive is part of Beijing’s official housing policy that is aptly titled; “Houses are for living, not for speculation.” The PRC takes the opposite stance towards housing speculation compared to successive Australian governments. For example, most Chinese cities ban households from buying more than two homes. Needless to say, Australia’s big end of town hate the PRC’s policies. That is why their media seek to denigrate it at every possible instance. Last year, they seized on the troubles of a Chinese capitalist developer hit by the anti-speculation campaign to claim that the PRC’s “Houses are for living, not for speculation”-policy was soon going to cause the Chinese economy to collapse. Needless to say, that never happened! Today, while the capitalist Australian, American, British and German economies are either in recession or on the verge of one, the PRC’s economy surged by 4.5% last quarter. More importantly, socialistic China’s workers continue to enjoy, by far, the world’s fastest growth rate in real wages. All this is why the Western capitalist powers see China as an “existential threat.” They fear that the successes of China’ socialist alternative will encourage their own masses to also demand a system that puts the masses’ needs above big end of town profits. Frankly, that is the kind of “threat” that working class people in the capitalist West need! Let’s help “infect” Australia’s working class population with sympathy for Red China’s “Houses are for living, not for speculation” policy and her system that underpins it. The fact that China’s transition to socialism is incomplete, bureaucratically distorted and endangered by hostile elements – including by the capitalist powers internationally and by its own capitalists who long to have the right to “freely” exploit as in “normal” (that is capitalist) countries and who have a layer of academics, lawyers, journalists and politicians in the right wing of the ruling Communist Party of China doing their bidding – actually makes socialistic rule in China more in need of defence, not less. Let’s oppose the U.S. and Australian regime’s military build up against the PRC! Let’s refute their lying propaganda attacks against China! And let’s oppose the anticommunist groups within China that they support in their quest to destroy socialistic rule there!

Sydney, 2 April 2022 – Demonstrators march to demand that the measures China is using to beat poverty be applied here – including a massive increase in public housing, a guaranteed minimum wage for food delivery riders and the nationalisation of the banks. The action was built by Trotskyist Platform and the Australian Chinese Workers Association.
Photo credit: Demi Huang/New Impressions Media

The PRC’s public housing drive has been made possible not only by official policy. It is also made possible by the fact that the developers building the public housing, the steel, cement, glass and other factories providing the materials for the constructions and the banks whose loans provided part of the finance for the projects are all, overwhelmingly, under public ownership. So the PRC is able to build more public housing without having a good part of the budget leached away by capitalist profiteers. China’s system centred on public ownership was created in an inspirational revolution in 1949 that brought the toiling classes to power – albeit a power administered in an imperfect, indirect way via a middle-class bureaucracy. To ensure a system here where not only housing but also health care, aged care, education, industry, agriculture, science and culture operate for the people’s needs and not the profits of a super-rich few, the working class here will also need to take power. Let’s advance towards that goal by enhancing working class peoples’ unity, confidence in their own power and distrust of all the parties and institutions serving the capitalist class (and all its wings) in the course of hard-fought struggles to radically drive down rents, stop the plunge in the masses’ living standards and reverse the decline in workers’ real wages. Let’s build militant struggles to win a massive increase in public housing and the confiscation of the vacant homes of the ultra-rich for transfer into low-rent housing.

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

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.

22 September 2022: Some of the Trotskyist Platform signs carried at the anti-monarchy protest in Sydney after Labor prime minister, Anthony Albanese, declared the day a public holiday in honour of the late queen Elizabeth II.

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.

Sydney, 26 January 2023: Aboriginal people and supporters of Aboriginal rights of all colours march together to protest against the racist oppression of Aboriginal people. The main banner of the thousands-strong demonstration and all the Aboriginal speakers who addressed the issue condemned the government’s “Voice” to parliament proposal as a powerless sham. Several key speakers including rally MC, Dunghutti, Gumbaynggirr, Bundjalung woman, Auntie Lizzie Jarrett also stressed that the new Labor government is just as much their enemy as the previous government.
Photo credit: Robert Wallace/ AFP

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.

Workers at the General Mills food processing factory in Sydney’s west do a shift on the picket line during their weeks-long June 2021 strike for improved wages and better job security. The workers’ resolve and courage won them some important gains. If unshackled from the dead-end Laborite program of seeking common ground with the capitalist bosses on the basis of a mythical “common national interest”, the workers movement will be able to wage powerful class struggle that can push back against the nearly four decades of increased capitalist exploitation of workers in Australia.
Photo credit: United Workers Union Twitter page

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.”

A two bedroom apartment in this building in working class Granville in Western Sydney was rented out before the real estate agency even put the unit up for its first open inspection. This all-too frequent occurrence took place despite the modest apartment being rented out for $620 a week (with a four week bond of $2480) – more than three quarters of the before-tax, full-time minimum wage. Not only are rents skyrocketing but the number of available properties for rent is very small relative to the need for them, giving low-income people little chance of securing suitable accommodation.

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.”

Top: The latest Global Wages Report from the International Labor Organisation shows that workers in China have enjoyed by far the fastest growing wages of any country in the world, whether “advanced” or emerging. Above: Although average real wages in Australia rose by roughly 10% from 2008 to 2019 they have plummeted since. By June 2022, workers’ real wages in Australia were lower than they were in March 2012 (data reprinted in ABC News and obtained from The Australia Institute). In the last few months, they have plunged further and Australian real wages are now lower than they were 15 years ago! In contrast, real wages have continued to increase in China over these last three years. Below: Although China’s workers have enjoyed by far the fastest growing real wages of any country, China’s stock market, represented by the Shanghai Composite Index, is actually lower than it was 15 years ago (see red dotted line). By contrast, in the same period the Australian stock market index, the S&P/ASX 200, has soared by 30% (blue solid line). This is an indicator that while workers’ real wages have been falling here, Australia’s capitalists have been gaining ever greater return on their capital. In contrast, in China, while workers’ real wages have been steeply rising, the capitalists are not gaining any greater return on their capital (indeed China’s richest have lost wealth in the last period).
Source for stock market data: Investing.com

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!

After this article was written, on 6 February 2022, DjabWurrung Gunnai Gunditjmara woman and prominent voice for Aboriginal rights, Lidia Thorpe, quit the Greens. The federal senator, who had been the Greens First Nations spokesperson, will now sit as an independent. Announcing her resignation from the Greens, Lidia Thorpe stated that: “This country has a strong grassroots blak sovereign movement, full of staunch and committed warriors, and I want to represent that movement fully”, “It has become clear to me that I can’t do that within the Greens.” Earlier, targeted for her strong advocacy of Aboriginal rights and her refusal to simply roll over and accept the powerless “Voice” to parliament scheme that was being championed by small-l liberals, social democrats and “progressive”-liberals and many mainstream conservatives, Lidia Thorpe had been subjected to a despicable witch-hunt over having once dated a former member of a motorcycle gang (big deal!). Greens leader, Adam Bandt, failed to defend Thorpe from the witch-hunt and indeed cowardly forced his First Nations portfolio head to resign as the Greens deputy leader in the Senate. Although our Marxist-Leninist politics are different to Lidia Thorpe’s politics, we salute her determined advocacy of Aboriginal people’s liberation right now and say: Down with the racist, right-wing and small-l liberal witch-hunt of Lidia Thorpe! Bravo Lidia Thorpe for having the courage of her convictions to resign from the Greens in order to unshackle her struggle for Aboriginal people’s rights! Hopefully Lidia Thorpe’s resignation will encourage any progressive-minded workers or youth that have illusions in the Greens to also break from the party. And hopefully it will put pressure on those Far Left groups that tail after the Greens and give it electoral support to dump their unprincipled support to this party of the “progressive”-liberal wing of the inherently anti-Aboriginal, capitalist establishment. We say: No unity with any wing of Australia’s racist, capitalist ruling class – including the “progressive”-liberal wing represented by the Greens!
Photo credit: Matt Roberts/ABC News

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.

Britain, 18 January 2023: Nurses picket outside London’s University College Hospital as part of a mass nurses’ strike. Over the last two months, Britain has had its biggest strike wave in decades as workers desperately demand decent pay rises to keep up with soaring living costs. However, the full potential of such powerful strike action is held back from being brought to bear by the social democratic (pro-Labour Party), present leadership of Britain’s workers movement. The same problem faces the Australian working class. Moreover, even though Australian workers are seeing similar cuts to their real wages as their British counterparts, since a Labor government is in office here (unlike in Britain), the pro-Labor social democratic bent of Australia’s current union leadership and beliefs amongst workers themselves that a Labor government should be supported as a “lesser evil” has meant that workers here are yet to unleash the level of resistance seen in Britain – let alone the massive, hard-fought struggle needed to truly smash the attacks on workers’ living standards.
Photo credit: Reuters/Toby Melville

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”!

Since this article was written, the Australian Electoral Commission has finally released the list of major political donations for the financial year from 1 July 2021 to 30 June 2022. Above are some of the ultra-rich capitalists whose large political donations thoroughly shaped last May’s federal elections and the political discourse that surrounded it. From Left to Right: Anthony Pratt, Australia’s fifth richest person and owner of the Visy packaging giant; filthy rich tycoon, Dick Honan, who along with his children own agribusiness behemoth, Manildra Group; mining billionaire, Clive Palmer; Australia’s fourth richest capitalist, Scott Farquhar; high-rolling investor, Duncan Turpie; Pierre Langenhoven who alongside his wife, Luciana, are big-time pastoralists in the NT and the son-in-law and daughter respectively of one of South Africa’s richest men. In the 2021-2022 financial year, Anthony Pratt made political donations of almost $4 million evenly distributed to the ALP and the Coalition. This is unlike in the previous two years, where Pratt donated a total of over $2.8 million to the Coalition as against just 0.35% of that amount to the ALP. The big turnaround reflects the fact that the capitalists were increasingly worried that the corrupt and unpopular Morrison government would not be able to hold back workers’ anger over falling real wages. Hence, the capitalist exploiters thought that Labor, with its organic ties to the union leadership, would be more effective at restraining workers’ resistance than the conservatives. As a result, many capitalists chose to support, or at minimum be indifferent to, an ALP victory in the 2022 elections. Dick Honan’s Manildra Group also gave big amounts to both sides: donating $154,200 to the Coalition and a slightly lesser $105,718 to Labor. Clive Palmer made by far the biggest political donations. He incredibly gave almost $117 million to his United Australia Party (UAP) and another $250,000 to fellow Far Right outfit, the Liberal Democratic Party. As a result, despite the UAP’s increasingly extremist right-wing politics, mixed with a good deal of crackpot conspiracy, the UAP was able to win a Senate seat and increase its vote in the lower house by 20%. Meanwhile Scott Farquhar donated $1.5 million to the Climate 200 campaign group that was in good part responsible for getting the TEAL “independents” elected and which also backed the Centre Alliance that won a lower house seat in the only seat that it contested. By donating more than three quarters of a million dollars to his campaign, Climate 200 were also largely responsible for getting elected ACT “independent” senator David Pocock (who later became known for weakening the only significant pro-worker aspect of the government’s “Secure Jobs, Better Pay” law). Farquhar also donated $8,000 to the Greens. However, the biggest single donor to the Greens in the 2021-2022 financial year was capitalist investor, Duncan Turpie, who gave the party a whopping $545,555. Also sizable donors to the Greens are the pastoral companies owned by the Langenhoven family. These filthy rich, rural capitalists donated a combined $29,000 to the Greens last financial year.

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.

Oppose the U.S. and Australian Rulers’ Violent Imperialist
“Rules-Based Global Order” Propping Up Israel’s Terror!

Photo above: Palestinian people survey the rubble of a house in Beit Lahia, in the northern Gaza Strip. The house was destroyed on 12 May 2023 by yet another deadly Israeli airstrike on the people of Gaza.
Photo credit: Fatima Shbair/AP

SUPPORT THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE’S RESISTANCE!

OPPOSE THE U.S. AND AUSTRALIAN RULERS’
VIOLENT IMPERIALIST “RULES-BASED GLOBAL
ORDER” PROPPING UP ISRAEL’S TERROR!

SUPPORT SOCIALISTIC CHINA AGAINST THE
AUKUS REGIMES’ POLITICAL AND MILITARY PRESSURE!
DOWN WITH WESTERN IMPERIALISM’S PROXY WAR AGAINST RUSSIA!

7 May 2023: Today, Israel demolished a Palestinian school at the Jabbet al-Dhib village in the West Bank. With ministers in its new extreme, right wing government openly vilifying Palestinian people, Israel’s authorities are emboldened to intensify what they have long been doing: destroying Palestinian people’s homes, schools, fruit gardens and water sources. The Israeli state aims to violently create “facts on the ground” so that Palestinians never regain their national rights over the West Bank and its key city of Jerusalem. It has moved half a million Jewish settlers into the West Bank.

Already, in this year alone, Israeli forces have killed 111 Palestinian people, including at least 20 children. They have done this through the terror bombing of Gaza, murderous raids on Palestinian activists in the West Bank and attacks on Palestinian protesters. All this racist state violence has in turn encouraged increasingly powerful, fascist gangs amongst Israeli settlers and others within the country, thereby adding to the terror that Palestinian people must face.

This oppression is outrageous to most of the world. In a UN session last December, a resolution standing against Israel’s actions in the West Bank was supported by a majority of the world’s most populous countries, including socialistic China, Pakistan, Russia, Nigeria and Mexico. The only countries that opposed the resolution were most of the Western powers and their most hopelessly dependent neocolonies. Also refusing to stand by the Palestinian people were several Western-allied regimes that either abstained or did not vote on the resolution including Ukraine, Japan, India, South Korea, the Philippines and Fiji. It is only because of the support of the Western imperialist powers that dominate the world that Israel is able to get away with its murderous occupation. In particular, the U.S. superpower and its AUKUS allies, Australia and Britain, are ardent supporters of Israel’s terror. Canberra’s opposition to the December UN resolution shows that the new Labor government is as committed to upholding Israel’s tyranny as was its conservative predecessors.

That Australia’s rulers strongly back Israel is little surprise. Capitalist rule was established here through the dispossession of Aboriginal people in a manner that had all the brutality of Israel’s later 1948 Nakba ethnic cleansing of Palestinians … and then some! The Australian ruling class continues to subjugate Aboriginal people. Anti-colonial activists must, therefore, both support Aboriginal people’s struggle for liberation and back the Palestinian resistance. Let us: Oppose the state murder of Aboriginal people in custody! Welcome any flow of arms to Palestinian people carrying out armed resistance against Israeli forces and fascist settler gangs! Let us demand: Israel and far right settlers, get out of the West Bank and Gaza! For the right of return of Palestinian refugees to all parts of Palestine!

13 May 2023, Nablus, Palestine’s occupied West Bank: The Balata refugee camp following a deadly assault by the Israeli army. The Israeli forces opened fire on the residents of the camp after they objected to the troops raiding the camp and surrounding a house. The Israeli military killed two Palestinians by shooting them in the head – 32 year-old Saed Jihad Masheh and 19 year-old Adnan Wasim – and injured three others, including an elderly woman.
Photo credit: Ayman Noubani/Palestine News & Info Agency

BRING DOWN ETHNIC/RELIGIOUS ULTRA-CHAUVINIST, ZIONIST RULE
THROUGHOUT ALL OF PALESTINE!

The Israeli occupation is hell for Palestinian people. But life in Israel is not that great for the Jewish masses either. Zionist rulers promised that Israel would create a sanctuary for Jews to escape discrimination and racist oppression in Europe – an idea that only gained wide appeal following the Holocaust. However, the idea of building a nation in a land by expelling its existing inhabitants will necessarily breed resistance by the dispossessed people of that land. And so while Palestinians are overwhelmingly the victims of violence in their homeland, the Zionist project incites attacks on Jewish inhabitants too. Moreover, a state where Jewish youth must endure a compulsory military service of up to three years and where residents are frequently running into bomb shelters is hardly a “peaceful sanctuary”. Far from protecting Jewish people, the Zionist project, based as it is on ethnic cleansing, has made Israel’s Jews the objects of hatred on the part of their neighbours.

That Israel is now administered by a chaotic, extremist government – and, moreover, one that is grabbing dictatorial powers for itself while being hated by much of its own population – is a symptom of just how crisis-ridden the Zionist “order” is. The Zionist regime is squeezed between the resistance it faces from the Palestinian people and the fact that its “order” does not serve the Jewish working class either but only truly serves a small class of capitalist Jews. The economic system that this capitalist class runs is based on the theft of Palestinian agricultural land and crops. These capitalists make huge profits, too, by super-exploiting Palestinian labourers who enjoy few rights. Although relatively privileged compared to their Palestinian counterparts, Jewish workers are also exploited by Israel’s bosses just like in any other capitalist state. Israel’s capitalist rulers infect their masses with virulent ethnic supremacist notions to keep the Jewish working class subservient to their capitalist interests. However, when the neighbouring Arab toiling classes rise up against their imperialist-dependent rulers and fight to take over power, this will inevitably inspire a portion of the Israeli Jewish working class to break from Zionism. There is plenty of social tinder for such an explosion. Arab toilers are seething under Western neolonialism and ground down by poverty and unemployment. Women workers face women’s oppression on top of all that. Meanwhile, Israel has one of the highest poverty rates in the OECD. In real terms, Israel’s minimum wage has dived by around 5% over the last five years. A section of the Jewish working class must be won to the understanding that the only way that they can put an end to their own exploitation and create a truly peaceful home is by linking up with neighbouring Arab workers and with the Palestinian people’s resistance in a joint struggle to smash the racist Israeli capitalist regime and create a secular, socialist Palestine where Palestinians and Jews can live together in equality.

2 May 2023, Ramallah, Palestine’s occupied West Bank: Large numbers of Palestinians marched in several West Bank cities to protest the death of Palestinian activist, Khader Adnan, who died after an 86-day hunger strike in protest at his detention without charge. The Israeli regime imprisons over a thousand other Palestinians without charge in such military detention.
Photo credit: Palestine News & Info Agency

RESIST THE U.S. AND AUSTRALIAN REGIMES THAT UPHOLD
THE SUBJUGATION OF PALESTINIAN PEOPLE!

Why do U.S. rulers and their allies support Israel’s conquest of Palestine? The imperialist rulers of the U.S. and those of Germany, Japan, Australia, Britain and France make profits not only from exploiting their own workers but from even more ruthlessly exploiting the workers of the ex-colonial countries of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the Pacific and Latin America and through plundering natural resources and seizing markets there. To enforce this tyranny, the strongest imperial power, the U.S., enlists deputy sheriffs to police particular regions. Israel is its deputy sheriff in the oil-rich and strategically-located Middle East. As Israel’s attacks on anti-Western forces in Lebanon, its threats against Iran and its air strikes against Syria prove, Israel acts to undermine forces that refuse to fully accept the U.S.-led West’s violent despotism over the world – what Western powers cynically refer to as the “rules-based global order”. Israel also serves in the West’s Cold War against socialistic China by intimidating regional countries that dare to become close to the Peoples Republic of China.

Yet, precisely because it is in the interest of America’s capitalists and their allies ruling Australia and Britain to back Israel, it is in the interests of the exploited masses of these countries to take the very opposite stance. For any weakening of Australia’s capitalist rulers through blows against their local or global interests can only be a good thing for the downtrodden masses of Australia. It would strengthen the struggles of workers facing plunging real wages, insecure jobs and skyrocketing rents and of Aboriginal people being hit with racist state oppression and ever more intense vilification in the capitalist media. That is why it is not only a matter of moral imperative but also in the clear interests of the working class of the U.S. and Australia to oppose Israel’s tyranny. The Australian workers movement must take industrial action to demand: End all U.S. and Australian military and economic support for Israel!

Right now there is a major battle in Ukraine whose outcome will affect the strength of the imperialist powers that prop up Israel’s occupation. Although the conflict started as mostly an inter-capitalist battle for territory, the Western powers intervened so aggressively that it quickly became a proxy war of the U.S.-led imperialist powers against Russia. Although Russia is also ruled by capitalist rulers, Russia’s ruling class lacks the capital to lord it over the “Third World.” It is not Russia that destroyed Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya and it is not Russia that props up Israel’s occupation. That is why it is in the interests of all those suffering directly and indirectly from the tyranny of Western imperialism – including the Palestinian people – and the workers of the world to stand for the defeat of the U.S., British and Australian regimes’ proxy war against Russia. However, the Socialist Alternative and Socialist Alliance groups which proclaim their solidarity with Palestine are on the side of the U.S.-backed imperialist powers in their Ukraine proxy war. They even support Western arms supplies to Ukraine. In doing so, they are taking the side which, if victorious, will reinforce Western imperialist tyranny over the world and with it the strengthening of their brutal Israeli deputy sheriff.

There is a far more serious threat to Western global domination (the so-called rules-based order) than Russia. And that is the rise of a giant socialistic power in China. China’s cooperation with developing countries is slowly enabling the latter to achieve greater independence from the imperial powers. Today’s decision by the Arab League to rebuff Western pressure and readmit Syria into the League and China’s successful efforts to bring Iran and Saudi Arabia towards rapprochement in defiance of the USA’s divisive schemes are early signs of this. If China’s strength were to continue to grow and she was able to further offer developing countries access to technology, capital and markets in her mutually beneficial way, Palestine’s neighbours would be less dependent on the imperialists and more willing to resist Washington’s demands that they acquiesce to Israel’s occupation. Most importantly, should China’s rapid development continue until her per capita income approaches that of the richest countries, her poverty alleviation successes will encourage workers all over the world to also demand socialism. The Western capitalist rulers would face being overthrown at home. The Zionist occupation will topple with them. That is why every true supporter of Palestine must stand for the defence of socialistic rule in China from not only imperialist military threats but also from Western-backed anti-communist forces within China. We must also oppose the lying anti-China propaganda attacks that are launched by Western imperialist politicians, NGOs and pro-Western media – the very same people that vilify the Palestinian struggle.

Let’s weaken the Western imperialist props that uphold Israel’s tyranny! Let’s combine opposition to Washington and Canberra’s military, political and economic aid to Israel with resistance to the brutal oppression of Aboriginal people and class struggle action against the exploitation of workers and all the poor in this country!

Defend Socialistic Rule in China Against the AUKUS Regimes’ Political and Military War Drive!

Photo Above: Last week hawkish ALP Defence Minister, Richard Marles announced a massive intensification in the Australian regime’s military build-up targeting China. This includes the spending of billions of dollars to acquire long-range missiles. The government said that it will speed up the delivery of HIMARS rocket systems (like the one shown above) and acquire other long-range missiles.

It is in Working Class People’s Interests to Stand
with Socialistic China against Australia’s Capitalist Rulers

Defend Socialistic Rule in China
Against the AUKUS Regimes’
Political and Military War Drive!

1 May 2023: The Labor government has escalated the scale of the AUKUS nuclear submarine project first organised by the former right wing government. Prime minister Anthony Albanese announced that the Australian regime will start receiving nuclear submarines from the U.S. from the mid 2030s and later build nuclear submarines with the technology and direction of its American and British counterparts. The official project cost is now $368 billion. But last week it was revealed that Defence had quietly provisioned an additional 50 per cent contingency for the project. This pushes the real cost up to half a trillion dollars!

Nuclear-propulsion allows submarines to operate for longer and further from shores before refueling. In other words, Australia’s capitalist rulers are not acquiring the subs for use around Australia’s shores. The nuclear submarines will be used to join the U.S., British and other Western capitalist militaries in threatening China in waters off her own coastline. The AUKUS regimes are barely doing anything to even hide this fact. All this raises the frightening possibility of the Armageddon scenario – a future U.S./British/Australian/NATO war unleashed against a country with almost 1,500 million people!

Long before the navy will receive its first AUKUS submarines in 10 to 12 years, Australia’s capitalist regime is right now engaging in a massive military build-up. Last October, it was revealed that the Labor government would allow the U.S. to deploy nuclear capable B-52 bombers in Northern Australia. The upgrading of NT bases necessary to allow for this was part of last week’s announcements by hawkish ALP Defence Minister, Richard Marles, of a huge anti-China military escalation. The plan includes the acquisition of long-range missiles. As the Albanese government made clear, the focus of the military expansion will be on projecting more power further north from Australia’s shores. In other words, the pretense of the military’s purpose being to defend Australia from invasion threats (of which none exist) will be quietly dropped in favour of openly preparing to join war moves against Red China thousands upon thousands of kilometres from Australia’s shores. Pro-war hardliners are so emboldened by the militarist political climate that the war-mongering Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) and right-wing extremist Shadow Defence Minister Andrew Hastie (who is notorious for having a few years ago spearheaded the white supremacist cause celebre’ to give special “refugee status” to rich white South African farmers) all criticised the expansion plans for not pouring even greater resources into the military build-up!

To justify their military escalation, the Australian ruling class and its Western allies have been trying to portray China as a “threat”. They rant that, “China’s military build up is now the most ambitious of any country since the end of the Second World War”, while deceptively covering up the truth that China’s annual defence spending is almost three times lower than that of the U.S. despite having more than four times as many people as the United States. Moreover, even before the sharp escalation announced by the Labor government last week and before the AUKUS expenditure comes online, Australia’s military expenditure per head of population is actually six times higher than China’s. More importantly, while over the last 40 years the U.S. and Australian imperialist regimes have together killed hundreds of thousands of people by twice invading Iraq and then later unleashing air strikes in Syria and Iraq which often “collaterally” killed large numbers of civilians, carried out the most hideous war crimes during their two decade-long occupation of Afghanistan and conducted a racist, colonial occupation of Somalia in the mid-90s, while the NT’s U.S./Australia Pine Gap spy base’s pinpointing of missile strikes helped the U.S. and NATO to bomb to death thousands of people in Serbia in 1999 and destroy Libya in 2011, while the Australian military twice occupied East Timor in order to ensure that the political order there facilitated the theft of the country’s offshore oil and gas wealth by greedy Australian corporations, while from 2003 the Australian military, police and bureaucrats carried out a more-than-decade-long, defacto neocolonial takeover of the Solomon Islands and while the Australian regime caused the death of up to 20,000 people after they orchestrated a decade-long war and blockade of the South Pacific island of Bougainville in the late 20th century after the people there rose up against the arrogant trampling of their rights by an Australian-owned mining company, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has not fought one single shooting war or engaged in one single occupation of another country during these entire last 40 years! The only concrete examples of so-called “Chinese aggression” that imperialist propagandists have been able to point to is China “invading” a few disputed, uninhabited pieces of rock off its own coast … in the South China Sea. The whole China “is increasingly aggressive” narrative is in fact complete rubbish from start to finish! We say: No to long-range missiles for the Australian military! No to the deployment of U.S. B-52s in the NT! Torpedo the AUKUS submarine deal! All U.S. troops and bases out! Close Pine Gap!

Why Are They Targeting the Peoples Republic of China?

Given that 35% of Australia’s exports are bought up by China, many wonder why Australia’s capitalist rulers are risking such a hugely lucrative trade by antagonising their, by far, biggest customer. Some on the Left answer this question by claiming that the Australian ruling class is joining the West’s war drive against China only because it is servilely bowing to American demands. However, this is not, in fact, the case. The truth is actually even more confronting! And that reality is that Australia’s capitalist ruling class is just as committed to the political and military Cold War drive against the PRC as its U.S. senior partners and for the exact same reasons. Those reasons all stem from one fact: that China is a country not under capitalist rule but one under socialistic rule. Although from the early 1980s, China’s compromise-seeking rulers bent to the worldwide dominance of capitalism and allowed the capitalists to gain a dangerous foothold in the Chinese economy, the backbone sectors of her economy – including her banks, fuel, power, ports, shipping, aviation, steel and aircraft, shipbuilding, train and auto manufacturing sectors – remain under the dominance of socialistic public ownership. This system of collective ownership that favours working-class people was created by China’s toiling classes in a massive anti-capitalist revolution in 1949. Although China’s transition to socialism is fragile and incomplete and the working class hold on power there is held indirectly via a middle-class bureaucracy, the capitalist powers see the existence of a workers state in a country with nearly 1.5 billion people with all the hostility that a capitalist boss views the presence of a militant trade union in their business.

So how does socialistic rule in China threaten the interests of Australia’s capitalist ruling class and the rulers of other capitalist powers? For one, when China engages in infrastructure construction, resource development and other major projects in developing countries, it is usually China’s giant state-owned enterprises that spearhead the projects. But these socialistic enterprises are not mainly driven by profits but by broader PRC national goals – including building good relations between China and other developing countries. As a result, they offer their host countries very good terms. Although this is great for the developing countries that cooperate with China, this is very bad news for, say, the Australian capitalist corporations that had been making an absolute fortune by looting the natural resources of the likes of PNG, East Timor, Fiji, Indonesia and the Philippines and super-exploiting the toil of workers there. With China’s socialistic state-owned enterprises offering developing countries access to infrastructure development, capital and technology without ripping them off, these countries are giving some projects to China that they would previously have had to give to Australia’s plundering corporate bigwigs. Moreover, with China’s public sector firms offering such good deals, South Pacific and southeast Asian countries are using the “threat” of turning to China to claw better terms from Australian companies that continue to be granted projects. Either way, without actually meaning to do so, the PRC’s socialistic enterprises’ mutually beneficial cooperation with countries in this region is causing Australia’s capitalists to lose money – lose big money! And we know how greedy capitalists behave when their profits are threatened!

Students at Papua New Guinea’s Butuka Academy. The school was provided by China as part of part of a sister-city partnership between Port Moresby and the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. It was built by a subsidiary of PRC socialistic state-owned enterprise, China State Construction Engineering Corporation, the largest construction company in the world.
Photo credit (photo on Left): Li Feng/People’s Daily
Photo credit (photo on right): Lin Xin/China Plus

Secondly, as huge as the income is that Australia’s big end of town gains from trade with China, working class rule there (as tenuous and bureaucratically deformed as it is) impedes their possibility of gaining much, much greater profits from operations within that country. Currently, with China’s real wages by far the fastest growing in the world, bosses there, including foreign investors, have to pay wages that are much higher than in capitalist countries with comparable income levels. This is especially the case when one adds the extra payments that worker-hiring business owners must make in China – including not only into a collective workers’ superannuation fund but into individual accounts for workers to use to buy or rent homes and into collective medical insurance, unemployment insurance, maternity support and accident insurance funds that together add up to not just around 10% of wages as bosses’ super payments and compo insurance does here … but to some 40% of wages! Moreover, the dominance of the PRC’s socialistic public sector over the most profitable sectors – like banking and finance, oil and gas, mining, infrastructure construction, defence and telecommunications – greatly restrict the amount of profit that capitalists can make within China. However, if capitalist rule were restored to China, Australian and other rich Western capitalists would not only gain a bonanza from looting these sectors but would be able to greatly increase their extraction of profits from Chinese workers’ labour as any new capitalist regime in China would drive down real wages and workers’ conditions to satisfy its new capitalist masters. And the more that their own decaying system lurches from one economic crisis to the next, the more desperate are the capitalist powers to prop up their failing system by gouging massive super-profits via the nightmarish scenario of turning China into a giant sweatshop for capitalist exploitation – like they have already done to their existing populous, semi-colonies like the Philippines, Indonesia, Bangladesh, India, Nigeria, Brazil and Mexico.

Most worryingly for the Australian and other capitalist ruling classes, the existence of a workers state in such a large country as China – and one that has successfully lifted all her people out of extreme poverty and is rapidly improving the living standards of her people – shows the working class masses of their own countries that it is viable for them to seize state power and build a system based on socialist, common ownership of the backbone sectors of the economy. Right now, with China still catching up from the terrible poverty of her pre-1949 capitalist days when she was a cruelly subjugated neo-colony of the imperial powers, per capita incomes in China are several times below that of the richest of the capitalist countries. This, therefore, makes socialism seem less attractive to the less politically aware layers of the masses in Western countries than it otherwise would. However, the Australian and other Western capitalists know that if the PRC’s rapid socialistic development is not choked off, then living standards in China will catch up with those in even the richest of the capitalist countries within two or three decades. If and when that happens, they know that large sections of their own populations will demand socialism in their own countries. After all, if socialistic rule in a huge country can deliver average incomes comparable to even the richest of the capitalist countries, then why would the working class masses living in the capitalist countries want to tolerate a system that brings with it economic crises, lack of secure jobs, unaffordable rents, dwindling real wages, bullying bosses, social decay and disharmony and racist oppression and violence against First Nations peoples and minorities. This is why the capitalist ruling classes in Australia and other Western countries see the PRC as an “existential threat.” It is not the type of existential threat that they portray to their own masses: which is as some sort of aggressive, war-mongering power. Rather, China is an existential threat to the capitalist rule that exists in most of the world because despite China’s inward focused rulers doing nothing to consciously encourage revolutionary struggle in the capitalist world – which is an incorrect and anti-internationalist policy – the mere example provided by the successes of socialistic rule in a country with nearly one in five of the world’s people threatens to eventually inspire the masses in the capitalist world to fight for socialist revolution in their own countries. Given China’s massive population, if the PRC’s per capita GDP were to even approach that of the richest countries, then her economy would be so huge that the scale of her cooperation with developing countries would undercut the ability of the Western imperialist ruling classes to plunder these ex-colonies to such an extent that these Western capitalist rulers, who rely on such imperialist looting to prop up their decaying systems at home, would face implosion of their own economies.

Given that it is rational from the point of view of the Australian capitalist class – if any political option that an obsolete, doomed class takes can be considered “rational” – to stridently oppose socialistic rule in China, it is little surprise that virtually the entire capitalist establishment is behind the campaign to destroy the Chinese workers state. A few big-time capitalists had been softly critical of the former Morrison government’s provocative anti-China rhetoric for damaging Australian exports to China. However, they are now satisfied after the new Labor government slightly dialed down the severity of Canberra’s anti-PRC language, while continuing to intensify the anti-China military build-up and more aggressively interfere in the region to damage South Pacific countries’ mutually beneficial relations with the PRC. Amongst mainstream politicians, all agree on enmity to the PRC’s socialistic system, with just a few critical of particular aspects of the Cold War drive – like the nuclear submarine project. Former prime minister, Paul Keating, is a partial exception. Keating also opposes the PRC’s system but believes that since China’s rise as the pre-eminent Asian power is inevitable, Australian governments should accommodate this rise and try to put guardrails around it rather than try in vain to oppose it. However, the unanimity of the rest of the capitalist establishment around confronting the PRC is evident in the fact that all sections of the mainstream media – from the hard right Murdoch media to the mainstream conservative Channel 9/Sydney Morning Herald to the centrist ABC to the progressive-liberal Guardian newspaper – have been spewing out an endless torrent of ever-more rabid, anti-PRC propaganda.

This anti-PRC unanimity extends to the other imperialist countries as well. All pro-capitalist factions in all Western imperialist countries are hostile to the PRC. In the developing countries the story is different. Many governments in these countries have good relations with the PRC because her mutually beneficial cooperation with these countries is enabling them to achieve greater independence from their Western imperialist overlords. However, a few of these regimes fear the message sent to their own masses by the successes of socialistic rule in China so much that they choose to align with the anti-PRC Cold War drive. Thus, the right-wing Philippines regime led by Bongbong Marcos, son of the corrupt, hated dictator Ferdinand Marcos, is increasingly aligning itself with the U.S.-led, anti-PRC war drive. The same applies to the far-right Hindu chauvinist, Modi government in India. For India’s capitalist exploiting class, the achievements of socialistic rule in China are especially threatening. This is because, since China and India have similar huge population sizes and both were freed from colonial/neo-colonial domination around the same time – in the late 1940s – a comparison between the two countries provides the fairest assessment of the relative merits of socialism versus capitalism. Indeed, at the time of China’s 1949 Revolution, India’s per capita income was 87% higher than China’s – that is, almost double. Yet today, workers’ wages are several times greater in China than in India, life expectancy is 11 years higher and the social position of women is far better. While extreme poverty has truly been overcome throughout China, hundreds of millions of people continue to live in abject poverty in India with ramshackle housing, inadequate food and very often suffering under debt bondage to creditors. India’s capitalist ruling class are, therefore, terrified that the masses in their country will notice the much better life for the masses across the border in China and demand socialism in India too. That is why Modi has taken that country into the Quad anti-PRC alliance with the U.S., Australia and Japan.

The Imperialist Powers All-Sided Campaign to Destroy Socialistic Rule in China

No exploitative ruling class in history has lost power without using all available means to cling on to it. So it is the case with capitalist ruling classes today. When they have seen the masses threatening their rule, they have quickly switched from claiming to be “democrats” to instituting the most violent fascist or other brutal authoritarian political orders in order to protect their class rule. This is what they did, for example, when they turned to Mussolini in Italy, to Hitler in Germany, Franco in Spain, Suharto in Indonesia and Pinochet in Chile to save their rule by murderously crushing the radicalised working class masses and leftists. With the successes of socialistic rule in China undermining the ability of the imperialist rulers to super-exploit the “Third World” and on course to eventually inspire the overthrow of capitalist rule in even the richest of the capitalist countries, the Western imperialist regimes are preparing to use every means possible to crush socialistic rule in China. And that includes being prepared to risk the destruction of human civilisation as we know it by unleashing nuclear weapons. The Biden regime’s decision last week to deploy submarines armed with nuclear ballistic missiles to the Western Pacific – aimed against China and North Korea – for the first time in four decades and the U.S. and Australian governments plan to deploy nuclear armed U.S. B52s in Darwin are signs of this.

However, the capitalist powers’ preferred means to destroy the Chinese workers state is to use political and economic means to foment a capitalist counterrevolution there. At minimum they intend to squeeze China so hard with all-sided pressure that it chokes off her development. That is why Washington has restricted micro-chip and other high-tech exports to China. With this same purpose of damaging the PRC’s economy, the Australian regime has joined the U.S. and a few of its Western counterparts in using the bogus cover of national security to limit the market access in Australia of some Chinese companies and products – including Huawei and Tik-Tok – and block several Chinese investment projects. The AUKUS regimes and their imperialist allies hope too that if they can cause economic woes in China this will create dissension and revolt within her borders.

Meanwhile, the Western capitalist ruling classes are giving huge support to those outfits within China seeking to restore capitalism there. The website of the U.S. government agency for foreign interference, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), admits to giving a range of such groups nearly $17 million in funding. This includes almost $900,000 to a group called the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) – in other words the Centre for International Capitalism – and huge amounts to various Chinese groups committed to “empowering entrepreneurs to protect their property rights” – in other words, to “empower” capitalists to protect their “rights” to the fruits of their exploitation of workers’ labour in China, which fortunately is not guaranteed them in Red China. The NED also funds anti-PRC exile groups including an Australian anti-communist group called the Australia New Zealand Tibetan Youth. Yet, such open imperialist funding of capitalist counterrevolutionary groups is dwarfed by the amount of covert backing from the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies and the amount of funding provided by Western anti-communist NGOs – the latter often flush with donations from wealthy capitalists. Whenever anti-communist forces within China stage actions, Western ruling classes are quick to declare their political solidarity with them in order to encourage these movements. Last November, when small groups in China – a component of which were anti-communists openly seeking to destroy socialistic rule – held the Chinese version of the Far Right-led COVID “Freedom” rallies opposing pandemic restrictions (in the Chinese case this was mainly, nominally directed against PCR testing and mask wearing), the Albanese government effectively declared its support for the protests … despite strongly opposing such COVID “Freedom” protests in Australia. Earlier in 2019, when pro-colonial rich kids in Hong Kong attempted a violent anti-communist uprising, the right-wing Morrison government and the ALP and Greens hailed the anti-communist forces. 

Shanghai, 27 November 2022: The man in the foreground holding the mobile phone starts a chant of “Down with the Communist Party!” and then “Down with Xi Jinping” at the Shanghai COVID “Freedom” protest. At the very moment that he begins the “Down with Xi Jinping”-chant, a blonde-haired Western person standing within touching distance of him turns around and smiles approvingly. She is one of the minority of protesters who fervently joins in with the two chants. Who is this person? Obviously, she can speak a fair level of Mandarin Chinese to be able to join the chants and moreover, inbound tourism into China has been stopped since COVID. The question then is, is she a member of one of the anticommunist Western NGOs operating within China under various social-work guises or is she a an attache of the nearby U.S. consulate or a manager for one of the many Western corporations that have offices in Shanghai and thus with a reason for class hostility to working-class rule in China or is she an international student? And if the Westerner was an international student, was her motivation for going to China simply to study or was she sent by a Western government agency or anticommunist NGO for the expressed purposes of quietly promoting a “democratic” capitalist counterrevolution?
Including the amount that it specifically allocates for work in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Tibet and Hong Kong, the U.S. government’s arm for foreign interference, the National Endowment for Democracy openly admits to donating a total of $US11 million ($A16.5 million) to groups pushing its capitalist counterrevolutionary agenda in China. The covert financial backing given by Western intelligence agencies and the amount given by anticommunist Western NGOs, the later often funded by wealthy tycoons, is even greater. Additionally, like they provided to the anti-communist rioters in Hong Kong in 2019, Western regime agencies and NGOs provide training to anti-communist forces within China (and in exile) on protest tactics, propaganda and disinformation methods and anti-PRC-state, “direct action” strategies.
Source: Still taken by Trotskyist Platform from a video posted by anti-communist Western journalist, Eva Rammeloo on her Twitter feed.

A key means that the imperialist ruling classes use to undermine socialistic rule in China is through their governments, media and NGOs saturating the world with anti-communist, anti-PRC propaganda, in the hope that some of it will make its way into China. They rant that China is “not a democracy”, while hiding the fact that the “democratic” structures in the West, which theoretically give each person equal rights, are designed to enable the rich capitalist class to – through their ownership of the media and their greatly disproportionate financial ability to fund political advertising and political parties, hire lobbyists and establish think tanks and NGOs – thoroughly dominate all political discourse to such an extent that the “democracy” is in effect only a dictatorship of the capitalist class over the working class masses. Most deceitfully, the Western ruling classes claim that China is “brutally persecuting” her more European-looking, Muslim, Uyghur minority. To justify this lie, they seize on China’s measures to curb that small section of Uyghurs – spearheaded both by capitalist Uyghurs angry that socialistic rule is curbing their ability to get even richer and a larger number of extreme religious fundamentalist elements who want to impose an ISIS-type regime and who are furious that the PRC’s secular, socialistic system has given Uyghur women too many freedoms – who are intent on overturning socialistic rule in the areas where Uyghurs reside in Northwestern China. Those measures involve putting into boarding schools for both socialist political education and vocational training those Uyghurs who have provided minor support to religious fundamentalist terrorist groups or other violent anti-communist forces. The Western propaganda deliberately ignores the truth that this practice is a very humane alternative to what happens in Australia to Islamic fundamentalists engaged in equivalent acts against the regime here – which is to be locked up for years in Goulburn Supermax prison on terrorism convictions.

Modern Day McCarthyism in Australia in the Service of the Anti-China Cold War

The imperialist rulers have another motive for their anti-PRC propaganda: to make their own populations accept their Cold War drive. To further this purpose, the Australian ruling class has a still more sinister means: to whip up fear and hatred of China by, in an ostentatious way, persecuting organisations and individuals for being supposed Chinese “agents” or “tools for Chinese foreign interference in Australia.” In the most recent case, two weeks ago Sydney man Alexander Csergo was placed into solitary confinement after being subjected to a high-profile arrest, with the Australian Federal Police (AFP) ranting about “espionage”, merely for allegedly providing, for a fee, alleged Chinese officials with open source information (that is from the media and public websites and publications) about “Australia’s national security”. If the accusation is true, this is no different to the numerous people in China hired by Western think tanks, government agencies and media organisations to collect open source information about China’s political and security matters. In another high profile case, Australian citizen and former U.S. fighter pilot, Daniel Duggan, has been imprisoned in harsh conditions here for extradition to the U.S. for allegedly training Chinese military pilots more than ten years ago – even though it is not illegal under Australian law to do so. Then, later this year, a prominent member of Melbourne’s Chinese community, Di Sanh Duong, will face trial under Australia’s authoritarian “foreign interference” laws because he committed the “dastardly act” of organising for his Chinese community organisation to … make a $37,450 donation to the Royal Melbourne Hospital, allegedly so that it will give Chinese people a good name! Meanwhile, the work of the Chinese language-teaching Confucius institutes has been curbed after Australian politicians engaged in truly bonkers accusations that the language schools were tools for Chinese “foreign interference”.

Another victim of sinister Cold-War McCarthyist witch-hunting in Australia: Di Sanh (“Sunny”) Duong is a prominent member of Melbourne’s Chinese community. An ethnic Chinese person from Vietnam and the president of the Federation of Vietnamese-Cambodian Old Chinese Organisations in Oceania, Di Sanh Duong will face trial under the charge of “preparing to commit foreign interference ” … after he organised for his Chinese community organisation to make a $37,450 donation to the Royal Melbourne Hospital and allegedly thereby influence politics through the positive impression that the donation creates!
Photo credit: Sina

This modern-day McCarthyist repression has another purpose: to silence the voices of those who dare to speak positively about the PRC. In June 2020, the AFP and ASIO secret police subjected the home of then NSW state MP, Shaoquett Moselmane, to a massive raid three months after he made the manifestly true statement that China had responded effectively to the COVID pandemic. Then his own party, the ALP, followed through further on this witch-hunt by refusing to re-nominate Moselmane for his Senate position for the recent state election, effectively dumping him from parliament. The previous year, Chinese international students were subjected to an intimidating interrogation by Australia’s secret police because they organised a large march in Sydney opposing the pro-colonial, anti-China riots in Hong Kong. Meanwhile, the media and the likes of ASPI have been demonising any Chinese community organisation in Australia that refuses to take an avidly anti-PRC line as a “tool of Chinese foreign interference.” There is a reason why Australia’s capitalist ruling class is especially determined to silence pro-PRC voices in the Chinese community. They know that other Australian residents will realise that Chinese international students and migrants from the PRC who have lived in both China and Australia are the best qualified to speak about the realities of life in the PRC. The capitalist class is worried that by speaking positively about life in China, these members of the Chinese community will undermine support for the anti-PRC Cold War and, moreover, could potentially “infect” others here with sympathy for socialism.

We Must Defend Socialistic Rule in China from
All Aspects of the Imperialist Campaign to Destroy It

For the very same reasons that it is in the interests of the U.S. and Australian capitalist rulers to destroy socialistic rule in China, it is in the interests of the working class of this country and the world to rally to its defence. The existence of socialistic rule in China and its stunning successes in poverty alleviation gives confidence to the working class masses in the capitalist world that capitalist rule does not need to be accepted – that another alternative is possible.

That is why the workers movement and all socialists must oppose the U.S., British, Australian and other Western regimes’ all-sided campaign to destroy the PRC workers state and the other workers states in Vietnam, Laos, North Korea and Cuba. Here in Australia, we must demand: Down with the Australian regime’s aggressive military buildup against the PRC! U.S./Australian/British/French warships stay out of the South China Sea! No arms shipments to, or diplomatic contacts with, Taiwan’s anti-working class regime! Oppose the Albanese government’s neocolonial meddling in the Pacific – Down with their efforts to intimidate the Solomon Islands and other countries that choose to establish economic and security cooperation with the PRC! Stop the support for anti-communist, anti-PRC exile groups in Australia from the U.S. and Australian regimes and pro-capitalist NGOs! Lift the discriminatory restrictions on Huawei and TikTok! Down with the hysterical campaign against the Confucius Institute language schools! Free Alexander Csergo and pilot Daniel Duggan! Drop the charges against hospital donor Di Sanh Duong! Scrap Australia’s McCarthyist, anti-PRC “foreign interference” laws! Down with the persecution of those Australian Chinese community organisations that refuse to join the Cold War campaign!

If we are to be able to oppose the capitalist ruling class’ Cold War drive against Red China, we must oppose the entire propaganda campaign that is used to “justify” it. We must expose the disgusting lie spread by the Western ruling classes that the PRC is “brutally persecuting” her Uyghur Muslim minority. We must, for example, point out that countries representing 85% of the world’s population have refused to sign on to this claim and that a very large number of countries, including most Muslim-majority countries – as well as the Organisation of Islamic States – have instead praised China’s treatment of Uyghurs after sending fact-finding missions to China’s northwest.

Similarly, we must refute the claim of the imperialists and exiled, anti-communist Tibetans that China is oppressing her Tibetan minority. We must explain that at bottom the clash over Tibet is not between Tibetans and China. Rather it is between, on the one hand, the now exiled, theocratic former rulers of Tibet – and their descendants – who mercilessly exploited and punished their serfs and still long for the day when, with the help of the imperialists, they can once again lord it over the Tibetan masses and, on the other, the former Tibetan serfs – and their descendants – who eventually liberated themselves from feudal serfdom with great assistance from China’s socialist revolution and who today rule the PRC’s Tibetan Autonomous Region. We need to point out that nearly all Tibetans today, just like nearly all Uyghurs, can not only speak their own language – unlike many actually persecuted people like most of Australia’s First Nations people who have been cruelly cut off from their tongue by brutal colonial dispossession – but actually learn to read and write their own language in China’s schools (unlike in the old Tibet when nearly all the serfs who made up 90% of Tibet’s population were kept illiterate) alongside learning the country’s national language, Mandarin. We must stress too that a recent video showing the Dalai Lama, in a public event, kissing a young boy on the lips and then asking the boy to “suck my tongue”, causing the boy to soon after pull away his head, should not be seen just as an isolated, inappropriate sexualised exploitation of a child. Rather, the Dalai Lama’s behavior is a throwback to what the monk aristocratic class that he headed was doing in the old feudal Tibet. As even anti-PRC journalists sometimes have to admit, it was the norm for Tibet’s then monk rulers to rape the young boys who the serfs were forced to give up for monastic slavery.

Above: The Dalai Lama caused a scandal when, in a grossly sexualised way, he kissed a young boy on the lips and then asked the boy to suck his tongue at a public event in India in February 2023. His abusive behavior gives a small sense of what the monk aristocratic class that he headed was doing in the old feudal Tibet, when Tibet’s then monk rulers used to rape most of the the young boys that the serfs were forced to give up for monastic slavery. Top: A serf in the time of the lama-ruled feudal Tibet. The aristocrats held many serfs in chains to prevent them escaping. It was in 1959, ten years after China’s anti-capitalist revolution, that Tibetan and Chinese communists with the crucial backing of the Chinese workers state liberated the serfs that made up 90% of Tibet’s population from the horrific oppression of serfdom. Below: Liberated serfs and their descendants celebrate the 60th anniversary of the emancipation of serfs in Tibet at a ceremony at the Potala Palace square in Lhasa, capital of China’s Tibet Autonomous Region. Bottom: Primary school children in the Tibet Autonomous Region at a class learn to read and write in Tibetan language. Tibetan children in China are taught both Tibetan and Mandarin Chinese in school.
Photo credit (Top photo): Tibet.cn website
Photo credit (below photo): Xinhua

We need to also explain that the anti-PRC attempted revolt in Hong Kong in 2019 was not a struggle for genuine democracy for all but an attempt by Hong Kong’s upper class and upper middle-class rich kids to maintain their privileged position in the face of their fears that the PRC would gradually bring aspects of socialism to Hong Kong. These pro-colonial rich kids and their U.S., British and Australian backers only wanted Western-style “democracy” because they knew that such a system would enable them to leverage their wealth to dominate all political discourse and elections – just like their class does in Western capitalist “democracies.”

We must also refute the positive portrayal given by capitalist politicians and media to Taiwan’s rulers. We must point out that the Taiwanese regime are the political descendants of the murderous deposed capitalist rulers of China who fled to the island with their ill-gotten wealth following China’s 1949 anti-capitalist revolution and who took over the island in order to use it as a base to foment capitalist restoration in all of China. This is equivalent to Andrew Forrest, Gina Rinehart, the Murdochs and their ilk fleeing the mainland to Tasmania in the wake of a workers revolution here and taking over Tasmania in order to retain it as a capitalist foothold in Australia. As for the so-called “democracy” in Taiwan that the Australian ruling class rave about, it is just like here – in practice only a democracy for the rich. Moreover, in the case of Taiwan, this “democracy” was built on the White Terror period during the first four decades of Taiwan’s existence, when the capitalist regime there carried out a reign of bloody political repression that saw them murder thousands upon thousands of communists and other leftists and imprison hundreds of thousands more. Today, Taiwan’s “democracy” continues to repress the workers movement, with large sections of Taiwan’s working class banned from taking industrial action. Taiwanese workers are subjected to long working hours and harsh military-style regimentation. As a result, suicide rates in capitalist Taiwan are two and a half times what they are in the socialistic mainland of China. The most brutally exploited workers in Taiwan are migrant workers from countries like Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Sri Lanka. Especially for those migrant workers toiling as domestic maids or in Taiwan’s huge deep sea fishing industry, Taiwan’s “democracy” means very low pay, over 100 hours of work per week and, for many, “debt bondage” and working conditions close to slavery. The PRC is completely justified in wanting to reunify China by reincorporating the rogue province of Taiwan. The mistake of the PRC leadership is that they promise to accommodate Taiwan’s capitalist class in doing so under the “one country, two systems” formula. Instead, we say that the PRC must foment socialist revolution in Taiwan in order to liberate the island’s cruelly exploited working class. For one China under one socialist system!

To oppose the Western imperialists’ war drive against socialistic China we must also stand for the defeat of their proxy war to subordinate Russia. Although Russia is itself ruled by a capitalist exploiting class and although the escalation of the war in Ukraine in February last year was initially mostly a squalid inter-capitalist battle for territory in which the working class had no side, the U.S., Australia and other Western powers intervened into the conflict to such an extent that quickly the war’s initial content was overshadowed by the conflict between the imperialist powers that dominate the world and an economically weaker Russia that they are determined to further weaken and stifle. If their proxy war can be defeated, the Western regimes will be significantly weakened and their ability to mobilise support for their campaign against Red China will be undermined. That is why it is important that we stand for the defence of Russia in this war. We must demand the ending of all arms shipments to Ukraine, the end to all U.S./British/Australian/German training of Ukrainian troops and the lifting of all sanctions against Russia.

Supporting the Imperialist Political and Propaganda War against the PRC
Means Fueling the War Drive against Her

Despite the incessant anti-China propaganda, there is much opposition to the AUKUS nuclear submarine project amongst some sections of the masses. Some of this is due to the gigantic cost of the scheme, especially when the government claims that it can’t find funding for a desperately needed increase in public housing, adequate funding for the NDIS and public hospitals and resources for a meaningful across the board increase in Jobseeker. There are also worries about nuclear accidents and the submarines displacing a civilian port where they are based, alongside fears that the submarine base will become a target for military attack, all of which are fueling understandable local opposition to the prospect of the submarines being based in the NSW South Coast’s Port Kembla, which is said to be one of three to five sites under consideration as a possible base site. Then there is opposition to provoking a war against China. As a result of such sentiments, many unions and even ALP branches have declared their opposition to the nuclear submarine project.

Aware of this opposition, the Greens have come out against the nuclear submarine project and the open drive towards military conflict with China. At the same time the Greens fully support the political and propaganda war against the PRC. Thus, they joined the rest of the parliamentary parties in strongly backing the 2019 attempted anti-communist uprising by the pro-colonial, Hong Kong rich kids. It is notable too that the Greens most outspoken opponent of AUKUS, senator David Shoebridge has been at the same time the most avid promoter of anti-communist hostility to the PRC. He has joined extreme right-wing, former Liberal MP (and now leader of the far right United Australia Party) Craig Kelly in supporting the claims of the far-right, extreme-homphobic, Chinese pseudo religious group, Falun Dafa that China has been executing Falun Dafa prisoners in order to harvest their organs. Given that Falun Dafa says that heaven is segregated into separate sections for White, Yellow and Black races in which people of mixed race have no place, avidly supported Donald Trump and promoted nutty COVID and anti-Vax conspiracy theories, anyone who is not prejudiced by their own hostility to the PRC workers state would deduce that Falun Dafa’s claims about organ harvesting are as bonkers as the rest of their right-wing extremist assertions. But that does not include Shoebridge! Also, it was Shoebridge who spearheaded the McCarthyist witchhunt that expelled the Confucius Institutes from teaching the Chinese language at NSW schools. Mixing rabid anti-communism with nationalist xenophobia, as he attacked the then NSW Coalition government from the right, Shoebridge outdid the likes of a Peter Dutton, an Andrew Hastie or an ASPI fanatic when he ranted that:

“Under the arrangement there are Chinese government appointees working directly inside the NSW Education Department. No foreign government officials should be inside the NSW government…. 

“This is a pretty stunning example of the NSW Government selling access to NSW school kids, and this time selling that access to the Government of a one-party state.

“The secrecy behind this program just increased the concern about inappropriate foreign influence, and now we see why.”

Greens NSW website, 23 Aug 2019

Moreover, while stating opposition to the drive towards war with China, Shoebridge and the Greens as a whole are fully on the side of Western imperialism in their proxy war against Russia. Yet if the Western imperialist powers triumph in their proxy war against Russia, they will be emboldened to escalate their war drive against socialistic China.

Like the Greens, the far-left groups Socialist Alternative (SAlt) and Socialist Alliance (SA) also back Western imperialism’s proxy war against Russia. Both even support Ukraine getting Western arms. In supporting the imperialist proxy war against Russia, SAlt and SA are on the side of an outcome in this Ukraine war that can only encourage the Western imperialist war drive against China – a war drive that they nominally oppose.

Still more harmfully, SAlt, SA and the Solidarity group – tragically alongside many others on the Left – back the forces seeking to destroy the Chinese workers state from within. Thus, all three groups joined the Albanese government, the Biden regime and all the capitalist media in hailing last November’s Chinese version of the Far Right-led, anti-COVID response “Freedom” protests (known as the A4 protests for the blank A4 pieces of paper held by many protesters), in which outright capitalist counterrevolutionaries were a significant component – as were a larger component of those with dangerous illusions in Western-style “democracy” who were not necessarily open anti-communists. Indeed, Solidarity and SAlt both cheered the most outright counterrevolutionary aspect of these A4 protests: that a section of the Shanghai protest started chanting, “Communist Party! Step down! Xi Jinping! Step down!” Earlier in 2019, all these groups, alongside to a lesser degree the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist), enthusiastically supported the Hong Kong pro-colonial, rich people’s attempted uprising against the PRC. They even marched in joint demonstrations in Sydney with extreme anti-communists and right-wingers (as did on at least one occasion the Socialist Equality Party) in support of Hong Kong’s imperialist-backed anti-PRC movement. In doing so these groups are not only treacherously on the side of the forces seeking to destroy the world’s largest workers state, they are also undermining the campaign against the military aspect of the war drive against China – a protest campaign that they are actively part of. For by teaching the people that they influence, primarily leftist-minded people, who are thus amongst the people who could be most easily won to the struggle against the anti-China war drive, that the PRC state is a force for reaction, it makes their leftist audience much less willing to make the effort to join actions opposing the war moves against this very same state. Indeed, one can say that the likes of SAlt, SA and Solidarity have so energetically and effectively convinced leftist youth that the PRC state should be opposed that they are now having trouble building the movement against the anti-China war drive. Yet these groups are still at it today! They ape the lying imperialist propaganda that China is brutally oppressing Uyghurs and Tibetans and unjustly repressing Hong Kong people.

Melbourne, 17 August 2019: One of a number of rallies that were held in Australia in support of the 2019 violent, attempted pro-colonial uprising by Hong Kong rich kids. The Australian demonstrations brought together anti-PRC Hong Kong international students, hardline anti-communist supporters of the deposed, murderous, South Vietnamese regime – brandishing the yellow with three red stripes flag of that overthrown U.S.-puppet regime – that fled Vietnam following her 1975 socialist revolution, Australian white supremacists and other far-right anti-communists. Criminally, these protests were not only promoted by all the mainstream media but were also supported by the Australian socialist groups, Solidarity, Socialist Alternative and Socialist Alliance, all of whom took part in several of the anti-communist rallies.

Bogus Theories Used to Justify Capitulation to Movements Seeking to Destroy the PRC Workers State

Those far-left groups that back the forces seeking to destroy socialistic rule in China excuse their stance by claiming that the PRC is just another capitalist state. The breadth of left groups pushing such “theories” range from SAlt to Solidarity to SA to the Socialist Equality Party to the Australian Communist Party to the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist). Their “China is capitalist” “theories” are all just simply plain wrong! After all, if the PRC is just another capitalist country, why are Australia’s capitalist rulers at the very forefront of the imperialist drive to crush the PRC when the Australian capitalists reap such huge profits from trade with China? Now, one could incorrectly claim that the Australian capitalists are being pressured by the U.S. to act against their own interests by joining the anti-China war drive. However, the main proponents of the “China is capitalist” “theories” themselves acknowledge, quite correctly, that the Australian capitalist class is a junior imperialist ruling class in its own right and, thus, acts in its own class interests rather than that of its U.S. senior partners. So why the hell would they want to risk losing such huge profits from trade with China by antagonising the latter if it is capitalist? The capitalists are very greedy but they are not stupid – they are all-too conscious of what is in their interests! Even if Australia’s capitalist rulers had other reasons for wanting to maintain their alliance with the U.S., if China were indeed “capitalist” and an imperialist rival to the U.S., the Australian ruling class would be doing everything possible to reduce tensions between the U.S. and China in order to protect their lucrative trade with the latter. But today, the Australian ruling class, both under Morrison and Albanese, have been egging on its senior partners to be ever more hostile to the PRC. The ONLY way that one can explain why an independent imperialist country whose ruling class reaps such massive benefits from trade with China would want to wage an all-sided military and political Cold War against her is because the PRC is indeed not “capitalist” but actually a workers state.

If the PRC is actually an “imperialist” power how did it get to be so? A key plank of Trotskyist theory which has been confirmed time and time again by history is that it is impossible for the colonial and semi-colonial countries subjugated by imperialism to truly free themselves from imperialist domination unless the working class leads all the downtrodden people in the seizure of state power. Now, no leftist would contest that China before 1949 was a brutally subjugated neocolony of the imperialist powers. How then has this former neocolony “under capitalist rule” not only completely freed itself from imperialist subjugation but caught up and overtaken so many other countries in development that it is now itself, supposedly, an “imperialist” power. Trotskyist and indeed Leninist theory – and the whole course of world history – say that this is just plain impossible!

The “China is capitalist” “theories” are just an adaptation of “theory” by those leftists seeking a justification to allow them to avoid the difficult task of having to defend the PRC workers state against all forms of attack. We should add that there is a self-fulfilling aspect to their stance. For by supporting forces seeking to destroy the PRC state under the rationale that the PRC state is in fact “capitalist”, these forces are emboldening pro-capitalist elements within the PRC state bureaucracy. For example, it is apparent that last November’s anti-communist-influenced A4 protests in China have handed the right-wing of the bureaucracy and the Communist Party of China (CPC) a stick with which to beat Xi Jinping and more so the more staunchly pro-communist, left-wing of the CPC and state institutions. The right factions would have been able to argue, “the recent measures to reduce inequality (dubbed “common prosperity” measures in China) pushed by Xi have angered some of the upper middle class in our country (who were the main strata participating in the A4 protests). We don’t want to make them our enemies. We need to pull back from some of these measures – they have gone too far” and “Look how powerful the Western powers are: they can even help incite protests here within China. We cannot thumb our noses at these powerful forces – they are too strong. We need to accommodate their concerns and meet them half-way in order to mollify them.” Indeed, it seems that although the A4 protests were small, they have pushed the political mood in China slightly to the right: there is less talk now of “curbing the disorderly expansion of capital” under which the PRC was cracking down on bigshot tech and real estate capitalists and slightly more statements calling for greater efforts to specially support the private, that is capitalist, sector. To be sure, overall, the PRC’s political atmosphere is still somewhat in a more socialist direction than it had been, say, five years ago. However, by supporting last November’s anti-communist influenced A4 protests, those far-left groups claiming that the PRC is “capitalist” have actually helped the soft-on-capitalism forces within the PRC state to gain greater sway than they previously had.

In contrast, we in Trotskyist Platform have influenced the intense political battle going on in China in favour of those who want to strengthen the PRC’s socialist foundations and the socialistic public sector of her economy. We have done so by initiating and building several united front actions openly in solidarity with the PRC workers state. When the 70th anniversary of the PRC occurred in 2019 during the midst of the anti-PRC, rich kid revolt in Hong Kong, we joined with the Australian Chinese Workers Association (ACWA) in building an action that saw over 60 people march through the streets of Sydney behind the slogans: “Working Class People in Australia & the World: Stand With Socialistic China!” and “Defeat Hong Kong’s Pro-Colonial, Anti-Communist Movement!” When word and photos of the action found their way back to communists in the North-western Chinese city of Xian, they were thrilled to see that people in Australia would openly take such a stance. In this way, we uplifted the spirits of staunch communists committed to the defence of socialism and demoralised those seeking an accommodation with capitalism.

Above and Below: Participants listen to a speech by Trotskyist Platform chairwoman, Sarah Fitzenmeyer, during the 7 October 2019 demonstration calling on “Working Class People in Australia & the World” to “Stand With Socialistic China.” The united-front action was built primarily by Trotskyist Platform and the Australian Chinese Workers Association. This rally and march through the centre of Sydney city also called to “Defeat Hong Kong’s Pro-Colonial, Anti-Communist [Opposition] Movement!”

Given that there are wealthy capitalists within China itching to gain greater “rights” so that they can in the future make a bid for state power, we say that it is crucial to weaken the power of the capitalists within China. We call to confiscate capitalist-owned enterprises in the sectors of China where the capitalist private sector is strongest – that is in the tech, real estate, big retail and light manufacturing sectors – and bring them into public ownership. For state takeover of promising small private enterprises that are in financial trouble – not tax concessions for them! Advance China’s socialistic state sector! We also say that China needs genuine workers democracy in order to make the PRC’s state economic sector more efficient and creative. The closer the PRC catches up with the technological level of the richest of the capitalist countries, the more crucial this will be in order to foster independent innovation in the socialist sector. However, we only have a right to make such calls for workers democracy in China and for the curbing of the private sector because we are resolutely fighting here in imperialist Australia to oppose all political, military, propaganda and economic attacks on socialistic rule in China.

The Danger that the “No War on China” Movement Is Diverted into
A Movement Appealing to the Australian Ruling Class to Be

More “Independent” of the U.S.

Given how determined the Australian rulers are to be part of the Cold War drive against Red China the slogans of any movement opposing this war drive must be carefully chosen. Local opposition to having the nuclear submarines based in Port Kembla has galvanised around the slogan “Port Kembla: No Place For a Nuclear Base.” The problem is that a movement centred on this demand will at best succeed in changing the location of the submarine base and causing inconvenience to the regime. But it will not substantially weaken the overall war drive against China. That is why Port Kembla locals initially mobilised around the possible local location of the submarine base must then be won to an understanding of the need to defend the socialistic PRC against the entire political, military, economic and propaganda campaign against her. This means that NSW South Coast-based activists that already understand the need to take this stance must not get caught up in promoting the “No Place For a Nuclear Base” agenda. Instead, they must help win others to a deeper commitment to oppose the all-sided anti-PRC Cold War drive.

There is, however, a much broader danger to the “No War on China” campaign. Given that a considerable amount of leftists believe that the only reason that Canberra is supporting the anti-China war drive is because the Australian ruling class are “compradors” of their U.S. “masters” who are “selling out” “Australia’s national interest” to Washington, there is a danger that the movement is organised around slogans calling for “Australia to break free from U.S. diktats and act independently”. Such an agenda would seem attractive to sell and a line of least resistance because it could appeal to “little Australia” nationalism and appeal to a section of the capitalist class and pro-capitalist sections of the middle class. The narrative such an agenda is based on is indeed a version of what Paul Keating outlined in his opposition to AUKUS. The problem is that this whole narrative is simply not true. As we have pointed out, Australia’s capitalist rulers are just as committed to destroying the PRC workers state as their U.S. senior partners are. Indeed, often the Australian capitalists are even more fanatical in their hostility to the PRC than their U.S. counterparts. This is because since the PRC is a workers state in Asia, her win-win cooperation with developing countries is often focused on the very same countries that the Australian imperialists consider in their “backyard”. In this way the PRC, without meaning to, greatly disrupts the ability of Australian capitalists to ravage these very countries for their imperialist super-profits. By contrast, the U.S. superpower has imperialist interests all over the world. It is notable that rather than the U.S. pressuring Australia to accept nuclear submarines, it was the Australian regime that for years lobbied the U.S. and Britain to assist it in acquiring nuclear subs. Appeals to the Australian ruling class to “act independently from the U.S.” and “refuse to be part of the buildup towards war with China” will, thus, largely fall on deaf fears. The bulk of the Australian capitalist class are committed to the campaign to destroy socialistic rule in China because they have calculated that this is in their interests. The section of the capitalist establishment represented by Paul Keating is, in fact, tiny.

There is another more fundamental problem with this approach. Even if a movement built on the line of appealing for “Australia to break free from U.S. diktats and act independently” were to mobilise a huge number of people it will not halt the war drive against China. Gven that the strategic justification for the nuclear submarines is tenuous it is quite possible that Australian governments may downsize the program, or even scrap it, in favour of acquiring other war machines – like more surface ships, more long range naval missiles and B21 nuclear-capable bombers. Yet that would hardly be a step forward for the campaign to oppose the drive towards war with China. The reason why even a huge movement based on appealing to the ruling class to change its policy because it is not in the “national interests” will not deter the capitalist class’ war drive against China is because such a movement does not politically threaten or scare the capitalists. After all, the movement will only be proposing what it thinks is good for the capitalists themselves (along with the rest of the “nation”). The capitalist class will understand that such a movement is not a step towards rebellious hostility towards them. Hence they will not be scared by the movement … they will simply ignore it!

To explain this point further, it is worth going back to one of the largest rallies in Australian history. In mid-February 2003 some half a million people marched through the streets of Sydney against the impending war on Iraq. For those who participated, the sheer size of the action was a buzz. However, the dominant political line of the march was that though this war was wrong and bad for Australia, if the shooting started then “we will support our troops” – that is, support the Australian imperialist military against the Iraqi people. Many participants did have a better, more anti-imperialist, line. But the overall line of the movement was so acceptable to the ruling class that some Liberal Party politicians participated in the protest. As a result, the movement did not scare the capitalists at all. They simply ignored the protest, despite its gigantic size, and carried on with their role in the heinous U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Soon, the ruling class’ decision to be unruffled by the protest was proven correct. Once the shooting started, the movement collapsed in size in accordance with its capitalist state-loyal line.

We should note that the Australian ruling class will be even more determined to see off any protests against the Cold War drive against the PRC than they were over the Iraq invasion. In Iraq, Australia’s interests in the war were only to ensure the success of their great power protector. In contrast, today, Australia’s capitalist rulers, like their AUKUS, Quad and other allies, see the matter of crushing socialistic rule in China as an existential question. Even if two million people are on the streets appealing to the ruling class to change their policy for the sake of its own “national interests”, the capitalist rulers will ignore it. By contrast, if even a much smaller, but still sizable, number of people are marching through the streets saying that they oppose the war drive against China because they stand with socialistic China against capitalist threats, the capitalist rulers would be terrified! For such a movement solidarising with a workers state against the capitalist rulers inevitably poses a future leap to a movement fighting for a workers state right here. Such a movement could, therefore, actually win concessions from the frightened capitalist class in the form of a scaling back of their war drive. This is the kind of movement that we need!

One of the most successful sets of anti-imperialist movements in history were the workers’ protests in Western countries like Britain and France that followed the 1917 Russian Revolution and that opposed the sending of troops to crush the young Soviet Russian workers state. Although several powers did send troops, the level of intervention was much less than the imperial powers wanted. For they feared that if they tried to send bigger contingents it could trigger not only mutinies but revolutions that would overthrow them. The fact that the imperial powers could not send the level of forces that they wanted to in order to aid Russian counterrevolutionaries allowed the heroic Soviet Red Army to win the Civil War against the capitalist restorationist forces.

Today, if we are to push back the U.S. and Australian imperialists’ war drive against Red China we too must build a movement that can scare the hell out of the capitalist rulers. However, to be realistic, given that the imperialist ruling classes understand that the continuing successful development of socialistic China is an existential threat to their own rule, to actually end the Western imperialist drive towards war with China will take nothing short of the overthrow of capitalism in one or a number of Western countries. That is why every move that we make in the campaign against AUKUS and the struggle against the drive towards war with China must advance the struggle towards socialist revolution. For starters that means we must never appeal to any section or party of the capitalist class, because the understanding that no section of the capitalist class can be allies of the toiling people’s struggle for liberation is key to advancing the revolutionary political consciousness of the masses. Therefore, Paul Keating can do his own thing. If he creates some dissension within the capitalist establishment well and good. Even here it is a double-edged sword. For Keating is known by politically aware workers for having presided over privatisations, the introduction of enterprise bargaining and anti-strike laws, the weakening of the union movement and the redistribution of income from the poor to rich. His speaking out against AUKUS could actually tarnish the campaign against AUKUS in the eyes of some. But the most important thing is that we must not alter the slogans of the movement to appeal to the likes of Keating. We need to, instead, set the slogans to appeal to the class interests of the working class and the pro-worker section of the middle class. What better way to do this than to appeal to the class interests that the working class have in defending a state – the PRC – that is centred on collective public ownership of the backbone economic sectors: the form of economic organisation that favours the working class masses. This too is the way to build a movement that can scare the capitalists and push them into potential backdowns. Building such a movement means taking head-on the anti-communist propaganda against Red China. No serious movement against the drive towards war against China can be built without challenging this incessant anti-PRC propaganda. So while it is correct to participate in anti-AUKUS and anti-Quad protests that have been called on other slogans, all our work in these actions should be directed towards the purpose of building a movement that openly fights for the defence of socialistic rule in China against U.S./British/Australian/NATO political, military, economic and propaganda attacks.

Beijing, 25 June 2017: Workers at state-owned CRRC (China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation) gather for a ceremony to mark the launch of a new model of high-speed train called “Rejuvenation”. China has nearly three-quarters of the world’s entire length of high-speed rail lines. The country’s magnificent high-speed rail system is a triumph of her socialistic state-owned enterprises. The high-speed trains are designed and manufactured by CRRC, the trains are operated by China State Railway Group Company and the network and infrastructure is constructed by state-owned constructions companies like the China Railway Construction Corporation. The successes in development and poverty alleviation of China’s socialistic system based on working-class rule (albeit administered indirectly by a middle-class bureaucracy) and the dominant role of public ownership is an existential threat to capitalist ruling classes around the world because of the example that it sets. For the very same reason, the existence of socialistic rule in China is a great advance for not only the masses of China but for all working-class people of the world. This massive conquest for the toiling classes – and for humanity – must be defended intransigently!

The Question of Defence of Socialistic Rule in China is
Not a Question That We Can Agree to Disagree On

Other than for ourselves in Trotskyist Platform, there is one other significant Left group involved in anti-AUKUS protests that also supports socialistic rule in China. That is the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). Unfortunately, the CPA largely confines its solidarity with the PRC as a workers state to the pages of its newspaper. In protests and meetings against AUKUS and the war drive against China, the CPA largely avoids solidarising with the PRC as a workers state and refuses to expose other movement participants that echo the imperialist propaganda against the PRC. No doubt, some CPA comrades would argue that this is for the sake of the united front against AUKUS. But such a stance is flawed. For one, it is precisely the effect of the massive propaganda war against the PRC that makes it harder to build movements against the military buildup against her. The need to oppose that anti-communist propaganda must be motivated to all that want to oppose the anti-China military escalation.

As severe as the military threats are to the PRC, the biggest threat to the workers state is not from direct military attack but from internal counterrevolution. The military pressure, of course, encourages and strengthens the forces of capitalist restoration. However, it is counterrevolutionaries themselves that are the most dangerous direct threat. Let us not forget that the Soviet workers state was in the end not destroyed by military attack but by the internal counterrevolutionary forces funded and directed by Western imperialism. To argue that opposition to capitalist counterrevolutionary forces threatening the Chinese workers state should be foregone for the sake of building a united front with anti-PRC forces on the basis of only opposing some of the military escalation against the PRC, is to fail to properly stand in solidarity with socialistic China.

As important as is the struggle against the nuclear submarine project, the overall need to defend the PRC workers state is far more important. Consider the enormous cost of the nuclear submarine deal, which will likely end up as much as at least half a trillion dollars. However, should capitalist rule be restored in China it will not only be a disaster for the Chinese masses but, by drastically driving down the wages and conditions of hundreds of millions of Chinese workers, it will lead to a race to the bottom that will send the wages and conditions of workers in Australia and the rest of the world into a tailspin. Meanwhile, the capitalists worldwide, triumphant after the defeat of working class rule in such a huge country, would feel emboldened to further attack the rights of the working class and the poor at home. This is just like how the 1991-92 capitalist counterrevolution in the former Soviet Union led to a huge increase in the rate of exploitation of workers in Australia and the rest of the world. In the end, the loss in Australian workers’ living standards that would result from the PRC workers state being drowned in capitalist counterrevolution will dwarf the gigantic costs that workers will have to bear to fund the nuclear submarine program. In summary, the need to defend the PRC workers state from internal and external threats cannot be excused on an argument that the issue of the PRC’s class character should be shelved for the sake of the “unity” of the movement against the nuclear subs.

The capitalist rulers of Australia, the U.S., Britain and other imperialist countries know that the survival of their own system demands the crushing of socialistic rule in China. To resist this drive we need to build a powerful movement that openly calls for the defence of socialistic rule in China against capitalist attack, that opposes the political and propaganda attacks on the PRC as much as the military ones, that appeals to the workers’ class interests rather than the “national interests” of Australia’s capitalist class and that advances the future struggle for socialist revolution in Australia. In order to urgently begin building such a movement, we advocate that the following central slogans be raised at protests against AUKUS and the Quad:

  • Defend socialistic rule in China against the U.S./Australian/NATO rulers’ war drive and their political and propaganda attacks!
  • Stand with socialistic China to stand by working-class interests!

Rally Calls to Rip the Electricity and Fuel Sectors From the Tycoons and Bring Them Into Public Hands

Rally Calls to Rip the Electricity and Fuel Sectors From the Tycoons and
Bring Them Into Public Hands

12 April 2023: Last Saturday, over thirty people rallied in the Western Sydney suburb of Auburn to demand that the electricity, coal, oil and gas industries be ripped out of the hands of the greedy tycoons and be placed into public ownership. The action was in response to the unaffordable cost of living and plummeting real wages. In introducing the action, rally emcee Samuel Kim, who is also a leading member of Trotskyist Platform, explained:

Sisters and brothers, we are gathered here today because everything is way too expensive. Electricity, petrol, gas, rent, food … you name it. Bread and cereal prices are up nearly 13% over just this last year. The price of milk and other dairy products has risen nearly 15%. Meanwhile, workers wages are barely rising. As a result, large numbers of people are being driven into poverty. Many people are having to skip meals and forego buying essential medicine. Hundreds of thousands of people are set to endure winter shivering in discomfort.

A major cause of the rising prices is the skyrocketing cost of petrol, electricity and gas. This is not only increasing our fuel and power bills but has driven up the cost of refrigerating, processing and transporting food and other groceries.

So why are the prices of fuel and electricity so high? It is because the greedy rich corporations and company owners have decided to put up their prices for higher profits. And guess who’s paying up so that these tycoons can get even richer … You and I, the working-class, are paying.

As the call-out for the April 8 action stressed:

What we need is for all of the petrol, electricity, gas and coal sectors to be taken out of the hands of the ultra-rich profiteers that own them and be brought into public ownership….

The ruling class’ only “method” to try and contain steep prices is to crash the economy by jacking up interest rates. But we won’t be able to endure unaffordable prices if we lose our jobs or have our hours cut in the resulting recession! Let’s push down the cost of living and do it in a way that protects workers’ livelihoods and stops the slashing of our living standards! Let’s drive down the prices of everything by bringing the petrol, electricity, gas and coal sectors into public hands! We can’t allow the current filthy rich owners of these sectors – like Mike Cannon-Brookes and Kerry Stokes – to keep on milking fat profits at our expense!

The action was jointly built by Trotskyist Platform and the Australian Chinese Workers Association (ACWA). Speakers at the rally included Brenda Wang, a senior member of the ACWA, Sarah Fitzenmeyer, the Chairwoman of Trotskyist Platform and Wayne Sonter from the Revolutionary Housing League. After the introduction from the rally emcee, a message of solidarity to the protest was read out from Pete a retired coal mine worker in the Hunter Valley. The message stressed how the mining capitalists are not only exploiting their workers and charging the public exorbitant prices but are also leaching from the public budget through receiving a huge fuel rebate:

Firstly, I send to you all Comradely greetings from the Hunter Valley in NSW. I am a retired coal miner from Muswellbrook and I worked for BHP at their Mount Arthur open cut mine that is just on the outskirts of town for 20 years.

I come from a long line of miners that started out in the turn of the century at Broken Hill in the far west of NSW.

You are gathering today to voice your opposition against the private ownership of our natural recourses and have them returned to the people of Australia and I wish you every success.

Mount Arthur coal mine where I was a slave to the capitalist system produces both coking coal used in steel making and thermal coal mostly used in power generation….

BHP owns Mount Arthur mine 100% and has recently announced a record pre tax profit for the SIX months up to December 2022 of 1.4 BILLION US Dollars for that one single mine alone. That breaks down to approximately 10 million Australian dollars per day !!!

All of the mining equipment that is used in the mine is diesel powered so the amount of diesel fuel required to run the mine is a staggering amount, millions of litres annually in fact. One of the best  kept secrets that the coal miners keep closely guarded is the fact that the Federal Government gives them back a rebate of 47.7 cents per litre. That is for every litre of fuel used in the mine they claim back 47.7 cents and with millions of litres of fuel used annually they get a very fat cheque in the mail to help them pay their fuel bill. This Comrades has to STOP!

Information that I have from the Australia Institute in Canberra tells me that the mining industry in Australia for the years 2022/23 will receive 7.7 BILLION dollars in fuel rebate and for the years 2023/24 it jumps to 9.2 Billion dollars.

This is YOUR money Comrades going to the dirty Capitalists !!

Rise up Comrades and voice you opinion on this unfair handout to the fat cats of the coal industry!

Rally emcee Samuel Kim addresses the protest. In the foreground, supporters of the Australian Chinese Workers Association hold the banner of this group.

Among the placards that Trotskyist Platform carried at the event included: “Confiscate the Power, Coal, Oil and Gas Industries from the Greedy Tycoons And Put Them Into Public Hands!”, “Fight for: The Seizure of the Power and Fuel Industries From the Capitalists And Their Transfer Into Public Hands, a Massive Increase in Public Housing and the Conversion of All Casual Jobs into Secure, Permanent Ones!”, “Australia: Power, Fuel, Ports and Finance Sectors in the Hands of Super-Rich Big Shareholders – 6.8% Inflation, Plummeting Real Wages. China: All these Key Sectors Under Public Ownership – Just 1% Inflation and the Fastest Growing Workers’ Real Wages in the World” and “We Don’t Want to Cop Higher Prices for the Sake of the Global Ambitions of the Capitalists that are Ripping Us Off – Lift Western Sanctions on Russia!”  

Participants in the spirited rally loudly chanted: “Fuel and Power into Public Hands!” and “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Confiscation’s the Way to Go!” Many passers-by in multi-racial, working-class Auburn stopped to listen to speeches and read the protest banner and signs. They also viewed a beautiful cultural performance put on by Chinese dancers from the ACWA during a brief interlude between the speeches.

The April 8 action received favourable coverage in several Australian Chinese language news outlets, international Chinese language outlets and also in several news platforms in mainland China. Some of the latter outlets especially highlighted the point made by ACWA spokeswoman Brenda Wang that the reason that China has much lower inflation than Australia is because she has public ownership of her key sectors. By thus showing people in China that even pro-working class activists in Australia understand the benefits of China’s system based on social ownership of the backbone industries and are demanding the nationalisation of key industries within their own country itself, the rally had the indirect effect of boosting the morale of staunch Chinese communists who want to defend and strengthen China’s socialistic state sector as against rightist elements who want to give greater openings to private – that is capitalist – “entrepreneurs” (read exploiters).

Emphasising the need to build a powerful working-class movement to win the transfer of the fuel and electricity sectors from the hands of the capitalists into public ownership, rally emcee Samuel Kim concluded the April 8 rally with a call to action:

Comrades and friends, fellow working class people in the good struggle – the costs of living for food, rents, fuel and electricity are eroding savings. Many even go hungry or take out loans. Wages are stagnant, and are in affect going backwards as the cost of living soars. Huge parts of the economy are controlled by the greedy rich who only care about themselves. They aggressively pursue profits – profits stolen from the wages of workers.

Today’s protest is one of many that will happen in the future. It is just the start, as things are not getting better. That is why we need to prepare for a future movement.

We reprint below the speeches given by the ACWA and Trotskyist Platform representatives at the April 8 action.

Speech by Brenda Wang, leading member of the
Australian Chinese Workers Association:

The Australian Chinese Workers Association strongly supports this rally to drive down living costs and to bring the fuel and power sectors into public ownership. I want to acknowledge that we are gathering here on the stolen land of the Dharug First Nations people.

Like our fellow working-class Australians of all ethnicities, Chinese workers in Australia have been enduring increasingly unaffordable living costs. Electricity prices, petrol costs, rent, food prices and the prices of other groceries are unbearable. Many working-class people of Chinese descent in this country are being driven into poverty just like our sisters and brothers of other ethnicities. We understand that the high cost of fuel and electricity is a major part of what is driving costs up across the board. That is why we in the Australian Chinese Workers Association support the struggle to take the electricity, oil, gas and coal sectors from the rich tycoons and put them into public ownership.

The Australian Chinese Workers Association is a mass organisation that organises Australian-Chinese workers to defend their workplace conditions and assert their rights to access social services; while linking the Chinese working-class community with the overall Australian trade union movement and involving them in broader social justice campaigns within Australia.

I want to share some of our experience as immigrants from the Peoples Republic of China and as people who still have many friend and relatives in China who we are in regular contact with. In China, not only is the fuel and power sector under public ownership but so are most of the steel, mining, ports, shipping, banks and other major sectors. That is why China has very low inflation now unlike the countries where these sectors are owned by rich shareholders. It is also why workers real wages continue to grow rapidly in China and the economy continues to develop. So if anyone tells you that public ownership does not work, please explain that they are mistaken. Public ownership works – we know this from our own experience and from that of our family and friends.

So I hope that Australian working-class people of all ethnicities can unite to struggle to bring the fuel and power industries into public ownership. And I hope that we can also unite to fight for higher wages, more low-rent public housing and other measures urgently needed by the masses. We in the Australian Chinese Workers Association pledge to do all we can to support these noble causes.

Speech by Sarah Fitzenmeyer, Chairwoman of Trotskyist Platform:

I acknowledge that we are gathering here on the stolen land of the Dharug First Nations people. And right across these stolen Aboriginal Peoples lands, the super-rich owners of Australia’s oil, gas, coal and renewable energy companies are making huge, obscene profits. They are making these sky-high profits both by exploiting their own workers and by over-charging us all for fuel and electricity.

But sisters and brothers it is not just the owners of the oil, gas and coal producers who are ripping us off. Right throughout the chain of the fuel and power industries, the billionaire owners of these companies involved are jacking up prices. This includes the oil refiners, the fuel distributors, the fuel retailers, the electricity generators and the electricity retailers.

If you cross the railway line and go not too far to South Granville, you will see that there are two petrol stations owned by United Petroleum. United is one of Australia’s biggest petrol retailers. United outlets are notorious for paying their workers below award wages. The company is owned by two Australians, Avi Silver and Eddie Hirsch. Each of them have acquired a fortune of over $1.6 billion from under-paying United workers and overcharging customers. So when you fill up petrol or buy food at a United outlet and wonder why you are paying such high prices, just know that a good chunk of what you are forking out is used to sustain the lavish lifestyle of two Australian billionaires.

Now, I want to speak about Australia’s biggest electricity supplier, AGL. By far the biggest shareholder in AGL is Australia’s third richest person, Mike Cannon-Brookes. Last financial year, this Mike Cannon Brookes company slashed more than 500 jobs, while pushing the remaining workers to toil harder at their jobs to cover the work of those who were retrenched. Through such exploitation of workers, Cannon Brookes has acquired a $28 billion fortune. Five years ago, he bought Australia’s first home that reached a price of $100 million! Last year, Mike Cannon Brookes share of AGL’s $860 million profit was almost enough to buy himself yet another $100 million home! So those of you who are AGL customers, when you fume at how high your next electricity or gas bill is, just know that a big slice of what you pay may well help a high-living Australian billionaire buy yet another $100 million mansion!

And as you continue to pay unaffordable prices for food and other groceries, just know that part of your payment is going to cover the high costs of transport, refrigeration and processing resulting from the rip-off fuel and electricity prices set by the companies owned by Australian billionaires like Mike Cannon Brookes, Avi Silver, Eddie Hirsch, Ivan Glasenberg and Kerry Stokes.

Sisters and brothers, we have put a stop to this! We cannot continue to tolerate unaffordable living costs just to sustain the lavish lifestyle of greedy tycoons. That is why we need to reverse the electricity privatisation that has taken place over the last two decades. That means we need to fight for the confiscation of the power industry from its current, super-rich owners so that it can be transferred back into public hands. The same nationalisation also needs to happen to the oil, gas, coal and renewable energy sectors. This is what is needed to seriously drive down these exorbitant living costs!

However, the ruling class and their media are doing everything possible to stop you coming to this realisation. That is why they want to blame Russia’s intervention in Ukraine for the high cost of living. But the fact is that prices were going up even faster before the war escalated last year. It is not the war or Russia’s actions that is causing high energy prices – it is because of the sanctions imposed by Western regimes against Russia and we must not be supporting these sanctions. The Australian, American, British and other Western regimes are waging a proxy war against Russia because they want to ensure that the tycoons that they serve maintain their exclusive right to exploit most of the world. It is true that Russia is also ruled by a greedy capitalist class just like here. But because Russia is economically weaker, it is not Russian capitalists that dominate most of the world but rather the American, British, Australian, Japanese and other Western capitalists. For example, resource-rich Papua New Guinea’s entire oil production is owned by Australian corporations! So it will be good for the world’s masses and good for the working-class people of Australia if the greedy ruling class that exploits us and rips us off suffers a blow by having their proxy war against Russia defeated. So we should oppose these sanctions on Russia – sanctions that are helping to drive up our living costs. We shouldn’t have to endure higher prices for the sake of the global ambitions of the capitalists that are ripping us off!

A Trotskyist Platform placard at the April 8 action condemned the Western economic sanctions on Russia that are contributing to the sky-high energy prices. The need to oppose these sanctions was also motivated in the speech given by Trotskyist Platform Chairwoman, Sarah Fitzenmeyer.

Yet, even these sanctions have not, by themselves, caused the steep price rises. Energy prices have surged because the greedy owners of the Australian fuel industry have chosen to massively increase prices here to match the increased world price. Just because world prices have increased doesn’t mean that we have to cop these increases here. After all it is here where many of these resources actually come from – produced by our labour. And the governments and pro-capitalist political parties have chosen to allow these tycoons to get away with this. The right-wing Liberal Party openly opposes any measures to curb power and fuel prices. The Labor Party, because it has a working-class base wants to look like it is trying to bring down living costs. But because it is so very committed to avoid angering the big end of town, the ALP takes only very weak measures. The price limit for gas that the Albanese government has implemented is nearly three times what the gas price was two and a half years ago! No wonder it has been announced that our electricity prices will go up in July by even more than they went up last year.

So we cannot rely on any of the current parliamentary parties to do what is needed to bring down unaffordable prices. That is why we need to build a campaign of mass actions, including protests, occupations and workers industrial action to demand the transfer of the fuel and power industries into public hands.  That is why we in Trotskyist Platform decided to initiate today’s action to begin the building of this much needed movement.  Sisters and brothers, if we look at the mass strikes in Britain against falling real wages and the militant protests in France against the government raising the age of eligibility for the pension, this gives us a small taste of what is needed here.

At the same time, we must understand that the rip off prices that we’re all paying for fuel, electricity and groceries is just a symptom of a much bigger disease. And that disease, is this decaying capitalist system that is only surviving by driving down real wages and forcing workers into ever more precarious forms of employment. So as well as demanding the transfer of the energy and power sectors into public ownership we need to fight for big wage rises, for the conversion of all gig and casual jobs into permanent secure positions and for a massive increase in low-rent public housing. To wage such struggles we need to build unity amongst all of the working class.

That means we must positively mobilise to oppose state violence against Aboriginal peoples, win the rights of citizenship for all guest workers, refugees and international students and defeat all far-right racist attacks on people of Asian, African and Middle Eastern backgrounds, stand with and support all women’s rights activists and the LGBTQIA+ community.

Now, working-class people do need a party, But not one like the ALP that accommodates the capitalists and runs their capitalists’ state for them. What we need is a workers party built to organise our intransigent and steadfast resistance against the exploiting class.

Sisters and brothers, nationalising the energy and power sectors will be an important step to driving down unaffordable prices. But it will be only be just a step because currently the state machinery itself is under the control of the big end of town. We will need to assert people’s inspection and supervision of any publicly owned fuel and power industries. These sectors and indeed the whole economy can only truly be made to work for us when we the working class take control of the state itself.

Now the apologists for the ruling class tell us that such talk of workers rule and public ownership is outdated and impractical. There is however a huge hole in their argument. For in the world’s most populous country, the Peoples Republic of China not only are the fuel and energy industries dominated by public ownership so are all the other key sectors including the banks, shipping, steel, ports, car manufacturing, airlines and telecommunications. To see how this works, lets look at state-owned China National Petroluem Company. This giant has a monopoly on China’s oil and gas production. Yet because it is directed as a public necessity to keep down prices, the profits of this Chinese state-owned giant is only just over 4% of its total sales. By contrast, Kerry Stokes oil and gas company here in Australia, Beach Energy has profits that are nearly 30% of its sales. That is why we are suffering an inflation rate of nearly 7%, while in China, through their public ownership of key sectors, they have kept inflation to just 1%. And while workers real wages here are markedly lower than they were 11 years ago, in China, workers real wages have more than doubled in the same period. Yet China’s socialistic system centred on public ownership is precisely what makes the capitalist rulers of the U.S. and Australia so hostile to her.

For they fear that China’s successes in uplifting her people out of extreme poverty will make the masses in their own countries also demand a system based on public ownership. But demanding public ownership is exactly what we need the masses here to fight for! So we should support, applaud and want the great example of socialistic China to continue in its success. That is why it is in the clear interests of the working-class of Australia and the world to oppose all the attacks on socialistic rule in China – whether that be the war-mongering AUKUS submarine project or the lying propaganda that China is persecuting Uyghurs and people in Hong Kong.

Sisters and brothers, we do not need to accept a system based on ownership of industry by filthy rich tycoons who exploit workers labour and charge us unaffordable prices. Let’s stop the ever growing slide into poverty for low-paid workers in Australia! Let’s fight for the confiscation of the coal, oil, gas and power companies and their prompt transfer into public ownership! Let’s build a spirited movement to fight for this. Let’s build on today’s action! 

Demonstrators chant slogans at the April 8 rally in Auburn.

How and Why Australia’s
Ruling Class Media Attack China
And Why the Working Class
Must Stand With Red China

Photo Above: The scene on 3 May 2021 at the Ancient City Wall in the Chinese megacity of Xian, capital of Shaanxi Province. The site was packed with tourists enjoying China’s long weekend, International Workers Day (May Day) public holiday. From April 2020 until about Mach 2022, while the capitalist world was being battered with terrible COVID death tolls and lockdowns to attempt to curve the virus spread, most people in China enjoyed the best of both worlds: very few COVID deaths and minimal pandemic restrictions. When outbreaks did occur during this time in particular areas, they were snuffed out in quick time by rapid, resolute and effective local measures so that the overwhelming majority of the population were not affected by either the disease or by pandemic restrictions.
Photo: CGTN

How and Why Australia’s
Ruling Class Media Attack China
And Why the Working Class

Must Stand With Red China

Down With the Far Right-Instigated, COVID “Freedom” Rallies in Australia –
Down With the Far Right-Instigated, COVID “Freedom” Rallies in China!

  • The Similarities Between the Chinese and Australian Versions of Anti-COVID-Response Protests
  • Foxconn Workers Rioted Against the Taiwanese Company’s Failure to Take Adequate Measures to Stop COVID Spread
  • Protests Are Not Rare in China and these COVID Protests Were Not “China’s Biggest Protests Since 1989”
  • The Western Mainstream Media Unleashed a Torrent of Disinformation and Deceit About Events in China
  • The Lives Saved Through China’s COVID Response Was a Great Feat of Humanitarianism. Failing to Stop a Terrible Loss of Life from COVID in the U.S. and Australia Was Brutal
  • Australia’s Capitalist Exploiting Class’ Drive to Try and Help Strangle Socialistic Rule in China is “Rational” From Their Point of View But Diametrically Opposed to the Interests of the Working Class
  • Stand With Socialistic China to Stand by Working-Class Interests
  • The Threat of China Being Engulfed by Capitalist Counterrevolution in the Future is All Too Real
  • Socialist Rule Cannot be Protected if the Capitalists and Their Allies Have Equal Political Rights as the Working Class
  • How Calls for “Democracy” in the Abstract in China End Up Being a Call for the Destruction of the Workers State
  • The PRC Workers State Does Need WORKERS Democracy
  • Mobilise in Action Here in Australia in Solidarity with Socialistic Rule in China

9 December 2022: Over the last five or so years, the Cold War that the U.S.-led capitalist powers have been waging against the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) has grown increasingly hot. Australia’s capitalist ruling class has been amongst the most aggressive participants in this campaign of military, economic and political pressure on Red China. Do not be distracted by recent efforts of Canberra to lower the temperature of their diplomatic disputes with Beijing. This is merely an attempt by Australia’s rulers to protect their hugely profitable trade with China from further injury while continuing to help turn the screws on the PRC. It is crucial to be aware that even while taking steps to restore diplomatic exchanges with Beijing, the Albanese government is continuing its right-wing predecessor’s anti-China military build-up of offensive weapons (including the acquisition of long-range missiles and nuclear submarines). Furthermore, two days ago during ministerial-level meetings with the U.S., it was announced that the Labor government would facilitate “increased rotational presence of US forces in Australia” – forces that are aimed against China. This will include nuclear-capable bomber task forces, fighters and future rotations of US Navy and US Army capabilities.  Meanwhile, in the South Pacific, the new Labor government has been even more aggressive than the conservative administration that it replaced in attempting to sabotage regional countries’ cooperation with Beijing. Moreover, the new Albanese government continues where Morrison and Dutton left off in waging a propaganda offensive against the PRC. It pushes the conspiracy theory that China is persecuting her Muslim, more European-looking, Uyghur minority that live in the country’s northwest – a lie that not only have no Muslim-majority countries (other than the tiny NATO-dependent European country Bosnia) signed on to during UN debates and motions but which most Muslim-majority countries, including many subservient U.S. allies like Bahrain, Egypt, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, have denounced, instead emphatically praising China’s treatment of Muslim Uyghurs. As hardline anti-PRC, ABC News global affairs editor, John Lyons approvingly noted: “Australian policy towards China has not changed one iota between Morrison and Albanese. Only the language has changed” (emphasis added).

It is not only Australian governments that are waging Cold War against the PRC. It is the entire capitalist establishment. This includes the mainstream media. In Australia, this is almost entirely either owned by billionaire tycoons – like Rupert Murdoch, Bruce Gordon (main owner of the Nine Entertainment Group that owns Channel 9, 2GB and 3AW radio stations and the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age and a whole lot of other newspapers) and Channel 7 owner Kerry Stokes – or by the capitalist regime itself, in the case of the ABC and SBS. Their choice method of staging propaganda attacks against China is to frenetically promote, as a serious possibility, some anti-PRC conspiracy theory. Then once facts decisively prove the “theory” completely false, they stop spreading the “theory” but do little to tell readers that the original speculation was false, so that most of the mud still sticks. Then they move on to promoting the next anti-PRC conspiracy theory! To see how this methodology works lets examine the media frenzy surrounding the supposed “purge” of former Communist Party of China (CPC) leader and PRC president, Hu Jintao. During October’s CPC 20th congress, Hu was paid respect by the CPC by being seated next to his successor, Xi Jinping, during the meeting’s sessions. This is despite Hu appearing confused at times during the gathering and from earlier appearances, sadly seeming to be suffering from dementia or some other form of cognitive decline. When Hu, while appearing to have a senior moment, was ushered out of the meeting during its final session, the Western media feverishly spread a conspiracy theory that he had been purged from the CPC by Xi. This is despite the Chinese government explaining that Hu had been ill (while respectfully not mentioning any cognitive decline) and that the aging former leader was ushered out to ensure that he was given his pre-arranged rest time. It was also despite the fact that TV news reports from earlier in the congress showed Xi interacting warmly and respectfully with Hu, despite Hu reaching out to touch Xi affectionately as he was ushered out and Xi then nodding amiably to Hu when the latter speaks briefly to Xi – probably wishing him good luck – as he leaves; and despite official PRC media still mentioning Hu Jintao favourably in its post-meeting wrap up, while featuring footage of him standing next to Xi in its post-congress news broadcast. Seems nothing like a purge! Moreover, four days ago this conspiracy theory was completely blown own of the water. In PRC state media reports of the mourning ceremony for Hu’s recently deceased predecessor Jiang Zemin, supposedly “purged” Hu Jintao was mentioned several times as one of the CPC leaders present at the event. Moreover, in all three photos showing the CPC leaders viewing Jiang’s body, all three not only show Hu … but showing him standing in a pride of place position next to Xi! Yet, as far as we can tell, none of the Australian and other Western media that fuelled the speculation about Hu’s purge, which is basically nearly all the mainstream Western media, have conceded that their previous promotion of this conspiracy theory was wrong given that this “theory” has now been totally blown to smithereens. The BBC was the most despicably dishonest. After giving a lot of air to the “purge” theory or otherwise bizarrely speculating that Hu had been a victim of a power-play by Xi at the October congress, the BBC deliberately hid from their audience the presence of Hu at Jiang’s recent mourning ceremony.

Yet Another Another-China Conspiracy “Theory” Gets Blown To Pieces

Above: When former Communist Party of China (CPC) leader and Chinese president Hu Jintao was ushered out of the final session of the 20th CPC Congress in October, mainstream Western media either emphatically stated that Hu had been “brutally purged” by his successor Xi Jinping or gave much oxygen to this conspiracy “theory”. This is despite Chinese media providing the very credible explanation that the ageing Hu (who sadly seems to be suffering from dementia or some other form of cognitive decline) was unwell and despite very strong evidence that Hu was not purged at all.
Below: This conspiracy theory was definitely blown out of the water just weeks later on December 5, when Hu was shown in several photos on Chinese state media amongst top current CPC leaders at the Beijing mourning ceremony for the death of Hu’s predecessor Jiang Zemin. Moreover, not only was Hu’s presence mentioned several times by Chinese state media but he was standing in the ceremony at the front row just to the very left of Xi Jinping, thus giving honour to Hu. This was also where he was seated during the party congress. The Western media that spread the conspiracy theory about Hu never mentioned that the “theory” had now been blown to smithereens. Some like BBC News even deceptively hid Hu’s presence in their coverage of Jiang’s mourning ceremony. With their “Hu purge” theory now blown to pieces, it did not take these media long to then move on to their next anticommunist, anti-China conspiracy theory.

Photo (below photo): Xie Huanchi/Xinhua

The Chinese and Australian Versions of Anti-COVID-Response Protests

In recent years, among the main targets of the establishment media’s propaganda is China’s response to the pandemic. In order to distract from the fact that the PRC has responded so effectively that her death toll from COVID is less than one-third that of Australia’s … even though she has a nearly 60 times greater population (!!!), the Western media have denounced China’s COVID response as “draconian”. So the media were absolutely ecstatic when demonstrations broke out in several Chinese cities, the weekend before last, against the PRC government’s COVID response. Bearing blank pieces of A4 paper, apparently as a condemnation of censorship, these demonstrations were basically the Chinese version of the large, Far Right-instigated, anti-lockdown, anti-masking rallies seen in Australia, the U.S. and Europe over the last couple of years. One big difference is the size of the protests. In China, despite megacities cities like Shanghai having roughly the same population as all of Australia, each of the protests have thus far only been, at most, hundreds strong. This compares to the COVID “Freedom” demonstrations in Australia which have been up to tens of thousands strong in several cities. Moreover, despite the Western media’s best efforts to insinuate the opposite, the recent protests in China have met with much public hostility. Thus when a handful of China-style “Freedom” protesters held a rally in Guangzhou last week, they were surrounded and angrily scolded by a much larger gathering of local community members. The public shouted at the protesters: “You are not here to help us, you are here to create trouble” and “We Cantonese are very generous, if you need money we can give you some [implying that the demonstrators were paid by Western forces to protest]”.

Despite the huge difference between Western and PRC society, there were nevertheless similarities between the Western “Freedom” protests and their Chinese version. For one, both promoted the conspiracy theory that the COVID-response measures were a deliberate attempt by governments to take away political freedoms. This claim is irrational – for it is against the interests of decision makers in both countries to have economic life constrained by COVID-response measures. To be sure, Australian governments certainly have been taking away people’s ability to express dissent. But they have used other pretexts to do so: including “fighting terrorism”, “combating Communist China’s influence”, “defending national security”, and “protecting the operations of essential services.” Such pretexts to clamp down specifically on their political opponents, are far, far easier for the Australian regime to justify than pandemic restrictions that inconvenience the whole population and hurt the profits of the capitalist exploiters that they serve.

Another similarity between the Australian – and indeed American and European – “Freedom” protests and their Chinese variant is that in both sets of demonstrations, those who personally have the most to gain from pandemic-response restrictions have mostly refused to participate. Frontline wage workers are the most susceptible to catching – and therefore dying from – COVID. Figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show that during last year’s Delta outbreak, the population with the lowest 20% of incomes, which includes a large proportion of frontline workers (and their families) toiling in minimum wage, gig economy and casual jobs, were about five times likelier to die from COVID than the wealthiest 20% of the Australian population. Moreover, frontline workers employed in hospitals and aged care facilities have seen first hand the deaths caused by COVID and have experienced incredible overwork in their efforts to alleviate the horrific suffering caused by the disease. So for very good reason, only a small number of frontline workers participated in Australia’s “Freedom” protests. In the Chinese version of the protests, wage-earning working-class people seemed to have made up an even smaller proportion of the demonstrations than the ones held in Australia. Accounts by the Western media of the profile of the Chinese protesters invariably describe them as being students from elite universities, legal practitioners, journalists, marketing and finance sector professionals, private-sector business owners and the like. In other words people from China’s upper middle-class, or in the case of some of the students from elite campuses and younger professionals, those who aspire to be part of the upper middle-class.  

The class composition of both the Australian and Chinese “Freedom” protests is shaped by a defining feature of all such protests around the world – they embody a selfish impulse of those involved to endanger the lives of large numbers of other people for the sake of their own convenience and economic prosperity. This ethos of these movements naturally attracts to their ranks a percentage of the self employed and of the highly educated middle-class professionals and elite students. This is because the likes of self-employed tradies, owner truck drivers, lawyers, journalists, small shop owners and accountants are usually engaged in an individual form of work where their income-earning work does not mostly rely on collective labour. This individual means of making a living can condition a self-absorbed attitude to their broader life. Moreover, the dog-eat-dog nature of the market that self-employed tradies, small business owners and say lawyers must operate in – where every other service provider in the market is a competitor for business – or the, often furious, competition amongst the aspirational architects or accountants or analysts in a firm to please their boss and rise up the corporate tree, can condition some of these self-employed and other middle-class people to have an individualistic outlook. In contrast, wage-earning workers are often conditioned, by both the collective nature of their production and the need to unite with their fellow workers to defend their common rights, to have a more collectivist outlook. Moreover, especially for workers employed in occupations where the risk of serious work accidents is high, workers instinctively learn to look after each others safety. This sometimes involves class-conscious workers insisting on workplace safety rules being followed against bosses trying to get workers to flaunt the rules in order to speed up production. Thus for many workers, the notion of following pandemic prevention rules to look after themselves and fellow citizens come as second nature. In contrast, self-employed tradies, owner truck drivers and small business owners sometimes see rules in areas like construction standards, road safety, waste disposal and hygiene as obstacles to them making a good profit when they are being squeezed so mercilessly by cut-throat competition. Some of them similarly see COVID response rules as yet another hindrance to their quest for profits. 

To be sure in both China and Australia, organisers of the protests were, for different reasons, able to tap into legitimate grievances. In the PRC, although the COVID response has been spectacularly effective and although, based on this success, improved COVID treatment methods, the apparent reduced lethality of the subvariants of the Omicron strain presently dominant in China and the more contagious nature of these strains combined with their shorter generation interval making it very difficult to implement a dynamic zero-COVID policy, the PRC was already in the process of significantly loosening its pandemic-containment measures when the COVID “Freedom” protests occurred, a few local authorities had not adequately embraced the central PRC government’s new directives. To the extent that protest organisers in China had any success in reaching a broader audience it was through tapping resentment at the inflexibility of these particular local authorities. However, the main demands of the Chinese version of the “Freedom” protests, to end all PCR COVID testing and abolish masking requirements, are a brutal demand that – even when, as Chinese health experts believe, the Omicron strains currently circulating in China are less lethal – would allow the virus to spread uncontained amongst China’s huge population, overwhelming the health system and therefore causing unnecessary deaths of potentially tens of thousands of elderly and health condition-afflicted people.

In Australia too, the main content of the COVID “Freedom” protests was reactionary. Nevertheless, the protests were able to tap into not only frustration with the very real disruption that is caused by pandemic response measures but widespread distrust of the Australian regime. Some people opposed the COVID response measures, because for often very understandable reasons, they do not trust anything that the Australian authorities tell them. Moreover, there were very real examples of unjust COVID-related repression in Australia. This was due to the regime imposing its pro-rich, class bias and its race bias against people of colour into its pandemic response-policing efforts. During last year’s Delta outbreak in Sydney, it was the working-class suburbs in southwestern and western Sydney that were selectively subjected to the toughest lockdown conditions after authorities failed to impose lockdowns to contain Delta when it first took hold in the city’s affluent Eastern suburbs. People in the heavily Asian, African, Middle Eastern and Islander working-class suburbs of Auburn, Campsie, Granville, Fairfield, Villawood, Bankstown, Liverpool and Blacktown were slandered by the media and the NSW government and subjected to heavy-handed treatment from police and army personnel. It has been in these suburbs, as well as towns with high concentrations of Aboriginal people (like Walgett and Brewarrina) and low-income suburbs in general where people have been subjected to the highest rate of COVID-related fines. Meanwhile, the regime failed to provide the services to the peoples of southwestern Sydney needed to minimise the inconvenience caused by the 2021 Delta lockdown. Thus essential workers living in suburbs like Fairfield, who had lockdown exceptions that enabled them to travel for work outside the region, had to sometimes queue for between six to eight hours to get the compulsory test that they needed to work outside the area! For these reasons, some migrants from these areas did participate in the “Freedom” protests out of revulsion with the way that residents in their suburbs were discriminated against.

Yet, given that it is migrants – especially from Tonga, Samoa, Iraq and Lebanon – who have disproportionately suffered the most deaths from COVID in Australia, which naturally makes these communities less partial to anti-pandemic-response protests; and given that these “Freedom” protests have in part been led by white supremacists, the rallies had disproportionately few people of colour participating. And alongside billionaire Clive Palmer’s hard right United Australia Party (UAP), conscious white supremacists really have been driving the “Freedom” protests. The fascist character of many of the movement’s instigators was most evident in Melbourne on 20 September 2021. Then, Far-Right activists – and some self-employed tradies that they roped in – attacked the headquarters of the left-wing CFMEU construction workers union. The “Freedom” horde assaulted union officials and damaged union headquarters.

In China, just like here, protesters shouted slogans for “freedom” and against censorship. But what established the character of some of the protests most clearly is the part that got the Western ruling classes most excited: that in the street protest in Shanghai and the one in Beijing, some of the demonstrators had chanted “Down with the Communist Party!” and “Down with Xi Jinping!” Now media footage of the Shanghai protest shows that it was a minority of the crowd chanting those slogans with many staying silent. Indeed at the Shanghai protest many participants also sang the Communist Internationale at one stage, although there were plenty in the crowd that did not join in too. Yet it was also true that no one in the Shanghai protest moved to immediately remonstrate with the man who started off the anticommunist chants and tell him to stop – although a Reuters news report said that when a small number of participants at the Beijing demonstration shouted out demands for the CPC and Xi Jinping to step down they were quickly rebuked by some fellow protesters. It seems that the protests were diverse in their composition. Nevertheless, it is also clear that those with a conscious agenda of capitalist counterrevolution were seeking to embed their movement within the grievances of those tired with pandemic response measures. Moreover, although many in the Chinese COVID “Freedom” rallies were not anti-communists, it is also true that a fair percentage of the organisers had sympathy for Western-style “democracy” – which in practice means a tyranny of capitalist oligarchs that is only a democracy for the rich. Given that – even polls done by Western organisations have shown that – a large majority of China’s population is currently both emphatically sympathetic to the PRC’s socialistic political order and strongly suspicious of the capitalist system in the West, this puts many of those driving the Chinese “Freedom” protesters on the relative Far Right of China’s political spectrum, even though they were not racial supremacists like their counterparts in the likes of the U.S., Germany and Australia.

When COVID “Freedom” activists called a rally on November 29 in the southern Chinese city of Guanzghou, just five people turned up to support the event (shown in the foreground of the above photo). But when locals saw the protest, a large crowd gathered to denounce the protesters . Many of the locals suggested that the “A4 protesters” had been paid by Western regimes.
Source: Still taken from video on Twitter account of Zhao DaShuai

High-Level Coordination of Those Seeking to Hijack
Frustrations over COVID-Response Measures

Those instigators of the Chinese “Freedom” protests with a broader political agenda seemed to be very deliberate in their attempt to hijack frustrations over COVID-response, just as those with an extreme white nationalist agenda were here. It is remarkable how coordinated the Chinese protests were. The protests were held almost simultaneously in several cities, using similar slogans and similar methods – like the use of the blank A4 pieces of paper. Such a level of coordination can only be achieved if protest organisers already knew each other prior to the actions. This could be attained to a partial degree through social media discussion even if instigators have not physically met. However, as the Western media have told us ad nauseum, discussion about protests on this issue had been censored on social media. Moreover, in Australia, or anywhere else for that matter, the only way a high-level of coordination in protests over any issue could arise is through activists having networked in earlier actions. The first protests in any movement over any issue often lack coherence. Yet what happened the weekend before last were the very first COVID “Freedom” protests in China – all the other COVID-related protests in China were highly localised outbursts against specific local authorities about very local concerns and did not target the central PRC government, let alone raise broader slogans about “freedom”, “democracy” and “censorship”. Therefore, key organisers could not have networked through meeting at earlier such events, because there have not been any! This means that some of the key instigators of the Chinese protests could only have been able to network with each other, because they had already, earlier, been brought together over a shared belief about some other issueslike a shared agenda of promoting, at least aspects of, Western-style “democracy” or at the more extreme end, the weakening of or overthrow of socialistic rule in China. Indeed Western media accounts of the Chinese protests defacto acknowledged this … and celebrated it!

Moreover, the timing of the coordinated protests was more than interesting. Everyone in China knows that on 11 November, the central government announced measures loosening pandemic restrictions and reducing the scope of PCR testing. Western media outlets headlined: “China Cities Reduce Mass Testing as Nation Eases Covid Measures.” So why just two weeks later, as more local governments were announcing easing measures, would some people want to instigate COVID “Freedom” protests? They could only have wanted to, because in seeking to channel frustrations over the inconvenience of pandemic restrictions into support for their broader agenda, they realised that they were … running out of time! The more that measures eased, the less resonance for their agenda these forces would get. It was now or never for them!

There were clear signs of external boosting of the “A4 protests”. For example, a few of the placards in the Shanghai protest reportedly had errors in the Chinese character writing indicating that the writers of the signs did not know well the simplified Chinese characters used in the mainland but rather were native users of the old-style characters still used in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Moreover, those scrutinising the Shanghai protest have said that two known anti-communist activists of Taiwanese background participated and confronted police, including an employee of Radio Free Asia (the U.S. government’s station that it uses to beam anti-communist propaganda into the PRC, Vietnam, DPRK and Laos) of German citizenship. Trotskyist Platform is unable to independently confirm whether this last detail is correct or not. However, what we can say is that Western-funded and trained anti-communist groups would have been involved in supporting and even, to a more or lesser degree, partially instigating the “A4 protests” – just as they did the 2019 pro-colonial riots in Hong Kong. This is apparent even from looking at the website of the U.S. government agency for foreign interference, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). As well as detailing on their website the total of $US2.5 million that they provide to various components of the anti-PRC movement of that (small) section of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang that happen to be anticommunist, the further $US1.4 million that they give to various anticommunist Tibetan groups (including $US18,000 for an Australian anti-PRC group called the Australia New Zealand Tibetan Youth) and the hundreds of thousands more that they continue to donate to the anti-PRC movement in Hong Kong, the NED also details the massive $US6.54 million (that is nearly $A10 million!) that they unleashed to bankroll 26 separate anti-communist organisations doing work within the rest of the PRC. Top on the NED’s list of recipients for work in the mainland PRC and handed out a $581,224 donation is an organisation whose name gives the U.S. government’s overall agenda away: the Center for International Private Enterprise, which in plain speak means the Center for International Capitalism. Similarly, among the recipients are several unnamed groups whose agenda is, “To empower entrepreneurs to protect their property rights”- in other words to “empower” capitalists to protect their “rights” to the fruits of their exploitation of workers labour in China, which fortunately is not truly guaranteed in Red China. However, most relevant to the “A4 protests” are the many, also unnamed, Chinese anticommunist groups receiving big money from the NED with stated agendas like, “To educate and train civil society activists on democratization and social movements, and to provide a platform for discussion of democratic ideas and civil society activism, fostering critical links among those who support democracy in relevant locations.” You can bet that at least some of these groups, bolstered by U.S. government money and the “education and training” that they were thereby able to dispense to “civil society activists” about “social movements”, would have been active in China’s November 26 to 28 “Freedom” protests! We should add that in addition to the more open interference conducted by the NED, the CIA and other Western regime agencies surely also provide more covert funding to counterrevolutionary groups inside China. Moreover, the total funds allocated by Western regime institutions is probably dwarfed by the financial resources poured in by Western anticommunist NGOs – including ones operating under the guise of being “human rights defenders” – which are known for receiving huge donations from capitalist tycoons.

It should be stressed that all we have said above about the Chinese rallies applies only to the highly coordinated “A4 protests”. We are not speaking about the spontaneous protests that have erupted at various times at particular neighbourhoods against local authorities or the protest in Urumqi (capital of Xinjiang Province) on November 24. That protest against the lockdown in parts of Urumqi following a deadly fire was aimed against the local government and implicitly appealed to the central government to pressure local authorities.

Shanghai, 27 November 2022: The man in the foreground holding the mobile phone starts a chant of “Down with the Communist Party!” and then “Down with Xi Jinping” at the Shanghai COVID “Freedom” protest. At the very moment that he begins the “Down with Xi Jinping”-chant, a blonde-haired Western person standing within touching distance of him turns around and smiles approvingly. She is one of the minority of protesters who fervently joins in with the two chants. Who is this person? Obviously, she can speak a fair level of Mandarin Chinese to be able to join the chants and moreover, inbound tourism into China has been stopped since COVID. The question then is, is she a member of one of the anticommunist Western NGOs operating within China under various social-work guises or is she a an attache of the nearby U.S. consulate or a manager for one of the many Western corporations that have offices in Shanghai and thus with a reason for class hostility to working-class rule in China or is she an international student? And if the Westerner was an international student, was her motivation for going to China simply to study or was she sent by a Western government agency or anticommunist NGO for the expressed purposes of quietly promoting a “democratic” capitalist counterrevolution?
Including the amount that it specifically allocates for work in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Tibet and Hong Kong, the U.S. government’s arm for foreign interference, the National Endowment for Democracy openly donates a total of $US11 million ($A16.5 million) to groups pushing its capitalist counterrevolutionary agenda in China. The amount given by anticommunist Western NGOs, often funded by wealthy tycoons, is thought to be even greater.
Source: Still taken by Trotskyist Platform from a video posted by anti-communist Western journalist, Eva Rammeloo on her Twitter feed.

Foxconn Workers Riot Against the Company’s Failure to
Take Adequate Measures to Stop COVID Spread

Even more different to the November 26-28 “Freedom” rallies than the Urumqi demonstration, was the mass workers protests at the huge Foxconn plant in central China’s Zhengzhou. The Foxconn factory makes iPhones for Apple. The Western media gave their audience the impression that these Foxconn protests were aimed against the PRC’s zero-COVID policies. Nothing could be further from the truth! As some of the anti-PRC media had to admit in the fine print: the Foxconn workers actions last month were not at all directed against PRC governments, even the local ones. Instead, it was aimed entirely against the company. Moreover, in as much as the workers’ actions were related to COVID it was not in opposition China’s COVID-response measures. Instead, workers complained that Foxconn was endangering their lives by putting newly recruited workers in the same dormitories as COVID-positive workers. Moreover, the main complaint of workers was actually over wages. The company had deceived workers by promising a much higher wage than they delivered. In response, militant workers bearing the red, pro-communist PRC flag, confronted the lying bosses and rioted. They also walked out of the factory compound and caught buses out of the factory in their thousands. They did so not only over the company’s failure to pay the promised wages, but out of a fear of catching COVID. As even pro-Western Al Jazeera had to report:

“One worker, Fay, said he feared catching COVID and anguished about whether to stay on for two more weeks to claim a bonus for completing his three-month contract. Eventually, he says, he crawled out through a hole in a green metal fence.

“`In the end, I decided that my life was worth more.’”

So you see, the Chinese Foxconn workers actually wanted more rigorous COVID-response measures, not less! In other words, the Foxconn workers’ actions were aimed in the very opposite direction to the A4 “Freedom” rallies. Indeed, if those angry, COVID-concerned Foxconn workers who had streamed out of the plant later came across one of those “Freedom” rallies (which did not begin until several days later) demanding that COVID-response measures be halted and claiming that the threat of the virus has been greatly exaggerated, the workers may well have shown their displeasure at the yuppies and right-wing students gathered at the “Freedom” protest in a more than verbal manner.

The Western capitalist media’s lying portrayal of the Foxconn workers struggle was not only one of their typical attempt’s to slander the PRC’s COVID response but also an attempt to deflect blame from the company that workers were fighting against. So why would the Western media want to protect Foxconn? Well you may very well not know this, because the media went to great lengths to either downplay this important fact, or simply not report it at all, but Foxconn is not a PRC company, Foxconn is a TAIWANESE company. The imperialist media seek to hide this truth, because not only do they want their audience to transfer their revulsion at Foxconn’s greed onto the PRC, they also want to protect the reputation of Taiwan. The latter is the province of China that the defeated capitalists fled to after China’s 1949 toiling people’s revolution. The fleeing capitalists took with them China’s gold reserves that they looted as well as their own ill-gotten personal wealth. The overthrown capitalists seized the island and made it their base from which they hoped to one-day launch a counter-revolution to restore capitalist rule to the mainland. As a result, this rebel capitalist province received massive economic aid from the U.S. and other capitalist powers to build itself up as an industrial power, as well as ever increasing amounts of military hardware. They managed to turn Taiwan into the West’s unsinkable aircraft carrier aimed against Red China.

The treatment of workers in Zhengzhou by Foxconn, whose biggest stake is an $A8.3 billion shareholding held by Taiwanese tycoon Terry Gou, in fact typifies the severe oppression of workers within Taiwan itself. Indeed, this intense exploitation by Taiwanese bosses was recently noticed here. Another Taiwanese corporate giant, 85 Degrees Café had ripped-off, so cruelly, eight Taiwanese students that it had brought to Australia that even Australia’s limp Fair Work Ombudsman fined the company the second largest amount that it has ever imposed on a single company. In last month’s ruling, the billion dollar Taiwanese company was found to have underpaid each of the students over $A50,000 in just 12 months!!! The Taiwanese corporation forced the students who had come here on a working holiday visa to toil between 60 to 70 hours per week in the company’s Sydney factories and retail stores for wages of, only, between $A1,650 to $A1,750 per month. Moreover, although Taiwan is no longer under martial law – as it was in the first four decades after 1949, when, in a notorious period known as the White Terror, the capitalist dictatorship executed tens of thousands of communist sympathisers, other dissidents, members of the island’s indigenous people and anyone with the slightest association with communists – workers right to resist their exploitation remains severely restricted in Taiwan. For example, workers in Taiwanese workplaces with less than 30 employees are not allowed to form a union that can bargain over workplace conditions. Moreover, Taiwanese teachers, public servants and defence industry employees are completely banned from going on strike and the those working in the island’s utilities, health sector and telecommunications industry are barred from taking any meaningful strike action as well. Most infamously, Taiwan’s capitalist bosses often subject their workers to harsh, military-style control. This militarisation of labour combined with the South Korea-style, hyper-capitalist social values that dominate the island – which results in many parents mercilessly berating their children if the latter do not score top marks at school while adults who are unable to obtain careers with high incomes are often outcast as a “failure” – together mean that Taiwan has a very high suicide rate. Indeed, the island’s suicide rate is double that of the socialist-ruled part of China.

When Foxconn set up factories in mainland China, it tried to bring Taiwan-style militarisation of labour to its plants in the PRC. Accentuated by the fact that workers in the PRC, especially those who had previously worked in her socialistic state-owned enterprises (known for their relaxed work environment and overstaffing in comparison with capitalist firms), were not used to such cruel management regimes, this resulted in a spate of suicides at Foxconn’s Chinese factories in the early 2010s. Eventually, pushed by mass workers protest actions, the PRC government cracked down on the Taiwanese corporation, forcing the latter to improve its employees’ working conditions. However, as recent events have proved, Foxconn still mistreats its workers. This calls on the PRC authorities to more decisively repress the greedy Taiwanese corporation.

The oppression of Taiwanese workers has only intensified over the last few years. À la John Howard and his notorious Workchoices industrial relations laws, in 2017-2018, Taiwan’s anti-PRC extremist president and darling of the Western ruling classes, Tsai Ing-wen and her Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government pushed through new laws that significantly diminished workers rights. This was despite large protests and mass hunger strikes by desperate workers. As a result, workers can now be made to work 12 days in a row with only 8 hours break between full shifts. Furthermore, the laws exempted employers of flight attendants, public transport drivers, domestic workers and caregivers from even those minimal restrictions on the amount of hours that they could coerce these workers into toiling. The new laws also slashed the number of public holidays in the island by nearly 40%.

The most brutally exploited workers in Taiwan are the island’s three-quarter of a million migrant workers from countries like Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Sri Lanka. Just like during feudalism, these workers not allowed to move jobs to a different employer. Amongst the sectors where indentured labour is most prevalent is amongst the quarter of a million, mostly women, migrants working as domestic maids for wealthy Taiwanese families. These domestic workers often toil from 5am in the morning until 10pm at night, seven days a week for a nominal minimum wage equivalent to $A190 per week. In practice, they often receive much less because employers frequently refuse to provide workers the income promised by their contracts or use loopholes in the contracts to take away most of their wages as expenses. Moreover, labour-hire brokers – with the permissiveness of the Taiwanese regime – usually force migrant workers to pay them exorbitant administration, recruitment, “training” and travel fees. Often, this means that Taiwanese employers or their brokers are able to ensnare migrant workers into debt bondage – in which workers pushed into debt are forced to do whatever their bosses want to try and repay debts that they will realistically never be able to repay. In other words, many migrant workers in Taiwan are doing forced labour. Some migrant women workers in Taiwan trapped in debt bondage have even been coerced in this way into toiling as sex workers.

The estimated 160,000 migrant workers toiling in Taiwan’s huge deep sea fishing industry face amongst the most barbaric conditions of all. Many are forced to do up to 21 hours per day of back-breaking work for a paltry nominal minimum wage of just $A154 per week. Ship captains and their bodyguards often brutally beat these workers or deny them food and water if they are perceived to not be toiling fast enough or if they make unintentional errors in their work. In a few notorious cases, captains and their bodyguards have even murdered migrant workers and dumped their bodies out to sea – but the full extent of such murders is not known because of the Taiwanese capitalist regime’s intention to deliberately turn a blind eye to, or downplay, such crimes. Moreover, in practice, most migrant fishermen toiling in Taiwan’s fishing industry receive far less than even the paltry, minimum wage. They are usually pushed into contracts stipulating well below the nominal minimum wage. Additionally, not only do the brokers take back a big chunk of the wages in fees, but the Taiwanese fishing firms extract “accommodation” and “food” costs from the workers even while forcing them to sleep in squalid conditions with inadequate food and water, even when they are in port. Indeed, some Taiwanese ship-owners with-hold paying their workers anything at all for months … and a few never pay their workers at all! As a result of all this, many migrant fish industry workers are desperate to quit and return home. However, by using transhipments at sea to get fish to market and take on supplies, Taiwanese deep water shipping vessels are able to operate for years without needing to call at a port, meaning that migrants workers enchained into forced labour have to wait years before having a chance of escaping their plight. Moreover, many are often trapped not only by debt bondage but through having their passports being held by their bosses and sometimes by even being physically incarcerated as virtual slaves. There have been confirmed cases where Taiwanese bosses lock migrant fishermen in underground bunkers when they return to the island’s shores or keep them imprisoned in over-crowded houses with the help of guards.

If one looks hard enough, it is possible to find in a small number of mainstream media outlets a number of accounts of Taiwan’s human trafficking of migrant labour and the appalling lack of workers rights in the island more broadly. However, mostly this information is deliberately buried by the mainstream Western media and is certainly not highlighted at all. In Australia’s capitalist media in particular, accounts of the brutal exploitation of workers in Taiwan are almost completely censored. For Taiwan is a protected species as far as the Western media is concerned. Such burying of the reality faced by working-class people in Taiwan is of course a violation of all the claimed ethics of “openness” and “fairness” that Australia’s mainstream commercial and government news organisations claim to stand by. Yet it is hardly a surprise. Taiwan’s continued existence as a rogue province of China not under the PRC is one of the imperialist ruling classes’ main means to provoke conflict with socialistic China.

A True Freedom Protest

Taipei, 16 January 2022: Hundreds of migrant workers on the island of Taiwan march against the Taiwanese capitalist regime’s draconian policy that prevents migrant workers from changing their employer. The policy helps facilitate the brutal super-exploitation of migrant workers on the island by Taiwanese business owners and by wealthy families hiring domestic maids.
Photo: Jimmy Beunardeau / Hans Lucas.

“Rare Protests in China” that were “China’s Biggest Protests Since 1989”? Really?

Despite their efforts to misrepresent and thereby co-opt into their anti-PRC narrative the Foxconn protests, it was the A4 “Freedom” protests that really had the Western ruling classes excited. Their media have cheered that these COVID “Freedom” rallies have been, as a 28 November ABC News article explicitly claimed, “China’s biggest protests since 1989.” Alongside this assertion, the media have insisted that these recent demonstrations were “rare” examples of protest in China. Ironically, if you look back carefully over Western media articles over the last few years, they have reports on many, many other protests in China. Quite comically, on each occasion the media report that “this is a rare example of protest in China.” However, if all these “rare” protests have been going on, then protests cannot be that rare in the PRC! To be sure, socialistic rule in China is currently not administered in its ideal form – that is a workers democracy where all who defend the rule of the working class and socialism are able to freely advocate their views and scrutinise and criticise the policies of governments and state institutions. The currently, bureaucratically deformed nature of the Chinese workers state means that there are restrictions on the scope of what should be legitimate protest – that is those that are not aimed at mobilising the forces of capitalist counterrevolution. Yet, contrary to the impression that the Western media would like to give, protests are actually very common in China. Indeed, one could even say that Red China’s people have a tendency to protest at the drop of a hat. It is estimated that there are on average somewhere between 300 to 500 protest actions in China every day. Today, protests in the PRC are mostly ones associated with workers strikes (which are usually aimed against private sector or Western/ South Korean/Taiwanese-owned enterprises where workers conditions are well below those at the PRC’s state-owned enterprises), protests by residents against the operation or opening of a nearby polluting factory and quite often, actions against perceived wrong decisions or bureaucratic excesses of local authorities – the latter protests usually appealing (often with success) to the central PRC government to crackdown on local authorities.

Moreover, the media’s claim that the recent A4 rallies were the largest protests in China since the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests is simply not true. In fact, there have been dozens of other protests that have been far larger. Here are just a few. In the late 1990s, China saw a huge number of protests by workers at state-owned enterprises (SOE) against privatisations and downsizing that had been pushed by pro-market then premier Zhu Rongji. Often the rebelling workers would march behind a portrait of Chairman Mao. In one action in Sichuan Province’s Nanchong, thousands of workers at the Jianlihua silk factory angered over lay-offs and pay cuts seized the general manager and took him hostage:

They loaded Huang [the manager] into the back of a flatbed truck and forced him into the painful and demeaning `airplane position’ – bent at the waists, arms straight out the sides.  Then they … paraded him through the streets [of Nanchong] just like the Cultural Revolution … Workers from other factories joined the spontaneous demonstration … 20,000 people took part.”

Timothy Cheek, Living With Reform: China Since 1989, Fernwood Publishing Ltd, 2006

Then in in March 2002, more than 100,000 sacked SOE workers protested across Northeast China against privatisation and under-payment of redundancy benefits. Such sentiments were unleashed again in particularly militant form in July 2009, when some 30,000 workers occupied the steel plant in northeastern Jilin province owned by state-owned Tonghua Iron & Steel after the company was sold-off to a privately owned, that is capitalist, company. In their struggle to resist the privatisation and the planned layoffs, workers beat to death the general manager appointed by the new capitalist owners! Within hours, the local government publicly announced that the privatisation had been cancelled. Just weeks after the Tonghua struggle, thousands of workers at the Linzhou Steel Company, in Henan Province, occupied the factory to oppose the sell-off of the SOE to a privately owned company. Workers mobilised behind a banner with a clearly pro-collective ownership – and therefore pro-communist – sentiment: “Learn from the Tonghua Steel workers! Defend collective wealth!” They also took hostage the assets-control state official managing the privatisation. Within days, their struggle also resulted in victory. Ever since then, there have barely been any attempts at privatisation of any sizable SOE in China.

On 14 August 2011, up to 70,000 people marched through the Chinese city of Dalian to demand the re-location of a chemical plant. The protest succeeded after the city government agreed to move out the plant. However, four years later, there was a militant protest in Linshui county, in Sichuan Province, that was aimed in the opposite direction. Some 20,000 residents demanded that a proposed high-speed railway that had been planned to pass through the county not be amended to another route that would bypass the area. Protesters carried banners demanding: “We want development, prosperity and a railway”. Note, that this was already two and a half-years after Xi Jinping became PRC leader, which the Western media have been claiming led to the constriction of all opportunities for protest in China.

Ten months later, about ten thousand workers at the Shuangyashan coal mine in Heilongjiang Province rallied to protest against the local government for failing to ensure that the, then semi-bankrupt, state-owned Longmay Group pay on time the wages it promised to continue paying workers after the mine was idled. Pushed by this and similar protests, the Xi Jinping government modified its supply-side structural reforms that were originally intended to reduce overcapacity and overstaffing at state-owned coal and steel plants. Beijing now moved to ensure that the SOEs with excess capacity establish operations in other areas, including agriculture, forestry and services, so that the excess workers can be transferred into new jobs. At the same time it turned the focus of its coal and steel sector capacity reduction drive from the SOEs to the closing down of smaller capitalist-owned operations.

However, Mao-portrait bearing rallies appealing to the CPC central government to act against local authorities and workers actions calling to “Defend Collective Wealth” and protect the PRC’s socialistic SOEs, are all not the type of protests that the Western capitalist media want to highlight. If the Australian media were honest they would not label the recent COVID “Freedom” protests, “China’s biggest protests since 1989” but rather call them, “China’s biggest protests since 1989 that had an agenda attractive to Western ruling classes” – that is protests that either included anti-communist elements or had the potential to grow into one aimed at undermining socialistic rule in China.

Nanchang, China, 1 July 2016: Workers at a Chinese store owned by notoriously anti-union American retail giant, Walmart begin a strike. The strike was against Walmart’s plans to introduce a flexible scheduling system that workers fear would turn the mostly full-time, permanent workers in China’s Walmart stores into casual employees like their American counterparts. Chinese Walmart Workers were also angry that Walmart stores often pays workers much less than the average wages paid by Chinese companies in the same area.
Unlike in Australia, there are no laws restricting the right to strike in China. However, as the right to strike is not explicitly enshrined in Chinese law either, it exists in somewhat of a legal grey area. However, although there have been occasions where strike action has faced repression in China, in general, workers are more easily able to wage strike action in China than in Australia. Certainly, workers are not restricted by laws limiting the time in which they can wage industrial action to a narrow window of time deemed the “bargaining period”, as they are here. Moreover, unlike in Australia, Chinese workers do not have to go through the lengthy, momentum-sapping procedure of holding a state-supervised secret ballot election before they can launch strike action. As a result, workers strikes are very common in China. Moreover, living in a workers state where people are taught from the country’s Constitution and from the education system that the working-class is the ruling class, workers in China often have a healthy sense of entitlement. Therefore, when they take collective industrial action against an employer they often take very militant actions such as occupying workplaces, blocking roads and taking bosses hostage.

Photo: By striking Walmart workers in Nanchang

The Australian media’s attempts to convince their audience that protests almost never take place in China is part of their push to create an impression of China as a repressive, “authoritarian” country in contrast to the “democratic” West. As part of this, they hyped up any repression of the A4 protests. For example they focussed on the arrests by PRC police of a handful of protesters – who from video footage appeared to be sitting on road intersections. However, in actual fact, PRC authorities have been rather mild in their response. The few detained were released within hours and at this stage it does not appear that a single protester actually remains held in detention or charged. Compare this with how Australian authorities dealt with COVID “Freedom” protests here. For example in just one COVID “Freedom” rally in Melbourne alone (on 3 November 2020), police arrested 404 protesters after having earlier unleashed capsicum spray against the demonstrators. Then in August last year, a court in Sydney sentenced an anti-lockdown protest organiser to eight months in prison. Let’s be clear: we have little sympathy for any repression faced by the, often Far-Right, organisers of these anti-pandemic response protests. Nevertheless, the contrast between the harsh repression against “Freedom” activists here and the relatively mild treatment of COVID “Freedom” protesters in China is striking given the determination of the Australian media to portray the differences between the Australian system and the PRC one as one of “democratic” Australia versus “authoritarian” Communist China.

Moreover, as those who stand up for workers rights, activists in support of public housing, staunch anti-fascists, sympathisers of socialistic China and climate activists can all tell you, the supposed right to protest and express one’s political views in Australia is inhibited. And the regime has been progressively restricting this right even further. In April this year, the right-wing NSW government, with the ALP’s support, passed laws that allow for people accused of illegally protesting on public roads, bridges, and industrial estates to be jailed for up to two years. Seven days ago, when the Australian media still hadn’t stopped screaming about the supposed repression of right-wing COVID “Freedom” protests in China, a Sydney court outrageously imprisoned a climate activist for 15 months for a protest in April. Deanna Coco was given this extreme sentence for blocking one-lane of the Harbour Bridge for merely 25 minutes. Moreover, on June 19, NSW police conducted an operation against climate activist group, Blockade Australia that makes the PRC’s police seem like teddy bears. When the climate group was merely having a meeting camp northwest of Sydney, police organised camouflaged undercover officers to literally hide in the bushes to spy on the camp. When the spies were detected by camp participants, police unleashed a fearsome force of 100 riot police, helicopters, the dog squad and uniformed cops to descend on the camp and arrest dozens of the group’s members. As a result of this and a subsequent raid, ten activists have been charged, two of whom were imprisoned after being denied bail. Four of the activists are facing up to ten years in jail. The charges allege that the activists were … planning to commit a crime in the future, by engaging in an unspecified future direct action to advocate measures to mitigate climate change! Meanwhile, the Australian regime is seeking to jail former Australian Army lawyer David McBride for up to 50 years for revealing to the media some of the details of the appalling murder of civilians and unarmed prisoners by the Australian military during its occupation of Afghanistan. And let’s not forget the complicity of Australian governments in the brutal ongoing persecution of Julian Assange for bravely reporting details of the U.S. regime’s heinous murder of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Above: Lightly equipped Chinese police basically standby and watch as people on China’s relative Far Right hold a COVID “Freedom” protest in Shanghai on November 27 against COVID PCR testing and masking requirements. A minority of the crowd also chanted explicitly anti-communist slogans. Police did not confront protesters with horses. Only after the protesters had rallied on the streets for many, many hours did police ask the protesters to leave. They then split the crowd into two after a chunk of the crowd refused to leave. The Chinese police then made only made a small number of arrests after some of the protesters provoked police by pushing into them – seemingly to get arrested for the benefit of Western media cameras. Below: Mounted police in Sydney attack protesters at a 24 July 2021 Sydney rally against lockdown and other pandemic-response measures. The NSW government and police had declared the COVID “Freedom” rally illegal and made mass arrests, while establishing a taskforce to identify and hunt down further protesters. We have little sympathy for any repression faced by the, often Far-Right, organisers of these anti-pandemic response protests. Nevertheless, the contrast between the harsh repression against “Freedom” activists here and the relatively mild treatment of COVID “Freedom” protesters in China is striking given the determination of the Australian media to portray the differences between the Australian system and the PRC one as a matter of “democratic” Australia versus “authoritarian” China.
Photo (above left): Casey Hall/Reuters
Photo (above right): Ryo Inoue/Asahi Shimbun
Photo (below left): Mick Tsikas/AAP photos
Photo (below right): NCA NewsWire/Flavio Brancaleone

A Torrent of Disinformation and Deceit

Their deliberate misrepresentation of the Foxconn protests and their lie that the blank A4 paper-bearing COVID rallies were the biggest protests in China since the 1989 were hardly the only chunks of deception that the Australian mainstream media have engaged in during the last couple of weeks. So let us identify some of the different streams that have contributed to the torrent of disinformation that they have engulfed the Australian population with over events in China. One of the favourite claims of the Western media is the notion that “China’s zero-COVID policy has crashed the country’s economy.” Yet in the first year of the pandemic, while the economies of the U.S., Australia, India and other capitalist countries dived into recession, the PRC economy was the only major economy to have positive growth during that year. The following year, the PRC’s economy surged by a remarkable 8.1%. Now, in the third quarter of this year, the PRC’s economy grew at a very decent 3.9% year on year. This compares with a 2.4% annualised growth of the Australian economy and a 0.8% annualised contraction of the British economy. So, so much for China’s pandemic response “crashing her economy”! Crucially, the PRC has been able to handle her pandemic response through methods that have kept the prices of food and other essentials in check. Today inflation in China is running at only 1.6% per year, in contrast to an inflation rate of 6.9% in Australia, 6.8% in India and a whopping 11.1% in Britain. To be sure, the Omicron spread in China this year has slowed her economy from its usual very fast pace. However, although pandemic response measures do reduce economic activity, the spread of the harmful virus is itself very damaging to production. As we have seen here in Australia, people falling ill with COVID has created shortages of frontline workers, while the understandable fear of catching the virus has caused many to voluntarily shy away from usual activities – thereby reducing consumer demand for services in many areas. Indeed, even the ABC’s business editor, Ian Verrender conceded – not when speaking about China of course but about Australia – that “it wasn’t the lockdowns at the root of the economic catastrophe that has befallen us in the past two years. It was a highly contagious virus.”

One of the most cynical mantras repeated endlessly by Australian ruling class’ media is the claim that China’s pandemic response efforts are now failing. Or, in the words of ABC’s chief, anti-PRC propagandist, Bill Birtles, “China now has the worst of both worlds” – that is strict pandemic restrictions on people and a rampant virus spread. Oh, really? Let us check the facts on how bad or otherwise the COVID spread in China really is. The facts are that over the last month, there were 593 COVID deaths in Australia, whereas in mainland China, with its huge population, there we just nine deaths! In other words, in terms of deaths per head of population, in Red China the COVID situation is currently about 3,700 times better than it is in Australia! Doesn’t sound like “China has the worst of both worlds” at all!

Another key piece of deception that the mainstream Western media engaged in is by deliberately giving the strong impression that (although often not explicitly stated so that they could claim that they are “not lying”) China’s people have been basically locked down or subjected to other restrictive measures throughout the whole three years of this pandemic. The truth however is that other than for the initial early 2020 lockdown in Wuhan and the surrounding parts of Hubei Province, when China was facing the rapid spread of a new virus that no one knew much about, as well as a small number of lockdowns for periods in other cities like Xian, the overwhelming majority of China’s people were never put into a stay at home lockdown for any period during most of 2020 and all of 2021. Thus while residents of Melbourne have been locked down citywide for cumulatively four months during the pandemic and Sydney residents were locked down for three and a half months during last year’s Delta outbreak, residents in Shanghai, Shenzhen, Chongqing, Chengdu, Tianjin and most other large cities in China never had to endure a confined to the home lockdown during the first two years of the pandemic. Moreover, while very small proportions of Beijing and Guangzhou were locked down for short periods and other parts of the cities faced short-term restrictions on travel outside the city during particular outbreaks, most of the residents of these megacities also did not experience any lockdowns whatsoever in 2020 and 2021. Indeed, other than for mandatory mask wearing in public transport and other high-risk areas and the blocking of tourist travel into China, the PRC’s rapid and aggressive suppression of outbreaks when they did occur ensured that, for most of 2020 (after the Wuhan outbreak was suppressed) and all of 2021 and into March 2022, most Chinese people were able to go about their lives as if there was no pandemic at all. Outbreaks, of course, still did occur during this time in particular areas. However, when they did, they were snuffed out in quick time by rapid, resolute and effective local measures so that the overwhelming majority of the population were not affected by either the disease or by pandemic restrictions. One could actually say that for two years of this pandemic, the PRC had the best of the both worlds: a lesser proportion of her people subjected to lockdowns than in say Australia and a far, far lower death toll.

This changed from about March this year as the more infectious but apparently less lethal Omicron strain became dominant. Nevertheless, the PRC’s efforts to protect her people’s well-being have continued to be remarkably successful. All year, 599 people have died from COVID in mainland China compared to 14,102 deaths in Australia despites its much smaller population. However, to stop the 2022 spread of Omicron, the PRC was compelled to lockdown significant parts of several cities at various times. Most notably, China’s most populous city, Shanghai, which had avoided any lockdowns earlier, was placed into a strict lockdown in early April that lasted just under two months. Although tighter than the lockdowns in Australian cities, it is still notable that the duration that even Shanghai residents have been locked down for is only half the duration that residents in both Melbourne and Sydney have endured. To obscure this reality, the Western mainstream media have engaged in deliberately deceptive coverage of China’s pandemic containment measures. They have reported lockdowns of particular suburbs, or even just small neighbourhoods, of cities as if those entire Chinese cities have been locked down. Meanwhile, in order to make the number of people under lockdown in China sound much larger than is actually the case, they lump in to their figures of the number of people facing “lockdown measures” (by adding the word “measures” to “lockdown” the Western media believe they have found a means to engage in this slight of hand) the amount of people experiencing only partial restrictions in their local areas – like the closure of karaoke bars and internet cafes – but who are not locked down. They are then able to quote a total number of people supposedly facing “lockdown measures” that sounds large … helped by the fact that any number for either good or bad sounds large when one is dealing with a country of nearly 1.5 billion people! Yet two can play this game. We can use this same method and, looking at the question from the opposite angle, point out that there are hundreds of millions of people in China, perhaps even the majority – including the overwhelming majority of residents in both Beijing and Guangzhou – who have never had to endure a Sydney or Melbourne-style confined-to-the-home compulsory lockdown during this entire pandemic.

In general, residents in China’s megacities have been subjected to compulsory confined to the home lockdowns for considerably shorter periods than those of us living in Sydney and Melbourne.

So why then has the PRC been able to protect her people from COVID so much better than every other large state in the world – including the Australian, U.S., Japanese, Indian, Russian and Saudi Arabian regimes? It is true that after the Australian and other capitalist rulers progressively abandoned any serious moves to contain COVID in the course of 2022, as they put business profits ahead of the lives of the elderly and ahead of the wellbeing of frontline workers and their families, it was the PRC’s determination to continue to put people’s lives first – including when necessary through targeted lockdowns – that enabled her to protect her people far better than the capitalist regimes. However, what about in 2020 and 2021, when governments in countries like Australia were locking down people in their biggest cities for considerably longer than their counterparts in China? There have been three key methods that have been responsible for the PRC’s success in containing COVID. The first is the provision of effective head to toe protective gear for all their workers most vulnerable to catching COVID. Take a look at most photos of health workers and testing staff in Australia during the pandemic and compare that with those of their Chinese counterparts. One will see that the Chinese workers have the benefit of far more comprehensive protective clothing and masking to protect them from acquiring COVID. The second feature of China’s COVID response has been test, test, test! During the height of the pandemic, whenever there was an outbreak, China PCR tested not only close contacts of known cases but the entire population of whole areas where the cases had been. This testing continued until the outbreak was suppressed – with residents often tested as frequently as once every two days. Additionally, frontline workers at high risk of catching COVID are being tested very frequently even if no known cases in their residential areas exist. Crucially, since COVID is often first transmitted into an area via frontline workers of working age and good health before it is passed on to elderly and sick people, the PRC’s frequent testing – and thus early COVID-positive detection – of frontline workers has been able to minimise virus transmission onto her vulnerable elderly and ill populations. Thirdly, during the height of the pandemic, the PRC moved almost every single COVID infected person into a hospital or makeshift hospital until they had cleared the virus. This ensured that not only were all COVID patients given proper care – thus avoiding the awful situation that we had in Australia during the Delta outbreak when people were dying from COVID at home before even being taken to hospital – but that those infected did not pass the virus onto others including older members of the same household.

The PRC’s winding back of its pandemic containment measures, which began before the protests, mainly involve a winding back of this third method – by moving to home quarantine for those with mild or asymptomatic cases. Additionally, the PRC has largely wound back the the use of Method 2. Mass testing of every single person in whole areas or cities where an outbreak occurs will no longer be conducted. However, frequent PCR testing of health sector workers, nursing home staff, childcare workers, school employees and certain other frontline workers will continue. The loosening was based on the declining severity of the Omicron variants present in China, the wide availability of antiviral medications for infected people that had not been available earlier, the Chinese medical system’s greater experience and competency in treating COVID patients and a rate of full vaccination of over 90% of China’s entire population (note that this proportion is relative to China’s entire population and not just to the over 16 year-old population as vaccination figures are reported in Australia). By comparison, at the time much of Australia abandoned strict pandemic preventive measures when NSW on 17 February 2022 removed the requirement for QR check-in before entering hospital venues, retail premises and gyms and removed all density limits on hospitality venues and nightclubs, antiviral medications were not available in Australia (at the time none had even been listed on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme) and Australia’s vaccination rate was lower than China’s was at the time of her recent loosening of COVID containment measures (at the time the number of vaccine doses delivered in Australia numbered 2.04 times its total population whereas by 28 November 2022 China had delivered vaccine doses that numbered 2.45 times her entire population – the ideal figure should be above 3 when all those older than age three have had at least three doses and the elderly and COVID-vulnerable have had four doses). It remains to be seen whether China’s changes are timely, as seems to be the case, or whether, under the pressure of private sector business owners, the self-employed and overseas capitalist governments wanting the Chinese market to operate at full throttle in order to prop up their deteriorating economies, PRC authorities have loosened COVID containment measures slightly too quickly. It is very possible that the PRC has managed to truly see off the pandemic with a very low number of deaths and can return to a situation when most people are not seriously inconvenienced by virus containment measures while COVID deaths are kept to a very low level (as was the case between April 2020 and March 2022). However, there is a small possibility that the PRC may need to partially bring back certain measures if the new guidelines lead to a spike in COVID deaths before the pandemic fully wanes.

The three key methods, referred to in this section of this article, that underpinned the PRC’s COVID response during the height of the pandemic (before vaccines and anti-viral treatments were available or when far more deadly COVID strains like Delta were dominant) could not have been utilised by most other countries even if they wanted to. To provide the massive amount of hazmat suits, medical grade masks, other personal protective equipment and COVID testing kits needed for a PRC-style pandemic response required manufacturers to switch over their production to making these items in quick time. To conduct mass PCR testing and processing on the scale that the PRC conducted required a massive mobilisation of human resources. So did the organisation and transport of large numbers of infected people into centralised quarantine and the provision of food and other services to such a large number of patients. Moreover, the required creation of new hospitals and makeshift hospitals in the space of weeks to suppress new outbreaks in a city was a Herculean task. None of this could be accomplished in societies where the construction companies, manufacturers, transportation firms, pathology firms and other key sectors are under the ownership and control of profit-driven private companies. Such capitalist firms would be loathe to rapidly switch over their operations to providing large amounts of protective gear, testing kits and makeshift hospitals at a low enough price for governments to afford, especially when they knew that the costly re-orientation of their operation to provide the new product would only bring in revenue for the duration of the pandemic. The PRC was only able to implement her three principle pandemic-response methods because her key means of production, distribution and infrastructure construction are under public ownership and because even her private companies are ultimately subordinate to the workers state. In other words, it was the PRC’s socialistic system that made her hugely successful pandemic response possible. It is notable that of all the countries in the world with a population greater than 15 million people, the two countries with the lowest COVID death rate per million residents are both socialistic countries: the PRC and the DPRK (North Korea).

Left: Medical workers at a makeshift hospital in China prepare to deliver medicines to COVID patients  Right: Medical workers at Sydney’s St Vincents Hospital’s ICU unit around a COVID patient. Australian medical workers are provided with far less comprehensive PPE than their Chinese counterparts. As a result during last year’s Delta outbreak in Sydney, dozens of people tragically died after catching COVID in hospitals after the virus has passed from COVID patient to medical worker and onto non-COVID patients. Such transmission has been much rarer within Chinese health facilities.
China’s spectacular success in protecting her people from COVID comes not from greater use of lockdowns but through, at the height of the pandemic, conducting mass testing of residents during outbreaks, providing high-quality protective gear to health workers and other vulnerable workers and through caring for – and quarantining – every infected person in a hospital or makeshift hospital. China could only make such a response because of her socialistic system based on public ownership of the backbone sectors of the economy and subordination of even the private sector to the workers state. Today, as China loosens pandemic restrictions, it is her state-owned pharmaceutical giants like China Resources Pharmaceutical Group that have stepped up to the plate and greatly increased their manufacture and distribution of anti-epidemic medications to hospitals, community fever clinics and pharmacies.
Photo (Left): Zhu Xingxin/China Daily

What is “Brutal” and What Is Not?

To obscure the truth that socialism was responsible for the PRC’s extraordinarily effective pandemic response is part of why the capitalist powers have been so intent on denigrating her COVID response. Thus, when their media have to acknowledge the PRC’s low COVID death rate, they say that it is only due to the use of “brutal” methods. In attempting to sell this narrative, these ruling classes employ one of their favourite tactics in their propaganda war against Red China. They pick out one particular bad act of a PRC state institution at one moment in time in one particular part of China (and it is always easy to find some examples of such particular events in China since it is such a huge, diverse and sprawling country) … and then claim that this is what is happening in all parts of China, at all times! So accounts of one overzealous local official (or more likely in China’s case a neighbourhood volunteer) in charge of COVID response in one neighbourhood, of one suburb, of one city of China, who has the doors welded of a couple of houses to ensure that its residents stay inside during a lockdown following their earlier breach of the lockdown in that particular neighbourhood at that particular time becomes translated into a claim by Western ruling classes that: “Communist China’s authorities are everywhere and at all times welding shut the doors of residents under lockdown!”

To “justify” their narrative, the mainstream media have supported the conspiracy theory that the November 24 fire at an apartment building in Urumqi that killed ten people was made worse because fire trucks were obstructed due to COVID response measures. PRC authorities have denied the rumours. But let’s say that the conspiracy theory actually is true. Then ten people died, in part, as an inadvertent result of the PRC’s COVID response. That is a tragedy. But the PRC’s pandemic response has also meant that her total COVID death toll is currently 5,235 when it would have been over 4.8 million deaths had China had the same COVID per capita death rate as the United States. Those extra 4.8 million deaths would have been a tragedy on a scale immeasurably more horrendous than the ten deaths from the Urumqi fire. And that is the point! The PRC’s COVID response, far from being “brutal”, has been a great feat of humanitarianism that has saved the lives of the nearly five million people who would have additionally died had she responded to the pandemic the way the U.S. ruling class did.

Now, let’s look at what really is “brutal”. “Brutal” is when a regime allows COVID to spread so wildly that the hospital system is engulfed, patients are dying on mass, already under-staffed hospitals are battered by health workers themselves being struck ill by COVID and those health workers lucky enough to be COVID–free are overwhelmed. Here is how a senior ICU nurse in Sydney described her work during the pandemic in Australia to the ABC’s Background Briefing program:

“In those four or five months that Delta hit, I had more patients pass away on me than I’ve ever had in my nursing career. And it’s not something that you can just go home and act like it’s fine….

 “By mid-January [2022], the simplest way to describe it is absolute chaos. We are seeing ICU filled back up with COVID patients, and a lot of nurses are now close contacts or isolating and unable to come to work….

“There have been times where I’ve been so exhausted that, after a drive home, I sit in the car for half an hour because I don’t have the energy to get out of my car and walk inside the house.

“I’ve heard stories of nurses having to leave their patients in a pool of faeces and urine for a few hours because they’re so busy keeping patients alive and there was no back up.”

Four days ago, even with the worst of the Omicron wave having receded for the moment, Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital still had to beg parents not to send their children there because waiting times at its Emergency Department had blown out to 12 hours. The next day, the city’s Alfred Hospital cancelled “elective” surgery and other hospitals have deferred some surgeries too. Now that is a truly “harsh” situation. However, to truly understand what is “brutal”, consider the following. If the Australian regime had responded as effectively to the pandemic as the PRC did and thereby kept Australia’s per capita death rate down to the level that China had, there would have been just 94 COVID deaths in this country. Instead, there have been 16,441! Those extra 16,347 COVID deaths in Australia occurred because the Australian ruling class failed to respond to COVID as effectively as the PRC did. Granted that the capitalist system in Australia means that Australian governments could never approach the PRC’s pandemic response success even if they wanted to. Nevertheless, part of the additional deaths was due to the regime consciously abandoning determined pandemic response, at a certain stage, in order to maximise business profits. The resulting extra thousands of deaths that occurred in Australia is not just “brutal”, it is actually an indirect form of mass murder – mass murder of mostly lower income people for the sake of the profits of super-rich business owners. Moreover, the remainder of the additional thousands of deaths in Australia compared to Red China is due to the inherently flawed and brutal nature of the capitalist system.

A man fights for his life at the COVID ward in Sydney’s St Vincents Hospital during last year’s terrible Delta outbreak. As a result of both the cruelty of the Australian capitalist regime that put business-owner profits over the well-being of the people and due to the inherently flawed nature of the capitalist system and its inability to effectively mobilise resources to meet social needs, more than 16,000 additional people died from COVID (as of 9 December 2022) in Australia compared to the number of people who would have died had Australia’s death toll per million residents been the same as China’s. That is brutal! All parts of the community have suffered during the pandemic, but those who have passed away from COVID in Australia have disproportionately been people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and also disproportionately from non-European migrant backgrounds.
Photo: Kate Geraghty

Hypocritical Western Media Says: Down with “Freedom Movement” in the West! Support the “Freedom Movement” in China!

The most striking feature of the Australian mainstream media’s reporting of COVID-related events in China over the last couple of weeks is the fact that while they hailed the recent Chinese COVID “Freedom” rallies, only a year or two earlier, they had nearly all been … strongly condemning the COVID “Freedom” rallies in Australia! Take for the instance the “progressive-liberal” Guardian online newspaper. Their stance on the anti-COVID-response protests in Australia and other Western countries is typified by their article from 12 February of this year, which, with plenty of justification, was headlined: “The global ‘freedom movement’ is a carnival of crank and conspiracy – and very dangerous.” Yet, just nine months later, this same Guardian was cheering on the Chinese “freedom movement”. This enthusiastic cheering of the Chinese demonstrations was despite the fact that just like the “carnival of crank and conspiracy” here, many Chinese “Freedom” protesters also voiced crank claims that the that the virus is really not that serious and repeated the same conspiracy theory as the “global freedom movement” that pandemic response measures are a deliberate plot to take away people’s freedoms … even when two weeks prior to their protests the PRC began gradually easing restrictions.

Moreover, given that most people in China have been locked down for a lot shorter time than those of us who live in Sydney and Melbourne, albeit having to do far more PCR tests, the frustrations of those participating in the Chinese version of the “very dangerous”, “carnival of crank and conspiracy” had even less justification than those demonstrating here. Indeed, precisely because people in China have on average been locked down for less time than here, protester anger and chants at the Chinese “freedom movement” rallies (and we are here speaking of the A4 protests and not the Urumqi one) – unlike the most intense manifestations of their Australian version – were not directed mostly against lockdowns. Instead, the main chant at most of the protests was: “I don’t want PCR test, I want freedom.” In the Beijing protest on the morning of November 28, Reuters reported that demonstrators chanted: “We don’t want masks, we want freedom. We don’t want COVID tests, we want freedom.” However, the Guardian and other mainstream Australian news outlets have been careful not to highlight too much the actual demands of the Chinese “Freedom” protesters. To admit that many of their chants were directed against mask wearing makes them sound too much like the pro-Trump Hard Right and clearly does show commonality between the Chinese version of the “freedom movement” and the Western “carnivals of crank and conspiracy.” Moreover, to emphasise the fact that the main demand of the Chinese protests was against PCR testing would make the Chinese protesters sound petty to the Guardian’s Australian readership. After all, more than 16,400 people have died from COVID in Australia, thousands more are suffering the debilitating effects of long COVID, hospitals are overwhelmed, nurses are exhausted to the point of breakdown and Sydney and Melbourne were each locked down for three and a half to four months … and some yuppies, rich kids and young wannabes in China complain about merely having to do PCR tests! Furthermore, the Guardian and the rest of the mainstream media never pointed out that the demands of the Chinese protesters were as obviously irrational as the “freedom movement” here. In Australia, the “freedom movement” simultaneously opposed lockdowns on the one hand and vaccines and vaccine mandates on the other – even though mass vaccination is precisely one of the most crucial tools for avoiding lockdowns. Meanwhile, in the Chinese “freedom movement”, participants opposed PCR testing and mask wearing … even though testing and mask wearing is absolutely crucial to avoiding the rampant virus spread that necessitates lockdowns!

It should be noted that unlike the likes of the Guardian, the ABC, SBS, the Sydney Morning Herald and all the main free-to-air TV channels, the most hard-right, shamelessly reactionary section of the media have supported, or at least legitimised, the Far Right-instigated “Freedom” protests in Australia. In fanatically also supporting their Chinese variant one could say that the Hard Right media were at least being consistent. Indeed, the Hard Right outlets had a field day pointing out the hypocrisy of their liberal rivals when the latter supported the Chinese “freedom movement” after having opposed the Western version. Thus a 2 December article in Murdoch’s disgusting, Fox News outlet screamed as its headline: “Media outlets praise anti-lockdown protesters in China after condemning American demonstrators as ‘extremists’”. Of course in correctly identifying the glaring contradiction in their liberal and mainstream-conservative rivals, the hard-right media’s conclusion is the diametric opposite of ours: while we say that the Far-Right instigated COVID “Freedom movements” should be opposed in both the capitalist West and in socialistic China, the Hard Right insist that they should be supported in both places.

The hypocritical stance of the overwhelming majority of the capitalist media to the “Freedom” protests in Australia and China also extended to their attitude towards the police response to the protests. When police have clamped down upon “anti-lockdown” protesters in Australia, the media have supported this. Thus when “Freedom movement” protesters marched in Sydney in July last year, ABC News reported in a favourable tone, and without any criticism, when NSW Police arrested and charged 57 of the participants and then established a strike force to hunt down and charge still more protesters. The ABC also had zero objection to NSW police minister David Elliot responding to the protest by threatening more severe repression, when they quoted the police minister warning that, “Those that are calling for this to happen again next week look out because these 400 officers will turn into 4,000 if needs be.” Yet when PRC authorities have more mildly dealt with the protests – whether that be the spontaneous, localised protests against local restrictions or the highly coordinated, recent A4 protests – the Australian media have rushed to describe the Chinese police response as “harsh”.

It is not just the bulk of the mainstream media that has taken a diametrically opposite stance towards the “Freedom movement” in Australia and the one in China. Most of the rest of the capitalist establishment have done the same. This February, when tens of thousands of “Freedom” protesters descended on Canberra to oppose vaccine mandates and other pandemic-response measures, then opposition leader, Albanese said that the protesters were ignoring the pressure health systems were under and the hard work of healthcare workers over the previous months. Pointedly, Anthony Albanese told the “Freedom” demonstrators in Canberra to “Go home.” However, the Albanese government definitely hasn’t been telling Chinese COVID “Freedom” protesters to “Go home”! Instead, the Albanese government effectively endorsed their rallies. A spokesperson for Albanese’s foreign minister, Penny Wong, stated that: “We urge Chinese authorities to engage constructively with protesters and address the concerns they have raised.” So you see, Australia’s ruling class establishment have no principle when it comes to supporting or opposing pandemic response measures – rather their only true principles are to maximise profit for the capitalist bigwigs and to do whatever it takes to denigrate and undermine socialistic rule in China.

All Wings of the Capitalist Class Are Hostile to Socialistic China

Despite the mutual contempt that hardline right-wing sections of the media on the one hand and their “progressive”-liberal rivals on the other have for each other and despite their big differences on many issues, not least on their attitudes towards the “Freedom movement” protests in the West, they and the rest of the mainstream media take an identical stance towards China. And that stance is not only support for the Chinese COVID “Freedom” protesters but extreme opposition to the PRC state in every way possible. Similarly, all Australia’s different pro-capitalist political forces, despite their bitter disputes, are united in supporting this Cold War drive. This ranges from the violent, extra-parliamentary white supremacist outfits (including the ones prominent in Australia’s “Freedom movement”) to Pauline Hanson’s racist One Nation Party and the UAP to the Liberal-National Coalition to the TEAL independents to the ALP to the Greens. The latter, to be sure, do not support aspects of Canberra’s military build-up – like the acquisition of nuclear submarines. However, the Greens still support the U.S.-Australia alliance that is aimed against China, albeit calling for it to be amended. More importantly, they zealously participate in the entire propaganda campaign that is aimed against the PRC and support all anti-PRC, anticommunist groups within China.

The common anti-PRC stance of all the pro-capitalist political factions is a reflection of the determination of Australia’s entire capitalist class to help strangle socialistic rule in China. As this U.S.-led Cold War drive gets hotter and hotter, even the faint noises, previously heard from the likes of former ALP politicians Bob Carr and Paul Keating, in opposition to the fanaticism of the campaign, have largely dissipated. In any case they never objected to the goal of undermining socialistic rule in China. They only wanted it to be done in a less provocative manner that would not damage Australia’s lucrative trade with China. The same agenda was held by a small number of the capitalist bigwigs that had massive, very direct trade interests with China, like iron ore miner FMG’s main owner, Andrew Forrest. However, with the Albanese government having moderated the language of its dealings with China, even while simultaneously driving ever harder the Cold War campaign against the PRC state, Forrest has now expressed his satisfaction with the Australian government’s China policy. Simultaneously, Forrest made clear his endorsement of the despicable Western slanders against China over supposed mistreatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, telling the Sydney Morning Herald (16 November) that: “We’re [i.e. China and Australia] not going to agree on Xinjiang. And my fellow Chinese business leaders, and other people I speak to, all know where we [i.e. Australia’s ruling elite] stand.” Indeed, even when Forrest was objecting to the intensity of Canberra’s loud denunciations of Beijing, he was in good part playing a double game. The greedy billionaire wanted to publicly appear like he was opposing excessive attacks on China so that he could protect his reputation with Chinese trade partners but he was at the same time supporting the political forces that have been waging one Cold War attack against the PRC after another. Australian Electoral Commission figures for the last two years that political donation records have been published show that Forrest’s FMG donated nearly $100,000 combined to both the Liberal Party and the ALP at the very time that they were both stepping up their campaign against the PRC. Moreover, in September 2019, when then U.S. president Donald Trump hosted then prime minister, Scott Morrison for a state dinner at the White House to further strengthen the Washington-Canberra anti-PRC alliance … Andrew Forrest attended as one of the invited special guests.

This common position of the capitalist establishment against Red China exists throughout all the Western powers. In the U.S., the hard right, Trumpian wing of the capitalist class is in a bitter conflict with the liberal-mainstream conservative wing. Less than two years ago, that conflict resulted in a violent and deadly confrontation at Washington’s Capitol building. Yet all wings of the capitalist class still manage to cooperate on passing, ever-more extreme ,anti-PRC motions in the congress. It is important to note that such unity does not even exist on the question of the war in Ukraine. Although the bulk of the U.S. capitalist class supports using Ukraine to wage a proxy war against Russia, there is a significant wing of the American ruling class that thinks that it would better serve their interests to build closer relations with Russia. This is reflected in the fact that over a quarter of Republicans in congress favour, at least to some degree, a rapprochement with Moscow. Their reason for this stance however is that they think that the U.S. should retard its predatory pursuits in Eastern Europe to stop driving Russia closer towards the PRC. These rabid anti-communists want a policy that can entice Russia into a grand U.S.-Russia inter-capitalist alliance against Red China.

The Three Closely Related Reasons
Why Australia’s Capitalist Rulers Oppose the PRC

So why are the Western capitalist ruling classes so hostile to the PRC? In particular, why are Australia’s capitalist bigwigs risking harm to their immensely lucrative trade with China by antagonising the latter? Amongst some on the Left there is a myth that this is only because Australia’s rulers are mindlessly “following America”. However, the truth is that Australia’s capitalist exploiting class is as opposed to the PRC as their American senior partners. This is for three closely related – but ultimately one and the same – reasons.

For one, China’s mutually beneficial cooperation with South Pacific and southeast Asian countries is undermining the ability of Australian corporations to plunder these countries. Australia’s imperialist rulers have long had a neo-colonial grip over the South Pacific. They dictate to South Pacific governments. They distort local administrations for their benefit – often with the help of Australian judges, upper bureaucrats and military and police officials dominating key positions in the state machinery of Pacific countries. This is in the service of the rich owners of Australian-owned multinational corporations who reap billions of dollars in profit by pillaging natural resources, exploiting cheap labour and monopolising markets in what they consider to be “Australia’s backyard”. For example, just one such Australian-owned corporation, oil and gas giant Santos – notorious at home for arrogantly dismissing the opposition of the Gomeroi Aboriginal nation to their Narrabrai coal-seam gas project – makes obscene profits from owning all of resource rich Papua News Guinea’s operational oil fields as well as a big chunk of the liquefied natural gas flowing out of both East Timor’s seabed and PNG. However, China’s cooperation with countries in “Australia’s backyard” is allowing Pacific countries to loosen the Australian ruling class’ stranglehold over their countries. You see, the Chinese companies building up infrastructure in the South Pacific and operating other projects there are largely very different to the Australian ones operating in the region. These Chinese firms are mostly not owned by rich, profit hungry shareholders but are under public ownership – that is they are under the collective ownership of all of China’s people. In other words, they are socialistic state-owned enterprises (SOEs) that do not operate mainly to maximise profits but rather for broader social goals needed by China’s people. These include maximising employment, developing poorer areas of China and building up the infrastructure of developing countries friendly to China so that they are better able to trade with her. When operating abroad, these SOEs are directed to help China gain a good reputation and build friendship with especially fellow developing countries by engaging in truly win-win cooperation. As a result, South Pacific countries have increasingly chosen to give development projects to Red China’s SOEs rather than to profit-obsessed Australian corporate bosses.

At other times, governments in the region have used the prospect of turning to Red China as a means to pressure the Australian imperialists to reduce their level of plunder. Take for instance East Timor and its struggles to stop Australian energy giants from stealing the lucrative resources in the Greater Sunrise gas field off its coast. Despite the field lying entirely on East Timor’s side of the seabed mid-line between East Timor and northern Australia, the Australian capitalist regime, aided by their spying on the East Timorese government’s confidential conversations about its resource negotiations with Canberra, bullied East Timor into signing a treaty granting the Australian ruling class 50% of the field’s upstream revenue. However, later in 2018, the Australian government had to back down somewhat. They signed a new treaty that while still allowing Australian corporations to steal a large portion and still preventing the East Timorese from having clear sovereignty over their gas field, now gave 70% to 80% of the upstream revenue from Greater Sunrise to East Timor. Part of the reason for Canberra’s back down was to try and restore its regional reputation following the high-profile exposure of its heinous spying on East Timor. However, the Australian regime’s partial retreat was also motivated by a wish to dissuade East Timor from turning further to China for development cooperation. In other words, whether it is by its SOEs winning development projects that would have been otherwise snared by Australian-owned corporations or by compelling the Australian ruling class to moderate its plunder of South Pacific countries, socialistic China is, unintentionally to be sure, making Australia’s capitalists lose money in the South Pacific. And we are talking here of big money – in the order of tens of billions of dollars over the last two decades. We know that when capitalists face the loss of large profits they become extremely ruthless. And that is why Australian capitalist rulers’ are so obsessed with coercing South Pacific countries to weaken their ties with Beijing. This compulsion to protect their lootings in the South Pacific also explains why the Australian imperialists are so determined to contribute to the combined West’s anti-China Cold Warif anything with even greater fanaticism than their U.S. senior partners.

Papua New Guinea, 2018: Local people wave PNG and Chinese flags as they cheer Chinese President Xi Jinping during his visit to PNG for the 2018 APEC summit. China’s mutually beneficial cooperation with South Pacific countries is very popular with most Pacific peoples. However, by strengthening South Pacific countries’ independent development it has undermined the ability of Australian capitalist companies to loot and exploit the region – thus enraging the Australian ruling class.
Photo: AP

Furthermore, all the Western capitalists know that the continued existence of socialistic rule in China prevents them from turning that country itself into their semi-colony. The Western imperialists not only want to be able to dominate China’s giant market but want to be able to exploit its huge workforce with the same ferocity that they currently exploit workers in the sweatshops of the other populous Asian developing countries like India, Bangladesh, Indonesia and the Philippines. To be sure, since pro-market reforms in the 1990s, China’s leadership allowed capitalists from the U.S., Japan, Western Europe, Australia, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore to extract profits from the labour of mainland Chinese workers. Moreover, as a sprawling and diverse country, there have been some local cases in China of severe exploitation, especially in Western and Taiwanese-owned factories. Nevertheless, since the working class cling onto state power in China, albeit in a deformed and incomplete form, workers wages in China are significantly higher than in the capitalist countries with similar per capita income. Notably wages in the PRC are clearly higher than in her fellow Asian countries Malaysia and Thailand. This is even more so if one adds the approximately 40% of additional labour costs that bosses in China must pay on top of wages (as compared to the less than 12% that bosses on average pay here for superannuation and accident insurance). These go into not only a collective workers pension fund but also into individual workers’ housing provident accounts for Chinese workers to use to buy or pay rent on their homes, as well as into four additional collective workers’ funds for, respectively, unemployment insurance, maternity payments, work-related injury insurance and medical insurance. Moreover, pushed by demands and strikes by workers, since the mid-2000s, Beijing has introduced a pro-worker industrial relations law and carried out a very welcome campaign of harsh repression against greedy bosses that violate workers legal rights or workplace safety regulations. All this together with a court system that – the opposite to Australia – favours workers in disputes with private business owners has led to major improvements in conditions for Chinese workers and a dramatic fall in deaths from workplace accidents. The PRC has come a long way in terms of workplace rights for workers since the 1990s and early 2000s.

Moreover, over the last two decades, workers in socialistic China have enjoyed, by far, the fastest rate of growth of real wages in any major economy. This is not only in comparison to the developed capitalist countries – like Australia where real wages are lower than they were ten years ago and Britain and Italy where wages have plunged even further. The PRC has boosted her workers’ real wages much faster than other developing countries too. Data from the International Labour Organisation’s last Global Wage Report (2020-2021) show that by 2019 (the last year for which ILO data was published), China’s average real wages had more than doubled from what it had been just eleven years earlier; indeed far more than doubled, growing to 2.3 times what it had been! This stunning rate of real wage growth enjoyed by Chinese workers is three times higher than in India, nearly six times larger than in Brazil and infinitely higher than in U.S.-plundered Mexico where workers suffered a real wage cut of 15% during that period. As a result, the likes of Nike and Addidas long ago stopped manufacturing in China and many other Western firms in low-end manufacturing have followed suit. Despite China’s giant market, highly skilled workforce and “First World”-quality infrastructure, these Western corporations are finding it hard to make a sizable profit in China and are transferring their operations to lower wage countries or even back to their home countries.

Therefore, everyday it is becoming clearer to the tycoons running the U.S., Japan, Australia, Britain, Germany, France and the other imperialist countries that the continued existence of socialistic rule in China will thwart their dreams of raking in a fantastic profit bonanza there. Yet these capitalists cannot shake this dream. For as large are the profits that they currently rake in from trading with Red China’s, still, solidly growing economy, they know that they could make far, far more should socialistic rule be destroyed there and they are able to superexploit China’s enormous, well-trained workforce. Moreover, the more that Western rulers’ economies slide towards a new deep recession, the more that they need their hoped-for neocolonial rape of China to prop up their own croaking systems. This is one of the key reasons why the Western capitalist rulers are so hell bent on doing whatever it takes to overturn socialistic rule in China.

However, the capitalist powers also have a far less ambitious but, for them, even more important reason for wanting to destroy the Chinese workers state. For, they understand all too well that the existence of working-class rule in China, in however an incomplete manner, could encourage the working-class masses in their own countries to also struggle for state power. This is despite the fact that the national-centred, compromise-seeking Chinese leadership, goes out of its way to reassure the capitalist rulers in the West that it will do nothing to encourage the class-struggle in the capitalist countries. However, the mere existence of socialistic rule in the world’s most populous country signals to the toiling classes of the world that socialism is indeed possible and that capitalist rule is not “the natural order of things” that must be endured. Therefore, when the capitalist rulers in the West claim that Red China presents an “existential threat”, they are actually right … but not for the reasons that they present to the masses! Contrary to their hysterical propaganda, China does not threaten other countries with predatory interference or wars of conquest. After all, the PRC is the only world power not to have fought a single shooting conflict in the 21st century. Indeed, China has not been involved in a single war for the last 44 years! However, the continued successes of socialistic rule in China does “threaten” to, in the future, inspire the masses in the capitalist countries to fight for socialism.

Even today, it would be striking to the most conscious pro-working class activists in Australia that while in Australia the tycoons have continued to get even richer during the pandemic while workers real wages have continued to plunge, in China it is the exact opposite: the billionaires are losing a chunk of their wealth while the real incomes of Chinese workers and welfare recipients continue to climb. Thus, whereas Australia’s 200 richest tycoons increased their wealth by 16% in just the last year, in the PRC, the wealth of billionaires fell by 18% during the same period, while workers real wages kept on growing in China. Per head of population, China now has six times fewer Australian-dollar billionaires than Australia does.

The inspirational effect of the PRC’s socialist course is muted by the reality that due to the extreme poverty of China’s pre-1949 capitalist days, when she was a brutally exploited neo-colony of Western imperialism, China’s per capita incomes – and thus average wages – still remain many times below that of the richest of the capitalist countries. However, the gap in per capita income between China and the Western countries is being gradually closed every year. As a result, even now, the wages of some workers in the more affluent parts of China like Shanghai and Beijing are higher than they are in the lowest wage parts of the U.S. – in its Deep South. One can say that if the capitalist powers do not first succeed in crushing socialistic rule in China or at least in squeezing the PRC so hard that it chokes off her development, then the per capita income of the PRC will catch up with that of the richest of the capitalist countries in the space of two or three decades. If that were to happen, why would a politically conscious worker in the West then want to accept capitalist rule? Why would they want to put up with a system of inequality, lack of job security, greedy bullying bosses, decaying social services, growing homelessness and periodic economic crises when a socialist system based on workers collective ownership of the key economic sectors is able to produce comparable incomes? Should per capita incomes in socialistic China be allowed to catch up with that of the richest countries, then the Western capitalist order would truly face an immediate “existential threat.” Therefore, the imperialist ruling classes know that they only have a limited amount of time in which to strangle, or at least decisively constrain, China’s socialistic development. That is why they are so obsessive in their opposition to Red China.

Top: The latest Global Wages Report from the International Labor Organisation shows that workers in China have enjoyed by far the fastest growing wages of any country in the world, whether “advanced” or emerging. Above: Although average real wages in Australia rose by roughly 10% from 2008 to 2019 they have plummeted since. By June 2022, workers real wages in Australia were lower than they were in March 2012 (data reprinted in ABC News and obtained from The Australia Institute). In the last few months, they have plunged further and Australian real wages are now lower than they were 11 years ago! Workers who rent, which is many lower-paid workers, are even worse off due to skyrocketing rents in Australia. In contrast, real wages have continued to increase in China over these last three years. Below: Although China’s workers have enjoyed by far the fastest growing real wages of any country, China’s stock market (represented by the Shanghai Composite Index) has barely increased from what it was 12 years ago (see red line). By contrast, in the same period the Australian stock market index the S&P/ASX 200 has soared by over 50% (blue line). This is an indicator that while workers real wages have been falling, Australia’s capitalists have been gaining ever greater return on their capital. In contrast, in China while workers real wages have been steeply rising, the capitalists are not gaining any greater return on their capital (indeed China’s richest have lost wealth in the last period).

Dashed Hopes for a Cold Capitalist Restoration From Above

If the capitalist powers’ hostility to the PRC has become even more fanatical in recent years this is not at all because China has become “more aggressive”, as they claim. Rather, it is due to internal developments within their own countries and within China itself. For one, the late noughties Global Recession, from which many major capitalist economies never fully recovered, has shaken the confidence of capitalist ruling classes in their own system. Moreover, they cannot but notice the growing distrust of their “own” masses in their regimes in the context of inadequate social services and stagnant or falling real wages. All this makes them even more fearful of the example provided by a socialistic country with a rapidly growing standard of living. These fears have been magnified by the strengthening of China’s pro-socialist character over the last few years. You see, in the 1990s and early noughties, China’s socialistic public sector was being eroded by privatisations and a growing capitalist private sector. Alongside these structural economic changes the emerging capitalist class – and a craven upper middle-class layer around them – more loudly demanded ever greater “rights” for private sector “entrepreneurs” to “freely” exploit. With these partial changes in the economic structure and power dynamics of Chinese society, the ideas associated with capitalism – like selfish individualism and worship of those with wealth – gradually gained traction within sections of the Chinese masses. Fresh from finally strangling to death the socialistic USSR, the triumphant Western capitalists looked at China and expected that it was only a matter of time before the PRC heads the same way as the USSR. However, China’s working-class masses had very different ideas. They waged militant struggles against privatisation and agitated against the emerging capitalist class. Pushed by their demands, in the mid-noughties, China’s then Hu Jintao-led government moved to curb privatisations. By the late noughties, with the economic crisis then engulfing the capitalist world having vindicated staunchly anti-capitalist groupings within the CPC, with the 2009 Tonghua and Linzhou steel workers struggles against privatisation showing workers determination to defend socialistic public ownership and with a 2010 strike wave against Japanese-owned auto manufacturers bringing workers demands to the fore, Hu Jintao and Co. moved onto a more aggressive pro-socialist course. The Beijing government began actually renationalising many enterprises – especially in the coal mining and steel sectors. It also focussed its housing policy on massively increasing the amount of public housing.

The right-wing of the China’s ruling Communist Party – the section of the party most under the pull of the capitalists – however pushed back in 2012 – the last year of Hu Jintao’s term. This right-wing influence appeared to continue into the first three or so years of Xi’s presidency. However, the Western capitalists’ hopes that Xi would lead major reforms that would weaken China’s socialistic state sector were dashed. Under the push of the Chinese masses and a new workers strike wave in 2014-2015, Xi Jinping’s administration started veering to the left in the middle of last decade. Corrupt capitalists have been brought to heel and their assets confiscated and turned into the people’s collective property. Xi’s anti-corruption campaign, by deterring private bosses from bribing state officials to gain an unfair advantage, has diminshed the ability of the private sector to grow in influence relative to the socialistic public sector. Indeed, over the last several years, China’s socialist sector has grown much faster than the private sector, thereby reinforcing the economic supremacy of socialist economy in the country.  Thus in the first three quarters of this year, the revenue of China’s socialistic public sector grew by 9% year on year, much faster than the country’s overall economic growth, while the output of the private capitalistic sector was at best stagnant.

Moreover, from late 2020, Xi Jinping’s government moved more decisively to the left under the slogan of “curbing the disorderly expansion of capital”. It cracked down on excessive profiteering by tech capitalists, introduced further curbs on property speculation and made decisive steps to guarantee the wages and rights of gig workers. Although China’s capitalists, via the more liberal, right-wing of the party – personified by the CPC’s then number two ranked official, premier Li Keqiang – again pushed back at the start of this year significantly slowing the momentum to the left, the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) five yearly congress held in October, endorsed a step to the left relative to the previous congress five years earlier, albeit notably pulling back (unfortunately) from the stronger anti-capitalist measures of the late 2020 to 2021 period. Thus the main document voted up by the congress, emphasises struggling “for common prosperity” – which in China means focussing on lifting the incomes of low-income groups and “adjusting” (i.e. curbing) excessive incomes of the rich. The document also stresses increasing social welfare and emphasising green development. Crucially, although the document upholds, incorrectly, the party’s long-standing line to “encourage, support, and guide the development of the non-public sector” it set up guard rails against pro-capitalist backsliding. Thus, not only does the document approved by the CPC congress reassert the need to “unswervingly consolidate and develop the public sector” but refuting the push of the party’s right-wing to “streamline” and “make leaner” SOEs – i.e. downsize them – the document stressed that the ruling party would ensure that SOEs, “get stronger, do better, and grow bigger.” Alongside this emphasis on protecting China’s socialistic SOEs, the CPC congress notably retired or removed from the party’s leading body (its central committee) prominent advocates for the private capitalist sector – including premier Li Keqiang, the party’s previously number four ranked leader Wang Yang and governor of the Peoples Bank of China, Yi Gang (although there are signs that the CPC’s new number two ranked official and the person slated to become the new premier next March, Li Qiang is also somewhat pro-private sector). Moreover, distinct from its somewhat banal statements of China’s commitment to socialism that it would make in the decade and a half after the 1991-92 capitalist counterrevolution in the former USSR, today the CPC, pushed by the sentiments of the most politically conscious sections of the Chinese masses both within and outside the party, very emphatically asserts that the PRC will be unwaveringly sticking to a socialist path. The congress document’s main theme is for the CPC “to lead the Chinese people of all ethnic groups in a concerted effort to realise the Second Centenary Goal [i.e. at the 2049 hundredth anniversary of China’s 1949 Revolution] of building China into a great modern socialist country in all respects.” Given this reinforcing of the socialist character of the PRC over the last decade and a half, the capitalist powers have all but abandoned their hopes that merely through China’s engagement with the capitalist-dominated, world economy and through their own heavy prodding, capitalist restoration will inevitably gain the ascendancy with the aid of a significant section of the CPC leadership. The imperialists realise that they will need to greatly ramp up their military, economic, propaganda and political pressure upon the PRC if they are going to be able to make socialistic rule crumble, or at least weaken, in China. And that is what they have doing!

What may have especially alarmed imperialist ruling classes is that the CPC congress document emphatically asserts that: “Scientific socialism is brimming with renewed vitality in 21st-century China.” Capitalist ruling classes are terrified that such statements of confidence in Marxism from the leaders of the world’s most populous country will not only undercut their lying efforts to convince their own populations that “communism is dead” and that “China is actually just practicing capitalism under the rule of an authoritarian Communist Party” but could “infect” their disgruntled populations with a belief that fighting for communism is worth considering.

Above: COVID deaths per million residents in a range of countries as of 12 January 2023. The figures for China includes deaths in the period from 8 December 2022 to 12 January 2023 after China significantly loosened COVID restrictions in the light of the weakening strength of the Omicron variants present in China and the great improvement in COVID treatments (in both China and internationally), including antiviral medications. On 14 January 2023, China announced her COVID deaths for this period. The loosening did lead to a spike in COVID deaths in China relative to the very few deaths in China in the previous three years as a large proportion of China’s population became infected with COVID. However, because China had earlier successfully protected her people from the more deadly COVID strains and because when most of her people were infected in the December 2022-January 2023 period it was with much weaker Omicron strains, China avoided having anywhere near the death rates of the countries with the highest per capita COVID death rates, like the U.S., India, Britain, Russia, Canada, Brazil and Turkey, which had most of their deaths when the more deadly strains (including Alpha, Gamma and Delta) were rampant and before anti-viral treatments (and largely also vaccines) were available. Indeed, even during the five week period up to 12 Jan 2023 when China had her highest COVID death rate, her death rate per resident was slightly lower than in Australia in the same period and much lower than Australia’s when this country had its equivalent loosening in February 2022. This is for several reasons. Firstly, when Australia opened up, no antiviral medications were able here – they were only listed in the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme several months later. In contrast, several anti-viral medications were available in China by the time that she loosened her COVID restrictions in December 2022. This includes Chinese anti-viral medications, which independent studies have confirmed as being just as effective as their Western counterparts. Also available in China is Pfizer’s Paxlovid, which however due to the exorbitant price that the American pharmaceutical company charges for the medication is available only to those at very high risk of developing severe COVID; this is the same as in Australia after Pfizer’s anti-viral pill became available here three months after Australia opened up (to this day Pfizer’s Paxlovid is only available in Australia to those 70 years of age or older or to those 50 years of age or older with at least two additional risk factors for developing severe disease). Secondly, China has been more effective in triaging high-risk patients for higher-level hospital care. This is because China’s grassroots-centred COVID response based on neighbourhood committees and local community activists means that those at high-risk have their health status and well-being frequently checked up on. Thirdly, China’s vaccination rate was significantly higher when she loosened her COVID response in December 2022 than when Australia opened up ten months earlier. Fourthly, China has a much lower proportion of people who are seriously ill with other ailments than in the U.S., Australia or other Western countries. This is because, being a country catching up from the terrible poverty of her pre-1949, neo-colonial capitalist days, China does not have the same availability of highly advanced medial care that is able to extend the lives of very ill cancer and heart patients in the richest countries for those able to afford the treatment. China’s relatively high life expectancy – her average life expectancy overtook that of the U.S. in 2020 – is instead based on quality preventative medicine, a healthier lifestyle and diet of her people and good primary hospital care. This is reflected in the fact that while China’s average life expectancy is still more than six years lower than Australia’s, her HALE – healthy life expectancy at birth, an indicator of the average number of years that a person can expect to live in “full health” – has caught up to being within a couple of years of that of Australia’s. With a much lower proportion of very ill people kept alive by advanced medical treatments than in the likes of Australia and the U.S. – that is a much lower proportion of the very people most vulnerable to dying should they be infected with COVID – China would be expected to have a much lower proportion of her COVID cases perish from the disease, even discounting other factors.
As a combined result of these four factors, even after China’s relative surge in COVID deaths in the period from 8 December 2022 to 12 January 2023, her total COVID death rate per million residents is still 15 times lower than that of Australia’s and 75 times lower than that of the U.S.! The success of China, Laos and other socialistic countries in responding to COVID shows the advantages of their systems based on common, social ownership of the strategic sectors of their economies. The capitalist powers fear that their own populations will understand this and thus gain greater sympathy for socialism. This is part of the reason why the Western capitalist ruling classes have escalated their propaganda war against the PRC over the last three years and sought to slander her pandemic response.

Sources for figures: Worldometers, Xinhua

Stand With Socialistic China to Stand by Working-Class Interests

Although it is rational from the point of view of Australia’s capitalist exploiting class – if anything that an obsolete class running a decaying system does can be considered rational – to seek to strangle socialistic rule in China, such enmity towards the PRC is completely against the interests of the working class of Australia and the rest of the world. For starters, waging Cold War against the PRC risks Australia’s trade with China that is greatly beneficial to Australia’s masses. Last year, Australia exported nearly $178 billion dollars of goods and services to China. If that revenue were divided up equally amongst the ten million households that compose Australia’s 26 million population, each household would receive a whopping $17,800 per year from exports to China! The damage to this trade caused by the PRC’s understandable reaction to the Australian regime’s barrage of provocations against her is yet to be truly felt. Although China has restricted Australian exports of barley, wine, beef, timber, lobsters and coal, the price of Australia’s by far biggest export to China, iron ore, rose so sharply that the value of Australia’s overall exports to China actually rose substantially last year. However, that trend is now reversing (although Australia’s overall export numbers to all countries are temporarily helped by the present abnormally high prices for it coal and gas exports). Furthermore, regardless of the shorter term fluctuations in iron ore and energy prices, the reality is that with China transitioning quickly towards a more low carbon, higher tech economy, the longer term trend is for growth in China’s iron ore and fossil fuel demand to wane. Therefore, with iron ore sales no longer able to mask the damage done to other Australian exports to China, this country’s masses could begin to see the full harm to their living standards resulting from their rulers’ hostile policy towards the PRC. For although the Albanese government’s toning down of Canberra’s anti-PRC rhetoric may lead to a temporary improvement in Australia’s trade relations with China, in the longer term, the Australian regime’s escalating military build-up targeting the PRC, its aggressive attempts to stifle Pacific countries mutually beneficial cooperation with Red China, its support for exiled anti-communist Chinese groups in Australia, its backing of the anti-China propaganda campaign over COVID, Hong Kong, Uyghurs and Tibet and its attacks on members of the Australian Chinese community who dare to express any sympathy for the PRC will all inevitably lead to new breakdowns in trade relations with China in the future.

To be sure, Australia’s capitalists also benefit much from trade with China, especially since they seize such a disproportionately large share of this country’s national income. However, while the Australian and other Western capitalists are willing to risk their profits from the China trade for the sake of the much huger profits that they could reap if they were able to overturn the PRC workers state and turn China into a giant sweatshop for capitalist exploitation, the Australian working class would gain absolutely nothing from the strangling of socialistic rule there. On the contrary, should the capitalist powers succeed in squeezing to death the Chinese workers state, thereby leading to a new, capitalist regime there that would greatly push down Chinese workers’ wages and conditions, it would allow capitalist bosses in Australia – and the world over – to massively drive down wages and workers rights at home in a race to the bottom.

However, the main reason why it is in the interests of working-class people in Australia and the rest of the world to stand in defence of socialistic China is political. And that reason is quite simply that: the existence of socialistic rule in a gigantic country and the fact that it has achieved such successes in poverty alleviation over the last seven decades proves to the masses of the world that not only is another world other than a capitalist one possible but that such a socialist alternative is actually viable. Encouraging the masses to struggle for socialism is what we need! That is the only way that we can liberate ourselves from the capitalist reality of plunging workers’ living standards, lack of affordable housing, racist attacks on minorities and imperialist war. Moreover, even before the decisive struggle for socialist revolution in Australia is immediately posed, the fact that China is today focussing on continuously increasing the availability of low-rent public housing, cracking down on property speculation and sticking to an economic system that maintains public ownership of the banks, the oil/gas/coal sector and the power industry, can only encourage the urgently necessary struggle for a similar anti-poverty program here.

Yet, against the interests of its base, the current leadership of most of the workers movement, the ALP, is right behind the capitalists’ drive to strangle socialistic China. Exposing this betrayal, there must be a struggle to mobilise working-class people and all leftists in mass actions to defend the Chinese workers state against imperialist threats and internal pro-capitalist forces. Let us oppose the Australian capitalist regime’s anti-China military build up. We must demand: No to the Australian capitalist military acquiring nuclear submarines, missiles, or nuclear capable bombers! All U.S. troops get out of Australia! Close Pine Gap and all other joint U.S./Australia military bases! U.S./British/Australian navies get out of the South China Sea! We must also expose and politically oppose all those National Endowment of Democracy-funded groups and other anti-PRC NGOs based in Australia that are engaged in promoting anti-communist forces within China. Fight back against the propaganda war against Red China over her COVID response, “human rights”, Taiwan, Uyghurs, Tibet, Hong Kong and the Pacific!

Let us also oppose attempts by Australian imperialism to sabotage South Pacific countries’ mutually beneficial cooperation with the PRC. We must defend the right of the Solomon Islands and any other country to engage in security and economic cooperation with socialistic China to the extent that they see fit. Let us support the engagement of the PRC’s socialistic SOEs with the Pacific to help liberate South Pacific countries from the tyranny of greedy Australian imperialist corporations. If we can reduce the plunder of the Pacific by these Australian corporations that exploit us back at home, they will have a smaller war chest to resist our efforts to stand up to them and defend our rights at work.

The Threat of China Being Engulfed by Capitalist Counterrevolution
in the Future is All Too Real

Those who are truly aware of events in China, know how much has been achieved for her people by socialistic rule. Now, with the PRC having, up to now, protected her people from COVID better than any other major country in the world and with her economy continuing to head in a better direction than the capitalist countries, to many supporters of Red China it seems that the PRC is simply unstoppable. However, let us never forget that in 1957 when the Soviet Union stunned the world by putting the first human-made satellite into space and her economy was growing at more than twice the rate of the capitalist countries it seemed that the then most powerful socialistic country was also unstoppable. Yet, just 35 years later, under the tremendous economic, military and political pressure of the combined imperialist powers and with the Soviet Union’s own internal resistance weakened by bureaucratic deformations that had emerged from the mid-1920s – distortions that were themselves a result of capitalist pressure – socialistic rule in the lands of the Soviet Union was destroyed. We must never let that happen to China! To say that the PRC “is big and powerful enough to look after itself” is foolish! Those living in the imperialist countries who say this are often looking for an excuse to avoid the difficult work of opposing the Cold War drive against the PRC. We must be brave enough to openly defend the PRC workers state!

A sober assessment would tell us that despite her stunning achievements, Red China remains vulnerable to strangulation by the capitalist powers. In terms of the number of nuclear weapons, the strength of air and naval power, the PRC remains militarily much weaker than the U.S. and even weaker in comparison to all the U.S.-allied imperial powers combined. More importantly, despite having caught up so much, per capita incomes in China remain several times below that of the richest of the capitalist countries. As long as this remains the case, the PRC workers state will remain under threat.

Moreover, there is an additional factor threatening socialistic rule in China that was not present even in the Soviet Union in its final days. In China there exists a significant capitalist class that has built itself up over the last four decades. This class does not rule as in the capitalist countries … but they sure want to! They chafe at the fact that SOEs dominate China’s most strategic economic sectors. These greedy capitalists want to have full access to these potentially most profitable sectors so that they can extract huge profits in them like in the “normal”, that is the capitalist, countries. They fume at the PRC state power often “bullying” them into starting up operations in poorer regions or, more recently, switching over their operations to pandemic relief items, when all of this is not what is required to maximise profits. They bristle too at the state often siding with workers when there is a dispute over working conditions. Currently, China’s capitalists realise that they do not yet have the strength to be able to make an open bid for power. They know that the Chinese toiling classes, still filled with the egalitarian sentiment that made the 1949 Revolution, would not tolerate that right now. So, for the moment, the capitalists try to expand the sectors where they have the “right” to exploit workers in. To help them do this, these rich capitalists cynically cry poor claiming that the state is “discriminating” against them by favouring the socialistic SOEs. To push this agenda, China’s capitalists have various lobby groups, most notably the All China Federation of Industry and Commerce, as well as various think tanks that they have established – some it turns out are being funded by the U.S. government’s NED to help them protect the “property rights” of “entrepreneurs” (read capitalist exploiters). Just as dangerously, their influence extends into the most right-wing components of the CPC and the state bureaucracy who act as their, conscious or unconscious, defacto spokespeople inside the CPC and the state institutions. China’s capitalists are biding their time for when they can make an outright bid for state power. The fact that the most powerful countries in the world – and indeed most of the world – remains under capitalist rule gives them great encouragement.

Therefore, to help protect socialistic rule in the PRC and all the gains for the masses that have resulted from it, it is urgently necessary to decisively weaken the power of China’s private sector “entrepreneurs”. China’s socialistic SOEs need to be more quickly advanced at the expense of the capitalist private sector. To be sure, with China still catching up with the more advanced countries in important areas of technology, it is necessary for the PRC to continue to have certain joint ventures with Western and Japanese capitalists to help Chinese technical personnel and workers gradually learn advanced technology, skills and processes in areas where they are behind. Currently, the PRC has useful such joint ventures in the auto manufacturing, renewable energy and aircraft manufacturing industry. However, the presence of Western, Taiwanese and Hong Kong capitalists owning operations in lower tech sectors needs to be squeezed out – the PRC no longer needs them as her technology level and capital base has now long passed the stage when she needed investment from foreign capitalists in these sectors. Far more importantly, the power of China’s own domestic capitalists over the sectors that they dominate needs to be overturned. The tech, real estate and light manufacturing sectors need to confiscated from these capitalists and brought into public ownership. Additionally, the danger of the socialist economy being white anted by a large number of smaller-scale capitalists also needs to be averted by ending concessions to small and medium sized private “entrepreneurs”. Rather than rescuing such private enterprises by giving them handouts, promising such enterprises should be nationalised when in trouble.

The struggle to weaken the capitalists and strengthen the socialistic SOEs can be integrated with the PRC’s existing policies – in particular her “common prosperity” drive, her ongoing moves to further improve workplace safety, her anti-corruption campaign and her moves to curb speculation and excessive leveraging in the real estate sector. For example when a private sector firm violates China’s labour law – rather than receive a fine as it does now – it should be confiscated and brought into public ownership. The same should apply to any company that contravenes workplace safety laws or has a workplace accident that causes serious injury. Similarly, any private company found to have paid even the smallest bribe should be immediately confiscated. Despite the Western media’s deriding of it, the PRC’s moves to crackdown on property speculation under the policy that “houses are for living in and not for speculation” and its restriction of excessive borrowing by real estate developers has had a positive effect. The prices of homes have stopped rising making them more affordable for lower-income people. Moreover, some big-time property capitalists that relied on excessive borrowing and speculation have been brought to heel. In particular, China’s once richest man, Hui Ka Yan, main owner of one-time property giant Evergrande, has lost 93% of his wealth and has been pressured by authorities into selling off some of his luxury homes, private jets and expensive paintings to pay off the company’s debts. The capitalist media see this as a terrible thing and a “property crisis in China.” But with his indebted Evergrande restricted by regulations in its ability to borrow, Hui Ka Yan’s assets have been bit by bit nationalised and brought into public hands. To a lesser degree, other property capitalists have also been hit in a similar way. As a result, in a very positive development, China’s real estate sector has gone from last year having its top five firms consist of three capitalist corporations and only two SOEs to now having four of its biggest five real estate firms being socialistic SOEs. However, the private sector property developers assisted by pro-market “experts” and the right-wing of the CPC have pushed back demanding support for private developers hurt by the anti-speculation and anti-leveraging crackdown. They have been able to use the fact that the private sector’s ongoing influence in the real estate industry meant that the crackdown led to a slowdown in housing construction. As a result, Beijing has backed down somewhat and called for China’s state-owned banks to increase lending support for real estate companies including privately-owned ones (although in subsequent bank announcements the majority of extra lending is at this stage headed towards state-owned real estate firms). Such bending to the pressure of profit-driven real estate tycoons and those within the bureaucracy pushing their concerns must be intransigently resisted. The house building sector must be boosted instead by directing the real estate SOEs to increase construction and by further accelerating the provision of low-rent public housing. The housing sector is not a new, high-tech innovative sector – there is no reason for private “entrepreneurs” to be involved. The real estate sector should be brought entirely under public ownership. Dangerously powerful capitalists should be stopped from emerging from this sector.

A public housing complex in China’s Shanghai. Over the last fifteen years, China has embarked on a massive program to provide her low and lower-middle income people with access to public housing. As a result, one in four of China’s housing dwellings are public housing dwellings and this proportion is rising every year. The proportion of China’s housing stock that is public housing is now eight times higher than the proportion of public housing in Australia. However, China’s focus on public housing, curbs on property speculation and measures to stop over leveraging by private-sector developers have met with resistance from China’s real estate sector capitalists, pro-private sector economists and from within the right-wing of the Communist Party of China itself. This resistance must be defeated rather than being accommodated. The real estate sector should be brought entirely under public ownership. Dangerously powerful capitalists should be stopped from emerging from this sector.
Photo: Wei Li

The Danger of China’s Upper-Middle Class
Going Over to the Side of Counterrevolution in the Future

If the actual capitalist exploiters were the only force pushing for capitalist restoration in China, the threat would not be so great. For their numbers are small – especially in socialistic China. However, just below the actual capitalist business owners and the managers who act as their henchmen is an upper-middle class layer that includes many people who are economically and spiritually influenced by the capitalist bigwigs. This includes pro-capitalist economists, academics, journalists and lawyers who echo the calls of the capitalists for “greater” rights. It includes state bureaucrats who interact with the capitalists in the course of planning and regulatory decisions and who are sometimes bribed both directly and more often indirectly and subtly – for example by being taken to expensive meals and invited to posh events – by these wealthy bigshots. And more numerously, there are many young highly educated professionals who dream of being the next big tycoon or otherwise admire the capitalist high-fliers and hope to become part of their companies’ managerial and technical elite. It was a similar layer of highly educated youth and young wannabes, alongside some petty capitalists and speculators that were the main social force that drove the capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union. As long as the per capita income and overall technological and cultural influence of the richest of the capitalist countries remains higher than that in the workers state – as was the case during the times of the Soviet Union and is equally the case in today’s PRC – then younger high-skilled professionals in the workers state can fall for promises that capitalism would open up a higher standard of living for them and more exciting opportunities to engage in leading-edge innovation and globally prominent cultural pursuits (like being part of Hollywood!).

Moreover, there is an additional corrupting influence on China’s upper middle-class that did not exist in even the last days of the Soviet Union. Since, there is a sizable capitalist sector in China, some well-paid professionals are able to invest part of their savings in the stock market. They thus become beneficiaries of capitalist exploitation even if share dividends only provide them with a minority of their income. Like, the capitalist bigwigs, some of these people may have lost money as a result of the Xi Jinping government’s common prosperity drive. For example, if they held shares in platform companies they could have had considerable losses when the share price of food delivery platforms dived after Beijing last year forced delivery platforms to guarantee at least the minimum wage for delivery riders. Moreover, even other well-heeled people without shareholdings may have felt a loss of privilege from some of the common prosperity measures. Last year, as part of moves to reduce the homework burden and stress of students, to curb inequality in education and to protect parents from having to fork out ever large amounts for their children’s after-school tutoring in an education rat race against other parents’ kids, the PRC dramatically banned all tutoring firms from making a profit. This measure, by design, led to a massive reduction in the amount of after-school tutoring. The moves were very popular with not only students but with most parents. However, richer parents hoping to leverage their wealth to buy their kids an advantage over poorer kids and youth from well-off backgrounds whose younger siblings can no longer have the benefit of more tutoring to outcompete with their less affluent peers, may have felt aggrieved by their “loss of freedom” from these measures. It is without doubt that anger over common prosperity measures forms some part of why some of China’s upper middle-class and well-off university students decided to stage anti-government “Freedom” demonstrations late last month. This is no reason to conciliate such sentiments. In fact the opposite is required: the common prosperity drive must be greatly deepened and accelerated to weaken the disproportionate economic – and thus political – power of wealthier layers and thus weaken their ability to obstruct China’s road towards full socialism.

Many of those who joined the A4 protests in part because of their opposition to common prosperity measures would not have necessarily been anti-communists – at least in the subjective sense. Many may have recognised how much has been achieved in China since 1949 and be proud of the PRC’s achievements. That is why some at the “Freedom” protests sang the Communist Internationale. However, even those with such subjective feelings could still be simultaneously animated by a wish to jealously guard their upper middle-class privilege. Thus they may be particularly opposed to Xi Jinping, because they see him as the one pushing the common prosperity measures. Such people would be angered that Xi has been re-elected for a new term as CPC leader and gained greater authority within the party. Thus, some of those “A4 protesters” that still see themselves as pro-communist are likely supporters of figures like Li Keqiang in the pro-private sector, right-wing of the CPC.

It should be stressed that the middle class are not an exploiting class. As a result, it is likely that the majority of young middle-class and even upper middle-class people in China still remain supportive of – or at the least accepting of – socialistic rule. China’s growing economy and growing technological and cultural level has seen the standard of living of these layers and their opportunities for professional growth constantly increase. However, given that China remains behind the most advanced capitalist countries in income and development levels, any future difficulties in economy would see some in this layer lose their sympathy for socialism. Notably, it was during a period of economic stagnation that a sizable chunk of the Soviet Union’s most educated youth and young professionals turn their backs on socialism. That the recent upper middle-class and university student “Freedom” protests in China occurred now is no accident. Although the Western media’s claims that the Chinese economy has “crashed” is a lie, there has been a relative slowdown. Smaller-scale capitalist exploiters and the self-employed in particular have experienced a drop in incomes during the Omicron wave. The recent A4 protests, small components of which stood for weakening or even ending socialistic rule, are an indicator of the counterrevolutionary force that could arise from the upper middle-class and ambitious educated youth should imperialist military and economic pressure reach such levels that they are able to suffocate China’s economic growth.

Socialist Rule Cannot be Protected if the Capitalists and Their Allies
Have Equal Political Rights as the Working Class

Within the upper-middle class and university student, A4 “Freedom” protests in China there were slogans and chants against censorship and also for “democracy.” The latter excited the Western capitalist media who played them up. Other sources reported that at least one student protest, the one in Liangmaqiao in Beijing, even called for “democracy” while simultaneously expressing support for the CPC. Reportedly, protesters chanted “Do the Communist Party and democracy conflict? No conflict! We want democracy, freedom, and the development of the Communist Party back! That’s all! We don’t want revisionism! Don’t be revisionist!” Protesters then implied that without “democracy”, there would be capitalist counterrevolution in China: “If we don’t change, we will follow in the footsteps of the Soviet Union!” Such sentiment would be correct if protesters specified workers democracy. In that workers democracy is crucial to both the efficient running of a workers state and to the active engagement of the broadest forces amongst the toiling classes in the defence of the workers state against counterrevolutionary forces. However, calls for “democracy” in the abstract can mean many things and turns out to be downright harmful when it is called for in a workers state without insisting that it should be democracy specifically and exclusively for the working-class and its allies. To begin to explain why, we need to stress that “democracy” is only a technique of governance of a state. It does not define the purpose and content of the governance of the state. That content is defined by the class content of the state, which in modern times means either a capitalist state or a workers state. In a capitalist state, the state exists to defend the rule of the class that makes profit out of the exploitation of labour and upholds the property system in the economy that enables this: the ownership of the key sections of the economy by wealthy private individuals. In a workers state, the state exists to defend the rule of wage workers and the only organisation of productive property that can enable this: the common, that is public, ownership of the key sections of the economy by all the people.

Capitalists can rule through their state being administered in different forms: an absolute monarchy as in say Kuwait or Qatar, a theocracy as in Saudi Arabia (which is also a monarchy) or Iran, a military dictatorship, fascism as in Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy or parliamentary “democracy.” In even the most democratic of capitalist “parliamentary democracies” where every person technically has the same one vote to elect governments and the same legal “right” to engage in politics, the state is still thoroughly controlled by and serving the capitalists. This is because it is the capitalists who dominate political discourse and disproportionately shape public opinion through ownership of the media and through their enormous wealth giving them the disproportionate ability to fund political parties, pay for political advertising, finance activist campaigns, hire lobbyists and establish influential NGOs and think tanks.

Above: One of the ways that the capitalist class thoroughly dominates political discussion and agendas in capitalist, so-called “democracies” is through using their enormous wealth to establish and fund (and thus control) “independent” think tanks. Take Australia’s two most influential and quoted-by-the-media think tanks on foreign policy and “defence” questions: the warmongering, fanatically anti-PRC, Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) and the pro-Western imperialism, Lowy Institute. ASPI is funded by not only the Australian government, the NSW Police force and the U.S., British, Japanese, Dutch and Canadian governments but also by giant capitalist-owned defence corporations like Lockheed Martin, SAAB, Thales and BAE and by other capitalist companies including Bill Gates’ Microsoft, Mark Zuckeberg’s Facebook (now called Meta), an Australian subsidiary of the Amazon company owned by the world’s fourth richest billionaire Jeff Bezos, as well as by the Property Council of Australia and Western-controlled NGOs. On the Sponsors section of ASPI’s website (Above Left – screenshot taken on 16 December 2022), three giant capitalist defence companies are highlighted as the key sponsors. For its part, the Lowy institute was established by – and is funded by – the billionaire Lowy family as well as by membership fees from major capitalist corporations – including each of the four big banks, BHP, Rio Tinto, Wesfarmers, Boeing and SAAB – and various repressive organs of the Australian capitalist state, including ASIO, the Australian Federal Police, the Department of Defence and the Office of National Intelligence. The Chairman of the Board of the Lowy Institute remains Frank Lowy (Above Right), Australia’s tenth richest capitalist, whose wealth is estimated at $9.3 billion.

Moreover, the enormous economic power of the capitalists ensures that no matter who is elected to parliament, all state institutions themselves are subordinated to the capitalists. The capitalists are able to directly and more often indirectly bribe state officials (including through the latter knowing that to get a lucrative job in the private sector after their political/bureaucratic career is over they would need to be on good terms with the capitalists). Furthermore, due to their control of the economy, key bureaucratic organisations have to consult and cooperate with the capitalist business owners. For all these reasons, capitalist parliamentary democracies no less than fascist and monarchist regimes are the dictatorship of the capitalist class over the working class. Moreover, when capitalist rule is threatened by the revolutionary masses, the capitalists will not hesitate to try to move their state to a more authoritarian or even fascist form in order to preserve their power by any means necessary.

The very opposite to a capitalist state, a workers (i.e. proletarian) state is the dictatorship of the working-class over the capitalist class. Its key roles are to prevent the overthrown capitalists and their allies abroad from taking back power and to protect the dominant role of public ownership over key sectors of the economy to ensure the working-class’ overall economic interests. Just like a capitalist (i.e. bourgeois) state, a proletarian state can have different forms. The ideal form is a proletarian (i.e. workers) democracy in which the working-class freely discuss and debate important decisions and administer their state through elected workers council, called soviets. Such a workers democracy form of administering a workers state was how the Soviet workers state was administered during its first seven or so years, albeit in very difficult conditions of Civil War for much of that period. However, a workers state cannot be administered through the form of parliamentary “democracy”. Because, although in a workers state the capitalists would have been dispossessed from ownership of key sectors of the economy, they would still have disproportionate ability to shape political discourse – including any “free elections”. Russian revolutionary leader, Vladimir Lenin explained why:

“There can be no equality between the exploiters—who for many generations have been better off because of their education, conditions of wealthy life, and habits—and the exploited, the majority of whom even in the most advanced and most democratic bourgeois republics are downtrodden, backward, ignorant, intimidated and disunited. For a long time after the revolution the exploiters inevitably continue to retain a number of great practical advantages: they still have money (since it is impossible to abolish money all at once); some movable property—often fairly considerable; they still have various connections, habits of organisation and management; knowledge of all the `secrets’ (customs, methods, means and possibilities) of management; superior education; close connections with the higher technical personnel (who live and think like the bourgeoisie); incomparably greater experience in the art of war (this is very important), and so on and so forth.

“If the exploiters are defeated in one country only—and this, of course, is typical, since a simultaneous revolution in a number of countries is a rare exception—they still remain stronger than the exploited, for the international connections of the exploiters are enormous….

“The transition from capitalism to communism takes an entire historical epoch. Until this epoch is over, the exploiters inevitably cherish the hope of restoration, and this hope turns into attempts at restoration…. In the train of the capitalist exploiters follow the wide sections of the petty bourgeoisie [the self-employed and other sections of the middle class – TP], with regard to whom decades of historical experience of all countries testify that they vacillate and hesitate, one day marching behind the proletariat and the next day taking fright at the difficulties of the revolution; that they become panic-stricken at the first defeat or semidefeat of the workers, grow nervous, run about aimlessly, snivel, and rush from one camp into the other ….”

VI. Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, 1918

That is why while capitalist “democracy” can nominally allow the “equal” rights of all to engage in political activity and then use their exclusive economic power to thoroughly dominate politics and the state, a workers state administered in the form of workers democracy CANNOT allow equal political rights for all. Instead as Lenin outlined in the above quoted work (which was a response to German left social-democratic leader Karl Kautsky who had attacked the Soviet workers state for not allowing parliamentary democracy), a workers state must EXCLUDE the deposed capitalist class from participation in workers democracy:

“… as long as there are exploiters who rule the majority, the exploited, the democratic state must inevitably be a democracy for the exploiters. A state of the exploited must fundamentally differ from such a state; it must be a democracy for the exploited, and a means of suppressing the exploiters; and the suppression of a class means inequality for that class, its exclusion from `democracy’” [emphasis added-TP].

If the overthrown capitalist exploiters are not in this way prevented from having the same rights to participate in the affairs of a workers state as the working class masses, they will use their still existing advantages – all the more so in today’s China – and their links with the capitalist exploiters ruling most of the rest of the world to take back the power.

In even a healthy workers state administered through a proletarian democracy, it is only as class differences are gradually overcome as the workers state moves towards full socialism and as the threat of capitalist restoration is diminished through the overturn of capitalist rule in some of the most powerful countries that the right to fully participate in socialist democracy can begin to be extended to elements connected with the deposed former exploiting class. Yet, simultaneously with a larger and larger proportion of the population being brought into the administration of a socialist society, the workers state itself (and therefore workers democracy with it) starts to wither away, because its purpose – the suppression of the overthrown exploiting class and their allies – becomes less and less necessary. When a fully communist society has been achieved, which means a society in which all class differences have been fully overcome, administration will still exist. But it will no longer be about the administration and disciplining of people but the administration of things.    

How Calls for “Democracy” in the Abstract in China
End Up Being a Call for the Destruction of the Workers State

In explaining why the “indispensable characteristic, the necessary condition” of a workers state is “the forcible suppression of the exploiters as a class, and, consequently, the infringement of `pure democracy’, i.e., of equality and freedom, in regard to that class”, Lenin showed how talk of “pure democracy” plays a counterrevolutionary role when used after the working class have already achieved state power:

“If we are not to mock at common sense and history, it is obvious that we cannot speak of `pure democracy’ as long as different classes exist; we can only speak of class democracy….
“`Pure democracy’ is the mendacious phrase of a liberal who wants to fool the workers. History knows of bourgeois democracy which takes the place of feudalism, and of proletarian democracy which takes the place of bourgeois democracy.”

Now a slick, nominal socialist may counter that Lenin was speaking at a time when the Soviet workers state was a proletarian democracy, whereas the PRC workers state is today not a workers democracy and that therefore Lenin’s conclusions do not apply. To argue like this would be absolutely wrong! Workers democracy is a method of administering a workers state. But the content of a workers state is the rule of the working-class over the capitalist class. Therefore, although very necessary, the need for workers democracy is completely subordinate to the need to defend the workers state. If the working-class lose state power, then any nominal “democracy” will end up only being a capitalist “democracy” in which the form of “democracy” covers up the fact that the working-class have been deposed from power and are being subjugated under a dictatorship of the capitalist class, in which the only real “democracy” is amonst the various capitalists.

Since there is a lack of genuine socialist democracy in the PRC, the disenfranchisement of the working-class masses from direct administration of the workers state diminishes their political consciousness and weakens their commitment to defending the workers state. This makes the workers state more vulnerable. However, that actually makes it all the more crucial to suppress the political activity of the capitalist exploiters. It is here important to refer here to the correct stance taken by co-leader of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky, who after the Soviet Union’s bureaucratic degeneration in the mid-1920s continued to fight for the unconditional defence of the Soviet proletarian state while struggling to bring back the agenda of proletarian democracy and revolutionary internationalism that Lenin fought for. In response to those calling for “free elections” in the Soviet Union of 1929, that is long after the soviets and the Communist Party had become bureaucratised and true workers democracy had been suppressed in the Soviet workers state, Trotsky insisted:

“We are fighting for proletarian democracy precisely in order to shield the country of the October Revolution from the `liberties’ of bourgeois democracy, that is, from capitalism….

“It is necessary to reject and condemn the program of struggle for `the freedom to organize’ and all other `freedoms’ in the USSR – because this is the program of bourgeois democracy. To this program of bourgeois democracy we must counterpose the slogans and methods of proletarian democracy, whose aim, in the struggle against bureaucratic centrism, is to regenerate and fortify the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

L.D. Trotsky, The Defense of the Soviet Union and the Opposition (1929), Marxist Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1929/09/fi-b.htm

Indeed, today, the call for “freedom to organise”, “liberties” and “democracy” in China is actually the main slogan of the Western imperialists and their allies within China who want to see the restoration of capitalism. They know that, especially given that in China, although the working-class have overall power there is still a rich and influential capitalist class, any “pure democracy” and “freedom to organise” of all classes in China would see the Chinese capitalists and the world capitalist powers together mobilising massive financial and media resources to dominate debate, disproportionately shape “public opinion”, swing any free” parliamentary elections and re-establish capitalism.

This is why, even when coming from those who uphold socialism and the CPC, the call for “democracy” and “freedom” in China in the abstract – without specifying it must be an exclusively proletarian democracy where there will only be full political freedom for the working-class and its allies and for those organisations that uphold the workers state – is a dangerous call that must be rejected. To be sure, those students protesting in Beijing’s Liangmaqiao who made this call very likely do not want capitalist restoration. They may have been from the right-wing of the CPC who oppose Xi Jinping’s common prosperity measures and thus want more democracy in the party to resist him. Or they may be completely sincere and motivated by understandable frustration at the stifling censorship and lack of genuine socialist democracy in the PRC. The problem is that the call for “freedom” and “democracy” in the abstract in a workers state ends up being a call for opening the door to capitalist counterrevolution no matter who makes the appeal – whether they be the capitalist exploiting class and their conscious servants or sincere but misguided supporters of socialism.

This same logic by the way applies to the class-struggle in a capitalist country. Take a strike for example where the workers have set-up a solid picket to stop scabbing. Now, the capitalist enemy that want to defeat the strike will of course howl that workers are violating the rights of the scabs who want to go into work during the strike. However, there may be others who genuinely want the strike to win but simultaneously insist that workers “should have the freedom to choose” if they want to work or not during the strike. Despite their different intentions, both sets of people insisting on “free choice” for the scabs are in practice sabotaging the strike, because if scabs are able to go into work, the strike will likely be defeated.

It tends to be the middle class in both capitalist countries and workers states that are the most prone to placing excessive weight on an abstract posing of “freedom”, “choice” and democracy” without specifying for which class. Why is this? Take for instance the case of China. There, the middle class are neither exploiters of labour themselves nor are they directly exploited wage workers in the private sector who would be much further exploited if capitalist state power was restored, or, in the case of SOE workers, potentially exploited workers – because these workers are not exploited now but would be if capitalism was restored. Since, in this way, this middle class is not as directly affected by the question of which class controls the economy as the working class is, this middle class, even when sympathetic to socialism, tends to downplay the importance of the question of which class rules and the question of which class should “democracy” and “freedom” be granted to.

Of course, the attitude taken to the different sectors calling for “democracy” and “freedom” in China must be different. Those who are conscious capitalist counterrevolutionaries and in organisations funded by the U.S. government’s NED must be sternly opposed by any means necessary. On the other hand, misguided youth who in all sincerity proclaim their solidarity with the CPC while simultaneously calling for “democracy” in the abstract and “freedom for all” must be sympathetically argued with and won over. It should be pointed out to the latter group that the call for “democracy” was in fact the main slogan of the capitalist counterrevolution in the former Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries. This is hardly surprising. After all, those seeking capitalist restoration would not want to admit to the overwhelming majority of the population who would be harmed by such an outcome that they intend to replace a system where everyone collectively owns the key sectors of the economy with a system where just a few rich people will own them. So instead they called for “democracy” and “freedom.” And in both the former Soviet Union and in some Eastern European countries there were not a few people who sincerely wanted to preserve socialistic rule who were sucked in behind these calls. This was especially the case in the former Germany Democratic Republic – GDR (“East Germany”). In the middle and latter parts of 1989 there were mass protests in the GDR by people who were critical of the bureaucratised government, wanted “democracy” and “freedom” but at the same time mostly wanted to preserve the achievements of socialist economy in the DDR. However, in pushing for “democracy” and “freedom” without insisting that any “democracy” must be an explicitly proletarian democracy with freedom for only those organisations that genuinely uphold the workers state, these protesters ended up aiding the West German capitalist class and their imperialist allies in driving through a capitalist counterrevolution made largely in the name of “democracy”.

It must also be pointed out to middle-class, pro-communist youth in China who call for “democracy” and “freedom” in the abstract that, as Lenin made clear in his 1918 reply to Kautsky, the capitalists and their social democratic lackeys were screaming about a “lack of democracy” and “arbitrariness” in the Soviet workers state even when the Soviet proletarian state was still truly in the form of a workers democracy. In other words, when the capitalist powers today shout about a lack of “democracy” in China today, it is not at all because the PRC workers state is currently not a proletarian democracy – it is solely because the PRC is a workers state. The capitalists want “democracy” and “freedom of all to organise” in China purely because they want the freedom to organise a capitalist counterrevolution there – just like they demanded “democracy” and “freedom” in Soviet Russia in even Lenin’s time when the Soviet workers state was in the form of a proletarian democracy. If the PRC workers state was renovated into one truly based on workers democracy, the capitalist exploiters – and their social democratic servants – would then be howling even more loudly about a supposed lack of “freedom” and “democracy” in China.

The PRC Workers State Does Need WORKERS Democracy

The serious threat of a future capitalist counterrevolution in China mobilised under the slogan of “democracy” does not negate the need for proletarian democracy in China. In fact it actually makes this more important. For free discussion and debate amongst workers is needed not only to facilitate innovation and efficiency in China’s socialist SOEs and to resolve day to day disputes in as least disruptive a fashion as possible but is importantly needed in order to undermine calls for Western-style, that is inevitably capitalist, “democracy.” So what would workers democracy consist of in the PRC. For one, censorship of the media and social media would be loosened so that all voices who are not seeking to weaken or destroy proletarian state power or undermine the backbone role of the public sector in the economy should be able to freely advocate their ideas, robustly scrutinise government policies and in the process criticize top leaders if they see fit. Secondly, all parties and NGOs that genuinely uphold the proletarian state and publicly commit to maintaining the dominance of public ownership in the economy should be able to operate as well as compete in elections for representative bodies. Most importantly, administrative power will be held in elected councils of workers (soviets) – which would draw into them other sections of the toiling masses. Each delegate that a lower soviet elects to a higher soviet body would be recallable at any time and all full-time officials of the soviet government should be paid no more than the average wage of a skilled worker. The membership of such soviets would be modelled on that specified in the first constitution of the Soviet workers state, which decreed that: “The right to vote and to be elected to the soviets is enjoyed by … All who have acquired the means of livelihood through labour that is productive and useful to society, and also persons engaged in housekeeping which enables the former to do productive work, i.e., laborers and employees of all classes who are employed in industry, trade, agriculture, etc., and peasants and Cossack agricultural laborers who employ no help for the purpose of making profits…. The following persons enjoy neither the right to vote nor the right to be voted for, even though they belong to one of the categories enumerated above, namely: (a) Persons who employ hired labor in order to obtain from it an increase in profits ….”

The soviet form of administering a workers state is crucial not only because it excludes exploiters of labour. It is also vital because, unlike in a parliamentary system where the working-class is dispersed from each other as they are herded off to vote in elections every few years, in a soviet political administration workers debate and decide on issues collectively in their soviet meeting. In this way, working-class people more readily feel their common class interests with each other and are therefore better able to resist the political pressure of the capitalists both within and outside the country.

However, we should not be naive. Given the presence of powerful capitalists within socialistic China and given the dominance of capitalism worldwide, any freeing up of political debate and censorship within China, even within the scope of workers democracy, would be exploited by the capitalists and their allies. They would use relaxed censorship to both push their agenda and create demoralisation about the present socialist system while trying to evade censorship by claiming adherence to socialist rule. The wealthy capitalists, even while excluded from the soviets, would try to get their ideas into the soviets and their agendas echoed by proxies or politically naïve workers within the soviets. Similarly, the capitalists would also seek to use the greater freedom for pro-socialist parties in order to get worker proxies or others they influence to form new parties that again claim loyalty to the socialist order while in practice pushing to expand the “rights” of the capitalists.

That is why any moves towards genuine workers democracy in the PRC must be accompanied by a struggle to weaken the power of the capitalists within the country. For starters, there must be a demand to expel all exploiters of labour from not only all state representative bodies (which would be a requirement of proletarian democracy in any case) but also to expel all capitalists from the CPC. Late former CPC leader Jiang Zemin and his Three Represents Theory was dead wrong for allowing capitalists into the party. Just as importantly, the power of the capitalists over the economy must be weakened through confiscation of privately-owned firms in sectors where they are not needed and their conversion into public ownership. Indeed, the route to implementing proletarian democracy in China is through the working-class building mass organisations that will, in alliance with sympathetic PRC state institutions, strike decisive blows to weaken China’s capitalists and in the process establish administrative control over China’s socialistic system.

The power of ethnic Chinese capitalists outside the mainland to influence affairs within the PRC must also be combatted. The companies of the property barons, corrupt casino owners, bankers and shipping magnates that dominate Hong Kong and Macao must all be confiscated and brought into common ownership. Socialist revolution in Taiwan to overthrow the tyranny of the likes of Terry Gou and Cheng Hsueh Wuh (the Taiwanese tycoons respectively owning notoriously exploitative companies Foxconn and 85 Degrees Café) must be fomented by appealing to workers longing to free themselves from the harsh militarisation of labour at Taiwanese workplaces and to migrant workers fuming at the savage exploitation that they face in the fishing, domestic work, manufacturing and construction sectors. Let’s fight not for, “one China, two systems”, but for one China under one socialist system!

At the same time, instead of hoping that the imperialists will stop interfering in the PRC’s internal affairs and start truly practicing mutual coexistence with socialistic China, which is never going to happen, Beijing should advance the struggle to extend socialism into the currently capitalist countries by speaking out in support of the working class and oppressed peoples’ struggles in the capitalist world – especially in all the imperialist countries. In summary, the struggle to bring workers democracy to the Chinese workers state must go hand in hand with the struggle to complete the victory of the working class over the capitalists within mainland China and the struggle to extend socialist revolution to the islands of China and onto the other capitalist parts of the world.

Mobilise in Action Here in Australia in Solidarity with Socialistic Rule in China

The above section outlines what we think communists in China should fight for. But we are here in Australia, so we must focus on what we can do here to help protect and strengthen socialistic rule in China. And what we need to do is to mobilise actions in defence of the PRC workers state. By doing so we will affect the balance of political forces within China in the direction of strengthening the resolve of those wanting to uphold and reinforce the socialist foundations of China’s system. We will be able to boost the confidence of staunchly pro-communist elements within China. We can show them that even within the belly of the imperialist countries most hostile to the PRC there are people willing to stand up to the capitalist ruling classes and take open action in solidarity with socialistic rule in China.

The enemies of socialism understand all too well the importance of international pressure in affecting the balance of political forces within China. Thus, while the bulk of the $A15 million in total that the NED spends on advancing its counterrevolutionary agenda for China is given to groups operating inside China, many of their grants also avowedly aim to, variously, “engage in a series of targeted international advocacy actions”, “support an international network of stakeholders to share expertise” and “respond to the increasing importance of exile and diaspora communities in countering Chinese Communist Party (CCP)” by laying “the foundation for a sustainable network of transnational youth activists through activities designed to foster joint strategizing and identification of common goals.” Meanwhile, just days after the A4 protests in China, anti-communists originating from Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China held demonstrations in Melbourne and Sydney supporting the most anticommunist of the protesters within China and promoting their goal of overthrowing the PRC state. Supporters of socialistic rule in China need to build our own actions here with the very opposite agenda!

For, although the A4 protests were very small relative to China’s massive population, it is undoubted that the massive support given to these protests by the capitalist powers and by the anticommunist section of the Chinese diaspora communities living in the West would have had some impact, however small, at least temporarily, on the balance of political forces within China. It would have obviously encouraged those within China who consciously seek capitalist restoration. However, it would have also, to some small degree, strengthened the hand of more rightist elements within the CPC and the Chinese bureaucracy who would have used the advent of the protests and the massive backing that these protests received from the Western capitalist media to argue against Xi Jinping and, more so, others more emphatically on the militantly anti-capitalist, left wing of the party and state, by saying that: “The recent common prosperity measures have angered some of the upper middle-class in our country. We don’t want to make them our enemies. We need to pullback from some of these measures – they have gone too far” and “Look how powerful the Western powers are: they can even help incite protests here within China. We cannot thumb our noses at these powerful forces – they are too strong. We need to accommodate their concerns and meet them half-way in order to mollify them.” Such rightist arguments, to the extent that they are loud enough to actually impact policy, have a disintegrative effect on socialistic rule in China. We must counteract the rightist, ultimately deleterious, pressure being exerted on the CPC and the PRC state by the imperialist ruling classes and by the anticommunist component of the Chinese diaspora communities living in the West. We need to be doing this all the time by mobilising actions here in Australia and other Western countries in solidarity with socialistic rule in China.

Unfortunately, most of the Left in Australia is on the side of those seeking to destroy the PRC workers state. When in 2019, Hong Kong pro-colonial, rich kids staged an anticommunist uprising and an assorted array of anticommunist groups in Australia held protests in support of the anti-PRC rioters – from anti-PRC Hong Kong students to anticommunists from mainland China to the far-right, Donald Trump-supporting Falun Dafa group to supporters of the defeated Western-puppet, South Vietnamese capitalist regime that fled to Australia (and their children) to prominent Australian white supremacists – the Australian left groups, Solidarity, Socialist Alternative and Socialist Alliance all joined in. Even the Socialist Equality Party, which was more tentative in its backing of the Hong Kong anti-PRC rioters, joined at least one of the anti-communist rallies in Sydney.

Today, most of these groups are at it again! Socialist Alliance ran an article in the December 9 issue of their newspaper, the Green Left Weekly, which uncritically cheers the Chinese “Freedom” protests. It repeats the disinformation of the imperialist media, including exaggerating the length of lockdowns in China. Most rabid of all in their hostility to the PRC state is the Solidarity group. The colour front cover of their December magazine is devoted to hailing the Chinese “Freedom” protests. The headline of their 4 December article is even worse. Sounding like the most rabid, right-wing anti-communists, albeit with a “pro-worker” veneer, Solidarity shouts “workers power can bring down the CCP” [i.e. CPC]. Indeed most of the article sounds like something from the Murdoch media or other extreme anti-communist, bourgeois media outlets. Not to be outdone in anti-communist hostility to the PRC are Solidarity’s rivals in Socialist Alternative (SAlt) who have their own article on the A4 protests dated 4 December. They celebrate the most reactionary section of the A4 protesters, hailing that some protesters had chanted, “Communist Party! Step down! Xi Jinping! Step down!” In cheering the Chinese version of the far-right-instigated, “Freedom” protests, SAlt are actually being more hypocritical than their Solidarity rivals. The latter had bent somewhat to the Far Right’s talking points about pandemic restriction measures in Australia. SAlt however stood firm and organised counter-rallies to the reactionary “Freedom” protests in Australia. We supported this and participated in the Sydney counter-protest that SAlt initiated last year. But by supporting the Chinese “Freedom” protests, while condemning the Australian ones, SAlt are behaving just like Albanese’s ALP and most of the capitalist media. And just like them, SAlt will be looking to seize on any spike in COVID deaths in China resulting from the recent loosening of pandemic restrictions to attack the PRC for neglecting people’s health after having just attacked her for her supposedly “draconian” measures to contain COVID!

1 October 2020: Huge, densely-packed crowds throng the Badaling section of China’s Great Wall, located about 80km northwest of Beijing, during the country’s all-week public holiday for the People’s Republic of China’s National Day. For two years after China suppressed her initial outbreak in the first three months of 2020, China had not only very few deaths from COVID outbreaks but suppressed the virus so effectively that her people were able to enjoy a life that was much closer to normal than most other countries in the world. When local outbreaks did occur, they were snuffed out in quick time by rapid, resolute and effective local measures so that the overwhelming majority of the population were not affected by either the disease or by pandemic restrictions. It is only from about late March 2022 as Omicron spread more widely in China, that sizable parts of the country’s population have had to endure lockdowns for periods – usually lasting from between one to eight weeks. Yet many of the far-left groups in Australia have joined the capitalist media in deceptively giving the impression that China has locked down her people continuously for the last three years. The Solidarity group railed against the supposed “three years of lockdowns and restrictions” in China. Sounding equally like Sky News or other of the most hardline right-wing outlets, their rival in Socialist Alternative screamed that “the Chinese Communist Party has relied almost totally on lockdowns and an incredibly punitive quarantine system.”
Photo: Yan Cong/Bloomberg

The excuse that SAlt, Solidarity and Socialist Alliance all use for opposing Red China is to claim that the PRC is actually just another capitalist state. If that was always wrong it is even more ridiculous today after we have seen how radically different and better was the PRC’s response to the pandemic. Even SAlt concede in their article that, “Unlike in the United States, where a `profits before people’ political framework often dominated, resulting in more than 1 million fatalities, China’s policy has averted mass death.” Yet if the PRC state is also a capitalist state just like the U.S. why did it not also put “profits before people.” Why wouldn’t a capitalist regime put profits first – after all that is what they have done in every other major capitalist country in the world? SAlt is also compelled to acknowledge another achievement of the PRC: that last year it overtook the life expectancy of the USA. They quote historian Adam Tooze describing this as “a truly historic marker.” Yet how under supposed “capitalist rule” has this “truly historic marker” been achieved where a huge country that 73 years ago was a backward, subjugated neo-colony with a life expectancy 33 years below that of the USA now overtakes the life expectancy of the imperialist USA. Is that not grossly over-rating what “capitalism” can achieve? And how too under supposed “capitalist rule” was China two years ago able to complete its lifting of every one of its rural residents out of extreme poverty? Are not amongst the most important reasons for needing to overthrow capitalism precisely because it cannot decisively improve the well-being of the masses, cannot lift all out of poverty and cannot truly liberate former colonies and neocolonies from imperialist subjugation? Then how has all this been achieved in a country with one in five of the world’s people? Furthermore, those leftists who claim that the PRC is just another capitalist state have another huge dilemma. How can they explain why Australia’s capitalist rulers – which most anti-PRC left groups acknowledge are imperialist rulers in their own right and not mere puppets of their U.S. senior partners – are engaged in such a hostile military build-up, propaganda war and political campaign against the PRC when the Australian economy (with the lion’s share going to the capitalists) received nearly 40% of its export income last year from trade with China? Why would Australia’s capitalist rulers risk such huge incomes – $A178 billion in total – by antagonising the PRC if the latter was simply another capitalist country? The capitalists are greedy exploiters … but they are not that stupid! The sole reason why Australia’s capitalist rulers are hostile to the PRC is because it is a workers state. That is the only way one can explain the Australian bourgeoisie’s enmity towards the PRC.

Other than for ourselves in Trotskyist Platform, there is one other bona fide left group in Australia that does not buy into the imperialist drive to destroy the PRC state. And that is the Communist Party of Australia. The December 5 issue of the CPA’s Guardian newspaper has an article on the protests in China reprinted from an overseas leftist paper. Refreshingly the article pushes back against the imperialist media propaganda over the A4 protests. The article begins with the plainly true statement: “Establishment media have seized on protests over COVID lockdowns to rehearse their favourite anti-China narratives.”

A problem however is that, aside from it seems the party’s Brisbane branch, the CPA’s stance that China is a workers state that should be supported is mostly left to its newspaper but is not reflected in the party’s actual work on the ground. Take for example, the CPA’s work in the Sydney Anti-AUKUS Coalition opposing the deal for Australia to get nuclear submarines aimed against China. Although the CPA has been a major component of the coalition, in the public meetings and rallies of the coalition, the CPA has shied away from asserting the class character of the PRC as a workers state that should be supported and has backed away from arguing the need to resist the deluge of anti-communist propaganda directed against the PRC or the need to defend the PRC against counterrevolutionary movements like the Hong Kong pro-colonial forces. No doubt some CPA comrades would argue that this is for the sake of the united-front against AUKUS. But such a stance is flawed. For one, it is precisely the effect of the massive propaganda war against the PRC that makes it harder to build movements against the military build up against her. The need to oppose that anti-communist propaganda must be motivated to all that want to oppose the anti-China military escalation. On the other hand, the more that the working-class can be convinced that the PRC is their state, the more that the workers movement can be won to taking an active stance against the multitude of threats against the PRC. Furthermore, given that the other most prominent components of the Anti-AUKUS Coalition are the stridently anti-PRC Solidarity group and the even more anti-PRC Greens senator David Shoebridge (who when he is not engaging with the coalition is vey prominently supporting the fanatically anti-PRC Falun Dafa group and whipping up anticommunist hysteria against the presence of Confucius Institute, Chinese language-teaching schools in Australia), to not challenge anticommunist attacks on the PRC over “human rights” when in an arena favourable to pushing back against such propaganda is to give these anti-PRC forces a blank cheque to spread their counterrevolutionary agitation in the other arenas where they work. More generally, the Australian population is being bombarded with anti-communist, anti-PRC propaganda. If even at events opposed to the anti-China military build up, this propaganda is not refuted then in what arena are pro-PRC leftists going to be resolute enough to openly challenge this propaganda on the ground and proudly declare solidarity with the PRC’s socialist course? Moreover, as the recent A4 protests gave a small indication of, the biggest threat to the PRC workers state is not from direct military attack but from internal counterrevolution. The military pressure of course encourages and strengthens the forces of capitalist restoration. However, it is counterrevolutionaries themselves that are the most dangerous direct threat. Let us not forget that the Soviet workers state was in the end not destroyed by military attack but by the internal counterrevolutionary forces funded and directed by Western imperialism. To argue that opposition to capitalist counterrevolutionary forces threatening the Chinese workers state should be foregone for the sake of building a united-front with anti-PRC forces on the basis of only opposing some of the military escalation against the PRC, is to fail to properly stand in solidarity with socialistic China.

If the Left and workers movement fails to mobilise struggles in open solidarity with the PRC workers state in the imperialist countries, then this will demoralise communists within China and make them feel that no one within the most powerful countries in the world is prepared to take an open stand in defence of them (the CPA president sending solidarity greetings to the 20th congress of the CPC is nice but wholly inadequate by itself – open action on the ground is needed!). On the other hand it will play into the hands of rightist groupings within the CPC who will be able to say that “in the most powerful countries in the world, all the significant forces are against us, so we have to compromise with the imperialists – we have to make concessions.”

It is instructive to look back at what happened during the last Cold War, the 1980s Cold War against the then most powerful workers state, the Soviet Union. At the time, there were much greater numbers of people in the Western countries who considered themselves sympathetic to the Soviet Union then than there are now who support Red China. However, those parties sympathetic to the Soviet Union – including the CPA’s predecessor the SPA – joined in peace coalitions with small-l liberals and pacifists who were against war with the Soviet Union but were also unsympathetic to the workers state and bought into the anti-communist “human rights” propaganda against her. In order to avoid antagonising these bloc partners, the parties sympathetic to the USSR recoiled from ever openly showing their solidarity with the USSR through mass actions on the ground. This was a part of why the counterrevolution triumphed in the former Soviet Union. Here in Australia, not only did a good chunk of the Left – including the predecessors of Socialist Alliance and Solidarity/Socialist Alternative – criminally support the capitalist counterrevolutionary forces arrayed against the Soviet Union, but even the parts of the Left with a pro-Soviet line failed to mobilise in actual open solidarity with the workers state. This and similar behaviour by the Left in all the other imperialist countries helped push the balance of political forces within the Soviet Union in favour of the sell-outs within the Soviet leadership and the outright capitalist restorationists. This must not be allowed to happen again with respect to the PRC!

Trotskyist Platform is proud that we have been the most active group on the Left in openly standing for defence of socialistic rule in China. At demonstrations against AUKUS we have openly advocated solidarity with the PRC workers state. Among the placards we have carried at these events includes ones stating: “Down with the AUKUS Nuclear Submarine Deal! Stand with Socialistic China to Stand by Working Class Interests.” At the Hiroshima Day rally, held days after Nancy Pelosi provocatively visited Taiwan, among the signs we carried was one urging: “Resist Washington and Canberra’s War Drive Against the PRC Workers State! Condemn Pelosi’s Provocative Visit to the Rogue, Anti-Working Class Regime Ruling China’s Taiwan!”

Most importantly, we have initiated and built several united-front actions openly in solidarity with the PRC workers state. When the 70th anniversary of the PRC occurred in 2019 during the midst of the anti-PRC, rich kid revolt in Hong Kong, we joined with the Australian Chinese Workers Association (ACWA) in building an action that saw over 60 people march through the streets of Sydney behind the slogans: “Working Class People in Australia & the World: Stand With Socialistic China!” and “Defeat Hong Kong’s Pro-Colonial, Anti-Communist Movement!” When word and photos of the action found there way back to communists in the North-western Chinese city of Xian, they were thrilled to see that people in Australia would openly take such a stance. Then, this April, we again joined with the ACWA in building an action welcoming China’s anti-poverty measures and calling for key aspects of them to be implemented here in Australia. Bringing out still larger numbers at its height than the October 2019 event, this rally built to advocate urgently needed measures in Australia that the PRC has implemented – including a massive increase in public housing, the guaranteeing of at least the minimum wage for all food delivery workers when working normal hours at a slow pace and the nationalisation of the banks – simultaneously promoted solidarity with socialistic China by pointing to her progressive, pro-working program.

Trotskyist Platform looks forward to working with other pro-PRC forces on the Left in building further united-front actions in open solidarity with socialistic China. All those committed to socialism should understand that we cannot allow the PRC to meet the same fate as the Soviet Union. The small, but notable, openly anti-communist component within the recent COVID “Freedom” protests in China and the broader raising within them of the slogans of “democracy” and “freedom” without an insistence that it must be a proletarian democracy that does not give political freedom to capitalist exploiters, is a warning sign. A warning sign that we must respond to by working harder to build actions to oppose all military, economic, political and propaganda pressure upon the PRC workers state. Let’s defend socialistic rule in China as part of our fight against the decaying, increasingly militaristic, capitalist order in Australia and as part of the struggle against capitalist domination of the world. With the masses in most of the capitalist world today facing plunging real wages and steeply rising prices, with some capitalist countries already on the verge of a deep recession and many others headed there, with extreme racist forces growing in strength within many capitalist countries and with the war-mongering Western imperialist powers waging a dangerous proxy war against a nuclear-armed country (in Russia), the need to overturn capitalist rule throughout the world is more urgent than ever.

The rule of the working-class in every country will open the way to a socialist world that will ensure a future free of unemployment and poverty for every single person on the planet. It will lead to an internationally planned, collectively-owned economy where resources and human labour, in all its creativity, will be rationally and fairly utilised to lift the living standards of all, effectively protect human lives from deadly diseases and respond to the threat of climate change. A socialist world will be one where exploitation of labour, racism, oppression of women, homophobia, imperialist subjugation of the “Third World” and war will be things of the past. Defending socialistic rule in a country where one in five of the world’s people live – however incomplete and distorted that country’s transition to socialism currently is – is essential to ensuring that the victory of world socialist revolution is completed before still deeper capitalist economic crises, the ascendancy of the fascist form of capitalism, imperialist war and climate changed-induced disasters drive the peoples of the world into a hellish existence. 

On 2 April 2022 about 80 people participated in a Sydney rally to demand the implementation in Australia of some of the key measures that the PRC has used to successfully combat poverty in China – including the provision of huge amounts of public housing, the guaranteeing of a minimum wage for food delivery riders, publicly owned banks and a system based on public ownership of the key sectors of the economy. In the course of advocating urgently necessary anti-poverty measures the action simultaneously promoted the progressive character of the PRC and therefore the need to defend socialistic rule there. Above: Some of key slogans raised by the initiators of the action – Trotskyist Platform and the Australian Chinese Workers Association. Below: Rally emcee and Trotskyist Platform editor, Yuri Gromov addresses the rally.
Photo (top two photos and above right photo): Trotskyist Platform
Photo (above left and below photos): Demi Huang/New Impressions Media

REVERSE THE PLUNGE IN WORKING CLASS PEOPLE’S LIVING STANDARDS!

Above photo: Lebanese cucumbers selling for all most $12 a kilogram at a Woolworths supermarket in an Inner West Sydney suburb on 22 July 2022. Food prices in Australia and other capitalist countries have been surging, while wage increases have been small.
Photo credit: Trotskyist Platform

REVERSE THE PLUNGE IN WORKING CLASS
PEOPLE’S LIVING STANDARDS!

FIGHT FOR HUGE WAGE RISES, THE RIGHTS OF PERMANENCY FOR GIG WORKERS, A BIG INCREASE IN THE DOLE AND
A MASSIVE INCREASE IN LOW-RENT PUBLIC HOUSING!

IMMEDIATELY PUT THE GREEDY OIL, GAS
AND POWER FIRMS UNDER PUBLIC CONTROL!

15 July 2022: Food prices are surging. The price of lettuce has more than doubled over the last year. Beef is 12% dearer. And then there are the skyrocketing electricity and fuel costs. Yet while everything is getting more expensive, wages have barely risen. That means that even while the rich business owners extract ever more exorbitant profits from their workers’ labour, workers’ living standards are plummeting. It is of zero comfort to Australia’s working class masses that bankers, corporate bosses, politicians and media “experts” celebrate that the economy is undergoing a “strong expansion” when their own lives are getting ever harder.

Prime minister Albanese stated that it was “absolutely welcome” that the “Fair Work Commission” (FWC) recently set the annual increase in the minimum wage at 5.2%, basically matching the official inflation rate. It is true that unlike the former government, which refused to back a pay rise, the ALP government did call for a minimum wage rise that matched official inflation. Yet not only does the 5.2% increase not make up for the fact that this minimum wage had not kept pace with inflation in the preceding period, it will not match price increases in the coming period, which even the Reserve Bank has conceded will reach 7%. Moreover, as FWC president Iain Ross admitted, the prices of non-discretionary items like food are rising much faster than official inflation, especially hurting those on low incomes. Most low-paid workers are renters and Australia’s rents soared by 9.5% over the last year. Therefore, the actual cost increases endured by low-income workers are closer to 10% and rising fast. In other words, last month’s FWC ruling cheered by Albanese actually means a sizable cut to the real income of minimum wage workers. And other workers will suffer an even bigger cut. The FWC only gave award workers a 4.6% increase – less than even official inflation. Meanwhile, public sector workers are being hit still harder. The right wing NSW government has restricted public sector wage rises to just 3%. Gig workers are suffering the biggest cut in real income. Especially for food delivery workers and taxi and Uber drivers, surging petrol costs are ripping away their net incomes.

WHAT IS CAUSING WORKERS’ LIVING STANDARDS TO PLUNGE
AND HOW CAN THIS BE REVERSED?

Australia is not alone in having soaring living costs. This is happening throughout the capitalist world. A poll found that one in six Germans are now skipping meals to get by! In the U.S. the annual inflation rate is 9.1%. Moreover, the crisis extends to the poorer countries. In India, inflation is over 7%, in Brazil it is nearly 12%. In Turkey, the inflation rate is nearly 80%!

So what is causing this crisis? When capitalist countries plunged into the late noughties’ Great Recession, governments found that they could only make their economies recover through flooding them with cheap credit and debt-financed spending. Even after that crisis waned, capitalist economies were so fragile that governments were never able to take their economies fully off of these life-supports. Then after COVID hit, capitalist governments dialled up the intensity of such pump priming “solutions”. The problem is that in the capitalist system, where the economy is in the hands of profit-driven bosses, excess money supply leads the corporate bigwigs to drive up prices. To ensure that the resulting increased revenue flows into their own pockets and not that of their workers, business owners avoid increasing wages knowing full well that soaring prices means that they are effectively slashing their workers’ pay. As a result, workers’ real wages in Australia are now 8% lower than they were six years ago!

This increasing exploitation has been going on under Liberal, Labor and Labor/Greens governments alike. Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data show that bosses are now exploiting their workers 22% more than they were 36 years ago. As a result, ABS figures show that for every $100,000 of value added by workers – that is after all material, property and interest costs have been paid – at a capitalist business (one using hired labour) about $50,000 is gouged by the business owners as profit and only $50,000 is given back in wages! And given that the ABS classifies the fat salaries of CEOs and managers as “wages and salaries”, the reality is that, on average, workers in Australia are now receiving back as wages far less than half of the fruits of their own labour.

Therefore, the measures needed to defend workers’ living standards must be based on drastically increasing the share of the fruits of workers’ labour going back to workers at the expense of the amount that is leached away by the capitalists as profits. For starters that means that the workers movement must fight for huge wage increases. We must also specially defend the most precariously employed workers by demanding guaranteed wages, holiday pay and all the other rights of permanency for all those currently employed on a casual or gig basis. To make it easier to unleash the trade union industrial action needed to win such gains, we must demand the abolishing of all anti-strike laws and all laws restricting union access to workplaces.

Whenever workers demand improvements in their wages, the capitalists scream that this will cause job losses. But such job cuts will only occur if we let these exploiters carry out retrenchments and if we let them retain as few workers as is necessary to maximise their profits. Instead of doing that, we must force the capitalist bosses to hire more workers than they want to at the expense of their profits. We must demand a ban on job cuts by all profitable firms and must demand that all companies making a profit be required to increase their number of full-time, permanent employees by at least twenty-five workers for every one million dollars of quarterly profit.

The already most poverty stricken people are being hardest hit today. Due to entrenched gender inequality, sectors where women workers predominate have especially low wages. It is crucial that the workers movement as a whole demands equal pay for equal work for women workers. Meanwhile, unemployed workers are having to make do with cruelly low social security payments. This is not only driving unemployed workers into extreme poverty but has made the prospect of losing one’s job so scary that it is helping bosses to intimidate some employed workers into avoiding joining workers’ rights struggles. That is why it is especially important to fight for a doubling of the Jobseeker payment. Surging prices also mean that, even though old-age pensioners receive higher payments than unemployed workers, many working class pensioners are facing homelessness. The current system where a meagre pension is combined with individual superannuation carries into old age the inequality that workers faced when at working age. CEOs receive huge superannuation while low-paid workers receive little and gig workers and the unemployed nothing at all. Our unions must demand that the current superannuation system be replaced with one where bosses pay super into a common fund that will be used to help equally pay all a pension equal to the minimum wage.

MASSIVELY INCREASE LOW-RENT PUBLIC HOUSING!

What is making plunging living standards especially unbearable for many working class people is the lack of affordable rental accommodation. Even in the lower income, Western Sydney suburb of Auburn, the median weekly rent for two bedroom units available for lease is right now $435. That’s well over half the minimum wage! And given that so many are working in casual jobs where they receive far less than the minimum full-time wage, it is clear why so many people are only able to pay rent by skipping meals and avoiding using the heater right now at the height of winter. Moreover, there are very few affordable properties available to lease. So people struggling with rising costs are not even able to move into rougher but cheaper dwellings to get by.

The capitalist “free market” is failing to make available enough affordable accommodation – providing such housing is simply not profitable enough for wealthy investors and real estate speculators. What is therefore needed is much more low-rent public housing. Instead, Liberal, Labor and Labor/Greens federal and state governments have overseen a big public housing sell-off over the last few decades. Some of that involves governments handing over public housing to private operators and passing off the resulting “community housing” as also being part of “social housing.” However, the private operators of such “community housing” are notorious for skimping on repairs and skewing their allocations towards higher-rent paying tenants at the expense of the most hard-up. Thus, the proportion of tenants paying more than a quarter of their income in rent is almost eight times as high in “community housing” as it is in public housing.

Even over the last five years, governments have eroded public housing to the extent that the proportion of Australian dwellings that are public housing has been slashed by a further 10%. Today, just one out of every 34 dwellings in Australia belongs to public housing of some form. Yet governments are still continuing on the same course. Let’s stop all sell-offs – let’s fight for a massive increase in public housing instead! And for all public housing properties to be properly repaired! Let’s stop governments from driving tenants out of public housing by allowing properties to become so neglected that they become unfit for habitation!

FOR A NEW, CLASS STRUGGLE AGENDA TO LEAD THE WORKERS MOVEMENT

Many working class people hoped that with the despised Morrison government finally gone, their needs would be addressed. However, the new ALP government also has no commitment to the measures needed to reverse the decline in working class people’s living standards. This was clear even before the elections. To reassure the big end of town that it would not be taking decisive moves to redistribute income from the rich to the poor, the ALP announced that it would ape the conservatives in refusing to lift dole payments. They also made clear that they would not abolish anti-strike laws. That is little surprise. Nearly all these laws had been accepted by previous ALP governments and a few of the rules – such as the Keating government’s 1993 measure restricting strike action to limited bargaining periods – were actually first brought in by Labor. Meanwhile, the ALP’s housing affordability plan will not increase public housing but rather promises funds for just a modest increase in privately-operated “community housing”.

To be sure, ALP leaders would like to improve the lives of their working class base. However, the ALP social democrats are unwilling to seriously challenge the power of the capitalist bigwigs who use their enormous wealth and ownership of the media and economy to thoroughly dominate political life and state institutions. Given their acquiescence to these oligarchs and given that the interests of these capitalists and those of its working class base are counterposed, the Labor Party always ends up betraying its base. Meanwhile, although more progressive on social questions, the Greens too accept the domination of the capitalists. For unlike even the ALP, whose ranks are largely workers, the Greens include significant numbers of actual capitalist exploiters in their ranks and is politically dominated by upper-middle class elements loyal to capitalism.

This means that plunging workers’ living standards are not going to be reversed by the agenda of either the new government or by any of the parties currently in parliament. The way that working class people can advance their interests is through mass action, especially through strikes and other class struggle action by our trade unions. It is through such struggle that working class people have won whatever rights they still have today. In recent months, there have been strikes by NSW train and bus drivers, nurses and teachers that give a small taste of the kind of struggle needed. However, the current pro-ALP union leaders see such actions as supplementary to their main strategy of herding workers into supporting the election and maintaining of Labor governments that they hope will uphold workers’ interests. As we have outlined, this is a losing strategy.

Therefore, we need a new agenda to guide our workers movement. One that rather than seeking collaboration with the capitalist class by limiting demands to what is tolerable to them, will mobilise the working class in an all out struggle against the capitalist exploiters to fight for what the masses actually need. That means not only unleashing struggles for secure jobs for all and big pay rises but also demanding free provision of the social services most needed by the masses. Despite ruling class politicians constantly congratulating themselves about the existence of Medicare, truly free healthcare does not exist in Australia. Currently, the out-of-pocket expenses that a sick person has to cover for specialist fees above what Medicare reimburses can be debilitating. And as governments increasingly underfund the health system, these out-of-pocket expenses are growing. Meanwhile, the lack of Medicare coverage of dental expenses means that large chunks of the working class simply avoid going to the dentist until their teeth deteriorate to the point of an emergency. Similarly, many are foregoing needed specialist visits. This is all the more damaging because COVID in 2022 has been killing people in Australia at the highest rate during this pandemic and hundreds of thousands are suffering Long Covid. Moreover, the inequality of healthcare is so large that those who cannot afford private insurance must wait long periods to receive treatment for debilitating conditions. For example, the current median wait time for a public patient who needs knee replacement surgery to enable them to walk properly again is around eight months!

That is why we must demand truly free health care – that means that Medicare should fully cover all specialist visits, all surgeries, all essential medicine and all dental care and that there should be no long waiting times. Similarly, we need to fight for free education, which means no fees and no HECS debt for TAFE and university. We must also demand free, 24-hour childcare. This is not only a crucial cost of living measure but would help enable women’s full participation in economic life. That in turn is vital for advancing women’s economic independence, without which many women being battered by violent, or otherwise abusive, partners could be coerced by financial necessities into remaining with such abusers.

Striking nurses march in Sydney. NSW nurses, rail workers, bus drivers and teachers have held a series of stop works and strikes over the last several months to demand increased hiring to cope with excessive workloads and to defend their wages and conditions. These actions give a small taste of the kind of militant class struggle needed to reverse the plunge in working class people’s living standards.
Photo credit: Tim Swanston/ABC News

SANCTIONS ON RUSSIA DRIVE UP FUEL PRICES –
WESTERN POWERS’ ANTI-RUSSIA PROXY WAR

HARMS THE MASSES’ LIVING STANDARDS

A major reason for the cost of living crisis are the surging fuel prices. These prices are being driven up by the sanctions imposed on Russia by Washington, Canberra and other U.S. allies that back Ukraine in its war with Russia. We must oppose these sanctions! This is necessary not only to protect our living standards. For the Ukraine war has become a proxy war of the Western imperial powers to unjustly drive their would-be Russian rival down to the subordinate condition that she had been in during the first fifteen years after her devastating 1991-92 capitalist counterrevolution. Australian governments have sent Ukraine’s authoritarian regime hundreds of millions of dollars of military equipment, including howitzers (long-range artillery) and dozens of armoured vehicles, to add to the billions of dollars of increasingly heavy and sophisticated weapons sent to Kiev by Washington and its European allies, including anti-aircraft batteries, advanced long-range anti-ship missiles, drones, tanks and advanced HIMARS multiple-launch guided rocket systems. Although Russia is also ruled by an ambitious capitalist class, her lack of economic strength means that it is the U.S, British, Australian, German, Japanese and other Western ruling classes and not, for the most part, the Russian one that are superexploiting and often simply steamrolling through brutal military power (as they did in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Somalia) the peoples of Asia, the Pacific, Africa and Latin America. That is why if the Western proxy war on Russia is defeated it would be great for the peoples subjugated by imperialism. Such a serious setback to the authority of Australia’s capitalist rulers can only strengthen the ability to resist them. So we must demand: No military aid to Ukraine! Lift the sanctions on Russia!

However, the sanctions on Russia are not the only cause of soaring fuel and energy prices. Although the majority of Australia’s petroleum is imported, Australian corporate oil producers contribute to the high pump prices by selling fuel at the obscenely high world price. This is quadruply so with gas, which Australia is a major exporter of. Greedy Australian energy giants are selling gas at such a high price that it is not only sending residential heating costs through the roof but is driving up manufacturing and electricity prices that are flowing through the rest of the economy as well as pushing up home electricity bills. Meanwhile, power cuts have been threatened because profit-driven generator companies are trying to avoid selling electricity at the capped price when their fuel costs are so high. That is why all oil, gas and electricity corporations must be immediately placed under strict public control. Fuel and power costs must be driven down at the expense of the profits of energy corporations!

BRING THE ECONOMY INTO PUBLIC OWNERSHIP UNDER WORKERS RULE

The bulk of Australia’s energy sector is owned by super-rich, Australian shareholders. Among them is Mike Cannon-Brookes who owns the largest stake in electricity and gas giant AGL. Australia’s third richest tycoon with a $28 billion fortune, Cannon-Brookes is known for his obscenely extravagant lifestyle. Four years ago, he paid the highest amount ever for a house when he bought a Sydney estate for $100 million! The fact that we need to take control of energy industries away from the hands of such people inevitably poses the question: why should these filthy rich capitalists be owning such key sectors at all? We should fight to confiscate the oil, gas and power sectors from their big shareholders and place them into public ownership. Similarly, we need to bring all the key social service sectors into public ownership. Part of why we are being hit with such high out of pocket health costs is that so much of the Medicare budget goes into the pockets of the rich tycoons owning private hospitals, pathology and radiology services and pharmacies – like Sonic Healthcare big shareholder, Michael Boyd, and billionaire Chemist Warehouse owners, Jack Gance and Mario Verrocchi. As a result, the service outcomes produced by each dollar of public money that’s spent is severely truncated. The same applies to childcare, where government subsidies end up feeding the profits of the companies that operate the sector. In public housing too, a good part of the budget ends up in the bank accounts of the owners of construction firms and maintenance contractors – including corporate giants like Downer and Ventia. So let us struggle to ensure that all parts of the operation of healthcare, education, public housing, childcare and aged care are brought into public ownership.

To ensure that all these social services are provided for free, more public funds do need to be allocated to them. But where will the money come from ask neoliberal apologists. It will come from confiscating the most profitable sectors of the economy from the capitalists, starting with the mining industry. Mining profits are so huge that the wealth of just the five richest of Australia’s mining billionaires increased by a staggering $19 billion in just the last year – more than three and a half times what all governments spent on public housing! However, to bring the mining, energy and social service sectors into public ownership requires taking on the tyranny of the oligarchs that own these sectors – oligarchs like Cannon-Brookes, Gina Rinehart and Andrew Forrest – who leverage their enormous wealth to keep state institutions under their control and who disproportionately fund political advertising, political parties, think tanks and lobbyists. Therefore, to bring substantial sectors into the collective hands of the people requires the working class to sweep away the whole capitalist-dominated bureaucratic and political machinery and to construct a new workers state. Based on democratically elected working class people’s councils, such a state would bring all significant parts of the economy into the people’s common, that is socialist, ownership and thereby enable the building of a society that would guarantee secure jobs, improving living standards and free quality social services for all. In doing so it would lay the economic basis for dissipating the inequality faced by women and minorities.

We have living proof that such a socialist system indeed works. For in the world’s most populous country, the Peoples Republic of China (PRC), socialistic rule has ensured that she is the one large country whose masses have not been hit by rising food prices. Although China’s transition to socialism is incomplete and deformed and threatened by intense hostile capitalist pressure, the fact that all her major oil and gas, power, food processing and warehousing, shipping, banking and stevedoring firms are under public ownership has enabled her to not only have an inflation rate of just 2.5% but to have actually falling food prices. And even while ensuring that her people have a COVID death rate per person that is 112 times less than Australia’s, the PRC’s socialistic system has ensured that, unlike here, her workers’ real wages have continued to rise during the pandemic. Indeed, for the last 15 years, the PRC has been enjoying the world’s fastest growing real wages. She has ensured that the proportion of her population suffering homelessness is much lower than in Australia through giving her people eight times greater access to public housing than we who live here in Australia. By curbing capitalist pre-school and tuition firms and replacing them with public and non-for profit childcare and children’s leisure activity services, the PRC has reduced her masses’ financial costs of raising children.

Yet, these achievements of socialistic rule and the fact that China continues to gradually lift herself up from the terrible poverty of her pre-1949 capitalist times is what terrifies the world’s capitalist powers. For not only are they enraged that the PRC’s cooperation with developing countries is impeding their economic rape of these countries, the capitalist powers fear that the PRC’s course will eventually incite their own working classes to demand that their economies also be brought under social ownership. Yet that is precisely why the working class in Australia and the other capitalist countries must stand with socialistic China. Let’s advance the struggle for working class ownership of the economy here by defending the existence of such a system in the world’s most populous country! Let’s oppose the U.S./Australia military build up against socialistic China! No to the lying “human rights” propaganda attacks on the PRC over Uyghurs, Tibet and Hong Kong!

If we can protect the PRC’s advance on the socialist course set by her 1949 toiling people’s revolution and if we can popularise knowledge of the benefits provided by her socialistic system, even in the partial form that it exists in, we can promote the need for a system based on public ownership in this country. The plunging living standards, unaffordable housing and lack of economic security of the capitalist system is pushing the masses to seek anti-capitalist solutions. However, in response, capitalist ruling classes are spreading racism to divide and divert the masses that they exploit. That is why racist far right forces have been growing in the U.S., Germany, India and here. To build the inter-racial unity necessary to fight the powerful capitalists, we must consciously oppose racist influence by mobilising the working class in defence of targeted ethnic groups. For union action to support Aboriginal people’s struggle against racist state terror and all-sided oppression! For workers’ struggle to demand the rights of citizenship for all guest workers, international students and asylum seekers! Bring the long-suffering Nauru refugees here! For united mass action of our workers movement and people of colour communities to crush violent white supremacist forces! Let’s also reject those who say that we can protect living standards by favouring Australian businesses over their overseas rivals. Such agendas only set local workers against their worker sisters and brothers overseas while obscuring workers from the truth that they can only defend their conditions by struggling against the local bosses that exploit them. Let’s understand that the main call of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, “Workers of All Countries Unite”, remains as crucial today as it was when the Manifesto was first issued.

Another famous line of our Manifesto – that “the spectre of communism” is haunting the capitalist world – also rings loud today. The escalating economic crisis in the capitalist world, the social decay of capitalist societies, the capitalist powers’ horror at the successes of socialistic rule in China and the terrifying extent to which the imperialist regimes are willing to risk World War III by waging a proxy war on fellow capitalist Russia in good part because they want to weaken her ability to obstruct their war plans against Russia’s socialistic Chinese, friendly neighbour proves this. The Communist Manifesto’s main agenda is to replace the rule of the capitalist class with the rule of the working class. We have made good progress in this task in countries that make up one in five of the world’s people. But we have much work to do! We need to speed up the completion of the Manifesto’s tasks because it is increasingly clear that decaying capitalism not only threatens the masses’ living standards but humanity’s very existence.

The Communist Manifesto made clear that the seizure of political power by the working class is preceded by a period of “more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society” where the working class “now and then” are victorious in defending their living standards against the capitalists but the “the real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers”. To build the unity, strength, self-confidence, organisation and political awareness that’s needed so we can advance towards the working class rule that we so badly need, we must, right now, mobilise militant class struggle to fight for huge wage rises, the rights of permanency for gig workers, a massive increase in low-rent public housing and the nationalisation of the oil and gas, power and social service sectors. Let’s build a party to spearhead the fight for this Communist Manifesto agenda! As Marx and Engels pronounced at the end of their famous tract: Let the ruling classes tremble at a communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

FROM THE U.S. TO AUSTRALIA:
FOR FREE, EASILY ACCESSIBLE,
ABORTION ON DEMAND!

Above photo: Thousands marched in Sydney on July 2 in protest at the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of abortion rights in America and to demand free, safe, legal, abortion on demand in Australia. The vigour and determination of the protesters reflected their understanding that those attacking abortion rights were not only opposing an absolutely crucial right for women but were attacking women’s very right to decide what they do with their own bodies and how they lives their own lives.
Photo Credit: Reuters

FOLLOWING MASSIVE U.S. ATTACK ON WOMEN’S RIGHTS,
MOBILISE THE WORKERS MOVEMENT TO FIGHTBACK

FROM THE U.S. TO AUSTRALIA:
FOR FREE, EASILY ACCESSIBLE,
ABORTION ON DEMAND!

1 July 2022: The U.S. regime struck a savage blow against women when its Supreme Court overturned its nearly 50 year old Roe vs Wade ruling that had tenuously given American women a degree of abortion rights. Now, 26 of America’s 52 states are set to deny women those rights or to severely restrict them. It will be low-income women – and because of intense racist discrimination that often means black women as well as other women of colour – who will be hit hardest. Since a women’s decision to seek an abortion is often an economic one, the majority of women who had been getting abortions in the U.S. were those below or just above the poverty line. Yet this is precisely the same group who will now find it extremely difficult to pay for the travel and accommodation – often while suffering loss of income from taking time off work – to travel to states where abortion is legal.

To make matters worse, the majority of black women, the women most hurt by the Supreme Court overturn ruling, live in the very same southern states that are now outlawing abortion. For many such black and low-income women, the stripping of abortion rights will mean that they will either be forced to continue with pregnancies that they do not want, which could well consign them and their children to further immiseration, or will be compelled to seek dangerous backyard abortions that could result in their death, or if they get caught, imprisonment. Trotskyist Platform insists that women must have the right to safe, free and widely accessible abortion on demand. We also say that there must not be any restriction on women accessing abortion care in even the later stages of pregnancy. Moreover, women must not be forced to undergo compulsory “counseling” which only adds to the stress of what can often already be an anxious time for her, when she may have to deal with pressure from husbands, boyfriends and family as well as ignorant stigma from broader society. We demand the right to abortion that is completely on demand for women in the U.S. and for women everywhere, including here in Australia.

Right now in Australia, women generally have more of the right to choose than in the United States. In recent years, important victories have been won here. In October 2019, a law came into force that finally decriminalised abortion in NSW. This is not the result of the benevolence of its pro-capitalist parliament but a product of a decades-long struggle by abortion rights activists and supporters of women’s rights, including from sections of the trade union movement. However, women are far from having the full right to abortion on demand in Australia. For example, if a woman wants a later term abortion in NSW, that is after 22 weeks of gestation, whether they will be able to go ahead is out of their hands. That decision lies with two medical practitioners who must decide whether the practice is “appropriate”. In Tasmania, such restrictions come into force after just 16 weeks of gestation. Meanwhile, Western Australia has this country’s most draconian laws. After 20 weeks gestation, abortion is basically banned, with a women only able to access services if two doctors out of a panel of six find that she or the foetus has a severe medical condition. Before this period, women can only access abortion care after first going through a “counseling” session with a doctor different to the one providing the services. We need to fight here to remove all these serious curtailments to the right to abortion in Australia. There needs to be a major struggle to ensure that whatever rights to abortion that do exist are actually accessible for working class and rural women – and especially for Aboriginal women who are often forced to live in poverty in rural areas. Many of the abortion services that are currently available are privately run and thus the procedure is often out of reach of lower income women. Thus, ensuring women’s true right to choose means not only winning the full right to abortion on demand but also requires ensuring that the procedure is a free and widely available service provided by the public health system; and it also means ensuring that lower-income women are lifted out of poverty.

Hundreds march for abortion rights in the city of St Petersburg in the U.S. state of Florida. There have been spirited and massive pro-choice demonstrations in the U.S. following the Supreme Court’s savage blow against women’s right to choose.
Photo Credit: WFTS

Women’s Rights Are Workers Rights

The abortion rights in the U.S. provided by Roe vs Wade had always been partial. Indeed, Texas and Oklahoma had effectively banned abortion even before the recent court ruling by passing laws enabling civil lawsuits against women getting abortions. A notorious late 1970s law passed in the time of Democrat president, Jimmy Carter, called the Hyde Amendment, prevents federal funding for abortion. Therefore, many low-income women simply could not afford an abortion even in the time when Roe vs Wade stood. Nevertheless, the recent court decision is a huge setback for women’s rights. In response, women in the U.S., joined by men who support women’s rights, have held huge protests. Trotskyist Platform stands in urgent solidarity with those fighting on the streets of America for women’s right to choose what they do with their own bodies.

The Supreme Court decision was condemned by senior U.S. Democrat Party members including president, Joe Biden. The Democrats have been, with success, taking control of the mass protests and saying that people need to vote for them in order to push back against the attacks on abortion rights spearheaded by the reactionary Republicans. However, the Democrats’ commitment to abortion rights is at best half-hearted. Biden himself has for decades been a strong supporter of the notorious Hyde Amendment that denied women access to federal funding to pay for abortion care. He only changed his position before the 2020 presidential elections after being attacked for his stance. Meanwhile, there have been many times where there has been a Democrat president and a Democrat controlled congress, yet the party has stubbornly refused to legislate the right to abortion on demand, despite this right long being supported by a sizable majority of Americans. Although most of those on American streets marching for abortion that have illusions in the Democrats or are rank-and-file Democrat members are sincere in their support for abortion rights, many rightly suspect that many a Democrat leader is half happy at the court ruling since it enables them to win votes from the right-wing Republicans on the promise of upholding abortion rights.

The very partial nature of the Democrats’ commitment to abortion rights flows from the fact that no less than the conservative Republicans, the Democrats are a party dominated by capitalists. The capitalist system in turn is tied up with an obsession on insisting that everyone conforms to the traditional family structure, in particular as a family economic unit. The wealthy capitalists have an attachment to this structure because they are fixated with passing on their property to, usually male, heirs. However, so as to be sure that their wealth isn’t claimed by the patriarch of another family, they want their property to be passed on to heirs who are indisputably theirs. This obsession with handing down their property to their own heirs and, thus, with ensuring that their wives do not bear children to other men drive rich propertied males’ compulsion to socially – and, thus, economically – isolate their wives. Yet the capitalists want everyone else to also adhere to the same structure that serves their needs, even the working class who own no commodity-producing property. This is because capitalists see the division of the masses into separate family economic units as being useful to, on the one hand, preventing workers from uniting against them and on the other hand with helping them to instill discipline and conservative values in the next generation. Moreover, greedy capitalist ruling classes do not want to actually pay people to conduct the essential tasks of housework and child rearing. And so it is held incumbent upon women to, without any pay, conduct these important social functions; work that in original human civilisations – including those of most of Australia’s Aboriginal nations – had humanely and quite rightly been carried out as the collective responsibility of whole communities. Given that the capitalists’ interests are in forcing everyone into economic units based on the traditional family structure, they view with hostility anything that deviates or challenges this, whether it be independent women empowered by the right to decide what to do with their own bodies, lesbian and gay relationships or trans people. Thus, women in leading positions in the Democrat party, which given the nature of the party means that they are either directly from the ruling class or are otherwise pro-capitalist in their politics, are torn between wanting their own personal freedoms and rights as female human beings on the one hand and, on the other, as capitalists, wanting to do everything possible to herd everyone into nuclear family units through measures that necessarily oppress women.

Yet for the same reasons that even progressive-minded women from the capitalist class are limited in their ability to stand for women’s rights, it is the united working class – in which history has destined working class women to play the lead role – that has a strong interest in spearheading the struggle for women’s emancipation. The workers movement needs working class women to have the right to control their bodies so that they will be feisty and independent and can, thus, play a leading role in uniting all their class to struggle for workers rights against the capitalist exploiters. Or as the peak trade union body in the north-eastern U.S. state of Vermont, the Vermont State Labor Council AFL-CIO, put it: Women’s Rights Are Workers Rights! Moreover, through their power to turn on and off production, the workers movement has not only the interests to stand up for women’s rights but the power to force the ruling class to concede rights to women through strike action and other mass actions. However, industrial action necessarily hurts the profits of all the capitalists, whether they are open right-wing reactionaries or supposed “progressives.” That is why the struggle to mobilise working class power in support of the struggle for women’s liberation will be a struggle that must be waged against all wings of the capitalist class – even its most progressive members. The extent to which working class power in the U.S. can today be unleashed in the urgent fight for abortion rights depends on the extent to which the workers movement can be unchained from its present subordination to the capitalist Democratic Party.

Here, mobilising the workers movement to support women’s full right to choose and to support the broader struggle for women’s emancipation requires breaking the stranglehold of the Labor Party – and pro-ALP and pro-Greens agendas – on the workers movement. Although most individuals in the ALP support abortion rights, the party’s stance is half-hearted given that it includes staunch anti-abortion elements within its leading layers. As a party that seeks to reconcile workers’ interests with those of the capitalist exploiters, the ALP parliamentary and union tops seek to restrict industrial action to being a supplementary add-on to their main parliamentary game rather than fighting for a program that fully unleashes the power of our unions in an all out struggle for workers’ and women’s rights. Meanwhile, although more progressive on social questions than the ALP, like the ALP the Greens are also congenitally opposed to a program of militant class struggle. For unlike even the ALP, whose ranks are largely workers, the Greens actually include significant numbers of actual capitalist exploiters in their ranks and this party is politically dominated by upper-middle class elements loyal to capitalism.

Anti-abortion politician Claire Scriven is a cabinet member in the South Australian Labor government and the state’s Minister for Primary Industries and Regional Development and Minister for Forest Industries. On July 2, Scriven joined politicians from the Liberal Party and the hard right Family First party in an anti-abortion propaganda training seminar. The event was held five days before South Australia’s law decriminalising abortion in the state finally goes into force and provocatively went ahead after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling gutting already limited abortion rights in America. The fact that the ALP includes such hardline opponents of women’s right to choose shows that it is an obstacle to mobilising the workers movement in support of women’s rights.
Photo Credit: South Australia ALP website

What Do You Mean That America is a “Liberal Democracy”?

The overturning of the already limited abortion rights in the U.S. has made a mockery of the U.S. ruling class’ claim to be the bastion of “liberal democratic values.” Of course, this was always a lie. Both the U.S. and Australia are neither truly “democratic” nor “liberal.” Their “democracies” are dominated by capitalist oligarchs who own and control the media, use their wealth and ownership of the economy to control state institutions by thousands of threads and use their billions to dominate political narratives by disproportionately funding political parties, paying for political advertising, establishing think tanks and “independent” NGOs and hiring lobbyists. As for “liberal values”, the U.S. has the world’s largest prison population and jails its people at a rate six time higher than in China. Moreover, both the anti-abortion Republicans and the more “progressive” Democrats supported the U.S. training and arming – and now hailing as valiant war heroes – of Ukraine’s ultra-right wing Azov Regiment, which along with other violent fascist groups there, have not only attacked Roma, leftists, Jews and pro-Russia activists over the last eight years but have conducted violent assaults on Ukraine’s LGBTIQ+ community and women’s rights activists; including simultaneously attacking, in several cities of Ukraine, participants in the 2018 International Women’s Day rallies. Meanwhile, here, the capitalist regime kills Aboriginal people in state custody, imprisons refugees in hell-hole camps and in Afghanistan committed horrific racist war crimes.

The claims of Washington and Canberra to be champions of “liberal democracy” are mainly used to justify their meddling in countries around the world and especially to sell their intensifying Cold War drive against socialistic China. However, undermining the mantras of Western governments is the fact that China has one of the most liberal abortion laws in the world. Article 19 of the Population and Family Planning Law of the People’s Republic of China grants the unrestricted right to contraception and abortion and Article 21 stipulates that these rights should be enjoyed for free.

Anti-communist propagandists have long sought to denigrate China’s liberal anti-abortion laws as merely a means to enforce a one-child policy. However, that policy was long ago abandoned and China is now actively trying to increase the country’s birth rate. Yet the liberal abortion laws remain. China’s liberal abortion laws were, indeed, confirmed in an amended version of her Population and Family Planning Law that was passed just ten months ago. There are, however, two small autonomous parts of China where abortion on demand does not exist: that is in Macau and in Hong Kong (as well as in the rogue capitalist Chinese region of Taiwan). This is a legacy of laws brought in by the former Western “liberal, democratic” colonial rulers of these territories. In both these regions, abortion is considered a crime which is only allowed as an exception when two doctors determine that there is a serious risk to the physical or mental health of a woman (the Macau law is stricter than the Hong Kong one). As a result of lingering influence of Christian churches and Christian schools from the British colonial times, there is often a terrible stigma against Hong Kong women obtaining abortion care. Furthermore, in Hong Kong it is hard to access abortion services from public providers,
meaning that the right to choose is out of reach for lower-income women. For these reasons, many Hong Kong women travel to Mainland China to access abortion services. Unfortunately, because the Beijing government has accommodated the Western imperialists and the local capitalists dominating Hong Kong and Macau by granting these regions a high degree of autonomy under a “one country, two systems” formula, it has not thus far moved to overturn the colonial-era restrictions on abortion in these regions. We call on the Chinese government not to bend to the sensibilities of those demanding the “two systems” part of “one country, two systems” and to instead move to bring the right to free abortion on demand overwhelmingly enjoyed by women in the socialistic mainland of China to the regions of Macau and Hong Kong.

It is telling too that the biggest ever blow to a women’s right to choose – even greater in scale than what has just happened in the U.S. – occurred as a result of a triumph of “liberal democracy”, by which the Western powers really mean capitalism. In her socialistic days, women in Poland had enjoyed the right to abortion on demand. However, soon after Poland became the first country in the former Soviet bloc to be swept away by capitalist counterrevolution, women’s right to choose became severely restricted in 1990. Today, women in Poland can only obtain abortion care if their physical health is seriously endangered by continuing the pregnancy or if she is raped – and even in the latter case she can only have the abortion up to 13 weeks’ gestation.

June 1987, Poland: Right-wing then pope, John Paul II very publicly gives his blessing to the then leader of Poland’s anticommunist forces, Lech Walesa. Walesa’s anti-secular, capitalist counterrevolutionary movement known as Solidarnosc (“Solidarity”) was also rabidly backed by the then conservative leaders of the U.S. and Britain, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher as well as by the Hawke Labor government in Australia. Upon seizing power and restoring capitalist rule, the new Solidarnsoc government followed through on its reactionary platform and wasted no time in carrying out mass privatisations and overturning the liberal abortion rights that women had previously enjoyed during the period of socialistic rule in Poland. The triumph of Poland’s Pope-backed capitalist counterrevolutionaries, which Western capitalist regimes had dubbed “a victory for liberal democracy”, was in fact the greatest setback to women’s control over their own bodies in any country since World War II (now, the recent U.S. Supreme Court has made the U.S. the country to have the second biggest rollback of those rights). As the chant popular with women standing for abortion rights goes: “Keep your rosaries off my ovaries!”
Photo credit: Arturo Mari/AFP

The Terrifying Rise of Far-Right Reaction in the Capitalist World

Right-wing forces wildly celebrated the court decision overturning Roe vs Wade. The momentum that these forces have been given could threaten women’s right to choose in even those American states that currently allow abortion. This terrible setback to women’s right to choose is indeed closely related to the growth of hard-right forces. The Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe vs Wade had been stacked with hardline conservative judges by racist former Republican Party president, Donald Trump. Trump celebrated the court ruling as did his estranged ex-vice president, Mike Pence. Now with the Democrat administration overseeing plummeting workers’ real wages and rampant inflation, the increasingly right-wing Republican Party is leading in polls for November’s mid-term congressional elections. Here too in Australia, far-right forces have been gaining ground. Along with the ever clearer right-wing trajectory of the Liberal Party, signified by the ascendancy of racist hardliner, Peter Dutton, to its leadership, forces even further to the right have increased their influence. At the recent federal elections, such far-right parties increased their votes by almost 60%, allowing them to gain almost one in eight votes. As well as the senate seats retained by One Nation, the United Australia Party, led by greedy billionaire Clive Palmer and rabid right-wing former Liberal Parry politician, Craig Kelly, was able to win a senate seat in Victoria after having won no seats in the previous elections.

Moreover, the growth of parliamentary based far-right parties has inevitably been associated with the strengthening of violent fascist gangs on the streets. Let’s remember, that it was less than a year and a half ago when far-right mobs incited by Trump tried to stage a right-wing coup in America. Then, just six weeks ago, a white supremacist, shouting racial slurs, shot dead ten black people in a mass shooting at a supermarket frequented by predominantly black people in New York state’s Buffalo. In March 2019, an Australian neo-Nazi, raised in Australia’s racist environment, murdered 51 Muslim people in a shooting rampage at two mosques in New Zealand’s Christchurch. Meanwhile, every day in Australia, violent bigots and those incited by them harass, abuse and physically attack Aboriginal people and people of Chinese background, as well as other people of colour and those from LGBTIQ+ communities. Emboldened by the recent U.S. court ruling, the growing Australian right-wing extremist forces are now likely to unleash more intense harassment and violence against women entering abortion clinics.

So why, in the 21st century, is all this bigotry rising in places like the U.S., Australia, France and Germany? In short it is because of the increasing decay of the capitalist order. To understand how capitalist decay spawns right-wing reaction, one needs to examine the social base of the Far Right. The stronghold of extreme right-wing forces is amongst economically insecure layers of the self-employed middle class – which includes farmers, self-employed tradies and contractors, owner truck drivers and small business owners (in short the class that we Marxists refer to as the petit bourgeoisie) – as well as smaller-scale members of the actual capitalist exploiting class. Now when the working class moves powerfully to challenge the capitalist exploiters, the best of the petit bourgeoisie will identify their interests with those of the workers movement. However, when the workers movement is on the back foot, the most insecure and reactionary members of the self-employed middle class, the petit bourgeois, will be manipulated by capitalist demagogues to turn their frustrations against those doing it harder than them. Instead of seeking to join with the working class to jointly seize the best parts of the cake stolen by the big end of town they will be mobilised to fight against the rest of the masses for the crumbs. In this way, sections of the self-employed middle class are being manipulated to obsess about maintaining their social position one or two rungs above the working class by seeking to push down those from the working class seeking to expand their rights – especially if they are from its most downtrodden layers like Aboriginal people, women workers seeking equal pay, unemployed workers and people of colour. Since the self-employed are essentially small businessmen, divided by the reality that everyone else operating in their market is an economic rival, they can easily fall prey to divisive racist rhetoric. Since they share the capitalists’ same pre-occupation with passing on productive property to male heirs – and sometimes they are even more obsessive about this than the big capitalists given that their businesses are much smaller and, thus, all the more precious and precarious – the insecure self-employed can easily fall for extreme “family values” agendas and, consequently, anti-abortion ones. Moreover, not brought together with others at the point of production like wage workers and hopelessly dependent on both the elements (the weather in the case of farmers) and big capitalist-generated market forces beyond their control, the isolated and precariously operating petit bourgeoise is especially susceptible to the influence of rabid religious forces.

So why then is middle class reaction becoming ever stronger. There are three closely related reasons. For one, the size of the self-employed layer has actually increased in countries like the U.S. and Australia over the last few decades. Theoretically, this should not be happening. Smaller scale production of goods and services is usually less efficient than large-scale production. However, the capitalists artificially propped up the size of this class by laying off workers from maintenance, courier, trucking, cleaning and other jobs and rehiring these workers as contractors. The corporate bosses made these moves because, although the new arrangement led to a loss of technical efficiency, it undercut union organising. So the social class on which right-wing reaction is based has actually grown in the U.S., Australia and other capitalist countries.

However, this would not have automatically led to such a rise in right-wing reaction if the workers movement had been active and determined enough to fight for its rights so decisively that it drew in the self-employed behind it. That this has not thus far happened is the fault of the social democratic current leaders of the workers movement, which in Australia means the ALP. Meanwhile, the reason that sections of the insecure middle class have moved from supporting traditional conservative politics to backing aggressive far-right agendas, is that the decay of the capitalist system and its repeated economic crises have increased economic insecurity. Today, it is surging fuel and other raw material prices that are buffeting the self-employed layers as they are all the masses. Furthermore, the more that the capitalists need to exploit to keep their system afloat, the more that its representatives promote racism, bigotry and extreme religion to divide the masses that they exploit.

What all this means is that even though the U.S. Democrats and the Australian ALP – and still more strongly the Greens – reject the agendas of the Hard Right, their loyalty to the capitalist order means that they uphold the very system that is spawning right-wing reaction. That is why one cannot resist the Far Right by supporting the Democrats in the U.S. or the ALP and Greens in Australia. After all, it was eight years of the relatively liberal Obama administration which, incapable of providing economic security to the masses, created the conditions for the rise of right-wing reaction that led to Trump’s ascendancy. Similarly, if Albanese’s ALP is allowed to carry out its pro-capitalist agenda, it will allow Dutton or others even more extreme to eventually gain the ascendancy. This is doubly so since right now the masses’ living standards are plummeting and there are even signs that we are headed towards yet another deep global capitalist economic crisis.

The force that can resist right-wing reaction and the socio-economic conditions which breed it is the multi-racial working class. However, it can only do this by opposing all the representatives of the capitalist class in unleashing struggles for secure jobs for all through forcing bosses to increase hiring at the expense of their profits and by stopping rampant inflation through winning the confiscation of the greedy oil, gas and power corporations and their transfer into public ownership. At the same time the workers movement must oppose the turning of its ranks into self-employed contractors by fighting for contractors and gig workers to be hired – and often rehired – by companies into jobs with high wages and all the rights of permanency. When the working class decisively challenges the capitalists in this way and fights for additional measures that are both in the interests of themselves and those of the middle class – like nationalising the banks and lowering power prices – then it can draw in the self-employed middle class behind them and make the latter realise that it is possible to fight against the exploiters above them rather than cowardly kicking those in a social position below them. Recent strike action by NSW nurses, rail and bus workers and teachers give a small taste of the potential for working-class resistance. However, to unleash the power of the workers movement requires replacing the pro-ALP social democratic leadership dominating the working class and its unions with one that stands for uncompromising opposition to the capitalist order.

The revolutionary party of the working class that we need, in which women and people of colour will necessarily play a dominant role, would champion the cause of all the oppressed. It would unite with all the oppressed in mobilising mass action to physically defend Aboriginal people, targeted ethnic communities, LGBTIQ+ people and abortion clinics from violent right-wing forces. It would also struggle for the complete liberation of women through fighting for women’s complete economic independence. This means standing for equal pay for equal work, guaranteed permanent jobs for all, a massive increase in low-rent public housing and free around the clock childcare. We also fight for a system that will deliver free pre-school education, free school lunches at all schools and after-school sports, music and cultural activities provided for free by the state alongside free transport from school to and from these activities. The struggle to implement and provide the resources for all these measures poses the need to strip the economy away from the filthy rich capitalist exploiters and place it into socialist, public ownership under a workers government. When such socialist revolutions place economies into the collective hands of the masses on a global scale, the capitalist decay and economic insecurity that breeds far-right forces will be done away with and racist, male chauvinist and homophobic bigotry will finally be consigned to the dustbin of history.

Defeat U.S., British, Australian and German Imperialism’s Proxy War to Weaken and Stifle Russia!

Photo Above: Firefighters put out flames in buildings in the central Maisky market in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk hit by shelling from Ukrainian forces on 13 June. Five people were killed in the Ukrainian attack including one child. Residential areas, hospitals and markets in the city, which is controlled by pro-Russian separatists, have been repeatedly hit by Ukrainian artillery attacks over the last eight years. Such attacks have escalated this month causing dozens of civilians to be killed.
Photo credit: Stringer/Reuters

Don’t Let the Western Capitalist Rulers
Reinforce Their Tyranny Over the World!

Defeat U.S., British, Australian
and German Imperialism’s Proxy
War to Weaken and Stifle Russia!

26 June 2022: Last month U.S. president Joe Biden signed a law granting Ukraine $US40 billion in military supplies and economic aid in order to sustain its war against Russia. The package is so huge that the direct military component of it amounts to almost five times Ukraine’s total 2020 defence expenditure! Many U.S. allies, including Britain, Denmark, Germany, France, Poland, Norway, Estonia, Sweden and the Czech Republic have also been rapidly increasing their military support to Kiev. Here, the former Morrison Liberal government and the current Labor Albanese government have sent Ukraine’s authoritarian regime hundreds of millions of dollars of military equipment including howitzers (long-range artillery) and dozens of armored vehicles.

The level of backing to Ukraine by the Western imperialist ruling classes has risen dramatically since the early weeks of the Russian intervention. In our statement written thirteen days after the Russian invasion, we stated that: “The West’s aid to Ukraine is not at a level aimed at achieving total Ukrainian victory but rather at bleeding Russia over a long period. Thus, much of the weaponry that the Western imperialists have supplied to Ukraine, like hand-held missiles and rockets, is most suitable for a guerilla war against Russia… Currently therefore, we cannot say that the large amounts of Western support to Ukraine is equivalent to the U.S., NATO and Australia being directly at war with Russia.” We qualified that observation by stating that, “It is, of course, possible that the West could qualitatively change their level of assistance.” Well, what we labelled then as a possibility has now become the reality. High on their own propaganda that they have been feeding the masses that Kiev is actually winning the war, Washington and its allies have been pumping the Ukrainian regime’s war campaign with ever greater military assistance.  In the wake of the U.S. congress passing the $US40 billion aid package to Ukraine, the politically connected American think tank, Centre for Strategic & International Studies, stated that:

“For the first five weeks of the conflict, military support to Ukraine averaged about $30 million a day (excluding economic and humanitarian support and the costs of U.S. forces deployed to Europe for the crisis). In April, a series of $800 million aid packages implied a level of $100 million a day. This package increases the aid level to $135 million a day.”

It is not just the level of military assistance that has changed but the character of it. Washington and Co. have been sending ever heavier and more sophisticated weapons to the Ukrainian regime. This includes anti-aircraft batteries, advanced long-range anti-ship missiles, drones, tanks and self-propelled howitzers. Most notably, this month the Biden administration started sending the Ukrainian regime advanced HIMARS multiple-launch guided rocket systems that have much greater range than Ukraine’s existing artillery systems. Meanwhile, as well as providing crucial intelligence assistance to Ukraine and training large numbers of Ukrainian troops in bases in Germany, Britain and France, Western imperialist militaries now have troops on the ground in Ukraine directly training and organising Kiev’s forces. Several Western mainstream media outlets reported that in mid-April British special forces moved into Kiev to assist the Ukrainian military. CIA spies are also reportedly now operating within Ukraine as are U.S. commandos.

The HIMARS guided rocket artillery system. The advanced HIMARS system has significantly greater range than the Ukrainian military’s existing artillery. This month the U.S. started sending the HIMARS to Ukraine as part of its markedly increased participation in this war.
Photo credit: Markus Rauchenberger

Alongside their stepped up military intervention, the Western imperialists have greatly ramped up their economic sanctions on Russia. They have also dialed up the intensity of their propaganda war. Initially the tycoon-owned and government-run media outlets in the U.S., Europe and Australia, as part of their anti-Russia war propaganda, claimed that Russia was killing many civilians by accident in the course of air and artillery strikes on military targets. Later, the Western media started lying through their teeth by claiming that Russia was deliberately bombing residential areas, schools and hospitals. Then they escalated their propaganda still further by working with the Ukrainian regime and Western “NGOs”, intelligence agencies and public relations consultants to claim that Russian troops had senselessly massacred a large number of Ukrainian civilians while withdrawing from towns north of Kiev, like Bucha. Given that the Russian withdrawal from this region was planned and announced days beforehand as part of her military’s overall strategic plan, the Western media’s claims are extremely hard to believe. Why would Russian troops making an orderly withdrawal, in which they were able to take all their working heavy weapons with them, choose to leave behind supposedly indiscriminately slaughtered civilians on the side of the road in the perfect position to be used as propaganda against them?

When it comes to lying propaganda, the most rabid outlets have been the BBC, the Australia regime’s ABC and the German government’s Deutsche Welle – the latter spewing out propaganda with all the zeal and dishonesty of their political forebears in Joseph Goebbels’ Nazi propaganda machine. In the first few weeks after Russia began its operation on February 24, these news outlets, while bombarding their populations with blanket anti-Russia propaganda, on rare occasions did made oblique references as to why many Russian speaking people in Ukraine’s eastern Donbass region were welcoming of the Russian intervention. On still rarer occasions they did mention the fact that many Russia-speaking people had been killed during the course of an eight year regional conflict that preceded the Russian intervention. A very small number of outlets briefly also reported, while downplaying the significance of these crimes, that Ukrainian soldiers had been abusing and torturing Russian prisoners of war. Yet in the weeks since, even the smallest pretense of balanced reporting has disappeared entirely from the Western media. Any, even limp, criticism of the Ukrainian regime and its military has been completely purged from all reports. The fact that Ukrainian troops and fascist paramilitaries have been shelling residential areas in Donbass cities held by pro-Russian forces has been completely whitewashed. So has the overwhelming evidence that Ukrainian forces have been using civilians as human shields by hiding in residential areas, schools and hospitals; and by preventing civilians from leaving the underground bunkers where Ukrainian forces established bases in their now defeated strongholds of Mariupol and Severodonetsk.

The intensifying character of the Western imperialists’ intervention into Ukraine can be gleaned by examining their media’s coverage of Ukraine’s fascist paramilitary forces. After Ukraine had a U.S.-backed right-wing coup in 2014 and war erupted in the eastern part of the country, the Western mainstream media did their best to downplay the spearhead role played by fascist forces in both the coup and the ensuing war. Nevertheless, there were occasional reports in the Western media highlighting the extreme white supremacist and anti-Semitic character of Ukraine’s Azov paramilitaries and the surge in racist violent attacks by such forces against Ukraine’s Roma community, pro-Russia activists and feminists. However, after Russia’s February 24 intervention such reports largely vanished. The executions of pro-Russia civilians by the likes of the Azov regiment was simply not reported by the Western media. Instead of the Azov being described as what they are – neo-Nazi fascists – the Western media used the less damning and vaguer term, “far right.” Then, as the U.S. and its allies stepped up their support for Ukraine by several gears, even that latter description was dropped. The likes of the BBC even started claiming that statements about the racist and neo-Nazi character of the Azov “have been widely discredited” … even though outlets such as their own did at one time occasionally make such “discredited” reports themselves! Most recently, when large numbers of the Mariupol-based Azov soldiers were trapped (along with an apparently smaller number of regular Ukrainian troops) in underground bunkers in a Mariupol steel works, the supposedly “democratic” Western media started positively lionizing the Azov white supremacists as heroes!

Left: Some of the nearly 2,500 Ukrainian combatants that surrendered to Russian forces in Mariupol are taken away by bus to their place of detention. The majority of those that surrendered were members of the white supremacist Azov regiment. A lesser number of regular Ukrainian troops also surrendered. Their surrender led to Russia’s complete victory in the large southern Donetsk port city of Mariupol. Right: Some of the fascist tattoos on a captured Azov fighter including Nazi swastikas, the Nazi black sun symbol (a yellow version of which formed part of the Azov emblem until they very recently changed their emblem in an attempted rebranding following their Mariupol mass surrender) and the Celtic cross symbol popular with KKK groups, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists.
Photo credit for photo on Left: Alexei Alexandrov/The Associated Press

The Changed Character of This Conflict

In summary, since late March, America’s rulers and their allies have greatly ramped up their military, economic and political support to Ukraine in its war against Russia. We can now clearly say that this Ukraine-Russia war has effectively become an indirect war of the U.S. rulers and their NATO, Australian, Japanese and New Zealand imperialist allies against Russia, with Ukraine acting as the proxy. The same Western capitalist ruling classes waging a proxy war against Russia are the biggest bullies and oppressors of the world’s peoples. It is they who destroyed Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, devastated Syria through a years-long proxy war, killed thousands of civilians in their 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia, occupied and terrorised the people of Somalia and in the specific case of Australia’s rulers, caused the death of up to 20,000 people after they orchestrated a decade-long war and blockade of the South Pacific island of Bougainville in the late 20th century after the people there rose up against the arrogant trampling of their rights by an Australian-owned mining company. Therefore, it is in the interests of the working class of the world and all the people subjugated by imperialism to see the Western imperialists and their Ukrainian proxies defeated in this war. Such a defeat would weaken the ability of the imperialists to mobilise further predatory interventions abroad. It would also deter their plans to use Taiwan as a proxy to pressure socialistic China or even to incite a world war against the socialistic giant. Moreover, any setback for the U.S. imperialists and their allies in this proxy war would give encouragement to the resistance struggles of all those being subjugated by the U.S. and its allies elsewhere, like the Palestinian people suffering under incessant Israeli terror. More generally, a defeat for the Western powers in their Ukraine proxy war could only encourage the toiling masses of Africa, Latin America, the South Pacific and most of Asia to resist in their own lands the various Western capitalists that super-exploit labour, plunder natural resources, leach loan interest repayments, seize markets and manipulate and stand over governments. Within the Western countries themselves, a defeat for the capitalist ruling classes in their proxy war would weaken their authority. It would thus open opportunities for the working class and oppressed to wage mass resistance against soaring rents and food and fuel prices, plummeting real wages, the incessant expansion of insecure work forms and brutal racist oppression of persecuted communities. Therefore, the workers movement in Australia and other imperialist countries must stop the military aid to Ukraine and demand the lifting of all sanctions against Russia!

Somalia, 1993: Occupying U.S., Australian and other Western imperialist forces terrorised and bullied the local population. In the countries of Africa, Latin America, the South Pacific and most of Asia, the various Western capitalists super-exploit labour, plunder natural resources, leach loan interest repayments, seize markets and manipulate and stand over governments. This tyranny is enforced by their governments, in good part, through the use or threatened use of military power.

To be sure, Russia is also ruled by a greedy capitalist class. Moreover, economic realities drive this class to seek to be an imperialist ruling class – that is a capitalist class that not only extracts profits from exploiting workers in their own country but which also reaps substantial wealth through the super-exploitation and economic domination of poorer countries. Yet, although being the world’s number two military power and with a strong industrial and technological base inherited from the days of the USSR, currently the Russian ruling class neither fully has the level of capital needed to displace the current imperialist players as the main subjugators of “Third World” economies nor the close relationship with an existing imperialist player that would allow them to prise their way into the imperialist big league without the possession of such a huge level of capital. That is why, although Russia’s capitalist ruling class has, to a limited extent, aspects of an imperialist country-dependent country relationship with certain neighbouring ex-Soviet countries, it is overwhelmingly not Russian capitalists but American, British, German, Japanese, Australian, French, Canadian and other Western bankers, mining bosses and owners of industrial and agricultural corporations that plunder and leach from the poorer countries of developing Asia, the South Pacific, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America (note that although mutually antagonistic, Russia’s relationship with Ukraine prior to the current war was not an imperialist country-dependent country one and, just like Russia, Ukraine also inherited a good chunk of the industrial, technological and military might of the former Soviet Union and the highly educated, technically literate population nurtured in the Soviet Union). And it is the Western states enforcing the interests of its capitalists, rather than the Russian state, that have been muscling in on the state affairs of dependent and neo-colonial countries, orchestrating “color revolutions” to overthrow disobedient governments there and threatening dissident countries with outright invasion. Let us not lose sight of the fact that it is the U.S and its allies and not Putin’s Russia that invaded and devastated Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan and Libya and which is propping up Israel’s bloody war on the Palestinian people and Saudi Arabia’s war on the people of Yemen. All this is why, as reactionary as Russia’s capitalist rulers are, a victory for Russia against the Western ruling classes and the latter’s Ukrainian proxy will encourage anti-imperialist struggles by the masses in the “Third World” countries, alongside spurring class struggle by the working class within the West against their own capitalist rulers. Whereas Russia’s defeat at the hands of the Western powers and their Ukrainian proxy will embolden the Western imperialists to further subjugate the peoples of developing Asia, the South Pacific, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America and to, at home, more aggressively attack workers’ real wages and the rights of persecuted minority communities.

For socialists based in Western countries, the changed character of the Ukraine-Russia war does not substantially affect our main tasks. From the very start of the Russian intervention, the response of leftists in the West needed to be guided by the understanding that it is the Western imperialist rulers and not Putin’s ambitious capitalist regime who are the main tyrants lording it over the world’s peoples. Moreover, based on the Leninist principle that the main enemy of the working class in an imperialist country are their own capitalist rulers, socialists in Australia would have to focus on opposing the intervention of the Australian ruling class into this war and on opposing first and foremost the side in this war that these imperialist rulers’ are supporting, which is Ukraine. Sticking by these principles, Trotskyist Platform statements written early on in the war had as their main headline: “Oppose Western Imperialism’s Provocative and Hypocritical Interference in Ukraine and Oppose Sanctions Against Russia! No to NATO Expansion! No U.S./Australian arms to Ukraine!” These remain the punchlines of the stance that needs to be taken by the Left and workers movement in Australia.

Where the changed character of the conflict does make a clear practical difference is in the work required of leftists in Russia. In our statement written in the early days of the conflict, we called for the working classes of Ukraine and Russia to unite to oppose the war campaign of each of their respective rulers, while simultaneously insisting that communists in Russia should be intransigently opposed to any pro-NATO or other pro-Western “anti-war” groupings and should keep any of their anti-war actions strictly separate from such forces. Today, in the wake of the changed character of the war, we of course still say that the workers of Ukraine should struggle against the war campaign of their own capitalist rulers. However, given that this war has become a proxy war of the united imperialist powers to bring to heel a mostly non-imperialist power in Russia, a war in which the working class of the world has a side against the imperialists, then we say that the Russian working class should no longer oppose the war campaign of their own ruling class. They should of course continue the class struggle and advance towards the future overthrow of the Russian capitalist exploiting class, which remains no less their enemy, but they should ensure that any such struggle does not disrupt the war effort against the U.S.-led imperialists and their Ukrainian proxies.

Although the changed nature of the war means that Russian leftists should no longer oppose Russia’s war campaign, we say that they should not positively support it either. For Russian leftists to actively support the war campaign of their own rulers – for example by participating in pro-Russian Army rallies – would associate the Left with Russian nationalism and patriotism. Although patriotic sentiments in Russia in part arise from the unfair treatment of Russia by Western imperial powers and from the masses’ resentment at the devastation and diminished status that Russia was pushed into following the Western-orchestrated destruction of the Soviet Union, Russian patriotism damages working-class struggle. For it ties workers to their ambitious capitalist exploiters on the basis of a non-existent “common national interest.” Such Russian patriotism is therefore overall reactionary, which is why Russian revolutionary leader Lenin fought tooth and nail against it in the years leading up to the 1917 October socialist revolution. Lenin’s anti-patriotic stance remains valid today because although Russia is not a full-fledged imperialist power as it was in pre-Soviet times, it is also not simply a semi-colonial or dependent country subjugated by imperialism as say Iraq, Syria, Libya and Somalia were (and still are today). Therefore a victory for Russia in this war would have a very different effect on Russia’s working class than the impact on, say, the Iraqi toiling masses had they been able to resoundingly defeat the 2003 U.S., British and Australian invasion. Such an outcome in the Iraq War would have generated a resounding sentiment among the Iraqi toilers that: “we have just beaten off a direct invasion from the imperialist overlords, it is time for us to finish off the local capitalist ruling class that are so dependent on and economically tied to these imperialists.” In contrast, a Russian victory in this current war would give the Russian capitalist ruling class renewed authority, while reinforcing Great Russian chauvinism and all manner of social reaction. This has already been evident in the last few weeks coinciding with increasing Russian battlefield victories. Some nationalist Russian celebrities like famous actress and media personality, Maria Shukshina, have felt emboldened to denounce Russia’s national minorities. Meanwhile, earlier this month, Russian politicians introduced a homophobic bill to parliament that will unleash draconian fines for people “promoting non-traditional sexual relations” (a bill that spits on the traditions of Russia’s 1917 Bolshevik Revolution that had made Russia the first large country in the world to decriminalise all gay and lesbian sexual activity).

Therefore, while Russian communists should not oppose Russia’s war efforts they must oppose any Great Russian chauvinism and social reaction inflamed by Russia’s battlefield successes. They must also insist that in Donbass territories conquered by Russian troops and their local Donetsk and Luhansk republic allies, the terms of oppression are not simply reversed. In other words where it was formerly Russian speakers who were oppressed, Ukrainian speakers should not now be discriminated against. That means that Russian communists should insist on Ukrainian becoming a joint official language in all the Russian-controlled Donbass territories and that those people who choose to live in the Russian-controlled territories for political or economic reasons but who wish to retain their links to Ukrainian language and culture are fully able to do so. Moreover, Russian leftists should stand for the expulsion of all Russian fascists from the Donbass. Although the component of fascists within the pro-Russia Donetsk and Luhansk forces is far less than in the Ukrainian forces, Russian fascists like the Russian National Unity group have had a presence. Authentic Russian communists should also oppose any internal party witch-hunts and state repression against several parliamentarians from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) who have defied their party’s line and opposed Russia’s war campaign. Russian leftists should salute the internationalist instincts of these dissenting CPRF members and their courage in opposing their own capitalist ruling class, while patiently explaining to these comrades why their stance is mistaken given that this has become an imperialist proxy war against, largely, non-imperialist Russia.

At the same Russian communists should oppose and mercilessly condemn any pro-NATO/pro-Western opponents of the war campaign – like supporters of jailed opposition politician Alexei Navalny. For while a Russian military victory would inflame social reaction within Russia, a victory for NATO’s Ukrainian proxies would also be harmful to the class struggle in Russia. Such an outcome would demoralise the masses, greatly embolden the pro-imperialist wing of the Russian capitalist ruling class and may well lead to the Russian working class not only having to face their own local exploiting class but Western imperialists again able to place their dirty paws upon Russia (as they did in the first decade and a half after the early 1990s capitalist counterrevolution that destroyed socialistic rule in Russia, Ukraine and the other parts of the former USSR). The reality is that while a victory for Russia in this war would be in the interests of the working class and oppressed in all of the rest of the world, any outcome to this war will be harmful to the working class movement in Russia – other than if victory for Russia is partly or mostly achieved as a result of the anti-imperialist mobilisation of the working class in the imperialist centres and/or significant resistance by a section of the Ukrainian masses against their own capitalist rulers and its war campaign. Hence our position that while in the rest of the world the workers movement should energetically work for the defeat of the Western imperialists and their Ukrainian proxy, within Russia the working class should continue the class struggle and the building of a revolutionary socialist movement without either impeding or supporting Moscow’s war effort. The best way for workers and leftists in Australia to assist the class-struggle of the Russian working class and to promote internationalist sentiments amongst the Russian masses is to mobilise against the proxy war that our “own” rulers are waging against Russia.

We are well aware that the stance that we advocate for Russian communists does not fit neatly into either the position of revolutionary defensism that Leninists advocate for semi-colonial and other dependent countries in wars with imperialist power/s or the stance of revolutionary defeatism that Leninists call for, either in a clash between rival imperialist powers or in a war between non-imperialist states of a similar level of development. Our position however flows from the unique nature and history of today’s Russia. Prior to the 1917 Russian Revolution, capitalist Russia was an imperialist “great power” but the most economically backward of the imperialist powers. She was able to grab a share of the bounty of imperialist exploitation largely by acting as the enforcers in the East of the capital investments of wealthier imperialist powers like Britain and France. After the 1917 socialist revolution, Russia not only ceased to be ruled by capitalists but she, therefore, also ceased to be an imperialist exploiter. Indeed just like today’s Red China, the socialistic USSR that Soviet Russia was part of provided great economic and development assistance to ex-colonial countries – in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and South Asia in particular – that allowed them to achieve a certain independence from Western imperialism that they would not have otherwise had. The advantages of the USSR’s socialist system meant that Russia, as part of the USSR, not only rose to become the world’s equal first military power but also became an industrial and scientific powerhouse much closer to the level of the most advanced countries than Russia had been in pre-1917 times. Therefore, when capitalist rule was re-established in Russia in the early 1990s, theoretically the new Russian capitalist class was in a position to play a relatively bigger role in imperialist looting than their pre-1917 forebears were able to do. However, the capitalist counterrevolution led to a shocking economic decline in Russia and the stunning weakening of her Soviet-inherited industrial base. This only started to be turned around in the twenty-first century after a sharp rise in oil prices greatly boosted the export income of energy-rich Russia and after the Russian capitalist ruling class got their act together somewhat and reduced their previously rampant level of personal mafia-like criminality for the sake of the overall interests of their class. However, Russia’s post-Soviet capitalist rulers face a still greater obstacle to their wish to re-build a version of the Tsarist empire. For the domination of most of the world has already been divided up amongst pre-existing imperial powers. Facing this situation, the new Russian capitalist class does not quite possess the capital required to shove aside existing players and muscle themselves into an imperialist position. Moreover, none of the existing imperialist powers has been willing to partner with Russia. With senile capitalism in economic decline, none of these imperialists is willing or able to afford to share a significant part of the imperialist loot with Russia should they agree to partner with her. Thus, the Russian capitalist class’ other route to sharing in imperialist plunder is, for the moment, also blocked. We are left with a country that matches the U.S. in nuclear weapons strength, which possesses considerable remnants of the industrial and technological strength inherited from Soviet times and that has a per capita income (in PPP terms) within 20% of that of imperialist Portugal but which is still not currently a full fledged imperialist power and yet clearly cannot be considered an imperialist-dependent or subjugated country either.

It should be noted that, in some sense, our exposition of the tasks of leftists in Russia is somewhat academic. We have no base there and little ability to influence the politics of communists in that country. However, stating the line that we believe should be taken by Russian socialists in the wake of the changed character of this current war does, in passing, help to make clearer the stance that must be taken by leftists in Australia. In particular it helps to underscore how urgent it is that socialists in Australia and other imperialist countries mobilise to oppose their regimes’ massive war assistance to Ukraine.

What is Driving the Western Imperialists to Wage a Proxy War on Russia?

To some degree, this war has been an anti-Russia proxy war of Washington and its allies from the beginning. The U.S. and NATO provoked this war by threateningly expanding NATO eastwards towards Russia and by encouraging Ukraine’s course towards joining NATO. Then, when in the days leading up to the Russian intervention, Ukrainian president Zelensky seemed to be open to a compromise deal with Moscow facilitated by French and German diplomatic efforts, Washington and Ukraine’s influential fascist groups pressured Zelensky to walk away from the deal. The U.S. ruling class did much to provoke the Russian intervention. Indeed, part of Russia’s reason for invading Ukraine was a quite understandable wish to pre-emptively prevent NATO forces and NATO missiles being placed on her borders.

However, there were initially other more significant reasons for Russia’s February 24 intervention. For one, Russia’s rulers had faced considerable public pressure to come to the aid of the Russian-speaking population in Ukraine’s eastern Donbass region who had been brutally oppressed by Ukraine’s military and even more cruelly by its ultra-nationalist paramilitary forces. A large chunk of the Russian-speaking population in this region had rebelled against the Kiev regime ever since anti-Russia, Ukrainian nationalist forces seized power in Kiev in a 2014 right-wing coup. However, in coming to the aid of the Russian-speaking Donbass rebels, Moscow has not merely been responding to public pressure and not simply acting out of nationalist concern for fellow Russian speakers. By either bringing the Donbass into Russia or making it an independent country close to Russia, Russia’s capitalist rulers want to secure markets and raw materials in this heavily industrialised region after having been squeezed out of access to the broader Ukrainian market following Ukraine’s pro-Western 2014 coup. Moreover, in pushing into territory in Ukraine beyond that where the mass of the population overwhelmingly wants to be part of, or associated with, Russia, Moscow is pursuing the innate capitalist drive to maximise the size of secure markets by maximising territory. Similarly, by insisting on forcibly maintaining the entire Donbass within its territory when much of the Russian-speaking population in at least large parts of this region would prefer to be part of, or associated with, Russia, the Ukrainian regime is also driven by the capitalist imperative to maximise territories. The faltering of their respective capitalist economies made this capitalist squabble for territory between Russia and Ukraine all the more desperate on both sides. Both Russia and Ukraine were beset by rampant inflation even prior to the outbreak of this war while Ukraine’s economy was actually contracting in per capita terms. Moreover, by ramping up nationalism during their respective war drives, the capitalist ruling classes in both Ukraine and Russia could divert the anger of the working class masses away from themselves. And the masses in both countries had much to be furious about. In both countries, the inability of their capitalist systems to protect their populations from COVID led to a terrible carnage many times greater than the numbers of people who have thus far died from this current war – with over 105,000 deaths in Ukraine by the start of the war and nearly 350,000 in Russia. In Ukraine, there had been such anger at persistently high unemployment, falling living standards and rampant corruption that by January last year, the opposition party advocating closer ties with Russia was leading in opinion polls in even the non-rebel held parts of the country. Meanwhile, in Russia, the capitalist regime had been on the receiving end of the people’s ongoing anger over massive inequality and over a 2019 pension reform that greatly increased the age at which Russian people can receive pensions. All these factors driving the initially squalid inter-capitalist war between Ukraine and Russia remain today. But they have now been overshadowed by the now dominant axis of the conflict – a proxy war of the Western imperialist powers aimed at bringing to heel its Russian, potential capitalist rival. What had been an important subsidiary aspect of the conflict has become the main feature of the war. Indeed in late April, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin made clear that Washington’s involvement in this war was not even mainly about the Ukraine issue itself. Austin told reporters that, “we want to see Russia weakened.”

So why do the Western imperialists want to weaken Russia? The answer to this question has nothing to do with the two main rationales given by Washington, Canberra and Co. for their heavy-handed intervention into this conflict. One of these rationales is that they are seeking to protect the people of Ukraine. Yet everything that the Western capitalist ruling classes have done over the past decades has shown how little they care for the well-being of the Ukrainian masses. It was these imperialists that orchestrated the early 1990s capitalist counterrevolution there. It was that counterrevolution that directly led to the mass privatisation that devastated the living standards of Ukraine’s working class people, weakened the technological and industrial base of the country (that when part of the socialistic USSR was at such a high level that she was able to play a key role in building the world’s largest aircraft – the magnificent Antonov An-225) and paved the way for the terrifying growth of violent fascist groups. Then in 2014, the U.S., British and EU ruling classes promoted a right-wing coup that overthrew Ukraine’s elected government and brought right-wing extremists into key parts of Ukraine’s state machinery. Now the imperialists are fighting a proxy war to the last drop of Ukrainian blood in order to reinforce their tyranny over the world.

The second rationale given by the imperialists for their proxy war against Russia is the claim that they are standing up for “democracy” against “authoritarianism”. This is laughable given that the U.S., European and Australian governments have been busy censoring any voices questioning their narrative on this war, including by outright banning Russian media outlets from broadcasting in their countries. Meanwhile just yesterday, the courts of the U.S. regime – the supposed standard bearer of “liberal democracy” – made a ruling that will see women in almost half of America’s states lose one of the most basic human rights – the right to abortion. Now that is authoritarian!

As for the Ukrainian regime that is being supported by the Western imperialists, it is very far from being a bastion of “democracy” – even in the sense of being a capitalist “democracy” where certain freedoms associated with elected parliaments are mixed in with total domination of the state and politics by the wealthy capitalists. Let’s not forget that in the eight years preceding this war, the Ukrainian regime had brutally killed thousands of Russian speaking people by indiscriminately shelling territories in the country’s eastern Donbass region that were held by pro-Russia rebels. Now, they have banned nearly a dozen centrist and leftist parties including the country’s biggest opposition party: the Opposition Platform — For Life. Even in the years preceding this war, Ukrainian authorities jailed large numbers of pro-Russia and leftist opposition activists. Meanwhile, extreme Ukrainian nationalists murdered journalists, social activists and those with pro-Russia sentiments, with the perpetrators rarely identified, let alone punished. Thoroughly corrupt and dominated by powerful oligarchs, the Ukrainian capitalist order is in many ways similar to Russia’s. But it is even more repressive. For example, while demonstrations by staunch pro-communist groups have often been attacked by police in Russia, in Ukraine, absolutely all activity by the large Communist Party of Ukraine – including its participation in elections – and other pro-communist groups has been prohibited for the last several years. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian regime has introduced draconian laws that can see anyone who displays a communist or Soviet flag or sings communist or Soviet anthems jailed for five years. Moreover, while Russian government politicians have often allied with far-right politicians, in the Ukraine fascists have actually been brought into key positions in the country’s state machinery, while large neo-Nazi paramilitary groups like the Azov and Aidar battalions have been officially incorporated into Ukraine’s National Guard. The racist nature of the Ukrainian state has indeed been very evident during this war. Ukrainian border guards have racially abused dark-skinned international students (from places like Nigeria, Zimbabwe and India) fleeing the war and forced international students approaching the border to alight from vehicles and walk huge distances in freezing weather to get to the border so that Ukrainians could use their vehicles instead.

London, April 2019: British police seize Australian journalist and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy. They threw Assange into prison where he has been kept incarcerated in extremely brutal conditions ever since. British authorities are conspiring with the U.S. state, with the complicity of the Australian regime, to extradite Assange to the U.S. on charges that could see him imprisoned for life. Assange is being cruelly persecuted by the AUKUS (Australia, UK, U.S.) imperialist powers for exposing their horrific war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their brutal persecution of Assange’s journalism makes a mockery of their claims to be upholders of “freedom” and “democracy” against “authoritarianism”. Moreover, their efforts to intimidate other journalists who may expose their war crimes, through their extreme persecution of Assange, shows that the Western imperialists intend to commit future war crimes in their efforts to defend their tyranny over the world. No doubt they are hoping that such intimidation will ensure that the very small number of more honest, principled journalists will today avoid exposing any war crimes by their Ukrainian proxies, their own special forces troops operating undercover in Ukraine and mercenaries participating in their proxy war against Russia.

So what are the real reasons for Washington and its allies’ proxy war against Russia? For one they want to maintain their prized access to the Ukrainian market. Before 2014, Russia was the main source of Ukraine’s imports. However, after Washington and the EU powers orchestrated the 2014 anti-Russia, right-wing coup in Kiev, much of Russia’s exports to Ukraine were replaced by ones from Germany, the U.S., Poland, Italy and France. Today, the capitalist rulers of these latter countries want to maintain this post-2014 status quo. They know that a sizable chunk of this market would be lost should the rich Donbass region and Ukraine’s south end up acceding to Russia or becoming pro-Moscow independent states. However as significant as this reason is – especially to EU governments – it is not the main factor driving Western ruling classes to wage a proxy war against Russia. Mainly, Washington and its allies want to prevent Russia emerging as an imperialist competitor and instead seek to reduce her to a subordinate position. Especially with their own economies faltering, the existing imperial powers cannot afford to have a new imperialist player intruding on their neocolonial exploitation of Latin America, Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, West Asia and the Pacific. Moreover, not only are the existing imperialists unwilling to accept a new imperialist rival they cannot even tolerate a non-imperialist state being strong enough to obstruct their ambitions. Thus, the Western imperialists hope to not only suppress Russia’s great power aspirations but seek to weaken her through a combination of military blows from their Ukrainian proxies and grinding economic sanctions. To be sure, they know that given that Russia is a formidable military and technological power, they will not be able to lord it over Russia in the same neocolonial manner that, say, Australian imperialism subjugates Papua New Guinea or the U.S. ruling class exploits the Philippines. However, by weakening Russia, the Western imperialists hope to reduce her to the humiliated condition that she was in during the first fifteen years or so after the 1991-92 capitalist counterrevolution there. During those years, the U.S. and European powers were able to dictate economic policy to Russia while grabbing prized access to her markets and ownership of chunks of Russia’s industrial and mining sectors as well. Just as importantly for the Western ruling classes, a debilitated Russia would be easier for them to elbow out of the way when seeking to grab markets and trade opportunities in the ex-Soviet countries of Central Asia and the South Caucasus.

Defend Socialistic China!

It is important to be aware that the imperialist proxy war against Russia is not only about Russia itself. Following their humiliating defeat in Afghanistan, the U.S. and Australian ruling classes, in particular, hope that what they intend to be a successful proxy war against Russia will restore – both in the eyes of their own populations and in the sentiments of other countries – credibility to their practice of throwing their military weight around. Most importantly for the Western ruling classes, this proxy war is meant to be an indirect slap against their main strategic target: the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). The Western capitalist powers see China as the main threat to their domination of the world because, unlike Russia which is just another capitalist country, albeit one that is currently obstructive to their interests, China is a socialistic country. Even though China’s march towards socialism remains incomplete, prone to veer of course and relentlessly pelted by internal and external capitalist enemies, the imperialist ruling classes of the U.S., Britain, Germany, Australia, Japan and other Western ruling classes understand that the mere existence of such a giant and evermore successful socialistic power is an existential threat to their imperialist interests. For not only is the non-imperialist PRC’s cooperation with developing countries allowing some of these countries to, right now, uplift themselves to the extent that they can somewhat loosen the stranglehold of Western imperialism over their countries, in the longer term, China’s ever-expanding achievements made possible by her 1949 anti-capitalist revolution could encourage the masses of other ex-colonial countries to also take the path of socialist revolution to decisively free themselves from Western domination. Even more threateningly for the Western exploiting classes, as China’s per capita income heads towards approaching closer to that of their own countries in future years, the working class masses in their own countries could start to look more favourably upon the PRC and, eventually, even start demanding socialism at home too.

The Addis Ababa – Djibouti railway was jointly built by Ethiopian and Chinese workers and technicians working for two Chinese state-owned companies: the China Railway Group Limited and the China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation. The railway connects the capital of Ethiopia with the Port of Djibouti in Djibouti. It has allowed land-locked Ethiopia to have a connection with a port on the Red Sea. The railway, which began operations in 2018, has proved extremely popular with passengers in Ethiopia and Djibouti and with those transporting freight. The railway has slashed the travel time between the cities from the three days that it took previously to just twelve hours. Top: Ethiopian and Chinese construction workers and engineers celebrate a milestone during the construction of the railway. Above: A train on the railway, which uses locomotives and passengers cars made by state-owned China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation. The railway will be fully taken over by a joint bi-national body of the Ethiopian and Djibouti railway operators from the start of 2024. Currently, it is being operated by the two Chinese state-owned constructors while they train local staff so that they can fully takeover by the start of 2024. Below: A conductor checks tickets as passengers board an Addis Ababa – Djibouti train. Unlike profit driven corporations from the capitalist countries which exploit and plunder from the peoples of the ex-colonies to the extent possible, China’s socialistic state-owned enterprises overwhelmingly operate on a mutually beneficial basis in their projects in the developing world. After having been so subjugated by Western colonialism and then Western economic neocolonialism, the railway and other similar mutually beneficial cooperation projects between Ethiopia and Djibouti on the one hand and socialistic China on the other has enabled Ethiopia and Djibouti to achieve a slightly greater level of economic independence from the imperialists. This and similar cooperation between Red China and other countries in Africa, the South Pacific, Latin America and developing Asia has – to a degree – retarded the ability of the Western imperialists to exploit these countries, causing the enraged capitalist powers to intensify their Cold War against socialistic rule in China.
Photo credit (top photo): China Railway Group Limited
Photo credit: (above photo): 2merkato.com website
Photo credit (below photo): Xinhua Silk Information Service

So how does waging a proxy war against Russia advance the imperialist drive against Red China? For starters, aware that the hostility that they have unleashed – for very different reasons – against China and Russia has pushed these two non-Western powers closer together, the Western imperialists hope that their massive propaganda war launched against Russia following Putin’s Ukraine invasion will, by association, also tarnish the PRC. In this way they intend to intensify political pressure against socialistic China. Indeed, the imperialists’ increased political attacks on the PRC over the last four months have actually produced some tangible results for them. It seems to have encouraged softer-on-imperialism, more rightist factions of China’s ruling Communist Party (centred on the party’s number two ranked figure, premier Li Keqiang, and number four ranked politician, Wang Yang) to gain greater influence. In recent months they have been able to reduce the momentum of president Xi Jinping’s crackdown on greedy rich, tech-sector capitalists and slow his “common prosperity” drive to reduce inequality.

Secondly, the U.S. and its allies intend their military support to Ukraine and economic sanctions against Russia to enfeeble Russia to the point that, at minimum, she will not be able to obstruct any U.S./NATO/Australian military provocations against China. In their best case scenario, they hope that they can cause such military losses for Russia in Ukraine and such economic pain for her people that it will trigger a “colour revolution” there that will replace the Russian nationalist Putin regime with a regime subservient to Washington and its allies – that is, a pro-Western regime that may even enlist Russia in the imperialists’ Cold War drive to crush socialistic rule in China. Thirdly, in waging their increasingly all-out proxy war against Russia, the Western imperialists are trialing and perfecting the methods that they seek to one day unleash against Red China, using Taiwan or other capitalist regimes neighbouring China as their proxies.

For the very same reasons that it is in the interests of the Western capitalist exploiters to oppose the Chinese workers state it is in the interests of the working class masses in their own countries – and indeed of the entire world – to defend the PRC. The indirect weakening of imperialism’s grip over its former colonies resulting from China’s rise is not only welcome news for the peoples of the Pacific, Africa, Latin America and developing Asia it is also good for the working class people living in the imperialist centres. A reduction in the ability of Western multinational corporations to plunder “Third World” countries makes it easier for workers and unions in the West to stand up to these companies and resist their incessant drive to lower workers’ real wages. Moreover, the fact that the world’s most populous country continues to cling onto a socialistic path can only give the toiling classes in the capitalist world hope that it is indeed possible to advance toward socialism – that is, advance towards a system that will finally liberate the masses from surging rents and grocery prices, ever greater exploitation of labour by capitalist business owners, insecure forms of work, racist discrimination of First Peoples and ethnic minorities, oppression of women and imperialist war. That is why we in Trotskyist Platform completely oppose the U.S., NATO and Australian military escalation against China. We say: U.S., Australian and British warships, get out of the South China Sea! U.S. troops out of Darwin! Down with ANZUS! Down with AUKUS! Not one submarine of any type, not one missile, not one warplane, not one person for Australia’s capitalist-serving military! Australian capitalist rulers: stop your neo-colonial bullying of Pacific countries that choose to establish cooperation with the PRC!

It is not enough to oppose the direct military threats to the PRC. The Australian ruling class’ military pressure against the PRC is part of an all-sided anti-communist Cold War. This includes a relentless anti-PRC propaganda campaign, support for Chinese anti-communist groups seeking the destruction of socialistic rule and McCarthyist intimidation of Chinese international students and migrants (and even some mainstream politicians like NSW upper house Labor MP, Shaoquett Moselmane) who dare to express even the slightest sympathy for the PRC. Unfortunately, most of the other left-wing groups in Australia, such as the Solidarity group, while stating opposition to the military buildup against China, actually join in the lying attacks on China over “human rights” and actively support the very same anti-communist forces within China that are backed by Australia’s capitalist rulers and their media. In doing so the likes of Solidarity are reinforcing the propaganda used by Australia’s exploiting class to “justify” their military build-up against socialistic China. In 2019, Solidarity as well as Socialist Alternative and Socialist Alliance – and to a slightly lesser extent the Socialist Equality Party – rubbed soldiers with right-wing, rabid anticommunists, both of local origin and those from Hong Kong, China and Vietnam (and even some Australian white supremacist activists), in participating in a series of anti-PRC demonstrations in support of violent anti-communist riots in Hong Kong. In supporting this movement, these groups poisoned the image of the PRC in the eyes of those that they influence, which is progressive layers of society – that is precisely the section of the community that could most easily be won to opposing the Cold War drive against Red China. In doing so, these wavering socialist groups have made it much harder to build opposition to the military escalation against China and to AUKUS, which they today proclaim their intention to campaign against. At the very least they are supporting the capitalist powers’ drive to crush socialistic rule in China by non-military means – that is via Western-backed anti-communist forces within China. Let’s remember, in the final instance, socialistic rule in the former USSR was not destroyed by military attack but by internal capitalist restorationist forces backed by Western imperialism. Infuriatingly, the very same left groups that in the previous Cold War backed these counterrevolutionary forces that destroyed the gains of Russia’s 1917 socialist revolution – under their previous names Solidarity, Socialist Alternative (these two groups were the components that came from the then ISO) and Socialist Alliance (then called the DSP) supported the Washington-backed pro-capitalist movement led by Boris Yeltsin that seized power in Moscow in August 1991 – are today supporting the modern-day Chinese equivalents of these capitalist counterrevolutionary forces!

In contrast to those leftists who are being swept away with the tide of Cold War propaganda, Trotskyist Platform has been energetically campaigning – including by holding street protests – against the entire military, political and propaganda drive of the U.S. and Australian capitalist rulers against the Chinese workers state. We call on authentic leftists to join with us in saying: Down with the lying accusations that China is “violating” the human rights of Uyghurs and Tibetans! Oppose the pro-colonial, rich people’s anti-PRC movement in Hong Kong! No support to capitalist Taiwan – reunify China through spreading China’s 1949 socialist revolution to Taiwan! Down with the Greens, Liberals and ALP’s McCarthyist campaign to shutdown the PRC-linked Confucius Institute Chinese language schools!

China’s Jiangsu Xiangshui offshore wind farm built by her state-owned power giant, Three Gorges. China’s socialistic state-owned firms, in which the profit motive comes second to serving people’s needs, have spearheaded China’s transition towards renewable energy. China’s public sector enterprises along with working class state power are the bedrock of her socialistic system. However, a sizable capitalist sector remains there deforming and threatening socialist rule. Imperialist pressure against China is in part aimed at boosting those upper-middle class elements within Chinese society and more rightist groupings within the ruling Communist Party of China who argue that, given that most of the world’s powers remain capitalist, China should adapt to this reality by giving ever more “rights” to her capitalistic private sector. That is why those committed to the fight for socialism must not only oppose the imperialist military build-up against China and the imperialist-backed, anticommunist groups within China attacking the workers state but must resist the Chinese capitalists and those advocating for them who seek to expand the “rights” and strength of China’s private sector at the expense of her state sector. We say: Curb the influence of the private sector! Advance China’s socialistic state sector!
Photo credit: Three Gorges

Reformist Socialists in the Camp of Imperialism

The same wavering Australian socialist groups that have capitulated to the imperialist political war against the Chinese workers state have also enlisted in the imperialist campaign to bring “untamed” Russia to heel. Thus, all these groups have joined the likes of Anthony Albanese, Joe Biden and Boris Johnston in condemning Russia’s intervention into Ukraine and proclaiming full support for Ukraine’s war effort. It has been striking too how left-wing groups that rightly state opposition to the white supremacist far-right in Australia ape the Western media in whitewashing the level of fascist influence within the Ukrainian state forces.

Today, even as the Western capitalist rulers greatly step up their intervention into the war against Russia, the soft-on-imperialism majority of the Left have doubled down on their support to the anti-Russia war. At the Sydney May 15 Nakba Day rally in solidarity with the Palestinian people, Socialist Alternative speakers deceptively equated the Western imperialism-propped up Ukrainian war effort, that is partly aimed at crushing the aspirations for self-determination of the Donbass region’s Russian speaking population, with the Palestinian people’s completely just struggle for self-determination against an Israeli regime that is backed by the very same imperialist powers that are behind Ukraine’s war campaign. In similar vein, the June 14 issue of the Socialist Alliance’s newspaper Green Left Weekly likened Russia’s war in Ukraine with the war waged by the U.S. and its allies in Vietnam in the 1960s and 70s. But the truth is that the direct force opposing Russia today, the fanatically anti-communist Ukrainian regime that is acting as a proxy for Western imperialism, is as diametrically opposed as one can get from the Vietnamese communists that heroically defeated these very same imperialists and their local proxies in the Vietnam War.

A more valid analogy for this war would be the October 1973 Yom Kippur War. Then, Syria and Egypt, supported by Iraq and other Arab states, attacked Israel. The aim of the invading Arab armies was to recover territories seized by Israel in the 1967 Israel-Arab War. However, the Syrian and Egyptian attack was also partly unleashed with the nominal aim of liberating the Palestinian people of Gaza and the West Bank from hellish Israeli occupation – just as Russia justifies its intervention today in good part on liberating the Russian-speaking people of the Donbass. Just like Ukraine today, Israel’s war effort was greatly backed by U.S. imperialism for whom Israel was a proxy to pressure the Arab states then aligned with the socialistic USSR. However, there are also differences between the 1973 Israel-Arab war and this Ukraine-Russia war. For one, the present military balance between Russia and imperialist-backed Ukraine, at least currently, favours Russia much, much more than the then match-up between the Arab states on the one side and the Israeli war machine massively built up by U.S. imperialism on the other. On the other hand, in the 1973 war the European powers did not line up behind Washington anywhere as near to the extent as they have today over the current war. However, the biggest difference between the October 1973 War and today’s conflict is the attitude of the U.S. capitalist rulers. Although they enormously and decisively backed Israel in the Yom Kippur War, Washington also sought to moderate some of Israel’s most extreme militarist agendas as they were not then keen on having the crisis spiral into a nuclear world war between themselves and a Soviet Union that was strongly backing the Arab states. Thus, the U.S. quietly nudged their Israeli allies towards negotiations and a ceasefire. In contrast, today, the U.S. ruling class and possibly even more so the British one, keeps on fanatically egging on – and even pressuring – Ukrainian president Zelenskyy to reject peace negotiations with Russia. Yet despite this extreme and ever more aggressive intervention into this current conflict by the U.S.-led imperialist powers, many nominally socialist groups in Australia, the U.S. and Europe are on their side in this war.

The capitulatory socialist groups lined up behind their “own” capitalist rulers in this war are not only taking a terribly wrong, pro-imperialist position on this conflict. By supporting the side taken by the Australian rulers in this war, these groups are implicitly sending a message to the masses that the capitalist exploiting class that runs Australia can sometimes take the right side on major events and is, therefore, not always reactionary. This can only have the effect of dulling the masses’ opposition to their own capitalist exploiters. Yet if the working class masses are to be able to effectively defend themselves from the capitalist exploiters and eventually overthrow this ruling class through socialist revolution, they need to be animated by the most uncompromising and fervent opposition to this exploiting class. By diluting such opposition through aping the anti-Russia stance taken by this exploiting class, the soft-on-imperialism socialist groups are weakening the masses’ revolutionary sentiments. In doing so they are undermining the very struggle for socialism that they nominally stand for.

The Ukraine-Russia War and the Marxist Method of Analysis

It is not unusual for a conflict to change its character and for Marxists to have to adjust our line to the new circumstances. For example, when mass anti-government demonstrations erupted in Syria in the early part of 2011 following Arab Spring upheavals in Tunisia and Egypt, we did not then side with either the opposition forces or with Syria’s capitalist Assad government. To be sure, we were concerned that forces backed by the imperialist powers were intervening into the protests. However, initially, such forces did not have a decisive grip on the opposition movement. We therefore called for building a united-front opposition movement that was pro-working class, pro-women’s rights and anti-imperialist. The latter meant that the movement that needed to be built then in Syria needed to reject any alliance with any opposition forces that were themselves pro-imperialist or who were willing to ally with groups backed by the Western capitalist powers. Moreover, we insisted that any pro-imperialist, anti-government groups needed to not only be shunned but be stridently opposed. However, over a period of several months and as the tensions in Syria erupted into armed conflict, the groups that emerged as the dominant forces in the armed opposition became thoroughly subordinated to the ruling classes of the U.S., France and Britain. Thus by the first half of 2012, it was clear that the conflict in Syria had evolved into a war between proxies of imperialism and ex-colonial Syria. Therefore, Trotskyist Platform adjusted our line to one of defence of Syria against the “Rebel” and religious fundamentalist proxies of imperialism (we were the first Australian left group to take this position and actually the only Australian socialist group that firmly maintained such a stance).

We are able to make such adjustments to new realities because we are guided by the Marxist dialectical method. This method is based on the premise that political and economic entities are not fixed but are in constant change and must be analysed not only in their current state but in their direction of motion. Moreover, entities may be shaped by trends and forces pushing in opposite directions often with one of the trends more dominant than the other. It is therefore crucial to determine which is the dominant trend and which is the less decisive one. At certain times, piecemeal quantitative changes can build up to a qualitative change – like how the quantitative ramping up of the level of imperialist backing for Ukraine since February had by last month amounted to a qualitative change in the relationship between the imperialist powers and this war. What had started off as, overall, a squalid inter-capitalist conflict, albeit with imperialism strongly backing the Ukraine side, has turned into a proxy war of imperialist powers against not fully imperialist Russia.

The character of this war is not the only thing that has changed in the last few months. So has the relationship between Ukraine and its imperialist backers. For a long time, the Ukrainian ruling class has been a highly dependent junior partner of the Western imperialists. However, until more recently, it would not have been totally correct to describe them as complete puppets. For example in 2017, that is three years after the Maidan, anti-Russia coup, Ukraine’s government chose to join the China-driven Belt and Road Initiative. This would not have pleased Washington at all, especially since none of its other closest allies – the Australian, British, Canadian, Japanese and Israeli regimes – have joined this main foreign policy program of Beijing. However, in the course of this conflict, the Ukrainian regime has become overwhelmingly subordinated to the U.S. and British imperialist rulers. Meanwhile, the German and French imperialists, who have long sought to strike out a more independent course from their U.S. allies/rivals, have over the last four months been bowing down ever more shamelessly before Washington’s agenda. Of course, Marxists understand that such shifts do not always head continuously in one direction. It is conceivable that the continuation of Russian battlefield victories could shatter the U.S.-dictated “consensus” within the Western imperialist bloc.

The Marxist worldview is based on the understanding that capitalism has long ago outlived its usefulness and that the liberation of the exploited as well as the well-being of humanity as a whole depends on the overthrow of capitalist ruling classes by the working class-led masses. Thus, we Marxist-Leninists construct our approach to wars from the point of view of which position will strengthen the working class on the one hand and weaken the capitalist exploiters on the other. The question of which side “started” a war or “attacked first” has almost no relevance. For, grounded on the central Marxist tenet that major world events are fundamentally caused by the clash of conflicting economic interests, we understand that wars, at bottom, do not arise because some leader or government “decides to start a war” – although that is, of course, the immediate trigger – but because the clash of competing, in most cases economic, interests reach such a level that they explode into a physical conflict. Or put another way: war is politics by other means and, as Lenin insisted, politics is concentrated economics.

An integral part of this Marxist analytical outlook is the understanding that capitalist ruling classes are not driven fundamentally by ideology but by the economic interests of their class, which in turn spawns their ideology. So this war is, at bottom, not the result of Biden being a warmonger who believes in U.S. domination of the world or Putin being an authoritarian who dreams of a new Tsarist Russian empire or Zelenskyy being a weak person unwilling to defy the fascist forces within the Ukrainian state. All these things are, of course, in themselves, true and do matter. However, they are mostly only the ideological manifestations of profound economic and social interests and conflicts within U.S, Russian, Ukrainian and indeed global societies. The fundamental cause of the conflict between the U.S. and its allies on the one hand and Russia on the other are that with the decay and contradictions in the economies of the G7 capitalist “great powers” – exacerbated further during the COVID crisis – the former are unable to allow a new potential imperialist competitor to arise or to even tolerate a non-imperialist power that is not subordinated to themselves. Moreover, given the stunning rise of a socialistic giant in China, a phenomenon that endangers both the imperialists’ neocolonial plunder of their ex-colonies and ultimately their rule of exploitation at home, the imperialists cannot accept the existence of another capitalist power that does not enlist in the anti-communist crusade against Red China. The fact that these economic – and resulting political – imperatives of the nuclear-armed Western imperialists are driving them recklessly into an ever more aggressive proxy war against a nuclear-armed adversary, in Russia, proves just how irrational and deadly dangerous this capitalist system has become. The scary thing about all this is that when the imperialists face a still deeper economic crunch at home they will be driven to become even more belligerent and threatening on the global stage; and from the Great Depression to the late noughties Great Recession we know that the capitalist system inevitably produces severe economic crises.

No Illusions in Russia’s Capitalist Ruling Class!

A Marxist worldview teaches one not to view current events from an impressionistic, short-term perspective. That means while noting that Moscow is right now defying Western imperialism we should have no illusions that Russia’s capitalist rulers have any progressive essence. Russia’s rulers today stand up to a proxy war from the imperialists not because they have any commitment whatsoever to opposing imperialism. Rather, with their own economy riddled with similar contradictions to their adversaries, Russia’s capitalists cannot continue to be shoved out of markets in their own region nor can they afford to again be subordinated as they were in the first decade and a half after the destruction of the Soviet Union. It so happens that these capitalist interests have, at this moment, put the Russian ruling class into a clash with the imperialist plunderers of the world, a conflict in which the interests of the toilers of the world lie with the defeat of the imperialist side and, therefore, with the victory of the Russian side. However, in the long-term, Russia’s present rulers are no force for the liberation of the world from imperialism and capitalism. Rather, as a capitalist class, they are ultimately enemies of the working class of Russia and the world. Indeed, we communists have a specially enmity for Russia’s capitalist class. For they came to power through destroying the world’s first – and then most powerful – workers state, the Soviet Union. The current top administrator of Russian capitalism, Putin, himself played a direct role in supporting that Western-orchestrated counterrevolution. During the decisive events in 1991-92, Putin was a key aid to leading Russian counterrevolutionary politician, Anatoly Sobchak. That Putin’s lengthy address to the nation made three days before Russia’s attack on Ukraine was, in its first one-third, wholly a tirade against communism, the Soviet Union, the Bolsheviks and especially its leader Lenin, where Putin even stated his support for Ukraine’s de-communisation policy (where Ukraine fanatically purges Soviet era officials from its bureaucracy and bans communist symbols and slogans), should not come as a surprise. Like their Ukrainian enemies, Russia’s capitalist rulers run an order that is thoroughly corrupt and dominated by powerful oligarchs. Alongside Brazil, the U.S. and India, capitalist Russia has one of the highest wealth disparities of any country in the world.

To be sure it is notable that while U.S. rulers arrogantly speak about the U.S. right to police what they deviously call the “liberal, rules-based, world order” – in truth U.S.-led Western tyranny over the world – Putin and Co. speak about the need for a multi-polar, inclusive world. Yet this does not reflect any inherent ideological, let alone cultural, difference between what Moscow calls the “Anglo Saxon powers” and Russia’s own capitalist rulers. Rather, the sermonising, American-exceptionalist rhetoric of Washington is the ideology that best serves the interests of the U.S. capitalist class because it “justifies” the exploits of a predatory class powerful enough to dominate the world; whereas Moscow’s emphasis on the need for a multi-polar world conforms to the interests of an up and coming capitalist power seeking an expansion in the number of players allowed into the imperialist big league so that it can secure its own admission into this “great powers” league.

Moreover, it is not inconceivable that Moscow will in the future end up joining an alliance with one or more of the imperial powers that is currently arrayed against her. Particularly if Russia is strengthened through winning this war, European imperialist powers like Germany and France may quietly seek to move over, to a greater or lesser degree, towards an alliance with Russia. They would do so in order to both leverage Russia’s military power to pry open for themselves some space for greater independence from their U.S. allies-cum-rivals and, also, so that they can more aggressively target socialistic China. Alternatively, the dominant sections of the U.S. capitalists may resign themselves to Russia’s strength and seek to make her a capitalist ally in order to both pressure Washington’s European partners-cum-competitors and in order to isolate and further besiege socialistic China. That was, after all, what former U.S. president Donald Trump intended to do when he first came to office.

If either of these above programs were to gain traction or, alternatively, if both Washington and the EU powers sought to unite with Russia in a grand-capitalist alliance against socialistic China, Moscow would demand as a price for its admission assurances that it would be granted an unofficial license to assert its power in its region. Moscow would want guarantees that it would no longer be obstructed from pursuing its ambitions towards becoming a modern-day version of the Tsarist empire in which Russia would be the power dominating nominally independent states in the territories of the former USSR. Indeed, if Russia’s capitalist rulers were able to link themselves with the capital of richer capitalist powers – say Germany and/or France and/or the U.S. – they would be able to obtain a slice of imperialist looting through extracting a commission from these wealthier capitalists for acting as the military and bureaucratic enforcers of their investments in the Caucuses and Central Asian regions.

Trump’s plans for a Washington-Moscow alliance were never realised because they were opposed by the dominant sections of the American capitalist class. They were not willing to allow Russia to remain as any sort of power independent of the Washington-led Western bloc let alone share the profits of imperialist plunder with a new player. However, an expansion of Russian power should Moscow secure a military victory in this current war could force one or another of the Western imperialists to rethink their attitude. This is particularly the case since, even now, containing Russia runs a distant second to the main geo-strategic goal of all the imperial powers: crushing socialistic rule in China.

Of course, the above variants are less likely than the one where tensions between the Western imperialists and Russia continue to dangerously escalate. This is because there are political obstacles to an alliance being established between Russia and any of the Western powers. For one, while the capitalist bigwigs on either side are completely cynical and would have no shame in abandoning their previous claims about each other if that was what they determined to be in their own interests, it is different with the journalists, politicians, academics, lawyers, think tank staffers and “NGOs” that act as their advocates. This upper-middle class layer actually convinces themselves, or rather half convinces themselves, of the “correctness” and “morality” of the deceitful propaganda that they feed the masses. That means that the capitalist upper class will have some trouble convincing this middle-class layer, so crucial to protecting their interests, to radically change their position. For example, some of the journalists in the West would screech that it is outrageous for a “liberal-democratic” Western country to join an alliance with an “authoritarian” Russia that “violates human rights.” However, given how financially and spiritually dependent this privileged middle class layer is on the big-time capitalists, they will eventually come around, albeit with plenty of whining and tantrums, if their capitalist masters decisively believe that a change in geo-political strategy is needed.

A bigger obstacle to the emergence of any Western-Russia inter-capitalist alliance is that the Russian masses have a very understandable hatred of Western imperialism. Putin and Co. would have a hard time getting the Russian masses to accept Moscow’s entry into an alliance with a Western power. This is especially so given that being disliked for the inequality and economic hardships that they have presided over, the main source of legitimacy for the likes of Putin is that they are seen to be saving Russia from a return to her humiliated status of the post-Soviet nineties and early noughties. Moreover, in any Western country seeking a bloc with Russia, the capitalist rulers – and even more so their middle-class propagandists – would be very worried about losing all credibility with their own populations if they suddenly tell the population that an alliance with Moscow is now needed after having yesterday so rabidly demonised Russia. But here the “beauty” of parliamentary democracy as a form of rule serving the capitalists can come into play. Such “democracy” of course does not allow the working class majority of a country to share power and was never meant to. However, such “democracies” are very effective for managing differences in strategy amongst different factions of the capitalist class. Should a majority of the capitalist class think that a change in strategy on a major issue is needed they would not risk discrediting their entire system by having existing political leaders make fools of themselves by suddenly implementing policies that they had only yesterday been fervently condemning. Rather, the bulk of the capitalists would throw their support behind the propaganda and electoral campaigns of another pro-capitalist political faction less tainted with the previous policy.

Indeed, although in Australia all the pro-capitalist factions are unanimously behind Washington’s current hardline anti-Russia stance, even today there are capitalist opposition factions in both European countries and the U.S. that favour closer ties with Russia. When Biden’s $US40 billion military and economic aid package to Ukraine was voted on in the U.S. senate, a quarter of the senators from the opposition Republican Party voted against the bill. It so happens that these soft on Russia senators are from the despicably white supremacist, far-right of the Republican Party. That it is often the far-right factions of the capitalist class in both the U.S. and Europe that favour closer ties with Russia requires analysis here. One reason for this phenomenon is that these forces are so fanatically anti-communist that they are more willing to make concessions to a fellow capitalist power like Russia if that helps to isolate and counter socialistic China. However, this is not the entire story. After all, the liberal and mainstream conservative wings of the capitalist class are also intransigently opposed to the Chinese workers state. To understand further this phenomenon of the Western Far Right often being pro-Russia we need to look at the different realities faced by individual capitalists in the context of the overall decay of the capitalist order. Many capitalists in certain sectors are making huge profits and feel, moreover, that those profits are fairly stable and durable. However, other exploiters of labour feel that their position is more precarious and could be threatened by increased competition from overseas rivals, evolutions in the structure of the economy or threats to their business model posed by popular pressure to address climate change. Now the various different political factions of the capitalist class each draw support from both the capitalists that feel more secure and the ones that are insecure. However, in general, the capitalists that feel secure in their position are more likely to be “liberals” or mainstream conservatives since they are fairly content with the status quo domestically. Similarly, the middle class layers that this wing of the capitalist class rests on tend to be the more secure, often upper-middle class layers, like high-paid professionals. In contrast, the more insecure sections of the capitalist class tend to favour the Far Right, which also rests on support from the more precariously operating sections of the self-employed, business-owning middle class. Their insecurity breeds their reactionary extremism. They desire to exploit and crush the most downtrodden sections of the working class even further in order to protect their threatened positions. Significantly, the different social basis between the far-right factions of the capitalist class and their mainstream rivals affects how they see the current state of their countries. The Far Right, reflecting a base that is disproportionately among the more economically insecure layers of the capitalist exploiting class and the self-employed middle class, are far less effusive about the current reality. This is reflected in Trump’s signature slogan “Make America Great Again” which is based on the notion that America is not currently great. In contrast, the more secure sections of the capitalist class and middle class are more likely to see the current state of affairs far more positively, as reflected in their retort to Trump that “America is already great.” The latter estimation of America’s current state also affects the global outlook of the mainstream factions of the capitalist class. They feel that the U.S. is strong enough to reject any compromises with an up and coming power like Russia and is, moreover, in a position to simply push Russia back down into a subordinate position. In contrast, the extreme right of the Republican Party, with their far less optimistic estimate of America’s strength – reflecting the more precarious position of their own base – think that the U.S. must seek an accommodation with Russia.

Russia’s ruling class is well aware of the openness to an alliance with themselves on the part of far-right conservatives in both the U.S. and Europe. Therefore, while occasionally publishing a decent anti-imperialist op-ed piece from a progressive point of view, Russian state media outlets like RT often subtly promote Western Far Right parties. Moreover, they shamelessly court Western far right sentiment by publishing articles that echo the latter’s reactionary narratives. Thus, even as they denounce Nazi influence within the Ukrainian state, RT has in recent months featured op-ed pieces that disgustingly attacked the black rights movement in the U.S., apologised for the 6 January 2021 attempted far-right coup in Washington and attacked LGBT pride. A couple of weeks ago, RT even ran a piece from the Epoch Times (gloating at China’s lack of self sufficiency in iron ore), the newspaper of the fanatically anticommunist, ultra-right wing Chinese exile group, Falun Dafa.

Save Humanity from the Imperialist System through World Socialist Revolution

Although an alliance between capitalist Russia and one or more of the current imperialist powers is possible in the future, right now the imperialist powers are united in waging an uncompromising proxy war against Russia. The more intensely that the Western imperialists pursue this war – by throwing ever greater military and political resources behind their Ukrainian proxies – the more damaging to their interests would be a Russian military victory. That in turn drives the U.S. and its allies to further escalate their involvement in the conflict, which in turn makes them even less willing to accept any sort of Russian victory and so on. In this way, the nuclear-armed imperialists are spiraling towards a possible future direct clash with nuclear-armed Russia. We should all ponder the following question: if the imperialists are provocatively heading down a road that risks taking them towards a direct clash with a fellow capitalist power that is not even their main strategic enemy, what will they be prepared to do against their actual main target: socialistic China? It is increasingly clear that we need to sweep away the imperialist world order not only to ensure the well-being of humanity’s working class masses but to guarantee humanity’s very survival.

So how can we free the world from the stranglehold of the U.S.-led imperial powers? Here we must look to a solution that we can say is partly Russian. But this solution has nothing to do with Putin and his regime. Rather it is the example set by Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party that led the working class of Russia – and behind them all of Russia’s toiling people and oppressed non-Russian national and ethnic minorities – in the overthrow of then Russian imperialism. This October 1917 Russian Revolution put an end to Russia’s participation in the World War I inter-imperialist slaughter and inspired revolutions throughout Europe that threatened to sweep away imperialist rule in Germany and beyond. The October Revolution was not only the world’s first successful socialist revolution but remains the only time that the toiling classes have toppled the ruling class of an imperialist country (subsequent great socialist revolutions in the likes of China, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam and Laos overthrew capitalist rule in semi-colonial countries subjugated by imperialism). This revolution showed that it is the working class in the imperialist countries themselves – alongside we must add working-class-led, anti-imperialist resistance of the masses in the neocolonial countries as well as the inspiration provided by the existence of socialistic states where the working class already hold state power – that can and must topple the imperialist rulers from power. Therefore, to rid the world of dangerous imperialism we urgently need to advance towards modern-day versions of the October 1917 Russian Revolution in the U.S., Britain, Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Germany, France and the other imperialist countries.

The October Revolution established working class rule over one-sixth of the world’s surface and quickly granted equality and the right to self determination to all the nationalities that had been subjugated under the previous capitalist order – including to the Ukrainian people. However, the Soviet workers state immediately came under intense imperialist pressure. Under this pressure, in the mid-1920s, a bureaucratic layer took over political administration of the Soviet Union away from the revolutionary masses on a right-revisionist program of seeking accommodation with imperialism. By the late 1980s, after decades of further sustained imperialist military, economic and political pressure on the Soviet Union and its allies, the wavering bureaucracy began to buckle. By a few years later, they were completely surrendering state power, which they had been previously compelled to wield in the interests of the working class, to Western-orchestrated counterrevolutionaries. Up until this counterrevolution, the Soviet Union had remained a workers state based on a socialistic economic system. That meant that even after the Soviet Union’s bureaucratic backwards step in the mid-1920s, her system produced immense benefits for the masses. To be sure in the 1930s, the Soviet Union’s tremendous industrial development running at a rate hitherto unknown in humanity and while the capitalist world was submerged in the nightmare of the Great Depression was mixed with severe bureaucratic repression of the masses and serious backsliding on the national rights granted to the non-Russian minorities by the October Revolution. However, following the Soviet Union’s heroic victory over Nazi Germany in World War II and then a subsequent decade of rapid reconstruction after the war, the Soviet workers state was able to offer its people a rapidly rising standard of living, guaranteed employment and an array of opportunities to access entertainment facilities and participate in cultural, leisure and sporting pursuits. Moreover, in the three and half decades from this time onwards until her tragic descent towards capitalist counterrevolution in the late 1980s, there was a level of racial and ethnic harmony and equality in the multi-racial Soviet Union that was unknown in any multi-racial capitalist country. Given that the Soviet Union’s course towards socialism was as yet unfinished and given that she was saddled with the administration of a middle-class bureaucracy that kept the masses out of politics, there was neither perfect ethnic equality nor perfect ethnic harmony in the USSR. There was a degree of Russian-centredness within the state. Nevertheless, no national or ethnic group within the multinational Soviet Union could then be said to be subjugated. No ethnic or national group there in this period, including Ukrainian people, faced anywhere near the same racial or national oppression as, say, Aboriginal people suffer in Australia – or indeed Asian, African and Middle Eastern communities in this country today – or black people in the U.S., Tamils in Sri Lanka, West Papuans in Indonesia or Kashmiris, Sikhs and Muslims in India. It is telling that despite the Ukrainian lands of the Soviet Union being far less resource rich than the Russian lands, in 1989 not only was the per capita income in Soviet Ukraine on a par with that of Soviet Russia, the average life expectancy in Soviet Ukraine was two years higher than in Soviet Russia.

The dive towards capitalist counterrevolution in the former Soviet Union and then, especially, the counterrevolution itself led to a catastrophic plunge in the living standards of the masses in every part of the former Soviet Union. It also tore apart the ethnic harmony that once existed there. Decades of peace were now replaced by a series of wars in Georgia, Moldova, Chechnya, Armenia-Azerbaijan, southern Russia and then the Donbass region of Ukraine. International students from Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America who in Soviet times spoke glowingly about how well they had been treated were now subjected to violent attacks from racist gangs. White supremacist forces dangerously grew in both Russia and Ukraine and in the latter gained a significant foothold in the state machinery in 2014. It is crucial to understand that all the conditions that led to this current war – the increased strength of NATO and its eastwards expansion, the drastic economic weakening of Ukraine that allowed the imperialist powers to subordinate her, the conditions of poor living standards and high unemployment out of which fascist forces were spawned, the existence of the rule of capitalist exploiters which necessitated the Ukrainian ruling class to scapegoat the Russian-speaking Donbass population and poison the Ukrainian masses with reactionary nationalism in order to ensure the masses’ subservience, the “Great Russian” chauvinism promoted by the Russian capitalist class in order to keep themselves in power and which in turn allowed Ukrainian nationalists to manipulate understandable fears of the Ukrainian people that they will once again be subjugated under Russians as in pre-Soviet times, the necessity for decaying capitalist ruling classes to expand markets by grabbing territory from each other – all these conditions were created as a result of capitalist counterrevolution in the former Soviet Union. In other words, the horrific suffering and loss of life in the Donbass war that began in 2014 and in its latest more intense phase that began with the Russian invasion this February are a result of the destruction of the workers state created by the October Revolution. This proves just how progressive the Soviet Union, with all its flaws, had been relative to capitalism and what a monumental step forward for humanity was the October 1917 Russian Revolution.

Above: Life in Russia in Soviet times. Students and teachers in the Soviet Union’s legendary Patrice Lumumba University of the Friendship of Peoples celebrate an occasion. Established in 1960, tens of thousands of international students from Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America studied on scholarship there, alongside local students. In February 1961, the university was re-named after the Congolese anti-colonial leader, as Patrice Lumumba University of the Friendship of Peoples. This re-naming of the university after Lumumba was a gesture of solidarity with the peoples of the world standing up to colonialism and neo-colonialism. It came only one month after Lumumba was assassinated by Belgian authorities in a plot orchestrated by the U.S. CIA and with the complicity of the UN. International students at the Patrice Lumumba University and other Soviet universities spoke glowingly at how warmly and hospitably they were treated by the local population. However, the 1991-92 capitalist counterrevolution led to an explosion in racist attacks against international students, non-white immigrants and ethnic minorities in Russia, Ukraine and other parts of the former USSR. Below: Post-Soviet capitalist Russia. Russian fascists, brandishing white supremacist flags, march in Moscow on 4 November 2016. They were participating in the annual, extreme nationalist “Russia March” held on Russia’s National Unity Day.
Photo credit (above photo): RIA Novosti
Photo credit (below photo): AFP/Pool/Vasily Maximov

The lessons from all this that we must draw is that we need to fight to restore working class rule to all parts of the former Soviet Union, fight for socialist revolution around the world and fight like hell to ensure that the counterrevolution that destroyed the Soviet Union does not happen in socialistic China and the other remaining workers states. Moreover, to ensure that workers states created by new October Revolutions are not again collapsed or even pushed a step backwards through bureaucratic degeneration by hostile capitalist pressure, we need to complete any victory achieved by a workers revolution in a particular country by fighting urgently for other such revolutions throughout the globe – above all with the aim of destroying the tyranny of the imperial powers from within their own countries. Today, as the capitalist order grinds down the masses with plummeting real wages, ever-more insecure employment forms, skyrocketing rents and surging food, electricity and fuel prices, those committed to the fight for new October Revolutions can help build popular sympathy for such radical solutions in the course of advocating and mobilising class-struggle resistance to the attacks on the working class masses’ living standards.

To march towards socialist revolutions we must do everything possible to enhance the self-confidence and class struggle sentiments of the working classes and everything possible to weaken and discredit the imperialist ruling classes. Today that means standing for the defeat of the U.S., British, Australian and EU ruling classes’ proxy war against Russia. Let’s mobilise to demand: Stop the military aid to Ukraine! End all the sanctions against Russia! Let’s oppose NATO expansion and oppose NATO itself! We must also oppose all the imperialist schemes to leverage their current proxy war to further escalate their Cold War drive against socialistic China – Let’s unconditionally defend socialistic rule in China! And let’s build parties like Lenin’s Bolsheviks that will lead the working class masses to liberate all oppressed people and humanity itself from decaying capitalism and its final, most horrific stage – imperialism.

Madrid, Spain, 26 June 2022: Spanish leftists march against NATO war-mongering in the leadup to the recent NATO summit. The Spanish language banner translates to “No to NATO!” As well as showing opposition to NATO, socialists in Europe, the U.S. and Australia must oppose the sending of arms to Ukraine by the each of their “own” capitalist rulers, oppose the sanctions on Russia and stand for the defence of Russia against the Western imperialists and their Ukrainian proxies.
Photo credit – Jesús Hellín/dpa.