In addition to the above articles contained in the print version, the following important articles below also form an integral part of Issue 27. All these articles had been published as leaflets and mailed out to subscribers in the period before Issue 27 appeared in print form. They were not included in the print version only to allow space for newer articles given the large volume of articles issued in this period:
Di Sanh Duong的判决法官对一个之前没有犯罪记录的人施加了非常严厉的监禁刑罚,之所以这样说是因为所谓的“罪行”既没有暴力,也没有受害者,甚至也没有被指控造成任何损害——除非你认为帮助医院治疗COVID是有害的!相比之下,上个ANZAC日,一名布里斯班男子对中国人发表种族主义言论,并袭击了几名在码头上钓鱼的亚裔澳大利亚人,他不仅没有被判监禁,甚至没有被判有罪。相反,他只被处以一笔小额民事罚款。尽管他使用金属物体作为武器进行的袭击可能导致致命,如果他成功将受害者击倒进水中,然后通过他的武器进行一击,这个行为可能是致命的。与对Duong极端重的判决相比,对暴力反华种族主义者的轻微惩罚显示了澳大利亚法律体系和司法体系的极端反共产主义和种族主义偏见。
Photo Above: A man carries a young girl injured in an Israeli attack on the densely populated, southern Gaza city of Rafah on 8 May 2024. Over 1.4 million Palestinian people have fled to Rafah to oppose Israel’s murderous attacks elsewhere. Now, Israel’s assault on Rafah threatens a new catastrophe for the people of Gaza. Photo credit: Rizek Abdeljawad/Xinhua
STAND WITH THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE OPPOSE THE U.S. & AUSTRALIAN IMPERIALIST BACKERS OF ISRAEL ON ALL THEIR BATTLEFRONTS!
10 May 2024: Over the last seven months, Israel has killed 35,000 Palestinian people. Now they are attacking densely populated Rafah. This Gaza slaughter is only happening because of the massive support given to Israel by the U.S., German, British, Australian and other imperialist regimes. Just two weeks ago, Joe Biden signed into law a package for the U.S. to provide Israel with a further $A21 billion (!!) of weapons. Despite its smaller size, the Australian ruling class is also hugely participating in Israel’s mass murder. Pro-Palestinian activists have rightly slammed the Australian government’s military ties with Israel and the hundreds of millions that the Albanese Labor government gives to Israel through granting Israeli defence firms military contracts. Australia’s rulers are also joining in Israel’s genocide in two even more consequential ways. Firstly, the Australian regime greatly assists Israel to direct its bombing raids through hosting and helping operate the NT- based, Pine Gap ground station for U.S. spy satellites. Secondly, the Australian military is participating in the U.S.-led strikes on Yemen aimed at crushing pro-Palestine actions by the Houthis in the Red Sea.
The world is outraged by the Western rulers’ support for Israel’s genocide. So, these rulers try to appear like they are restraining Israel. The Labor government has publicly given its Israeli allies soft slaps on the wrists. This while the joint U.S.- Australia Pine Gap base is pinpointing Israel’s strikes on Gaza’s people! For its part, the U.S. regime leaked vague claims that it had delayed one weapons shipment to Israel. But the Pentagon then denied that there had been any decision to withhold arms. Washington and Canberra are behaving like a mafia thug who owns a vicious attack dog. The crime boss fears that the dog’s extreme brutality is setting everyone against them. So they give the dog a gentle public scolding. But they still keep on feeding the dog chunky pieces of meat, for they need the dog to keep on attacking their adversaries.
So concerned are the Western capitalist rulers at their damaged credibility that their media have been implying that it is Western governments – and only these governments – that have been opposing an Israeli invasion of Rafah! This, even as it is clear that it is actually Western imperialism’s adversaries – Yemen’s Houthis, Iran, Syria, North Korea, China and Russia – who have (albeit to differing degrees) been the ones opposing Israel’s terror. Yet many are seeing through the deceit of Western mainstream media outlets. There have been large protests in Western countries against their own regimes’ complicity in Israel’s genocide. In Australia, opposition to the ruling class’ racist oppression of people of colour and Muslims is magnifying sympathy for the Palestinian cause amongst not only people of Arab background but people of Asian, African and Islander heritage, as well as anti-racist whites. In Sydney, there have been huge marches organised by the Palestine Action Group, attempts to stop the loading of ships belonging to Israel’s pro-war Zim shipping line and pro-Palestinian protest camps at universities. We in Trotskyist Platform support all these actions. We struggle for the world’s working class movements and all anti-imperialists to take action to demand: Israel stop your terror now! Israel out of Gaza and the West Bank! Stop the massive support being given to Israel by the U.S., Australian, British and German imperialists! Close the U.S.-Australia Pine Gap spy base! U.S., British and Australian forces get out of the Red Sea region! Let’s support the brave Palestinian resistance! Let’s stand with Yemen, Syria and Iran against U.S. and Israeli attacks!
RESIST THE WESTERN IMPERIALISTS UPHOLDING ISRAEL’S TERROR!
Many activists have shown great energy and courage to stand with the Palestinian people. But for our efforts to actually make a difference, another key factor is urgently needed: a clear political direction. For starters, we need to understand why the U.S. and its allies so intransigently back Israel. Some say it is because “Zionists control America”. But this has it completely the wrong way around! In fact, it is the U.S. capitalist ruling class which controls Israel’s Zionist ruling class. Israel is the attack dog for U.S. imperialism in the oil-rich and strategically-located Middle East. Its role is to weaken all forces in the Middle East that fail to adequately subordinate themselves to Washington – whether they be Syria’s government, certain factions in Lebanon, Yemen’s Houthis or Iran. In imperialism’s new Cold War, Israel’s key designated task is to target countries that choose to have friendly ties with socialistic China. For undertaking this project, the imperialists are prepared to support Israel’s murderous subjugation of the Palestinian people.
The imperialists know that China’s cooperation with developing countries is making it harder for them to super-exploit these countries. Moreover, despite the incomplete, uncertain and deformed nature of China’s transition to socialism, the Western capitalists fear that if China continues to successfully lift her people further away from poverty, the masses in their own countries will eventually be demanding socialism too. And the more that the Western powers see this existential threat resulting from the rise of Red China, the more unconditionally are they willing to back their Zionist attack dog. This is part of why Australia’s imperialist rulers back Israel. With Australia and China both inhabiting the Asia-Western Pacific region, China’s cooperation with the ex-colonial countries is particularly damaging to Australian imperialist plunder in the region. Australia’s ruling class also backs Israel because they want the power of Israel’s U.S. masters to be protected. It is U.S. might that underwrites the Australian capitalists’ plunder of PNG, Fiji, East Timor and other Pacific and Southeast Asian countries. Furthermore, Australia’s rulers are counting on their U.S. allies to spearhead the destruction of the socialistic rule in China that an exploiting class in the Asia-Western Pacific region finds so threatening to its own rule.
The Israeli regime is not imperialism’s only attack dog. The anti-working-class Taiwanese regime has long been built up by the capitalist powers to be an unsinkable aircraft carrier targeting the Chinese workers state. For its part, imperialism’s Ukraine attack dog has been designated the task of waging a proxy war against Russia and the anti-Western inclined, Russian- speaking community in Eastern Ukraine. Although Russia is itself ruled by a reactionary capitalist class, Russia and the Russian-speaking East of Ukraine are too independent for the Western masters of the world to tolerate. That is why twelve days ago, Australia’s government announced that it was sending yet another $100 million of weapons to Ukraine.
There is a perverse “solidarity” among imperialism’s attack dogs.The Taiwanese and Ukrainian regimes are among Israel’s most rabid supporters. Most significantly, the very same U.S. law that granted $A21 billion in weapons to Israel, gave billions in military aid to Taiwan and an incredible $92 billion (!!) to Ukraine. This proves just how much imperialist support for Israel and their opposition to the Chinese workers state and to unbowed Russia go hand in hand. Conversely, true support for the Palestinian people means standing for the defence of socialistic rule in China and taking the side of Russia and Russian-speaking Eastern Ukraine against NATO and its Ukraine proxies. Unfortunately, some of the groups supporting Palestine are actually backing Israel’s Western masters in their proxy campaigns. The Socialist Alternative and Socialist Alliance groups even back imperialist military support for their Ukrainian proxies. Yet, it is very obvious that the liberation of Palestine requires the weakening and not the strengthening of Israel’s Western imperialist backers.
WAGE POLITICAL WAR AGAINST THE AUSTRALIAN CAPITALIST RULING CLASS THAT IS PARTICIPATING IN ISRAEL’S GENOCIDE!
Given how much Israel’s terror depends on imperialism’s support, it is crucial that the pro-Palestine movement becomes a movement that fights to degrade the imperialists by opposing them on every single one of their battlefronts. Most of all, the movement here must become a movement of unyielding opposition to Australia’s capitalist ruling class. For Australia’s rulers will not be swayed one bit by appeals to their conscience. The only thing that will make them retreat from their support for Israel is the prospect of a resistance movement that undermines their rule. There are aspects of today’s movement that are promising. Aboriginal speakers have powerfully exposed the connection between the rulers’ brutal oppression of Aboriginal people and their support for Israel’s terror. Meanwhile, protesters have aptly chanted: “Albanese Your Hands are Red, Fifteen Thousand Children Dead!” When the ruling class hears such determined opposition and see activists making the connection between their support for Israel and their tyranny at home, it makes them very worried.
However, there are other aspects of the pro-Palestine movement that will be a relief to Australia’s ruling class. They are reassured when they see some at the protests appealing to them to be “independent of the U.S.” To be sure, the capitalist rulers do not agree with this appeal as their alliance with the U.S. is in their own interests. But the ruling class will be comforted that those pushing such calls are only appealing to them to change their policy, rather than staunchly opposing them as supporters of genocide, as some protest chants are doing. Other calls have downplayed the crimes of the Australian government by promoting the illusion that it could be a positive force for the Palestinian cause; or by appealing to the government “to do more to oppose Israel’s war.” Do more?! Far from having done anything at all to defend the Palestinian people, this government has been actively supporting Israel’s slaughter. Among those consciously pulling the movement back from unyielding opposition to the Australian ruling class are ALP “Left” forces, soft-on-Labor groups and pro-ALP union officials who have joined the pro-Palestine protests. The Greens are also pushing in this direction. For although individual Greens politicians like Mehreen Faruqi have spoken up against Israel’s terror, the fact is that the Greens ultimately uphold the rule of the capitalist class whose interests lie with supporting Israel. That is why when the Greens were part of a de facto coalition government with the ALP from August 2010 to February 2013, the Australian government continued to back Israel’s subjugation of Palestine. Today, the Greens German counterparts and the Greens foreign minister of Germany, Annalena Baerbock, are among the most rabid supporters of Israel.
Although some consciously hold back the movement from becoming one of staunch opposition to Australia’s rulers, in other cases, one and the same activists simultaneously hold sentiments of intransigent opposition to the capitalist rulers alongside support for slogans that pull the movement back from such a direction. Therefore, the duty of all pro-Palestine activists who understand the need for resolute opposition to the capitalist rulers is to strengthen such attitudes amongst fellow activists, while dispelling illusions in the potential benovelence of Australia’s capitalist class. The same political struggle is needed within our unions in order to turn verbal union statements in solidarity with Palestine into concrete actions – such as wharfies’ action refusing to load and unload Zim ships. This struggle to turn our unions into bodies of relentless opposition to Australia’s capitalist class is precisely what is also needed to make our unions weapons in the struggle to secure real wage rises, win a massive increase in public housing to drive down rents and fight for the conversion of casual jobs into secure ones. In short, the struggle to mobilise the workers movement in support of Palestine is one and the same struggle as the fight for workers rights and the struggle to oppose imperialism on all its battlefronts.
Let’s force Australia’s rulers to pull back from their support for Israel’s genocide! Let’s do this by making the pro-Palestine and union movements forces of unrelenting opposition to the capitalist rulers! If we succeed, we will inspire similar struggles in the U.S. and other Western countries. Two and a half million people in Gaza need us to succeed!
Photo Above: The act of charity that has seen the Australian regime disgustingly jail 68 year-old Chinese-Australian Di Sanh Duong for two years and nine months. At the height of COVID, Duong donated more than $37,000 to the Royal Melbourne Hospital to help it purchase pandemic response materials. Duong made the 2 June 2020 donation which was collected from his Oceania Federation of Chinese Organisations for Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in a ceremony involving then immigration minister Alan Tudge. Photo credit: James Ross/AAP
Free Di Sanh Duong!
Free the Three Cold War Political Prisoners in Australia!
29 February 2024: Australian citizen of Chinese descent, Di Sanh Duong, today became the first person jailed under Australia’s “Foreign Interference” laws. The Australian regime sentenced 68-year-old Duong to two years and nine months jail for making a charitable donation to a Melbourne public hospital during the height of the pandemic. Yes, you read that right! The act for which Doung has been jailed is the making of a public donation to the Royal Melbourne Hospital in a ceremony with then immigration minister, Alan Tudge. The Australian regime and its courts deemed this to be illegal in a largely secret trial. Their allegation boils down to a claim that by giving himself a good name through the donation, Duong was “preparing” to in future advance the interests of the Communist Party of China (CPC) – the party that administers the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). What Duong is really being punished for is the fact that although he is certainly no leftist (Duong was actually a long-time member of the Liberal Party!), the group that he led, the Oceania Federation of Chinese Organisations for Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, has signed (from a Chinese patriotic point of view) public statements showing some sympathy for the PRC. By jailing Di Sanh Duong, Australia’s capitalist regime is seeking to threaten others, especially members of this country’s Chinese community, that they should not express any positive views about the PRC. They are also demonising Duong in order to try and create an anti-communist, anti-China hysteria amongst the population. The Australian ruling class wants to justify to the masses its rabidly enthusiastic participation in Western imperialism’s all-sided political, economic and military campaign to destroy socialistic rule in China.
The charge under which Duong has been jailed is so ridiculous that Duong was not even convicted of “foreign interference”. Instead, he was convicted of “preparing to commit an act of foreign interference”. As we explained in an article titled, “Resist the Cold War Repression” that was written a few months before Duong’s trial late last year:
“Federal prosecutors claim that Duong’s donation to the hospital charity was a means for him to `interfere’ with then immigration minister Tudge – presumably by presenting Duong in a good light to the minister. Yet if that logic is followed consistently, there would literally be tens of thousands of other donors being arrested: for every single person who makes a donation to a charity in a public way is doing it to win themselves credibility with others and gain the influence which that brings. Yet the Australian regime is fine with nearly all others who make public donations to charity. Indeed, when a billionaire tycoon publicly donates to a charity a tiny fraction of the wealth that they have leached from the masses, the regime gushes with praise. But when the leader of a Chinese organisation that is somewhat sympathetic to the PRC makes such a donation, Australia’s regime screams that that this is a sinister act of `foreign interference’ on behalf of the CPC. Such a claim is a crystal clear example of McCarthyism. McCarthyism, the name given to the 1950s anti-communist witch-hunt in the U.S. and Australia, is based on the premise that those who either support communism or are even mildly sympathetic to a socialistic state should be treated with suspicion and denied the rights accorded to others … in this case even the right to publicly donate to a local public hospital!”
Yet even when compared with the hysterical zealotry of the 1950s McCarthyist witch-hunt, today’s lengthy prison sentence handed down to an elderly man – who suffers from glaucoma and cataracts as well as diabetes and high blood pressure – for merely making a public donation to a hospital to aid their pandemic response comes off as especially fanatical. Today’s sentencing judgement by judge Maidment was full of vitriolic denunciations of the Chinese Communist Party and it’s supposedly “pervasive foreign influence program”. Basically the judge has decided that an Australian person, who has even vague links to organisations associated with the Chinese Communist Party, who advocates a political position and happens to take the same stance as the Chinese Communist Party is definitely engaging in “foreign interference” rather than that person happening to share the same belief on an issue as the PRC government that is led by the Chinese Communist Party. Moreover, the Cold War extremist judge’s sentencing judgement practically insists that anyone who has any relations with people who are members of the Chinese Communist Party and who does not declare those associations before making any political advocacy is engaging in “a significant breach of trust” using “covert methodology”. Do Australians who have friends in, or links with, the Liberal or Labor or Greens or One Nation parties here – or say the Republican or Democrat parties in the U.S. – always declare their friendships or connections with those parties every time that they advocate something to a political figure or community organisation?
Despite the sentencing judge’s rantings, the truth is that the Communist Party of China conducts almost no direct interference in Australia’s politics. The foreign state that interferes in Australian political processes the most is the USA. But even U.S. influence operations on Australian politics are today of secondary importance. By far the biggest interferers in Australia’s “democracy” are the wealthy capitalist tycoons and the corporations that they own. These ultra-rich capitalists make very public charity donations to gain a positive reputation in order to influence political decisions according to their agendas – as Di Sanh Duong is alleged to have done – but on a scale far, far bigger and wider than a person like Duong collecting from members of his grassroots community organisation would ever have any hope of doing. This big end of town uses far more direct and potent methods to control political life in this country to an extent that is in great disproportion to their small size. They do so through direct donations to political parties, through the corporate and bosses organisations that they fund, through the corporations that they own being able to entice politicians and high-ranking bureaucrats with the prospects of future lucrative careers in their companies, through using their control of the economy to effectively hold government and other state institutions to ransom; and through the lobbyists that they hire, the media that they own and the NGOs and “independent” think tanks that they establish (like the Lowy Institute, the Institute for Public Affairs and the Australia Institute). Many of these influence operations involve truly “covert methodology” with their media and think tanks making the completely false, lying claim that they are “independent”, unbiased publishers of news and opinion. And while some of their direct political donations are reported – albeit usually many months after they first make them thus diminishing the impact of the disclosure – much of it is concealed through paying big payments to attend super-expensive fundraising dinners or through being funnelled through third parties. Yet none of these corporate bigwigs and their henchmen are even threatened with imprisonment for engaging in such interference in this country’s political system! That is of little surprise – the ruling capitalist class always intended Australia’s “democracy” to be a “democracy” that is controlled exclusively by their class, making sure that their so-called “democratic” system was organised and administered in such a way that would be most conducive for the political interference of the rich in it to continue unabated and largely unhindered.
Resist the Cold War Repression!
Di Sanh Duong’s sentencing judge has slapped a very severe jail term on a person who has had no prior convictions for a supposed “offence” that involved no violence, had no victim and was not even alleged to have done any damage unless you believe that helping hospitals treat COVID is damaging! By contrast, last ANZAC Day when a Brisbane man shouting racist abuse against Chinese people assaulted several Asian-Australians fishing on a pier, he was not only not given a jail term but he was not even given a criminal conviction. He was, instead, merely given a small civil fine. This is despite the fact that his assault using a metal object as a weapon could have been fatal had he succeeded in knocking one of the victims into the water after debilitating them through a blow with his weapon. That slap on the wrist to a violent anti-Chinese racist when contrasted with Duong’s outrageously heavy sentence shows the extreme anti-communist and racist bias of Australia’s legal system and judiciary.
Sunny Duong, as he is affectionately known, has today become Australia’s third Cold War political prisoner. Of the other two current political prisoners, one is pilot Daniel Duggan who has been imprisoned for the last sixteen months under harsh conditions for merely training Chinese pilots to fly more than ten years ago! The Australian regime is seeking to extradite Duggan to the U.S. to face charges as nothing he did is illegal by Australian laws. Meanwhile, Alexander Csergo has been jailed for the last eleven months accused of violating Australia’s “foreign interference” laws for merely looking up open source politics and defence affairs articles on the internet and passing their contents over to a Chinese think tank!
The anti-China hysteria surrounding all this Cold War repression – especially the persecution of ethnic Chinese Di Sanh Duong – will only further inflame anti-Chinese racism in Australia. It is a call out to all the filthy racists. It will lead to more people of Chinese appearance being abused in public transport and shopping centres, being bullied at school and being physically attacked on Australia’s streets. Moreover, these Cold War prosecutions have helped produce such a “national security” obsession that it is being used to intensify the repression of those targeted for matters not directly related to the Cold War. Thus, there is no doubt that the repressive political atmosphere created by the new McCarthyist witch-hunt has contributed to the prosecution of whistle blower, David McBride. McBride was convicted last November of “unlawfully disclosing Commonwealth documents” after he gave to the media information detailing the horrific and very widespread war crimes that were being committed by the Australian regime’s forces during their participation in the NATO occupation of Afghanistan. Now, he too faces imprisonment. The entire Left and all genuine defenders of democratic rights in Australia must demand: Drop the Charges against David McBride! Free Di Sanh Duong now! Free Daniel Duggan and Alexander Csergo! Scrap Australia’s draconian “Foreign Interference” laws! Down with the new McCarthyist witch-hunt!
As part of their Cold War drive to destroy socialistic rule in China, the Australian and other imperialist ruling classes seek to attack the PRC over “human rights”. However, the truth is that unlike Australia’s capitalist regime the PRC does not jail people for donating to public hospitals! We should stress that the imprisonment of Di Sanh Duong here has very little in common with the former imprisonment of Australian citizen, Cheng Lei, in China and the current jailing of another Chinese-Australian in China, Yang Hengjun. Cheng Lei was jailed for illegally supplying state secrets overseas – a form of spying. Notably, Cheng Lei confessed to the crimes – although she has tried to walk back and obscure her confession after returning to Australia after serving her sentence. For his part, Yang Hengjun was found guilty of espionage. It is important to understand that not only were Cheng Lei and Yang Hengjun convicted of offences that would be considered very serious in any country, from the point of view of the interests of the working class of Australia and the whole world their actions truly are crimes. For they weaken and undermine a workers state – a workers state in the form of socialistic China. Their actions are as abusive towards the working class masses as a person who crosses a picket line to scab on a strike but with potentially even more damaging consequences. Unlike the Cold War political prisoners that Australia has imprisoned here, Cheng Lei and Yang Hengjun were not jailed for merely donating to a public hospital or teaching people (apparently civilian pilots) how to fly planes or passing on the results of Google searches!
Today, the claims of the Australian and other Western capitalist rulers that they stand for “human rights” are being thoroughly exposed by their active support for Israel’s heinous war on the Palestinian people. Through hosting and jointly operating the joint U.S.-Australia spy base at the Northern Territory’s Pine Gap – which pinpoints a large number of Israel’s air and artillery strikes on Gaza – and through joining the U.S.-led Red Sea operation against Yemeni actions in support of Gaza, the Labor Party-administeredAustralian regime is directly participating in Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people. This shows that whether administered by the right-wing Liberal-Nationals, the social democratic ALP or any other party, Australia’s capitalist-serving state will use the cruellest means possible to protect the interests of this country’s ruling class – that small but powerful class of people that obtain their massive wealth through exploiting the labour of others. And that includes putting people sympathetic to Red China who publicly donate to hospitals in jail!
Today’s imprisonment of Di Sanh Duong underscores the importance of the demonstration that Trotskyist Platform and the Australian Chinese Workers Association conducted in Sydney’s Eastwood last September that called to “RESIST THE COLD WAR WITCH-HUNT!” That action also opposed the marginalisation of Australia’s Chinese community that has accompanied the ruling class’ Cold War drive against socialistic China. During the protest march, we loudly chanted, “Resist, Resist, the Cold War Witch-hunt!” and “Di Sanh Duong, Drop His Charges Now!” We now need to urgently build on that action and grow and strengthen the movement. We need to build a mass united-front movement of anti-Cold War leftists, pro-PRC members of the Chinese community and the most advanced sections of the workers movement to demand: Free Di Sanh Duong! Free Australia’s three Cold War political prisoners! Scrap Australia’s draconian “Foreign Interference” laws! Down with anti-Chinese racism! Down with the Western capitalist ruling classes’ Cold War offensive against socialistic China that is the root cause of this repression!
Energetic Protest Opposes the Australian Rulers’ Cold War Witch-Hunt
26 September 2023: Two days ago, about forty people participated in a determined protest against the stigmatisation and marginalisation of Australia’s Chinese community that has accompanied the ruling class’ Cold War drive against socialistic China. Witch-hunting in Australia associated with the U.S. and Australian rulers’ new Cold War has specifically targeted that majority section of the Chinese community that has a friendly attitude towards the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). Sunday’s action also opposed the broader Cold War repression in Australia. This repression is increasingly targeting even non-Chinese people who continue to maintain pragmatic relations with the PRC and her institutions. Even people with no particular political sympathy for China are being persecuted.
Sunday’s protest in the Sydney suburb of Eastwood has special importance. Since the Australian ruling class began aggressively persecuting the PRC-friendly section of the Chinese community nearly six years ago and started targeting others in this witch-hunt too, this was the very first action whose main focus was pushing back at this Cold War repression. And it was the first demonstration to in any way call-out such Cold War witch-hunting since the campaign to free pro-North Korea, then political prisoner in Australia, Chan Han Choi, culminated nearly two and a half years ago when Choi was freed from the clutches of capitalist Australia’s “justice” system.
The September 24 rally and march was reported on by the popular Chinese-language Australian news site, Sydney Today and picked up by many other Chinese-language news sites. Reflecting the deep concerns of Australia’s Chinese community, the article about the rally had one of the highest number of readers’ comments of any article published by Sydney Today on the day that the report was issued.
The main banner of the demonstration called to “RESIST THE COLD WAR WITCH-HUNT!” The other banner slogans included, “Free the People of Many Ethnicities That the Australian Regime is Cruelly Prosecuting for Merely Engaging with China’s Institutions!”, “Stop the Marginalisation of the Chinese Community!”, “Resist the Attacks on Social Organisations Friendly to China!” and “Stop the New McCarthyist Witch-hunt! `Free Speech’ Must Include the Right to Express Positive Views about Socialistic China!”
The September 24 rally was proudly multiracial in composition bringing people of white Australian background together with people from Chinese, Korean and other Asian and Middle Eastern ethnicities. It was endorsed by the Australian Chinese Workers Association (ACWA), ourselves in Trotskyist Platform, Anti-War West Sydney and, in an individual capacity, by well-known peace activist Nick Deane who is both the convenor of the Marrickville Peace Group and a member of the Independent and Peaceful Australian Network (IPAN). For the ACWA, it took particular courage to participate in this action. Since the Cold War witch-hunt threatens all Chinese community organisations that have either a friendly or neutral attitude towards Red China – that is all Australian-Chinese groups that refuse to enlist in the capitalist rulers’ PRC-bashing campaign – the ACWA is itself one of the groups in the firing line.
Each of the endorsing entities had representatives speak at Sunday’s rally. The formal part of the demonstration began with an address by one of the two co-chairs of the event, ACWA chairman, David Chen. Introducing the action David stated:
“Thank you everyone who has come here to support this important action to oppose the marginalisation of the Chinese community in Australia and to stand up against the new Cold War witch-hunt.
“I want to start by acknowledging that we are gathering here on the land of the Wallumettagal clan of the Eora First Nations people.
“My name is David Chen and I am the chairman of the Australian Chinese Workers Association. I will be co-chairing this event together with my friend Sarah Fitzenmeyer who is the chairwoman of Trotskyist Platform, the Australian-Chinese Workers Association’s partners in initiating this event.
“My remarks will be focussed on one important symptom of the marginalisation of the Chinese community. That is Ryde City Council’s decision to name a big chunk of Eastwood without properly consulting the Chinese community or the broader community at all [Editor’s note: According to the latest census, people of Chinese ethnicity are by far the biggest ethnic group in Eastwood and make up 49% of the suburb. However, recently the local council that covers Eastwood has decided to rename a big chunk of the suburb as `Koreatown’ without consulting the Chinese community. This has provoked outrage among some who see it as a symptom of how marginalised the Chinese community in Australia has become]. Sarah and other speakers will then talk about the many other aspects of Cold War repression in Australia which has seen Chinese social organisations slandered, people of various ethnicities jailed or charged for having connections to China and violent racist forces being encouraged on the streets.”
In calling to “suspend the construction of the Koreatown project” until a proper consultation has taken place, the ACWA chairman stressed that his group’s stance has nothing to do whatsoever with rivalry with the Korean community or even disapproval of the existence of a “Koreatown” within Eastwood per se but is based on opposition to the Ryde City Council’s lack of consultation with the Chinese community and lack of openness around the Eastwood naming issue. He concluded by calling for Ryde to become “a model multicultural community where all ethnic groups live together in peace, friendship and equality.” Indeed, it was notable that several people of Korean ancestry joined the September 24 protest.
“For All Working-Class People and Nearly All Middle-Class People Too, the Cold War Witch-hunting is Completely Against Our Interests”
Next to speak, was the other rally co-chair, our Trotskyist Platform chairwoman Sarah Fitzenmeyer. Sarah began her speech by stating:
“We are gathering here today on the stolen land of the Wallumettagal clan of the Eora First Nations people. This country’s current political order is built on the brutal dispossession of Aboriginal people. Alongside this, the regime here has often engaged in persecuting Asian people – especially Chinese people. This started from the mid-19th century gold rush and then continued on into the White Australian Policy after Federation.
“Anti-Chinese racism has come back with a vengeance over the last few years – driven not only by the long-standing racist xenophobia but also the jingoism surrounding the Australian rulers’ participation in the Western regimes’ Cold War drive to destroy and ultimately annihilate socialistic rule in China. To justify their Cold War, the Australian ruling class have created a fear of China. They have been slandering sections of the Chinese community as supposed “agents” of “foreign interference” from Red China. Such propaganda inevitably creates hostility towards the Chinese community.
“To stifle any opposition to their Cold War drive, Australia’s capitalist rulers use repression to silence people – both within the Chinese community and the broader community – anyone who dares to express a positive view on the Peoples Republic of China.
“In the face of this increasing stigmatisation, we say that the Chinese community should not have to stand alone. It is the duty of Australians of other ethnicities, especially white Australians, to strongly oppose the attacks on the Chinese community and – in particular – the attacks on that large section of the Chinese community that has positive views about the Peoples Republic of China. Taking such a stance is a big part of what today’s demonstration is all about.”
Sarah then listed some of the “examples of how the Australia’s rulers’ Cold War, China-bashing campaign has caused great harm to both the Chinese and the broader community” and recalled the 1950s McCarthyist witch-hunt in the U.S. and Australia (that saw many communists and others deemed sympathetic to then most powerful socialistic state – the Soviet Union – being sacked from their jobs and in many cases imprisoned):
“Five years ago, all of Australia’s parliamentarians from all political parties voted to introduce repressive, so-called Foreign Interference laws. The true purpose of these authoritarian laws is to prevent certain groups of people from expressing views that are positive about socialistic China.
“The following year, the then NSW Liberal state government, pressured by the Greens, banned the China-connected Confucius Institutes from teaching Chinese language in NSW schools. The politicians ludicrously claimed that this language teaching would be used by China to conduct foreign interference.
“Around the same time, Australia’s ASIO secret police unleashed threatening interrogations against Chinese international students who had become involved in political activity. In August 2019, the students had organised a large pro-China rally against the pro-colonial, anti-China rioters in Hong Kong. While the Australian ruling class were overtly backing the anti-communist, anti-China forces holding rallies here, when pro-Peoples Republic of China activists did the same, they were hit with terrifying intimidation by Australia’s secret police….
“In November 2020, the leader of the Chinese community group, the Oceania Federation of Chinese Organisations, Di Sanh Duong, became the first person charged under Australia’s Foreign Interference laws. Ridiculously, the Australian regime claimed that the charity collection that he organised for a public hospital was an act of `Foreign Interference’. Can you believe it?
“The Cold War repression has reached such a level that many non-Chinese people are now also being targeted.
“The NSW state MP, Shaoquett Moselmane, in 2020, was subjected to an intense media attack after he made the manifestly true statement that China had responded effectively to the COVID pandemic. Both the AFP and ASIO unleashed a massive raid on Moselmane’s home to supposedly investigate `foreign interference’….
“The neo-McCarthyist witch-hunt has reached such proportions that even people without the slightest sympathy for China but who have had pragmatic relations with PRC entities are being persecuted….
“In one of the most outrageous persecutions of this entire neo-McCarthyist campaign, Australian citizen and former U.S. fighter pilot, Daniel Duggan, is facing extradition to the U.S. simply for training Chinese, most very likely civilian, pilots in South Africa …. For this Duggan has been languishing in harsh conditions in NSW prisons for the last ten months. The prosecution of the 54 year-old pilot has little to do with upholding the law. In the context of the crazed Cold War drive against socialistic China, Duggan is a convenient object for the U.S. and Australian rulers to create a show trial to hype up the supposed `Chinese military threat.’
“If we do not push back against this Cold War repression it’s going to get even more intense. Earlier this year, the Albanese government banned public sector employees from accessing the popular Chinese, short-video platform, TikTok, on government devices. Last month, a parliamentary committee further demanded that TikTok and WeChat be subjected to requirements that could provide the basis for completely banning these platforms in Australia.”
The rally co-chair stressed that “for all working-class people and nearly all middle-class people too, the Cold War witch-hunting is completely against our interests”:
“This Cold War witch-hunt is helping to foster an unhealthy, hysterical national security obsession. It is this climate that has enabled the Australian regime to persecute the courageous whistle blower, David McBride, the former Australian Army lawyer who exposed the Australian regime’s horrific war crimes in Afghanistan.
“The main aim Western rulers’ have for their new Cold War is of course to crush socialistic rule in China. This would be completely catastrophic for more than 90% of the people of Australia and the entire West. To ensure that this future does not come true what is most badly needed is for socialistic rule in China to succeed and flourish…. While people in Australia are ground down by unaffordable power, fuel and food prices because of the greed of the oil, gas and electricity company owners, we need to be able to point to the existence and reality of what public ownership is capable of [in the PRC], how China’s energy and power sectors are publicly owned and thus price gouging does not exist there.
“Sisters and brothers this is what we must do, we need to oppose in entirety the political, economic, propaganda and military campaign which is being waged against socialistic rule in China. And this means that we must oppose all Cold War witch-hunts that are being used to promote the war drive and to silence any opposition to it.”
Next to speak was anti-war activist Nick Deane. Recalling how he had campaigned against the Vietnam War and then against the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Nick Deane expressed his fear that the U.S. and its allies would actually unleash a war on China. He explained that China is no threat at all to any country and that Australia actually does not have any external threats whatsoever. Instead the real threat is the climate crisis. The peace activist emphasised the need to oppose Australia’s planned acquisition of nuclear submarines under the AUKUS pact.
Demonstrators at the September 24 action listen to a speech by anti-war activist Nick Deane.
“We Have to Resist the Coming New Fascism by Resisting the New McCarthyist Repression Today!”
Samuel Kim then spoke on behalf of Trotskyist Platform. He began by skewering the persecution of Di Sanh Duong and the so-called “Foreign Interference” laws that Di Sanh Duong has been charged under: Take the case of Melbourne Vietnamese-Chinese community leader, Di Sanh Duong, known as Sunny Duong. Three and a half years ago, Sunny arranged for a community group to collect over $37,000 for a Melbourne Hospital to treat COVID patients …. You would think that this act of charity would win Sunny’s organisation praise. Instead he has been arrested and charged with foreign interference. The reason that Sunny is being targeted is because his group has a friendly attitude towards China. Donating money to a hospital could see Sunny Duong facing up to ten years in jail!
Sunny Duong was charged under Australia’s draconian, so-called, “Foreign Interference” laws brought in five years ago. Under the cover of these authoritarian laws, a very large number of office bearers of Chinese social organisations that have a friendly attitude towards Red China have been subjected to intimidating interrogations by Australia’s ASIO secret police. This Gestapo style secret police then threaten people not to talk about the interrogations. Therefore, it is not publicly known who had been interrogated! The combined ASIO intimidation, repressive laws, and media lies have pressured many Chinese social organisations to reduce their public activities.
Samuel warned of how the new McCarthyist witch-hunt is threatening to persecute ever more people: A couple of months ago, the likes of far-right Liberal MP James Patterson and Greens MP David Shoebridge even demanded that the police arrest people who make strong social media comments defending China against anti-communist, anti-China activists. If we are not careful, in the future even people here who criticise the Cold War and extremist Sinophobes, or who advocate for the public ownership of the banks and key sectors – may be accused of “foreign interference”…. Like a cancer, the Cold War witch-hunt in Australia is spreading. The whole parliament from parties that are neo-fascist like One Nation to the Liberals, Labor and the Greens join the Cold War as they all serve the ruling class. Many non-Chinese are now also being targeted.
During his speech, Samuel Kim briefly addressed the Eastwood naming issue noting that he is a person of Korean background: With Chinese voices silenced by the Cold War no wonder that the Council renamed part of Eastwood “Koreatown” without consulting the Chinese community. As a Korean person, I was shocked, because I knew Eastwood is overwhelmingly Chinese, and not Korean. If there should be a Koreatown, it should be in the southern part of Lidcombe where Koreans are the main ethnic group. But what has happened here in Eastwood is not about Koreans. This is a symptom of the growing attacks on the Chinese community.
The Trotskyist Platform spokesman not only re-asserted the basic point that the Cold War repression in Australia is aimed at ensuring the population’s subservience to the capitalist rulers’ drive to crush socialistic rule in China but explained why the capitalist rulers are hell-bent on this quest and why we must defend socialistic rule in China: Despite China’s transition to socialism being incomplete and bureaucratically deformed from hostile pressure, China is proving that socialism can greatly improve the lives of the masses …. This will encourage the struggle for socialism here…. Capitalist rule in Australia is leading to homelessness and unaffordable rents …. Meanwhile workers real wages are plummeting, all whilst corporate profits soar, the prices of food, fuel and electricity are surging and society is becoming more toxicly racist and cannibalistic due to capitalist individualistic savagery and brutality. So it is crucial that socialistic China succeeds and societies learn from her socialist-owned banks, property, and enterprises. Working-class people here must do whatever is possible to defend socialistic rule in China. We demand U.S. and Australian navies get out of the South China Sea! Down with the acquisition of long-range missiles and nuclear subs! Scrap Western support for the anti-working class Taiwanese regime! Challenge the propaganda against China – over COVID, Hong Kong or treatment of her Uyghur minority – for they are lies like the Iraq WMD allegations that lead to war, took lives, and wasted trillions of dollars!
In the context of the Cold War repression in Australia, Samuel responded to the demands by Australia’s capitalist media that prime minister Anthony Albanese attack the PRC “over human rights” when Albanese has his expected meeting with the PRC president in China later this year: When prime minister Albanese meets Chinese president Xi Jinping later this year he has absolutely no right to criticise China about “human rights”. In fact, we appeal to Chinese president Xi Jinping to ask Albanese to scrap Australia’s draconian, so-called, Foreign Interference laws and to stop the intimidating ASIO interrogations…. We also appeal to Xi to demand that the Australian regime drop the charges against those imprisoned here or facing jail on charges related to the Cold War witch-hunt.
The Trotskyist Platform representative concluded his speech by urging resistance to the new McCarthyist witch-hunt in Australia warning that it if this Cold War repression is not resisted it could become a springboard to something even more horrifying: As the capitalist order decays, there are far-right forces strengthening who want nothing less than to impose a Nazi-style or Mussolini-style fascist version of capitalism to maximise profits and quell dissent. In the U.S., Europe and to some degree Australia, these forces are growing. We have to resist the coming new fascism by resisting the new McCarthyist repression today …. Workers, students, out-of-work people of all ethnicities, religions, and background have to step up and struggle …. Let’s demand: Stop the attacks on Chinese social organisations friendly to China! Drop the charges against Di Sanh Duong! Free Daniel Duggan! Free Alexander Csergo! Stop the Cold War marginalisation of Australia‘s Chinese community! Stand with socialistic China!
Alongside the speeches of our spokespeople and the leaflets that we distributed, Trotskyist Platform supporters promoted a perspective of working-class based opposition to the Cold War repression through the placards that we carried at the rally. Among our many signs at the demonstration were ones that called to: “Resist the Push By Australian Politicians to Repress People Who Make Strong Social Media Comments Sympathetic to the People’s Republic of China!”, “Resist the Australian Regime’s Attempts to Silence Positive Opinions About Socialistic China! With Working-Class People Here Suffering Unaffordable Rents, Insecure Jobs and Plunging Real Wages We Badly Need to Hear About China’s Socialistic Alternative” and “A Strong Socialistic China is Good for Australian Working Class People. Australian Workers: Defend the PRC Workers State!” Additionally our ethnic Korean supporters carried bilingual English and Korean placards with messages such as: “Working-Class Korean-Australians Say: Stop Discrimination Against Australia’s Chinese Community!”
Sabotuers Rebuffed, the Pro-PRC Chinese Community Given Confidence, the Resistance is Energised
After several speeches in English, ACWA chairman David Chen addressed the Chinese-speaking people present at the rally by reiterating in Mandarin Chinese the points made in his initial introductory speech. The rally then marched west down Eastwood’s Rowe Street mall and then snaked through the shop-crowded streets of Eastwood in a loop that took us past the main entrance to the suburb’s railway station. Here is a video of a part of the march taken by the Australian-Chinese online newspaper, Sydney Today:
Immediately after the march, a message of solidarity to the action was read out from Wayne Sonter, the leader of activist group, Anti-War West Sydney. The messaged expressed “strong opposition to this governments attempts to intimidate and suppress all those who may have links with, or express views supportive of the PRC.” The solidarity statement stressed that:
“Anti-War West Sydney supports the concepts of a global community of nations, a global green new deal and aspirations for an ecological civilisation.
“We support and advocate a pathway to peace, progress and sustainability, not a road to endless war, destruction and catastrophe.
“We, or our governments cannot choose to do both. The Australian government, by these acts of intimidation and a host of associated commitments shows to the Australian people that it has chosen the wrong path and is on the wrong side of history”
During the march, participants loudly chanted “Resist, Resist, the Cold War Witch-hunt!” and “Di Sanh Duong, Drop His Charges Now!” Chinese-speakers on the march also chanted in Mandarin, calling to unite against the discrimination targeting the Chinese community. The march attracted a great deal of interest and sympathy from onlookers in the local Chinese community and from the broader Eastwood community. Indeed, throughout the whole event we met with few signs of hostility (aside from some drunken rednecks who chanted “We want nukes” as we marched past a pub that they were patronising).
However, in the days leading up to the demonstration, there was a concerted attempt by hostile forces to sabotage the action. A small number of representatives of two Chinese business bosses’ groups – the Eastwood Chinatown Chamber of Commerce and the Northwest Chinese Business Association – that had both hastily scrambled together their formation in the three weeks leading up to the rally, tried to bully the ACWA into pulling back from the September 24 action. Most harmfully, they spread disinformation within the Chinese community implying that Sunday’s demonstration would be deemed illegal by the police. We would not call these disgusting acts of sabotage a “betrayal”. Rather, it is a case of capitalists and their henchmen acting in their own class interests – the interests that is of a class that extracts its income from plundering the fruits of their workers’ labour. To be sure, as in every other political dispute, personal factors like ego come into the equation. However, at bottom, certain business bosses and their avaricious upper-middle class henchmen were acting against the September 24 rally because they feared that the explicitly pro-working class initiators of the action – the Australian Chinese Workers Association and Trotskyist Platform – could gain greater authority and that this could eventually lead to their own workers becoming more assertive of their rights and better connected with the broader Australian trade union movement. Or, to put it another way, a few of the local business bosses feared that the activism of the groups that spearheaded the September 24 rally could eventually threaten the level of profit that they can gain by exploiting their own workers. For in the end, a capitalist in Australia is a capitalist – regardless of whether they have white European, Chinese, Korean or any other ancestry! To be sure, even capitalist Chinese in Australia suffer discrimination as a result of the explosion of anti-Chinese sentiment incited by the Cold War witch-hunt. However, at the same time, the fact that this present socio-economic order upholds their very privileged economic and social position makes them zealously loyal to the current order and suspicious of any protest against the pro-capitalist authorities upholding it. Thus the particular capitalist elements within the Chinese community that attempted to undermine the September 24 rally objected to the “combative” approach to governments of the protest initiators. They counterposed to this their “positive” attitude to governments in dealing with both the Eastwood naming issue and the much more serious attacks faced by the Chinese community. Of course, these forces would be the first to grab for themselves any concessions to the Chinese community that the authorities make in a response to the activism of the likes of those of us who conducted the September 24 protest.
In many ways, the conduct of those upper-class elements within the Chinese community that sought to undermine the September 24 rally can be compared to the attitude that several Indian-Australian community groups took to protests in the late noughties against the wave of violent racist attacks on Indian students that were unleashed in Australia at that time. Although these Indian community groups included people in all classes within them (unlike those who sought to sabotage the September 24 action), it is upper-class and upper-middle class elements who – through their ability to make big donations and the often greater eloquence that flows from their greater opportunities to access high-quality education – have gained a stranglehold on many of these Indian-Australian community groups. As a result, even though the leaders of these groups’ own children may have been subjected to racist bullying at school – and on the streets – as part of the wave of anti-Indian violence, they downplayed the racist attacks on Indian, mainly international, students and condemned the spirited anti-racist protests of these students. They proved that they would rather accept, albeit with a heavy heart, racist attacks on Indian international students and even the threat of such attacks on their own children, than risk any damage to the authority of the social order that upholds their very privileged economic and social status. This attitude of the wealthy leaders of some Australian-Indian community groups provoked understandable outrage back in India. Today, certain of their class compatriots within the Australian-Chinese capitalist class are following in their footsteps with respect to the Cold War stigmatisation and marginalisation of the Chinese community today.
Those who sought to sabotage the September 24 action did have some success. With Australian-Chinese people who considered attending the rally only too aware that they are in the Cold War firing line of the authorities, fear of the likelihood of a police attack on the protest that was deviously spread by the saboteurs did indeed cause some Chinese people who were planning to join the action to decide to stay home. However, the saboteurs’ campaign against the 24 September action only made the core cadre in the ACWA more determined. As a result they, Trotskyist Platform and the other rally supporters were able to successfully conduct the action. The demonstration received much sympathy from onlookers who saw it and others who later heard about it, as well as important coverage in the Australian-Chinese media. Most importantly, the ethnic Chinese people who participated in the September 24 protest were invigorated by the action; as were the many non-Chinese people who took part. A huge step has been taken in conducting the very first action in Australia to directly oppose the Cold War marginalisation of the Australian-Chinese community and broader Cold War repression. Momentum for follow-up actions has inevitably been created. Those who hesitated in participating this time but heard of the successful conduct of the action, will be keen to join next time.
As rally co-chair Sarah Fitzenmeyer stressed in her concluding remarks:
“We must push back against this Cold War repression even though it is not going to be easy. The witch-hunting climate is intense and is accompanied by rabid propaganda by the mainstream media pushing the `China Threat’ and `Chinese Foreign Interference’ hoaxes. But history is made by the brave and not by the cowardly and today’s rally is an important step forward. It is indeed the very first action that has directly opposed the overall McCarthyist witch-hunt in Australia. So well done everyone who has come here to support this action….
“I hope the Chinese community, especially the section sympathetic to the People’s Republic of China, gets the message from today’s action that they are not alone. It is vitally important that those Chinese-Australians with a sympathetic view about socialistic China feel that they are not alone. Because we need you to be able to express your views …. We need you to tell other Australians about what the People’s Republic of China is really like and how much she has achieved in poverty alleviation and in improving the lives of her people. We need this because we know that this will help undercut support for the dangerous anti-China war drive that our rulers are hell-bent on pushing.
“So, with courage and perseverance, let us resist the Cold War repression in Australia and demand: End the Cold War witch-hunt! Free the Cold War political prisoners in Australia! Scrap the authoritarian foreign interference laws! Stop the ASIO raids! Stop the attempts to silence social media users sympathetic to socialistic China! Let’s resist our rulers’ political, military and propaganda campaign against socialistic China that is the root cause of this new Cold War repression!”
Photo Above, 26 June 2020: Some of the dozens of ASIO secret police and Australian Federal Police (AFP) officers that raided the home of then NSW Labor MP, Shaoquett Moselmane. The upper house state MP was witch-hunted because he had weeks earlier made the manifestly true statement that China had responded effectively to the COVID pandemic. Moselmane was politically lynched by the mainstream media after authorities gave the media pre-warning of the raid to enhance the witch-hunt. However, later, after Moselmane’s reputation had been trashed, the AFP finally confirmed that he had no case to answer … and that they never intended to charge him!
OPPOSE THE PERSECUTION OF AUSTRALIAN-CHINESE COMMUNITY ORGANISATIONS AND INDIVIDUALS WHO ARE SYMPATHETIC TO RED CHINA!
RESIST THE COLD WAR REPRESSION!
26 August 2023: Di Sanh Duong is a respected member of Melbourne’s Chinese community. The man in his late 60s, known affectionately as “Sunny”, is the president of the Oceania Federation of Chinese Organisations. The group represents people of Chinese descent that have roots in the Chinese minority communities of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. In June 2020, in front of the then immigration minister Alan Tudge, Duong made a donation of more than $37,000 on behalf of his organisation to the Royal Melbourne Hospital to help the latter treat COVID patients. This big donation to a hospital made by Duong’s organisation during the height of the pandemic would be an act that would win most people in most countries respect for themselves and their organisation. But not for an ethnic Chinese person in present day Australia, during the midst of the anti-China, anti-communist Cold War! And especially not for a prominent member of a Chinese organisation that – as is the case with Duong’s organisation – has “failed” to enlist in the U.S. and Australian ruling classes’ propaganda war against Red China! For his “terrible deed” of making a large public donation to a hospital on behalf of a Chinese community organisation that is mildly sympathetic to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Di Sanh Duong is facing ten years jail for breaching Australia’s draconian “Foreign Interference” laws. Duong is the first person charged under these 2018 laws. He is currently on bail awaiting trial.
How on earth can Australia’s capitalist regime claim that a person making a donation to a public hospital is engaged in “foreign interference” on behalf of the Communist Party of China (CPC)?!! Well, that would be hard to sell. So, the authorities have instead charged Duong with “engaging in conduct with the intention of preparing for, or planning, foreign interference.” If that sounds like a very vague charge that could be used to target any political opponent … it’s because that is precisely what it is! Australia’s capitalist state wants to persecute Duong for daring to lead an organisation that has a somewhat positive view of socialistic China. The Oceania Federation of Chinese Organisations has apparently signed petitions opposing the Western powers’ provocative interference in the South China Sea issues. Not that Sunny Duong and his organisation are any kind of communists. Indeed, Duong was a member of the Liberal Party and only resigned from it after his arrest. Duong’s soft sympathy for China is likely based on a patriotic pride that an ethnic Chinese country that until seven decades ago had been ground down and humiliated by Western imperial powers has, since the foundation of the PRC, become a highly successful country. Moreover, as a businessman whose company’s operation, providing graveyard stone memorials, has a main client base amongst the Chinese community, Duong is no doubt shaped by the reality that having a positive attitude towards the PRC plays well with customers.
Federal prosecutors claim that Duong’s donation to the hospital charity was a means for him to “interfere” with then immigration minister Tudge – presumably by presenting Duong in a good light to the minister. Yet if that logic is followed consistently, there would literally be tens of thousands of other donors being arrested: for every single person who makes a donation to a charity in a public way is doing it to win themselves credibility with others and gain the influence which that brings. Yet the Australian regime is fine with nearly all others who make public donations to charity. Indeed, when a billionaire tycoon publicly donates to a charity a tiny fraction of the wealth that they have leached from the masses, the regime gushes with praise. But when the leader of a Chinese organisation that is somewhat sympathetic to the PRC makes such a donation, Australia’s regime screams that that this is a sinister act of “foreign interference” on behalf of the CPC. Such a claim is a crystal clear example of McCarthyism. McCarthyism, the name given to the 1950s anti-communist witch-hunt in the U.S. and Australia, is based on the premise that those who either support communism or are even mildly sympathetic to a socialistic state should be treated with suspicion and denied the rights accorded to others … in this case even the right to publicly donate to a local public hospital!
Ironically, the “Foreign Interference” laws that Duong is being persecuted under were instituted under the guise of defending Australia’s supposed “democratic system” against the influence of “authoritarian powers” – principally the PRC. Yet the reality is that while China’s authorities have never threatened to jail a single one of her 1.4 billion residents merely for donating to a public hospital charity, their Australian counterparts want to do precisely this merely because the donor has dissenting foreign policy views to their regime! Now that is authoritarian! So is the fact that part of the evidence brief in Di Sanh Duong’s trial has been withheld from him, his lawyers and the media on the supposed grounds of protecting “national security information”. Even more worrying are suggestions that part – or even all – of Di Sanh Duong’s trial will be held in secret. These concerns have been amplified by the fact that there has been no media reporting whatsoever on his trial’s direction hearings that had been scheduled for earlier this year and no reporting on when Duong’s exact trial date is. Moreover, online links to certain more recent media articles on his case have been broken. All this suggests that the courts have placed a partial gag order on more current reporting on the case, including the outcome of directions hearings and the exact trial date.
Melbourne, 2 June 2020: The act of charity that has Di Sanh Duong facing trial on a charge that carries a ten year sentence. In the presence of then acting minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, Alan Tudge, Duong made a $37,450 donation to the Royal Melbourne Hospital on behalf of his Oceania Federation of Chinese Organisations. Australia’s capitalist regime has ridiculously branded the donation “conduct with the intention of preparing for, or planning, foreign interference” on behalf of China!
SOCIALISTIC RULE IN CHINA: GREAT FOR THE WORKING CLASS OF AUSTRALIA BUT AN EXISTENTIAL THREAT TO THE CAPITALIST RULERS
Despite how truly bizarre this persecution of Sunny Duong is, the mainstream Australian media have reported on the case as if the prosecution is perfectly rational. So why is the entire Australian ruling class intent on persecuting a hospital charity donor? A big part of their motivation is to manufacture a fear of China amongst the population. They want to present China as an evil power – a devil that secretly “interferes” in Australia’s internal affairs with sinister motivations. This helps the ruling class to mobilise the population behind its participation in the U.S.-led campaign to strangle socialistic rule in China through all-sided political, military, economic, diplomatic and propaganda pressure. That begs the question of why the hell a ruling class wants to suffocate its biggest trading partner. And why would it want to spend half a trillion dollars of public money acquiring nuclear submarines in order to threaten a country whose huge purchases of Australian exports had, for three decades, single-handedly prevented this country’s economy from spiralling into deep recessions. However, it turns out that although their participation in the new Cold War against socialistic China is very harmful to the overwhelming majority of Australia’s population, it makes sense from the greedy point of view of the capitalist class that rules this country. For socialistic China’s mutually beneficial cooperation with developing countries is allowing these countries to pry out greater independence from the rich capitalist powers that plunder and subjugate them. In the South Pacific, the likes of the Solomon Islands, PNG, East Timor and Vanuatu are able to leverage their cooperation with Red China to either slowly squeeze out the predatory Australian regime and the Australian-owned corporations that the regime serves or force them to offer these countries a fairer deal. As a result, just like their American, British, Japanese, German and French counterparts, Australian capitalists are losing big money as a result of socialistic China’s engagement with Western imperialism’s former colonies! In decaying capitalism’s current stage, the capitalist bigwigs in the richer countries actually face an implosion of their economies unless they can make up for the increasing chaos of their domestic economies by, within the ex-colonial countries, super-exploiting labour, looting natural resources, seizing markets and leaching interest payments on debt. Therefore, to the extent that China’s collaboration with the ex-colonial countries is inadvertently impeding all this, she is indeed a “threat” to the Western capitalist ruling classes.
However, the capitalist powers see still greater threats posed by China’s rise through a system dominated by socialistic public ownership of the strategic sectors of her economy. For one, what if her successes inspire the toiling classes of other developing countries to also grab power and wrest their country onto a socialist path? Then, just like China, these countries would also become genuinely economically independent of the imperial powers. That would cause the Western capitalists to suffer huge losses to their imperialist super-profits. Most worrying for the capitalist powers is the prospect that socialistic China’s rapidly developing economy will see her per capita incomes catch up to those of the richest countries within the next three decades. For the capitalist ruling classes in Australia, the U.S., Britain and France know that with their “own” masses seething over unaffordable rents, falling real wages, inadequate infrastructure and all manner of social malaise, their own working classes will be soon demanding socialism if they see that a socialistic giant like China can deliver her people comparable incomes while ensuring wide access to low-rent public housing, ever-improving infrastructure, freedom from the painful boom-bust economic cycles of capitalism and a happy and largely harmonious society. Therefore, the Western capitalists understand that their quest to crush socialistic rule in China is a necessity for the maintenance of their supremacy over their own countries. This truth is not substantially altered by the reality that China’s course towards full socialism remains unfinished and working class rule there is deformed and weakened by external and internal capitalist pressure. Those realities only give the capitalist powers and the supressed capitalists within China encouragement in their quest to overthrow socialistic rule. However, the ruling classes of the capitalist powers also understand that if they fail to accomplish this task within the next three decades, or at minimum suffocate the PRC enough to prevent her from catching up to the per capita incomes of the richest countries, then they, the capitalists, will be toppled from power by their own resurgent working class masses.
So, when the Western ruling classes shout that “Communist China is an existential threat” they are right. But not at all for the reason that the capitalist rulers’ present to their own populations: that China is an “aggressive” power. Red China has absolutely no intention whatsoever of invading Australia or of coercing other countries. Let’s remember that it is not China that invaded and killed hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq. It is not the Chinese military that occupied Afghanistan, executed civilians there and massacred Afghan onion farmers. And it is not the PRC that is today pouring huge amounts of deadly weapons into Ukraine to push Ukrainians to fight to the last drop of Ukrainian blood in a brutal proxy war against Russia. It is not China that orchestrated a bloody late 20th century war against the people of Bougainville in order to defend the huge profits of a ruthless Australian mining company or that twice occupied East Timor in order to create a political order there that would facilitate the plunder of that country’s seabed gas resources by Australian corporations or that invaded Tonga in 2006 to brutally crush a pro-democracy, anti-monarchy uprising. No, all these acts of predatory militarism were the work of the Australian imperialist ruling class and its U.S. senior partner. In stark contrast, the PRC has not fought a single shooting war in the last 45 years and has never fought a war within countries that do not directly border her.
As we explained, the real “existential threat” posed by Red China is the threat to the capitalist order that would arise should the exploited masses in the capitalist world become impressed with socialistic China’s successes in poverty alleviation. Yet it is precisely the capitalist order that is hitting the masses with unaffordable housing costs, ever-more insecure forms of employment, worsening poverty levels and increasing racist persecution of minorities and First Nations peoples. Any encouragement of the struggle for socialism resulting from awareness of the achievements of socialistic rule in China boosts the struggle of the downtrodden of Australia and the world for their liberation from capitalism. On the other hand, if the capitalist powers and capitalist counterrevolutionary forces within China succeed in jointly overthrowing socialistic rule there, workers’ wages in China would drastically plummet. China would be turned into a giant sweatshop for capitalist exploitation that would pull down workers’ rights in every country on the planet in a race to the bottom. That is why the working class of the world have a clear interest to resolutely defend socialistic rule in China. We must fight to: Oppose the U.S./NATO/Australian military build-up targeting Red China! Resist the expansion of military bases in Darwin! Stop the Australian military’s acquisition of long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles! Torpedo the AUKUS nuclear submarine deal! Get the U.S. and Australian navies out of the South China Sea! Resist Western military and political support for the anti-working class Taiwanese regime! Oppose the U.S. and Australian ruling classes’ financial and political support for forces seeking to destroy the Chinese workers state – whether they be lobbyists for greater “rights” for the capitalist private sector, pro-colonial opposition forces in Hong Kong or anti-communist, pseudo-“pro-democracy” activists! Combat the lying anti-communist propaganda attacks against China – whether over COVID or treatment of her Uyghur minority! Repel the Australian regime’s aggressive anti-China diplomatic offensive in the South Pacific! Resist the new McCarthyism in Australia – Don’t let them silence those who advocate against the anti-China Cold War! Drop all charges against Di Sanh Duong!
RIVAL PRO-CAPITALIST FACTIONS STANDING TOGETHER TO PROSECUTE THE NEW MCCARTHYIST CAMPAIGN
Despite the capitalist rulers’ fears about Red China’s “existential threat”, Beijing does not promote socialist revolution internationally. On the contrary, it pledges its respect for the capitalist ruling class of other countries “choosing the system that suits its own country’s needs.” This is another way of Beijing saying that it is happy to see capitalist exploiters continue to maintain their stranglehold over the currently capitalist countries as long as they allow China to practice socialistic rule within her own country. As supporters of the exploited of Australia and the world, this is a policy that we criticise. It is the duty of workers states – especially ones as powerful as the PRC – to support the struggle for workers’ liberation in the currently capitalist countries. The PRC must openly throw its political weight behind the struggles of the oppressed in the capitalist world. She must loudly declare solidarity with strikes for workers rights within Australia, with protest actions here in defence of public housing and with First Nations people’s resistance against racist state terror. The masses of Australia badly need this kind of “Chinese interference”! Taking such a stance is not only a matter of practicing communist internationalism. It is also a question of defending socialistic rule within China itself. For if most of the world remains under capitalist rule and if the workers movements within the capitalist powers do not rise to such a level that they mobilise in defence of the Chinese workers state as part of resisting their own rulers, socialistic rule in China will inevitably crumble under the incessant pressure of the combined West. This will be the case despite China’s gigantic size. Let’s never forget how the seemingly invincible Soviet workers state was destroyed by imperialist pressure.
Yet despite Beijing’s insular policy, Australia’s ruling class still scream of “rampant Chinese foreign interference”. If one examines closely all their accusations of “Chinese interference”, one will see that even these hyped-up allegations are never ones of China trying to alter Australia’s political system. Rather, all their claims are about alleged PRC efforts to nudge Australian politicians to take a less hostile stance towards China and for Australian elites to take a more positive view of the PRC. This alleged kind of “interference” is simply what every diplomatic service of every country openly seeks to do through its embassies! However, when Australia’s ruling class hear of any effort to portray socialistic China in a positive light, they see red! This exploiting class is so frightened about the widespread discontent amongst their own masses that they fear – quite rationally from their point of view – that any spread of sympathy for the biggest socialistic state could set off a pro- communist, left-wing radicalisation within Australia.
Of course, the ruling class also cynically hype up claims of “Chinese interference” to “justify” their Cold War. All the political factions that support their rule have been doing this – from the far-right One Nation and United Australia Parties to the conservative Liberal-National Coalition to the Teal “Independents” to the social-democratic ALP to the progressive-liberal Greens. Although these political forces have many – sometimes bitter – differences with each other, when it comes to crucial questions concerning the basic survival of capitalist rule, they unite as one. And given that the entire capitalist class understand that the growing successes of a socialistic giant in Asia will ultimately inspire a threat to their own rule, all the factions upholding the capitalist “order” have come together to both combat the socialistic power and to whip up the “CPC interference”-scare that they use to justify their anti-PRC campaign. For example, look at the positions taken by the different pro-capitalist factions when Australia’s “Foreign Interference” laws were brought before parliament in 2018 by the former right-wing Turnbull government. The main aim of these “Foreign Interference” laws is to suppress expressions of positive views about the PRC – especially from within Australia’s Chinese community – by criminalising certain means of expressing such views and thereby intimidating those sympathetic to the PRC. Although there was dissent from the Greens and other Senate cross-benchers about certain aspects of the proposed laws, in the end, every single member of both the House of Representatives and the Senate voted for the laws.
To be sure, particular factions have been especially rabid in promoting the new McCarthyism. Leading the charge are people on the hard right of the Liberal Party, like shadow home affairs minister, James Paterson, and shadow defence minister, Andrew Hastie (the latter notorious for having led the white supremacist cause celebre for special “refugee status” for rich, white South African farm bosses). Yet, Labor MPs Deborah O’Neill and Peter Khalil have been just as extreme. And although the Greens have opposed the AUKUS nuclear submarine plans, sections of the Greens have been the most fanatical McCarthyists of all. Thus, it was Greens senator David Shoebridge – when he was a NSW MP – who successfully spearheaded a campaign to drive out the Chinese language-teaching Confucius Institutes from schools. Shrieking that the institute was a tool for Chinese “foreign interference”, Shoebridge even attacked the then NSW Liberal government from the far right, accusing them of being slow to crack down on the Institute.
OPPOSE THE COLD WAR MARGINALISATION OF AUSTRALIA’S CHINESE COMMUNITY!
It is no surprise that the neo-McCarthyist witch-hunt has first targeted the Chinese community. Fears that this White European outpost in Asia would be “over-run” by the hundreds-of-millions-strong Chinese populations to our north runs deep within Australia’s racist mythologies. During Australia’s mid-19th century gold rush, Chinese immigrants were beaten and killed by racist mobs. Then, immediately upon federation in 1901, the new parliament passed the White Australia Policy act. This notorious law restricting non-white immigration was mainly aimed at keeping out Chinese people and Pacific Islanders. Today, such “yellow peril” racism is being slyly used as a fuel by those stoking anti-communist “Red peril” fears. To be sure, the China-bashers would claim that they are only opposed to the CPC and not to Chinese Australians. But they are not stupid. When they promote their Red peril agenda by warning of a Communist “Chinese invasion” or of harmful “Chinese influence”, they know that they are appealing to “yellow peril” racism.
Those who appeal to anti-Chinese racism, necessarily reinforce it. They are causing the upsurge in racist violence against people of Chinese appearance that has accompanied the intensification of the West’s Cold War against the PRC. Even a survey by the conservative Lowy Institute found that last year alone, a staggering one in seven Chinese-Australians were either violently assaulted or physically threatened because of their ethnicity. In one attack on ANZAC Day this year, several Asian Australians in Brisbane were attacked by a man believing that they were Chinese. Screaming anti-Chinese insults, he assaulted the Asian-Australians fishing on a pier with metal crutches used as a weapon.
Other than being a soft target, there is another reason why the ruling class have made the Chinese community the main target of their new McCarthyist witch-hunt. That is because they know that the more astute of the masses will want to verify whether the China-bashing propaganda they have been fed is true and in order to do this they will logically turn to Chinese-Australians for feedback. Given that there are some 1.4 million people in this country of Chinese ancestry, Chinese- Australians can have much impact in shaping the broader population’s views about China. This terrifies the capitalist class. For they know that the majority of Chinese-Australians have a positive view of the PRC, especially the nearly 800,000 first and second generation migrants from mainland China. The ruling class would like to put this down to their conspiracy theory that Beijing’s “influence operations” are “manipulating” Chinese Australians. The truth is a lot simpler. Most Chinese Australians have a far better idea of what the PRC is really like than the rest of the population. This is especially the case for relatively recent migrants from mainland China or for those who regularly visit there or are still in close contact with family and friends. They know how much people have been lifted out of poverty through the PRC and how quickly the country’s infrastructure has improved. Although they are aware of China’s issues too, most migrants from mainland China have an overall positive view of the country – especially working class Chinese-Australians. Therefore, Australia’s ruling class is obsessed with stopping pro-PRC Chinese-Australians from sharing their opinions about China with the broader population. Their “Foreign Interference” laws, their persecution of Di Sanh Duong and their media’s hyped-up propaganda that Beijing is working through the Chinese community to “interfere” in Australia are all aimed at intimidating pro-PRC Chinese-Australians into silence.
The ruling class have still more sinister methods of silencing Chinese people who are sympathetic to the PRC. In June 2020, the ASIO secret police raided the homes of Chinese journalists working in Australia. Australia’s secret police subjected the journalists to heavy-handed interrogations and seized their computers and smart phones. They then demanded that the journalists not report the raids. Since then, very credible reports have emerged from within the Australian-Chinese community that many members of Chinese social organisations have been subjected to intimidating interrogations by ASIO as part of supposed “Foreign Interference” investigations. The number of people said to be interrogated is very large – at least in the dozens but possibly in the hundreds. In true totalitarian fashion, Australia’s secret police demanded that those interrogated keep silent about what was done to them. Therefore, it is not publicly known exactly who has been raided or even to which particular organisations they belong. Nevertheless, the effect of this sinister intimidation combined with the “Foreign Interference” laws and the media witch-hunts has been to cause most of the Chinese organisations that have either a sympathetic or neutral attitude towards the PRC to greatly reduce their activities. If one looks at the website of what was once one of the most popular Chinese community organisation in Australia, the Australian Council for the Promotion of the Peaceful Reunification of China (ACPPRC), one can see that since it held a January 2020 fundraising dinner for the NSW rural fire brigades, the ACPPRC has held no public events whatsoever. Given that the ACPPRC has been a prime target of media red-baiting and was seven months ago coercively hit with an Attorney-General’s Department “transparency notice” declaring it to be “a foreign government related entity”, one can presume that officers of this group have been amongst those interrogated by ASIO.
Given that, reflecting community views, most social organisations based upon mainland Chinese immigrants are either sympathetic to or neutral in their orientation towards the PRC, the Australian regime’s Cold War campaign has decimated Chinese community life. Not only has it silenced the bulk of the Chinese community from publicly expressing their views about the PRC, it has diminished the voice of Chinese community members about other issues. This was evident in a recent local government decision to name a portion of the Sydney suburb of Eastwood as “Koreatown”. Given that people of Korean ancestry make up less than 9% of Eastwood, the decision to name a part of this nearly 50% ethnic Chinese suburb without consulting the suburb’s Chinese residents has provoked anger within the Chinese community. As a joint statement by the Australian-Chinese Workers Association and Trotskyist Platform pointed out:
“… even if the Koreatown project was not itself aimed at sending the provocative message to the Australian-Chinese community that if it does not adhere to the China-bashing agenda it will be further marginalised, it nevertheless reflects the fact that the Australian-Chinese community has already been shoved so far to the margins that mainstream political actors think that its concerns can be simply ignored….
“… The hardening of White Australia racism that has occurred through the Cold War witch-hunt of the Chinese community ultimately targets all people of colour in this country. Therefore, given that ethnic divisions are poison to working class struggle, it is in the interests of working class activists of all ethnicities as well as people of Asian, African, Middle Eastern and Islander backgrounds to oppose the marginalisation and stigmatisation of the Chinese community. As Samuel Kim [a prominent Trotskyist Platform central committee member of Korean descent] stressed: many fellow ethnic Koreans in Australia have been physically attacked and abused by racists assuming that they were Chinese [including two of the Asian people who were attacked on a Brisbane pier while fishing on ANZAC Day].”
THE AUSTRALIA RULING CLASS DISTORTS THE VIEWS OF THE AUSTRALIAN-CHINESE COMMUNITY
By silencing through intimidation the pro-PRC voices within the Chinese community, Australia’s capitalist rulers are enabling the ramblings of the smaller, anti-communist section of the Chinese community to be heard louder. This distorted presentation of the views of the Chinese community is evident in the media sphere too. In the past, all peoples of colour were greatly under-represented in the news media. The media is notorious for this colour bar. And given the fact that the Australian media is owned by either big-time capitalists or by the capitalist regime, it is unthinkable for an ethnic Chinese supporter of the PRC to be given a prominent role as an Australian news presenter or even be given serious airtime in an interview. However, given the propaganda value for the ruling class of having ethnic Chinese people speak out against communism, those few Chinese-Australians that either happen to be anti-communist or are willing to sell out any principles to further their own careers (in other words, people of the type who would sell their own grandmothers!) are allowed to not only break through the media colour bar but are even assisted to leap-frog their white counterparts into prominent roles. ABC News, in particular, now has a posse of high-profile ethnic Chinese journalists spewing out anti-communist propaganda. As a result of both this practice and the silencing of the voices of pro-PRC – and even neutral – Chinese organisations, non- Chinese Australians are being deceived into thinking that most Chinese-Australians oppose the PRC and her system. And that is exactly what the capitalist ruling class wants us to think!
With the voices of those whose connections enable them to accurately tell fellow Australians what is happening in China increasingly suppressed, the Australian regime is able to get away with throwing out there ever more fanciful claims about China. Thus, over the last few days, the ABC ran a campaign to convince us that “China’s economy is in deep trouble.” The real fact however is that the PRC economy grew last quarter at the highly impressive rate of 6.3% year on year – the highest growth rate of any major economy in the world – and most crucially did so while continuing to boost her workers’ real wages and keep inflation at literally zero!
COLD WAR REPRESSION KEEPS GETTING MORE INTENSE
The section of the ethnic Chinese population that the Australian ruling class is most determined to silence are Chinese international students. Since the college environment means that these students would interact with many local students – most at the age when they are still forming their political views – Chinese international students could significantly shape local students’ perceptions of the PRC. What horrifies Australia’s rulers is that despite experiencing life in wealthier Australia the overwhelming majority of these students remain sympathetic to Red China and proud of her achievements. So, when in August 2019, in response to anti-PRC riots in Hong Kong, Chinese international students in Sydney organised a 5,000 strong pro-PRC march, ASIO unleashed threatening interrogations of rally organisers. It was not until those student organisers returned to China that they felt safe to even publicise the Australian secret police intimidation. Since then, the Australian regime, via an order of its Federal Court of Australia, has censored Australians from accessing the main website where the activists detailed their frightening experiences (https://news.have8.tv/2636880.html) using the excuse that the site has made a “copyright infringement” (yeah, right!)
In the four years since, the neo-McCarthyist repression has greatly intensified. Earlier this year the Albanese government banned public sector employees from accessing the popular Chinese-based, short-video platform, TikTok, on government devices. At the start of this month, a parliamentary committee recommended imposing the same ban on another Chinese social media platform, WeChat. Moreover, the committee demanded that the platforms be subjected to “transparency requirements”. Imposing such requirements could then be a trigger for completely banning the platforms if the requirements are “not met”. However, as a high-profile report by anti-communist researchers that was submitted to the committee’s inquiry made clear, the main objection of the ruling class and its hacks is not that TikTok could be used for state surveillance [which is a loony conspiracy theory] but that the company would bias algorithms to promote pro-China narratives and “socialist core values.” Even if the latter were true, we say: so what! After all, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube bias their algorithms to promote the agenda of the Western capitalist ruling classes. Facebook is programmed to minimise the views of articles and accounts with a pro-PRC stance, like those of ourselves in Trotskyist Platform. This bias has increased in recent years. Meanwhile, these major Western social media platforms have each banned tens of thousands of accounts expressing pro-PRC political ideas. We say people ought to be free to access platforms that have an opposing slant to these Western capitalist-owned platforms. People must be free to decide for themselves! It is striking how those who say that they are intent on defending Australia’s “democracy” from “authoritarian influence” insist on carrying out censorship of opposing voices using the very same arguments that all “authoritarian” regimes used to justify their censorship: that certain views and biases are not acceptable. In truth it is not overtly political messaging on the likes of TikTok that worries the Australian ruling class. Rather they fear that Australian youth seeing clips of daily life of Chinese people – from viral videos of their interaction with their golden retriever pets, to funny clips of them pranking their friends, to their holiday snapshots – could undermine the efforts of anti-communist propaganda to portray life in Red China as a grey, monotonous and joyless existence.
The same committee that targeted TikTok and WeChat also attacked the Australian Federal Police (AFP) for not prosecuting anyone for alleged “foreign interference” through social media. Although the politicians also mentioned people who made comments defending other states deemed hostile by Australia’s rulers – like Iran and Russia – their main targets were people who made strong social media comments attacking opponents of Red China. Some committee members, like James Paterson and David Shoebridge, were so rabid that they made the AFP Commander being grilled sound half decent. The latter explained that “a self-directed individual who’s a loyalist, let’s say, who is undertaking under their own directive … won’t fit in foreign interference because there’s no actual foreign principal or proxy connection.” He also said that supporters of the targeted states making social media comments often do not meet the “threshold” for prosecution and if their postings are threatening then that is more akin to a hate crime rather than “foreign interference”. However, the Greens David Shoebridge, who despite his strong opposition to AUKUS seems to be bidding to be Australia’s leading McCarthyist witch-hunter, rejected all this. He ranted to ABC News that the AFP’s response was not “up to scratch” claiming that his office receives a “troubling” number of reports of coordinated interference. Shoebridge demanded that “we need the AFP to do its job, take these threats seriously and take some action to let bad actors know that they will be caught and brought to justice.” If the likes of Shoebridge and Paterson have their way, dozens of supporters of socialistic China – amongst Chinese international students, the Australian-Chinese community and the broader Australian Left – would be jailed for passionately expressing their views.
The neo-McCarthyist witch-hunt is only able to become more vicious because there has been inadequate push back against it. Most of Australia’s Left groups, who ought to be spearheading such resistance, have only moderately opposed some aspects of the new McCarthyism, while failing to oppose other aspects at all. The three most active Left groups – Socialist Alternative (SAlt), Socialist Alliance (SA) and Solidarity – have thus far said nothing opposing the prosecution of Di Sanh Duong or the demands to prosecute pro-PRC social media users who sharply criticise opponents of Red China. They all failed to oppose the campaign that drove out the Confucius Institutes from NSW schools.
In part, the tepid response of these groups to the neo-McCarthyist campaign flows from their perspective of seeking a strategic alliance with the Greens – a party that has been fervently pushing most aspects of the witch-hunt. It also stems from the fact that although these groups declare “No War with China”, they simultaneously support the political campaign to overthrow the PRC state – from supporting the lying propaganda that China is “brutally persecuting” her Uyghur minority to hailing the most anti-communist of last year’s anti-COVID-response protests in Shanghai and Beijing. It is thus no surprise that none of these groups condemned ASIO’s threatening interrogation of the Chinese international students that organised the August 2019 Sydney march defending PRC sovereignty over Hong Kong. After all, SAlt, SA and Solidarity were on the opposite side to these students persecuted by ASIO – they were on the side of the anti-communist Hong Kong rioters. Moreover, by supporting the political and propaganda war against Red China, these left social-democrats are strengthening the anti-communism that underpins the neo-McCarthyist witch-hunt.
In contrast, we in Trotskyist Platform have opposed all parts of the regime’s anti-communist, anti-PRC scare campaign and all its attempts to intimidate those with sympathies for the PRC. Yet we understand that we need to put still more energy into this work. We are calling for united-front action of all pro-PRC and neutral-towards-the-PRC leftists to demand: Scrap the “Foreign Interference” laws! Drop all charges against Di Sanh Duong! Down with the restrictions and planned restrictions on people’s access to Chinese social media platforms TikTok and Wechat! Stop the attacks on Chinese community organisations that exercise their right to have a sympathetic or neutral stance towards the PRC! Down with the calls to arrest people who make strong social media comments defending the PRC against anti-communists! We insist that “free speech” must include the right to express a sympathetic stance towards Red China.
EVEN NON-CHINESE AUSTRALIANS WITH PRAGMATIC DEALINGS WITH CHINA ARE BEING TARGETED
The targets of the Cold War witch-hunt have long ago widened beyond the Australian-Chinese community. In the autumn of 2020, NSW state MP, Shaoquett Moselmane, was subjected to an intense media attack after he made the manifestly true statement that China had responded effectively to the COVID pandemic. A few weeks later, the AFP and ASIO unleashed a massive raid on Moselmane’s home to supposedly investigate “foreign interference”. It was only months later, after Moselmane’s reputation had been trashed that the AFP confirmed that Moselmane was not suspected of doing anything illegal, nor had there ever been any plan to charge him. Then his own party, the ALP, followed through on this witch-hunt by refusing to re-nominate Moselmane for his Senate position.
Now the neo-McCarthyist witch-hunt has reached such proportions that even people without the slightest sympathy for China but who have had pragmatic relations with PRC entities are being persecuted. In these cases, the repression is not aimed at silencing particular pro-PRC voices. Rather it seeks to both fuel the general “China threat” hysteria and to scare Australians away from having normal, legal, working relations with PRC institutions. In the latest case, Sydney businessman, Alexander Csergo, was imprisoned after being subjected to a high-profile arrest four months ago, accompanied by AFP ranting in the media about “espionage.” However, the next day it turned out that Csergo was not even charged with espionage but with “reckless foreign interference.” Details of the case are sketchy but it seems that Csergo merely allegedly provided, for a fee, alleged Chinese officials with open source information (that is information from the media and public websites) about “Australia’s national security”. If this is the sum content of the allegations, Csergo 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 one of the most outrageous persecutions of this entire neo-McCarthyist campaign, Australian citizen and former U.S. fighter pilot, Daniel Duggan, is facing extradition to the U.S. simply for training Chinese pilots at a South African training school more than ten years ago when he was still a U.S. citizen. As a result, Duggan has been imprisoned in harsh conditions in NSW prisons over the last ten months. Washington claims that the pilots trained by the “Top Gun” former U.S. marine pilot were military pilots. However, the husband and father of six emphatically insists that he only trained Chinese civilian pilots. He has been backed up by the South African training school where he had worked, which reported that none of its training involved classified methods nor any frontline activities. Moreover, even if military pilots were trained it is absolutely certain that this training would have been at a low level – much below the level of training and sophistication then already reached by China’s People’s Liberation Army Airforce. Thus the U.S. accusation does not even claim that Duggan trained the pilots on actual fighter aircraft. Rather they claimed that a T-2 Buckeye trainer, first produced in 1959, was used. This trainer cannot even reach the speeds of modern passenger airlines … let alone supersonic speeds! At the time Duggan was allegedly training pilots on them, the aircraft was so obsolete that it had been out of production for four decades (!) and had been fully retired from use by the U.S. military in favour of faster trainer aircraft.
Furthermore, it was not and is not illegal under Australian law for Australians to train Chinese military pilots. This means that Duggan should not be extradited since an extradition requires the alleged offence to be illegal in both the requesting country and the requested country. This fact and the reality that the charges related to training that Duggan conducted more than ten years ago – training that the U.S. regime was at the time aware of – shows that the prosecution of the 54 year-old pilot has little to do with upholding the law. Unlike Di Sanh Duong, Duggan does not have any known political sympathy for the PRC. He is just a top notch pilot, who like many others highly-skilled in their field enjoy making a living by imparting their knowledge to others. However, in the context of their crazed Cold War drive against socialistic China, Duggan is a convenient object for the U.S. and Australian rulers to create a show trial around in order to hype up the supposed [actually non-existent] “Chinese military threat.”
WHAT THE STRUGGLE TO FREE DAN DUGGAN AND STOP HIS EXTRADITION CAN LEARN FROM THE MOVEMENT THAT FREED ANOTHER AUSTRALIAN POLITICAL PRISONER
The facts of Duggan’s case are very much in favour of him staving off extradition to the U.S. and a possibly very long sentence. However, the political streams are flowing strongly in the opposite direction. This was apparent when ASIO boss Mike Burgess delivered his annual “threat assessment” in February. In a clear shot at Duggan and comparison with his case, the secret police chief ranted that former Australian defence personnel “willing to sell their military training and expertise to foreign governments” “… that do not share our values or respect the rule of law” “… are lackeys, more ‘top tools’ than ‘top guns’”. This vicious attack on Daniel Duggan by the ASIO boss showed that the Australian regime is just as committed to persecuting Duggan as their U.S. counterparts. It is not simply a matter of a reluctant Canberra being unwilling to stand up to demands from Washington, as some believe. Moreover, this insult thrown at Duggan and some former Australian defence personnel for conducting activities that are not illegal, show that it is the secret police boss who does not “respect the rule of law”. His statements show that ASIO, far from being a body motivated to uphold the law independent of political bias, is a highly ideological institution that is deeply committed to enforcing the interests of Australia’s capitalist ruling class – a class whose interests mandate joining the combined West’s Cold War against socialistic China and manufacturing the “China threat” hysteria used to justify it. Unfortunately, the courts that will hear Duggan’s extradition case have this very same bias.
Since Duggan is not a political sympathiser of the PRC – unlike the equally unfairly persecuted Di Sanh Duong – and his imprisonment is so blatantly unjust, Duggan has received neutral, or even mildly sympathetic, coverage from some of the mainstream media. Even arch neo-McCarthyist witch-hunter, David Shoebridge, has spoken out in support of Duggan (as have many on the Left). However, the degree of mainstream support that exists for Duggan may not help him much. For as long as the message coming from those demanding freedom for Duggan is that his persecution is an affront to an otherwise “democratic Australian system” “based on the rule of law”, the Australian ruling class will feel that agitation in support of Duggan is not doing much harm to their political reputation. They will judge that at least those calling for his freedom are reinforcing the notion that the system here is in most cases “fair’ and “democratic”. But if the push for Duggan’s freedom is not doing the ruling class any political damage, they will be content to simply ignore it!
This is the exact same problem faced by those fighting to free Julian Assange. There is massive support for Assange in Australia and in other countries. However, the campaign to free him has largely been restricted to the single issue of freeing Assange. The implication behind that message is that the political systems in the U.S., Britain and Australia are otherwise fair but for this one terrible atrocity. Aware that this message is not doing them much political harm, Washington, London and Canberra have been comfortable to largely ignore the pleas.
To see the kind of movement that would be needed to have a chance of freeing Duggan we should look back at the campaign to free another Australian political prisoner, Chan Han Choi. Now Chan Han Choi’s case could not be more different to that of Dan Duggan’s. Whereas Duggan is a non-political figure who very unluckily happened to be a convenient target for building up the anti-China scare campaign, Choi is a highly politically driven person. Choi, a South Korean-born Australian, is a sympathiser of socialistic North Korea who was proud of the latter’s efforts to maintain independence from the imperial powers. What drove him most was opposition to the Western-instigated economic sanctions on North Korea and the suffering that it caused – suffering which he had seen with his own eyes and which deeply moved him. To alleviate this suffering, Choi risked his own freedom to attempt to arrange trade deals between North Korea and other countries in violation of the sanctions. Choi was caught in December 2017 and imprisoned in harsh conditions in Sydney jails. He was for long periods blocked from access to lawyers, language interpreters and visitors and denied medical treatment during a crucial eight and a half-month period during which his diabetes condition reached emergency levels. The authorities refused to give him bail for nearly three years based largely on the McCarthyist notion that Choi’s avowed political sympathy for North Korea made his alleged offending more serious.
The Australian regime grossly exaggerated Choi’s charges. They initially, quite ridiculously, claimed that he had sought to facilitate the export of North Korean weapons of mass destruction – charges which they later dropped. This exaggeration of the charges pointed to one notable similarity between Choi’s plight and Duggan’s – both were being demonised as a means to create fear of socialistic states and, thus, to “justify” the Cold War. Indeed, when Choi was first arrested, then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull launched a tirade against North Korea, which is a neighbour and ally of the PRC. The hype and North Korea scare campaign whipped up around Choi’s arrest was a significant part of what enabled the Turnbull government to create the anti-communist and national security-obsessed political climate that allowed it to push through parliament the Foreign Interference laws six months after Choi’s arrest.
The Australian ruling class thought they could continue to milk Choi’s case to justify a further escalation in their anti-PRC/ anti-North Korea Cold War drive. However, instead, quite unexpectedly for them, a lively solidarity campaign was launched in defence of Choi. Trotskyist Platform – and the smaller grouplets and individuals who also joined the campaign – demanded not only Choi’s freedom but an end to the cruel economic starvation sanctions on the people of North Korea. We said that if Choi is indeed guilty of trying to arrange deals in violations of the sanctions then he is a great humanitarian. Importantly, we did not say that Choi’s imprisonment was a blot on Australia’s otherwise “great democracy.” Instead, we had an almost opposite message: that Choi’s unjust imprisonment showed that the “democracy” in capitalist Australia is only a “democracy” for the capitalist class. We connected the harsh imprisonment of Choi and the McCarthyist denial of bail by the courts to the unjust persecution of war crimes whistleblower David McBride, to the anti-working class prosecutions of construction workers’ union activists by the police and courts and to racist state terror against Aboriginal people. We pointed out that the Australian ruling class had no right to attack the PRC or North Korea over “human rights” issues.
Eventually the campaign reached a level of support that convinced the capitalist class that any remaining boosting of their Cold War campaign by the hype surrounding Choi’s prosecution was more than cancelled out by the political damage and exposure of their “democracy” that they were suffering as a result of the campaign to free Choi. After nearly three years in jail, Choi was finally granted bail and eight months later his legal persecution ended and he was free. The regime which had been expecting to give him a ten to fifteen year jail sentence, ended up only being able to hit him with a three and a half-year sentence that had already mostly been served before trial. To be sure, even after Choi became free there was no guarantee that the regime and its allies would not seek a way to gain revenge on Choi for the lighter sentence that he endured. Nevertheless, the fact that the campaign to free Choi was able to divert what was heading to be a horrifically bad injustice into being just a plain bad injustice shows that the movement had pushed the ruling class back. Indeed, this was the first – and so far only – significant pushback against the neo-McCarthyist campaign. The important lesson of this struggle for supporters of Duggan is that we will only have a chance of pushing back his persecutors if we are able to damage them politically . That means broadcasting the message that Duggan’s terribly unjust persecution shows what the Australian regime is all about and proves that its pretensions of being “democratic” and “committed to the rule of law” are bogus. That the “democracy” here is only a democracy for the ultra-rich capitalists and that the regime has no basis to attack the PRC over “lack of respect for human rights and the rule of law.” If a powerful, Free Duggan movement with this message can be built, the Australian regime will truly be faced with the need to limit political damage to their authority by making a concession to Duggan and his supporters.
Above, 13 April 2019: A sizable crowd of demonstrators march through the streets of Sydney demanding freedom for socialist, then political prisoner in Australia, Chan Han Choi. Below: In the nine street actions held for Choi that eventually resulted in him being freed from incarceration by the Australian regime, his supporters connected his persecution to the broader repression that the capitalist state was unleashing against union activists, whistleblowers, pro-PRC members of the Chinese community, Aboriginal people and leftists. Photo credit (all photos): Trotskyist Platform
DOWN WITH THE NEO-MCCARTHYIST WITCH-HUNT!
Although in Australia, governments are elected on the basis of one person one vote, it is the capitalist class who are able to disproportionately shape public opinion and with it election results. For it is the super-rich capitalists that have the ownership of the media and the financial resources to fund political think tanks, make big donations to political parties and pay for political advertising. As the ASIO boss’ tirade against Duggan shows, the state institutions themselves have been built up, trained and ideologically prepared to enforce the exclusive interests of the capitalist class.
Thus, the democracy that nominally exists in Western capitalist countries is largely a democracy only for the capitalists. When this biased democracy is not enough to enforce the capitalists’ agenda, they use blatant repression instead. Today’s neo-McCarthyist witch-hunt and the persecutions of Di Sanh Duong, Dan Duggan, David McBride and Alexander Csergo all prove this. In the long run, if the capitalist class faces a serious threat to their domination of society from the exploited masses, they will turn to the most hideously brutal methods to maintain their rule. That is what happened when the Italian and German “democratic” capitalists turned to Mussolini and Hitler’s fascism for salvation.
Nevertheless, despite the grossly slanted nature of the “democracy” that currently exists in Australia, this form of capitalist rule is preferable to more repressive forms of capitalist rule. It gives the working class and all the oppressed more space to organise struggles for their rights. Therefore, the workers movement must oppose any repressive measures that curtail its democratic rights. That is why we must mobilise in determined opposition to the Cold War repression that is plaguing Australia. We should understand too that the national security obsession that the neo-McCarthyist repression is creating is being used to repress dissidents making a stand over non-Cold War issues too – from David McBride to activists in support of public housing to environmental activists and to trade unionists taking industrial action. Moreover, if we do not push back against the Cold War witch-hunt it will eventually reach such a level that even people who advocate policies that are being implemented in China with a focus on public housing or publicly owned banks will be accused of “foreign interference.” And the working class masses do need to be able to fight for the policies that the PRC has used to combat poverty. For it is precisely those policies – like a massive increase in public housing, restrictions on housing speculation and public ownership of the banks, electricity, power and energy sectors – that we desperately need implemented here right now. So let us mobilise in action to demand: Down with the “Foreign Interference” laws! Drop the charges against Di Sanh Duong! Free Dan Duggan! Resist the push to arrest pro-PRC social media users! Stop the persecution of Chinese social organisations that choose to have a friendly or neutral attitude towards the PRC! Stop the marginalisation of the Chinese community!
Above Left: Australia’s Labor prime minister Anthony Albanese meets with Australia’s unelected feudal, head of state for life, King Charles III a few days before the British monarch’s coronation on 6 May 2023. Above Right: Albanese arrives with his partner for King Charles III and Queen Camilla’s coronation ceremony. Albanese pledged allegiance to the new monarch. Photo credit: AP
LIKE THE DEPOSED, MUCH HATED, RIGHT WING MORRISON GOVERNMENT, ALBANESE HEADS AN ADMINISTRATION SERVING THE CAPITALIST EXPLOITERS!
HIS MAJESTY’S LABOR GOVERNMENT MARCHES THE SAME PATH AS HER MAJESTY’S LIBERAL GOVERNMENT … ONLY WITH LESS ODIOUS REGALIA
27 January 2023: After nearly nine years of conservative administration, Australia’s working class masses, progressive youth, Aboriginal people and much of this country’s Asian, African, Islander and Middle Eastern-based migrant communities had been hoping that the defeat of the hated Morrison government in last May’s elections would finally bring at least a modest degree of relief from years of reactionary attacks on their rights and living standards. However, eight months later, it is clear that little of substance has changed. Moreover, the new Labor administration headed by supposed ALP “Left” Anthony Albanese has no agenda to substantially alter the course that the former right-wing government was on. As a result, the masses’ living standards continue to plunge. Workers’ wages only rise slowly, while food, gas and electricity prices are surging and petrol prices remain obscenely high. Millions of gig economy and casual workers continue to endure jobs with no security and harsh employment conditions that can be made still tougher at any time at the whim of the boss. Just look at how the 15,000 riders delivering food for Deliveroo were thrown out of work with no notice, zero entitlements and zero payout after the delivery platform wound up in Australia two months ago. Especially hard hit are the large number of low-income households that rent. Last year rents soared by more than 10%. Moreover, with so little affordable rental accommodation available, low-income households are not even able to move into cheaper dwellings to get by. As a result, not only are many unemployed workers being forced into living rough on the streets but more and more casual, part-time and other low-paid workers are being reduced to sleeping in their cars or their friends’ lounge rooms to get by. Many more are trying to make ends meet by skipping meals, foregoing essential dental visits or enduring cold winters without using the heater at all.
There are a couple of areas where the new government has moved to end especially extreme anti-working class measures imposed by the previous right-wing government. It has wound back the powers of the union-busting Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC). Yet, at the same time, the ALP government has committed itself to maintaining all the laws restricting workers’ strike action and union access to workplaces. The government did follow through on their promise to end the compulsory use of the cashless debit card that had been imposed on welfare recipients in some communities to control how they could spend their money. However, the Albanese government insists on continuing to subject unemployed workers to grinding poverty by refusing to make any real increases to the paltry Jobseeker payments [update – At the May 2023 budget the government did announce that JobSeeker, Youth Allowance and Austudy payments would increase from September onwards … but only by an insulting $2.60 a day!]. Albanese and his treasurer Jim Chalmers are simply not prepared to spend any of the public budget to lift these most vulnerable people out of poverty. Nor are they prepared to use public revenue to maintain funding levels for public hospitals – let alone boost them. Last October’s budget saw the federal government incredibly announce that it will cut the funding that it gives to the states to run public hospitals by $2.4 billion over four years. This is at a time when the public hospital system is so overwhelmed that patients are waiting years for surgeries deemed “elective”, ambulances are queuing in ramps outside hospital emergency departments for sometimes hours before they can get their patients admitted and nurses are being battered with ever more unsustainably high work loads due to short staffing. Yet if required to expand the wealth of the rich, ALP leaders are quite happy to drain down the public budget. Thus, Albanese and Chalmers dismissed opposition from Labor ranks and went ahead with their promised tax cuts for the wealthy.
The main difference between the current ALP government and its right-wing predecessors is merely in style and rhetoric. Morrison and Co. would oversee skyrocketing rents, falling real wages, and rising profits and then arrogantly tell us that this is all fair and we ought to work harder if we don’t like it … or buy a house if we are tenants who think that rents are too high! On the other hand, the ALP as a party with a mass working class base is careful to acknowledge “that many working people in Australia are hurting” and that “real wages need to rise.” Yet, the more sympathetic demeanour does not help workers to pay for their surging food and electricity costs and their ever-increasing rents that result from a government that continues to put the interests of the capitalist bosses ahead of the needs of the working class masses… just like their predecessors!
The divergence between the style and substance of the Albanese government is especially apparent on the issue of workers’ wages. When the Fair Work Commission (FWC) was about to make its annual setting of minimum wages last June, the Albanese government made a submission to the FWC calling for a minimum wage increase in line with the then inflation rate. This is what the FWC basically did, granting an increase in the minimum wage of 5.2% and a below inflation increase of 4.6% for other award workers. The Labor government boasted about its role in the decision and contrasted its stance to that taken by the previous Liberal-National government. The currently pro-ALP, ACTU leadership of our unions also stated that they were “really happy” with the outcome. However, the Albanese government and the ACTU tops knew all too well at the time that the inflation rate was expected to sharply rise and that by the Labor government only calling for a minimum wage increase that matched the then inflation rate, they were in effect calling for a pay cut. Seven months down the track this is all too clear. Prices have soared in this period. Annual official inflation is now 7.8% – the highest in over three decades. Most notably, food prices surged by 9.2% over the last year. As a result, the rate of price increase of non-discretionary items like food and fuel, which is what low-paid workers spend most of their money on, has surged even faster than the overall inflation rate – rising by 8.4%. Therefore, the June Fair Work Commission wage decision, so cheered on by Albanese, has in effect turned out to be a 3.2% pay cut for minimum wage workers and an even larger cut for other award workers. For many gig economy workers – like food delivery workers, Uber drivers and taxi drivers – the loss of income is even greater. Not only are they not even granted award wage increases, they have to pay out of their own pockets for the super-high fuel costs.
The reason that workers’ living standards are plummeting can be seen by comparing changes in wages with that of business profits. The latest figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) show that while wages only increased by 3.1% on average over the last year – that is a 4.7% cut in real wages – company profits increased by 8.5%. The profits of unincorporated businesses – overwhelmingly small businesses – increased even more sharply, surging by nearly 16%. In other words, workers are getting poorer because capitalist business owners – both big and small – are seizing as profits an ever greater share of the fruits of workers’ labour.
Australia’s capitalist bosses have been increasing the rate at which they exploit their workers not only over the last year but over the last nearly four decades. This is revealed in an index published by the ABS called the Unit Labour Cost, which shows the relative amount that bosses pay workers in wages, super and other benefits for every dollar of output value added by their workers. That Unit Labour Cost has plunged by over 21% over the last 36 years, representing the staggering increase in the rate at which capitalist business owners are exploiting their workers. This has been presided over by Liberal, Labor and Labor-Greens governments alike. Whether under the Coalition, Labor or indeed Labor-Greens defacto coalitions, the rich capitalist exploiters have gotten richer while the working class masses got poorer.
With no program to close the ever expanding income gap between the rich capitalists and working class people, the Albanese government inevitably seeks to divert the masses’ frustrations onto racial minorities by upholding the xenophobic and reactionary nationalist policies of the previous government. Thus, although the Labor government made a sop to its progressive supporters by finally ending the unpopular persecution of the Murugappan Biloela-based Tamil family, it continues to cruelly incarcerate over two hundred Asian, Middle Eastern and African refugees in off-shore detention in Nauru and PNG. To show how deeply it shares the racist refugee policy adhered to by the Coalition, immediately upon taking office, the Albanese government deported the asylum seekers who had arrived by boat on election-day from Sri Lanka. In fact, even as it slashed funding for public hospitals in its recent budget, the Albanese government increased annual spending on enforcing its offshore detention policy by a further $150 million. Meanwhile, the government has refused to offer permanent residency to those brought here for medical treatment from off-shore detention in Nauru and PNG (the “Medevac refugees”). As for their promise to grant permanency to the thousands of refugees living here on temporary visas, eight months into office this has not been implemented. This has left thousands of refugees in limbo. On top of the stress of having to reapply for these temporary visas every three or five years and not knowing if they will end up being deported at the end of a visa period, these temporary visas deny refugees the right to bring their spouses or children living abroad, the right to travel abroad, the right to have full access to social security payments, the right to university education and in the case of SHEV visa holders the right to live and work in urban areas.
Meanwhile, like its predecessors, the Labor government defends a system that continues to cruelly oppress Aboriginal people. This was signified in the ostentatious way that the government mourned over the death of Queen Elizabeth, the monarch under whom Aboriginal people were brutally subjugated and under whom generations of Aboriginal children were heinously stolen from their parents in order to be cut off from their culture and heritage. Albanese and Co. deeply offended Aboriginal people and all those opposed to colonialism by hailing uncritically the dead, war-criminal queen and by embracing the coronation of her unpopular son as king. They went event further. Seemingly trying to outdo right-wing conservatives and monarchists in adulation for the queen, the supposedly “republican” prime minister, Albanese, even decided to grant a special public holiday to mourn the passing of Australia’s unelected head of state for life. While upholding the social order that oppresses Aboriginal people, the ALP proposes to insert a token “recognition” of Aboriginal people into the constitution and to set up a powerless Aboriginal advisory body (“Voice”) to the parliament. This scheme is aimed at giving the regime the appearance that it is listening to Aboriginal people’s voices. Although the hard right-wing section of the Australian ruling class cannot stomach any recognition that Aboriginal people lived on this land for tens of thousands of years before colonial invasion, much of the ruling class see the proposed scheme as being useful because they hope that it will dampen the Aboriginal rights movement that has become more vigorous in recent years. They also think that the planned changes will persuade the broader population into having greater faith in the supposed “fairness” of the present Australian social order and, therefore, be more willing to support the ruling class’ more aggressive military and political interventions into the Asia-Pacific; as Australia’s capitalist rulers seek to, on the one hand, maintain their neo-colonial plunder and paternalistic control of the South Pacific and, on the other, play a frontline role in the Western imperialists’ Cold War drive against socialistic China. Those sections of the White Australia capitalist ruling class pushing the new scheme also want to ostentatiously display “constitutional recognition” and a nominal Aboriginal “Voice” for international consumption. They want to deflect widespread global revulsion at the Australian regime’s brutal oppression of Aboriginal people, which they know undercuts their ability to unleash (usually bogus) attacks on their enemies over “human rights.” However, most staunch Aboriginal activists have seen through the proposed measures. They have been enraged by the window-dressing nature of the “embrace” of an Aboriginal “Voice” and have skewered the tokenism of the proposed constitutional changes. At yesterday’s January 26 Invasion Day rally in Sydney, every single Aboriginal activist that addressed the issue of the “Voice” and “Constitutional Recognition” – including leading activists Gwenda Stanley, Lizzy Jarrett and Lynda-June Coe – condemned and opposed the sham plans. Nearly all the speakers at the Melbourne and Brisbane protests took the same stance. As Gumbainggir man and veteran Aboriginal militant, Uncle Gary Foley, powerfully told the Melbourne rally, the Voice would “only be cosmetic”. “Like lipstick on a pig. It will not address the deep underlying issues that still pervade Australian society and that primary issue is white Australian racism,” Foley pointed out.
The stance taken by staunch Aboriginal activists is especially valid when the government that is pushing the proposed constitutional changes not only hails the blood-soaked, white supremacist monarchy but does nothing to stop regime personnel from killing Aboriginal people in custody and continuing to remove Aboriginal children from their families; while doing little to ensure decent housing and services for Aboriginal communities and absolutely nothing to genuinely return stolen land to Aboriginal people. Since the ALP took office, young Aboriginal people continue to die in state custody at a horrific rate and police and prison guards responsible for killing Aboriginal people continue to get away with these crimes. This has only encouraged violent white supremacists on the streets. The sickening beating to death by white racists of 15 year-old Aboriginal boy, Cassius Turvey, while he was walking home with his friends from a school in suburban Perth is a product of the White Australia capitalist “order” upheld by the Liberals, One Nation, the ALP and the Greens alike.
CLASS STRUGGLE IS THE ONLY ROAD TO DEFEND WORKING CLASS PEOPLES’ LIVING STANDARDS
With the ALP’s working class base increasingly angry at their falling living standards, ALP leaders have been at pains to look like they are trying to lift wages. They pushed through new laws ostentatiously called the “Secure Jobs, Better Pay Bill.” As well as claiming that it will lift wages and improve job security for casual workers, Labor says that the bill will help reduce the gender pay gap. However, any benefits to workers from this bill will at best be modest and on balance it may do as much harm for workers as good. One positive aspect of the legislation is that it somewhat increases the scope for workers employed by different businesses in the same industry to collectively bargain for their rights. This partially winds back the measures introduced by the Keating Labor government in the early 1990s that restricted workers to bargaining with their bosses at a single enterprise. That system of enterprise bargaining, by curtailing the number of workers who could be united together to fight for a particular deal, reduced workers’ power and has been part of the reason why the capitalists have been able to increase their rate of exploitation of workers over the last few decades. To the extent that particular aspects of the new law undo the enforced limitation of workers bargaining to the enterprise level – that is, undo the damage done by a former Labor government – these aspects should be defended. However, we need to fight for the extension of the right to multi-employer bargaining that is far, far more wide-ranging than those very modest measures prescribed in the current law. For example, not only does the new law give small business bosses the power to refuse to be part of multi-employer deals with workers, it also gives this same power to capitalists who already have an enterprise agreement with their staff. Moreover, the legislation excludes multi-employer deals done with unions that have been involved in “repeated breaches of industrial law” – effectively preventing construction workers, mine workers, wharfies, seamen, offshore energy workers, ferry drivers and others represented by the more militant unions like the CFMMEU from engaging in multi-employer bargaining. Furthermore, in typical social democratic fashion, the ALP caved in to ruling class opposition to the pro-worker aspects of the bill from bosses’ organisations and the yuppy cross-benchers, thereby weakening them further. Thus, the extension of industry-wide bargaining prescribed in the original legislation kept on getting narrower and narrower. In the last few days before the bill was passed, the ALP government bowed to cross-bench senator David Pocock and excluded businesses with fewer than 20 employees from being compelled by the majority of their workers to engage in multi-employer bargaining, rather than the previous threshold of 15 employees. Additionally, the Albanese government agreed to changes that will make it much easier for bosses of businesses with up to 50 employees to escape multi-employer bargaining by workers.
Moreover, there are aspects of the so-called, “Secure Jobs, Better Pay Bill” that will actually help capitalist bosses to intensify their cuts to workers’ employment rights and real wages. For one, the new law includes new impediments on workers’ already very restricted right to take strike action. Workers must now go through a momentum-slowing, compulsory period of formal conciliation with the bosses before taking any industrial action. If they take action involving multi-employer bargaining they must give the bosses a full five days notice. And in a measure aimed at quashing long-running union industrial action, workers must now go through the complex process that they already need to engage in before taking industrial action – involving a time-consuming, momentum-sapping secret ballot of employees – every three months. Moreover, a measure in the bill to give the “Fair Work Commission” (FWC) the power to resolve disputes between bosses and workers through arbitration where there is no reasonable prospect of agreement being reached, will in the long run do far more harm to workers than any good. Yes, in places where workers’ unions are weaker and in the context of the workers movement having been on the back foot over so many years, it is perhaps possible that compulsory arbitration could allow some workers in the short term to receive a tiny few more crumbs from their bosses than they otherwise would. However, when the workers movement rises in a class struggle fightback – as it must – then increased arbitration powers for the FWC, which are after all the courts of a capitalist bosses-serving state, will be used to quell workers’ struggles and prevent workers from winning substantial victories through action. Furthermore, in a concession to lobbying by business groups, the ALP has introduced a measure in the legislation that will weaken the requirement that deals between workers and their bosses leave the workers nominally better-off than previous arrangements. Instead of this Better Off Overall Test (BOOT) being applied for specific changes, bosses can claim that they have met the BOOT because they have made improvements to workers’ conditions in some areas that supposedly offset cuts to workers’ rights in others. The new measure is set to open the way for business owners to drastically undercut workers’ conditions at those workplaces where workers have less bargaining power – for example, where workers’ union organisations are weaker. Indeed, secretary of the Retail and Fast Food Workers Union, Josh Cullinan, described the new law (when it was still at a bill stage before its better aspects were weakened further) as one containing “calamitous attacks on working people.” The union secretary further insisted that the (then proposed) law “does nothing to improve the job security of casual workers. In truth, it only attacks them.”
With the last eight months having proven, once again, that the ALP in government is not willing or able to stand up to the rich and powerful capitalist bigwigs that the conservative parties openly represent, it is clearer than ever that the only way for the working class masses and all the oppressed to defend their living standards and rights is through determined class struggle. Let’s build up our unions and make them infinitely more militant. We need hard-fought strikes and other struggles to win massive pay rises for workers. We must not only make up for rampant inflation but for the years of falling real wages. To clear the legal obstacles to such struggles we must simultaneously fight for the repeal of all anti-strike laws. For the unrestricted right of unions to engage in industry-wide and nationwide bargaining with the bosses! Reverse Labor, the Liberals and the capitalists’ gutting of the Better Off Overall Test in workplace agreements! We also need to ensure that all those currently working as casuals and gig workers have their positions converted into secure jobs with all the rights of permanency. As part of fighting for this and in order to ensure secure jobs for all unemployed workers, we must force companies to increase hiring of permanent workers at the expense of their fat profits. To stop landlords being able to jack up rents ever higher because they know that renters have nowhere else to go, we must take action to demand a massive increase in low-rent housing. To facilitate women’s full participation in economic life and complete economic independence, we must struggle for free 24-hour childcare. We must also fight for Medicare to fully cover all specialist fees, essential medicine, dental, “elective” surgeries and all aged care. The public budget will only be able to afford such free childcare, healthcare and aged care if we bring these sectors completely into public ownership so that a large part of the public budget for these social services does not end up, as it does today, in the pockets of the wealthy capitalists that own profit-driven childcare, aged care, pathology, X-ray, medical centre, pharmacy and other health service firms. We need funds to employ more public sector nurses, paramedics, doctors and aged care workers and not high profits for health sector profiteers. To help provide the urgently needed resources for public health, aged care, public housing and education and to drive down surging living costs we must fight for the confiscation of the oil, gas, coal and power companies and their transfer into public ownership.
To wage such struggles against the powerful capitalist class that runs this country, working class people need tight unity across racial and ethnic lines. Such unity can only be built if the workers movement consciously combats the efforts of the exploiting class to divide the masses with reactionary nationalism and if it actively mobilises against racist oppression. The workers movement must unleash its power to oppose racist state killings of Aboriginal people in custody and to oppose the disproportionate imprisonment of black people in Australian jails. We have to resist the rampant white supremacist violence in this country – whether it comes from rabid rednecks on the streets, as in the beating to death of Cassius Turvey, or from the regime forces, as in the crushing to death of 26 year-old Aboriginal man, David Dungay, by racist prison guards. There also needs to be united mass action of our unions, Aboriginal people, Asians and other people of colour to sweep violent far-right racist outfits off the streets. If we can strike blows against such organised white supremacist forces, we can send a message to the more numerous garden variety rednecks out there – of the type that in Kalgoorlie deliberately ran over and killed 14 year-old Aboriginal boy Elijah Doughty, who murdered Indian-origin, Brisbane transport worker Manmeet Alisher by throwing a firebomb into the bus that he was driving and who have brutally bashed numerous Chinese and other East Asian people over the last few years – that they had better pull their head in. We can not allow racist terror to intimidate and, thus, marginalise from broader society and social struggle Aboriginal people and other people of colour. We also need to ensure that migrant workers are not bullied out of participation in class struggle resistance by the threat of deportation. That means that we must fight for the rights of citizenship for everyone who is here. We must demand that all refugees on temporary visas, all guest workers and all international students are given permanency and the rights of citizenship. Let us also demand that all the asylum seekers incarcerated in PNG and Nauru are brought here with the full rights of citizens.
THE ALP DID NOT EVEN PROMISE TO STAND UP TO THE WEALTHY BUSINESS-OWNING CLASS
That the ALP government is kowtowing to the big end of town is hardly a surprise. Even during the lead up to the elections they made clear that they were not going to challenge the capitalists. Fearful that the billionaire oligarchs would utilise both their ownership of the media and their power to decide which political forces that they direct their massive financial resources to in order to campaign against Labor, Albanese’s team went out of their way to assure the wealthy ruling class that the ALP would look after their interests as diligently as Morrison’s conservatives. To their working class base, on the other hand, Albanese and Co. promised that they would reverse the plunge in real wages, fix the crisis in aged care and address the lack of affordable housing. Yet they promised to do all this by merely managing the existing capitalist system more rationally than the Liberals and by doing away with the most extreme reactionary of the latter’s policies. Rather than measures to curb the power of the corporate bigwigs, the ALP tops advocated “win-win” policies that brought together workers and their unions on the one hand and worker-hiring business owners on the other. However, such talk of “win-win” between workers and the capitalists is a cruel hoax. Workers are getting poorer precisely because capitalist bosses are increasing the proportion of the fruits of workers’ labour that they seize as profits. The interests of workers and those of the business owners that extract profit from their toil are counterposed. To refuse to stand with workers’ interests against those of their capitalist bosses means to accept the status quo of ever-increasing capitalist exploitation of workers.
Yet, despite all the ALP leaders’ efforts to please the capitalist ruling class, the latter do not come easily to accepting a Labor government. The ALP is, after all, a party whose rank-and-file are workers and is a party organically tied to the union movement. The exploiting class worries that this base could push an ALP government into enacting measures to defend workers’ interests. Therefore, in “normal” times, the oligarchs prefer their own parties, like the Liberals and the Nationals, to administer government, especially at the federal level. However, when the working class start to get restive or when the ruling class wants to herd the masses into supporting measures that could be unpopular – like a major war – the ruling class turn to the ALP. They hope that with the ALP’s greater authority amongst the working class and with its ties to the union leadership, the Labor Party is better able to pacify the working class masses and more effective at lining up the masses behind major campaigns of the capitalist elite than the openly, pro-business owner conservatives. In this way, the ruling class will look to ALP social democracy to come to their rescue when they are in a difficult position, even while having misgivings that an ALP government could irritate them by throwing some sops to its working class base. This was the case in the lead up to the 2007 elections when the working class masses were angry after more than eleven years of right-wing Coalition government and when workers had in the previous two years participated in mass nationwide stopwork actions against the Howard government’s anti-worker Workchoices legislation. At the time, even the main national, NSW and Queensland newspapers of hard-right billionaire Rupert Murdoch called for a vote to Kevin Rudd’s ALP. Murdoch even personally praised Rudd. Then, in the lead-up to last May’s elections, after nearly nine years of corrupt Coalition rule has discredited Australia’s present social order in the eyes of the masses and with working class people grumbling over plunging living standards, decisive sections of the ruling class started to seriously consider whether it would be better to get the ALP into government. This is especially the case because the capitalist rulers are worried that the disgruntled working class masses could refuse to get behind their Cold War drive against socialistic China.
However, before they were willing to accept the possibility of a Labor government, in the months and years leading up to the federal elections, the various factions of the capitalist class subjected Albanese’s Labor to a number of tests to see whether this nominally workers’ party could be trusted to run the federal government. The big end of town utilised their control of the media and think tanks and their numerous personal connections with politicians to demand reassurances from the ALP on key issues.
For one, they wanted to be sure that the ALP would not loosen anti-strike laws and would not encourage class struggle by pushing any policies that would openly redistribute wealth from the rich to the masses. The capitalist bigwigs were quite satisfied with Labor’s response. Not only did the ALP pledge to uphold anti-strike laws, some of which they had themselves instituted on previous occasions that they were in office, the ALP also pointedly refused to make even the most modest promises to redistribute income away from the super-rich. Indeed, ALP head offices openly instructed branch members not to make any negative references to the “big end of town” that the Labor Party had sometimes used in the lead up to the previous elections in 2019. The big end of town also demanded that the Labor Party abandon any plans to enact even minimal measures that would curb the returns of the rich from buying up multiple properties for speculation or for renting out as landlords. Here too Albanese’s Labor duly obliged. Thus, long before the elections, the ALP ditched the agenda that it took to the previous two elections of limiting the scope of negative gearing tax exemptions and reducing the amount of discount on capital gains tax payments. The supposed ALP “Left” Albanese has ostentatiously positioned himself even further to the right than his ALP Right faction predecessor, Bill Shorten. Even when promising resources for lower-rent “social housing”, the proposals of Albanese’s ALP are so modest that they would not be enough to pull down rents across the market – music to the ears of multiple-property owning, rich landlords shaking down ever greater rents from their tenants. Moreover, even the ALP’s modest plan for more “social housing” that it took to the election will not increase badly needed public housing but rather promises funds for just a modest increase in “community housing”, notorious for its private operators who skimp on repairs and shun the most hard-up, would-be tenants. Thus, even in making a sop to the needs of low-income renters, the ALP was careful to show that there would be a lot in the plans for the capitalists – in the form of expanded opportunities to profiteer from running partly government-funded “community housing.”
THE BIG END OF TOWN’S KEY RED LINE: ANY GOVERNMENT MUST FULLY PARTICIPATE IN THE COLD WAR TO STRANGLE SOCIALISTIC CHINA
Perhaps the most important assurance that the ruling class demanded of Labor in the lead-up to the elections is a guarantee that it continue to support the U.S.-led Cold War drive to “contain” and squeeze socialistic China. They want Labor to follow through on the conservatives’ agenda for an increase in the U.S. military presence in Australia, for an aggressive Australian military build-up in support of this anti-China war drive and for a continuation of political support for those forces seeking to undermine socialistic rule in China from within – whether they be pro-capitalist, pseudo-“pro-democracy” activists or the dwindling number of anti-communist and fanatically anti-women’s-equality, religious fundamentalist forces based on the, more European-looking, Uyghur minority in north-western China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. The capitalist class also want Labor to do a more skillful job in aggressively interfering in Australia’s South Pacific “neighbourhood” in order to sabotage socialistic China’s south-south cooperation with the region. To be sure, the capitalists also want Labor to somehow conduct this Cold War in a way that simultaneously maintains workable diplomatic relations between Canberra and Beijing so that the tens of billions of profit that they get from Australian exports to China is not disrupted too much.
This begs the question: why are Australia’s capitalist bigwigs risking harm to their immensely lucrative trade with China by antagonising the latter? The answer to this question is entirely related to the fact that China is a workers state as opposed to being a country under capitalist rule. China’s toiling classes grabbed state power in a giant anti-capitalist revolution in 1949. To this day, China has an economy centred on a property system that favours working class people: that is, socialist, public ownership of key economic sectors. Even though the current Beijing leadership does not seek to challenge Western imperialism’s domination over the world, the mere existence of China as a socialistic power is slowly undermining the grip of imperialism over the ex-colonial countries. China’s mutually beneficial cooperation with the Global South is allowing countries in the Pacific, Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America to access capital, modern technology, training and a large market in China without having to subordinate their country to the imperial powers or their agencies like the IMF. This is what is driving Australia’s capitalist rulers mad as countries in the South Pacific like the Solomon Islands and Fiji slowly exert greater independence from their Australian imperialist overlords.
Furthermore, the capitalist powers are terrified that even though Beijing does nothing to explicitly promote socialist revolution, the mere example presented by the most populous country in the world continuing to adhere to a socialistic course, while successfully lifting her people out of poverty and providing rapidly rising real wages, wide access to low-rent public housing and ever improving infrastructure, public transport and cultural opportunities for her masses, will encourage working class people in the capitalist world to themselves start agitating for socialism. That is why the Western ruling classes see the rise of socialistic China as an “existential threat.”
For the very same reason that capitalist exploiting classes fear and loathe the socialistic PRC, the working class must hail and defend its existence. For the very existence of working class rule in China, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba and North Korea – in however a fragile and incomplete form – gives confidence to the toiling classes in Australia and other capitalist countries that they do not have to accept capitalist rule and all that it brings – bullying bosses, plunging real wages, skyrocketing rents, growing racism and all-round economic insecurity and chaos. That is why the workers movement and Left must unconditionally stand with socialistic China and the other workers states against every form of attack that they face – whether that be military, economic or propagandistic.
Yet, diametrically against the interests of its working class membership, the ALP is right behind the capitalists’ drive to strangle socialistic China. Thus, while in Opposition, the ALP supported every one of the former Liberal government’s Cold War moves against the PRC – from the discriminatory banning of Chinese tech giant, Huawei, from participating in the building of Australia’s 5G wireless network, to the introduction of McCarthyist, so-called “foreign interference” laws aimed at intimidating Australians of Chinese descent that are sympathetic to Red China, to the enacting of the AUKUS anti-China deal for Australia to acquire nuclear submarines from the U.S. and Britain. Indeed, in the lead up to the elections, Albanese’s ALP even sought to position itself as more extreme in its opposition to the PRC than the right-wing Coalition. Thus, the ALP joined the hysterical, anti-China denunciations of the deal leasing part of the civilian port of Darwin to a Chinese company. Moreover, ALP leaders criticised the Morrison government for not bullying enough the Solomon Islands into renouncing their security cooperation with China. At the same time, the ALP tops canvassed to the capitalist class that they could do a better job than their rivals of dragging South Pacific countries back into the Australian ruling class’ tight hold. They argued that they would restore the Australian regime’s damaged credentials in the region through taking a more rational verbal position on issues – like climate change – knowing full well that Pacific island countries vulnerable to rising sea-levels are only too aware that Australia’s carbon emissions per person are among the highest in the world and nearly two and a half times larger than China’s. Australia’s capitalist rulers have been more than convinced. As far as they are concerned, the ALP passed with high distinction their test requiring that any prospective government commit to zealously pursuing the anti-communist Cold War against China. Moreover, Labor’s assurances that they could do all this while simultaneously restoring full trade relations with China through dialling down the ferocity of Canberra’s anti-China rhetoric also impressed the corporate elite.
THE STANCE THAT MARXISTS SHOULD HAVE TAKEN TOWARDS THE ELECTIONS IN ORDER TO ADVANCE ANTI-CAPITALIST RESISTANCE
Before finalising their decision not to throw their massive economic might against the election of an ALP government, there was one final important requirement that Australia’s capitalists vetted the ALP over. They wanted to be sure that Labor would be all the way with Canberra’s Western allies in waging the West’s defacto war against Russia via their Ukrainian proxies. To be sure, initially the war was mainly a squalid battle for territory between the respective capitalist classes of Ukraine and Russia. In such an inter-capitalist war, the working people of both countries had no side except opposition to their own respective rulers. However, even from the very start of the war, an important additional aspect of the conflict was Russia’s just struggle to keep the nuclear-armed NATO warmongers from its Western border, on the one hand, and, on the other, Kiev’s kowtowing to the interests of Western imperialism. Before long, this second aspect of the conflict became the dominant one. The U.S. and its British, EU, Australian and Canadian allies poured into Ukraine such huge amounts of weapons, military advisers, intelligence assistance and propaganda backing, that in a matter of weeks this conflict ceased to be primarily a Ukraine-Russia war and effectively became a conflict between the Western imperialists and Russia with Ukraine acting as the proxy for the former. The U.S. imperialists want to subordinate Russia and reduce her to the humiliated status that she had in the first decade and a half after the early 1990s capitalist counterrevolution devastated her and the other lands of the former USSR. They want to ensure that Russia does not obstruct their predatory designs on the resource rich Caucuses and Central Asian regions. Moreover, the U.S.-led imperialists cannot tolerate Russia or anyone else being an independent, nuclear-armed power, especially if that power has failed to sign up to their Cold War drive against Red China. To be sure, the Australian ruling class’ reasons for opposing Russia are very different to their opposition to socialistic China. Most notably, unlike the PRC, Russia is a fellow capitalist country. Moreover, Russia has few interests in the South Pacific and Southeast Asian region. She is not obstructing Australian multinational corporations from plundering this region. Nor do the Australian capitalists have any significant interests or ambitions within either Russia or its neighbouring regions that would enable them to gain some direct economic benefit from any subordination of Russia. That is why, in previous years, Australian regime officials had privately complained to Washington that it is expending too much energy countering Russia when it should be devoting all its efforts to suppressing Red China. However, once the U.S. and its other allies entered the recent war in a decisive manner, the Australian ruling class fell in behind its allies. It wants the power and prestige of the U.S. and the overall West to come out strengthened rather than damaged from the war. This is a matter of self interest for Australia’s capitalist rulers. It is Australia’s alliance with U.S. – and to a lesser extent British – military and economic might that enables Australia’s capitalists to subjugate the peoples of the South Pacific. If the powerful allies of Australia’s exploiting class are weakened, then its own tyranny in this region becomes endangered.
Here too on the question of the war in Ukraine, the ALP proved its credentials to the capitalist class. It enthusiastically backed the Morrison government’s imposition of sanctions on Russia and its sending of hundreds of millions of dollars of military equipment to the authoritarian regime in Ukraine. With the ALP thus on board on all the issues of greatest strategic concern to the capitalist class and with the latter having serious concerns about the corrupt Morrison government’s ability to hold back mass struggle in the context of plunging real wages, much of the ruling class chose to either back Albanese’s ALP in the elections or to be indifferent as to whether the ALP or the Coalition won. This is shown by the fact that just like the openly pro-boss Liberals, far-right parties, “Teal independents” and Greens, the various branches of the Labor Party received tens of millions of dollars in donations from both ultra-wealthy individuals and from corporations in the months and years leading up to last year’s federal elections. Moreover, significant sections of the capitalist-owned media sided with the ALP in the elections. Take, for instance, Nine Entertainment Holdings which owns Channel Nine TV, the 2GB radio station and the vast suite of newspapers that formerly belonged to the, now defunct, Fairfax Group. Nine Entertainment is owned by right-wing billionaire, Bruce Gordon, and the chairman of the corporation is none other than former federal treasurer and Liberal Party stalwart, Peter Costello. The flagship newspapers of the corporation, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, both editorialised for a vote to Albanese’s Labor at the elections. Also calling for a vote to the ALP was the “progressive” liberal, Guardian Australia online newspaper, a publications that has relied on massive financial contributions from wealthy capitalists to operate – including a huge initial investment from filthy rich, Australian tech tycoon Graeme Wood (at the nudging of Liberal Party then future prime minister Malcolm Turnbull) and large contributions to the British owners of the publication from foundations controlled by some of the most powerful American capitalists in history, including Bill Gates, the Ford family that control the Ford car company, the Hilton family owning the Hilton hotel chain and the Rockefeller family known for their vast oil, banking and property empire and their one-time advocacy of despicable fascistic “theories” like Social Darwinism and Eugenics. To be sure, the hard-right Murdoch family’s main newspapers like The Australian and the Daily Telegraph supported the Liberals at the elections. Yet, Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch were unperturbed enough about the prospect of a Labor government to recoil away from enforcing a uniform, anti-ALP election line on their outlets, unlike the uniform positions that they often enforce for questions that are important to them – like support for particular Western military interventions abroad. Thus, the Murdoch newspaper in the Northern Territory, the NT News actually editorialised for a vote to Labor.
With major sections of the capitalist class either backing, or being unconcerned by, an ALP election win, to call for a vote for the ALP at the elections would have been a call for upholding the overall interests of the capitalist class. To do so would have been harmful to the interests of the working class and oppressed just as would obviously have been any support for the reactionary, openly anti-union Coalition. As we put it in a Trotskyist Platform leaflet issued in the weeks leading up to the election:
“… the Labor Party (ALP) “alternative” is hell bent on proving to the big business owners, the people who really hold the power here, that an ALP administration will enforce capitalist interests as reliably as the Coalition does. Albanese’s ALP even proclaimed that a Labor government will not increase the paltry JobSeeker payments. So, at the upcoming elections, no vote should be given to either the Coalition or the ALP and Greens “alternatives” and obviously not to the racist One Nation or the other nationalist far-right outfits like the United Australia Party. Instead, we need hard-fought strikes and other mass actions by the workers movement and its allies to turn back the capitalists’ exploitation of workers, to resist their oppression of Aboriginal people, women and coloured ethnic communities and to oppose “their” regime’s military buildup. The more that the working class understands that their position will not be advanced through supporting any of the current parliamentary parties, the more determined they will be to build the mass struggles needed.”
Trotskyist Platform, For Militant Class Struggle Against Australia’s Capitalists!, 25 April 2022
Most of the other far-left groups rejected such a stance. They called either openly, or more often backhandedly through preferences, for a vote to the ALP. However, events since the Albanese government’s election have confirmed the correctness of our opposition to supporting either the Coalition or the ALP or indeed any of other current parliamentary parties. Since coming to office, the Labor government has upheld all its commitments to the big end of town, while delivering few of the meagre promises that it made to its working class base. Thus, the Albanese government has given tax cuts to the rich, maintained tax exemptions for wealthy property speculators, cut public hospital spending and maintained – and even strengthened – anti-strike laws. Its measures to lift wages are so limp and state Labor and Liberal governments so draconian in their determination to keep state public sector pay rises well below inflation, that not only are real wages falling even faster than they were during Morrison’s reign but even treasurer Jim Chalmers quietly concedes that real wages are expected to continue to fall until … at least, 2024!
Meanwhile, as promised to the capitalist bigwigs, the ALP has continued the Australian regime’s obsessive participation in the imperialist campaign to strangle socialistic rule in China. Indeed, it was literally just hours after Albanese and his cabinet had been sworn into government by “Her Majesty’s” representative (the Governor General) that Albanese and foreign minister Penny Wong flew off to a Quad meeting in Tokyo to advance the Cold War measures of the U.S.- Australia-Japan-India, anti-China alliance. That Albanese briefly met Chinese president Xi during the G20 summit is hardly a sign of an easing off of the Australian regime’s determination to participate in the anti-PRC Cold War. The government and the capitalist class that it serves wants to have a relationship with the PRC somewhat like the Japanese, German, New Zealand and French regimes, who are all fellow, zealous Cold War opponents of socialistic rule in China but maintain diplomatic relations with Beijing at the level just above that which causes trade to be seriously affected. Albanese and Penny Wong thus seek improvement in diplomatic exchanges with Beijing from Morrison’s time. This is especially because the inflation-plagued Australian economy is faltering. Yet, while seeking to reduce the temperature of diplomatic disputes with Beijing, Canberra is following through on its commitment to the capitalist class to continue to pile on the pressure on socialistic China. Since, the Albanese government took office, Australian warships and military aircraft have continued to provocatively traverse waters and skies claimed by Beijing in the South China Sea, thousands upon thousands of kilometres from Australia. Moreover, not only is the ALP government following through on the deposed conservative government’s plan to acquire long-range naval missiles and nuclear submarines, late last year it was revealed that the Albanese government was planning a still more threatening move against China – allowing the U.S. to deploy nuclear-capable B52 bombers at a base south of Darwin. Then, three weeks ago, it was revealed that the Albanese government would be buying the expensive, long-range HIMARS missile system from the United States. All this is part of an aggressive military build-up aimed at contributing to Cold War military pressure against the PRC. Meanwhile, in the South Pacific, the new government has followed through on its promise to intervene more aggressively in the region in order to shore up the interests of Australia’s capitalist class through sabotaging the efforts of regional countries to cooperate with the PRC. Indeed, Albanese and Penny Wong have intruded so coercively into the Solomon Islands that the Solomon Islands government responded to one such act of meddling last September with a defiant statement slamming Canberra’s move as “an assault on our parliamentary democracy” and “direct interference by a foreign government into our domestic affairs” (a brave act by the Solomon Islands government given that Western powers had stoked riots against them a year earlier and given the degree to which not only the upper levels of the country’s bureaucracy have been infiltrated by Australian officials and “advisers” but broader sections of the island nation’s civil institutions and media have been ensnared in the Australian ruling class’ influence operations).
Moreover, the new ALP government has taken over the baton from the previous government when it comes to participating in Western imperialism’s joint propaganda war against Red China. Three weeks ago, the government joined a very small number of other countries – including the U.S. and Britain – in imposing a requirement that travellers from China and only from China get a pre-departure COVID test. They forced through the new rule in spite of Australia’s chief medical officer and most other experts advising against the move! Clearly, the Australian government’s measure has little to do with protecting the Australian population from COVID and everything to do with trying to build negative perceptions of China by denigrating her COVID response, despite the fact that the PRC has so successfully protected her people from the pandemic that her COVID death rate per resident is currently 15 times lower than Australia’s. After having supported last November’s small anti-COVID-response protests in China – that were the Chinese version of the Far Right-instigated COVID “Freedom” protests in Australia and other Western countries – that opposed China’s mask mandates and PCR testing of COVID-affected regions, the Albanese government and its Western counterparts have now done a 180 degree flip and want to portray China’s recent relaxation of COVID controls as reckless. This is despite the PRC being in a much better position to protect her people from COVID deaths after reopening than Australia was when it opened up a year ago because the anti-viral medications that are now widely available in China – both from Western pharmaceutical firms and from Chinese ones – were not available at the time Australia opened up; and because China’s community-based COVID response (which involves doctors and nurses seeing patients in makeshift clinics within neighbourhoods and neighbourhood committees and local volunteers regularly checking up on the health condition of elderly and other COVID-vulnerable neighbours, while delivering medical kits and pandemic information) is very effective in ensuring that vulnerable COVID-infected people get prompt enough access to anti-viral medication and are speedily triaged to top-level hospitals.
Meanwhile, just like its right-wing predecessors, the Labor government has continued to claim that China is persecuting her Muslim Uyghur minority that live in the country’s northwest – a claim that not only have countries representing around 85% of the world’s population refused to sign on to during UN debates and motions (including every single Muslim majority country in the world other than for tiny U.S.-dependent Bosnia) but which the organisation of Islamic Cooperation, most Muslim-majority countries individually and much of Africa, the Middle East and Asia have denounced as a lie and instead emphatically praised China’s treatment of Muslim Uyghurs after sending fact-finding inspections to the country’s northwest.
The Albanese government has also more than delivered on its promise to the imperialist ruling class to continue the Morrison government’s support for the Washington-led proxy war against Russia. In July, Albanese exceeded the former prime minister’s level of support for the war by personally visiting Ukraine and meeting with its authoritarian president. Albanese announced during his trip that his government would provide Ukraine with an additional 34 armoured vehicles valued at $100 million. As Albanese has boasted many times, the Australian regime is now the largest non-NATO provider of military aid to Ukraine… or rather to the proxies of Western imperialism. This backing reached a new level last week when 70 Australian soldiers departed for Britain to participate in a British-led training program of Ukrainian troops.
THE LABOR PARTY HAS ALWAYS BETRAYED ITS WORKING CLASS BASE
Although none of the Labor Party’s working class supporters thought that the Albanese government was going to seriously redistribute income and power from the big end of town to the masses, even their most modest hopes of progressive change are gradually being dashed. Yet this is hardly a new experience for Labor supporters. The ALP has always betrayed its base. This is not merely a matter of a lack of resolute, selfless leaders or a matter of the leadership not living up to the “principles” of the Labor Party. Mostly, it is because the social democratic strategy that the Labor Party commits itself to is incapable of delivering major, lasting benefits for its mass base. Social democracy seeks to improve the lives of the masses without fundamentally challenging the tremendous economic and political power of the capitalist class … or by “postponing” constructing that challenge to the distant never reached “right moment”. This becomes a recipe for resigning oneself to the domination of society by the big end of town and capitulating to their demands on the most decisive issues. By thereby accepting the supremacy of the capitalists, while negotiating with the latter on terms of their dominance in society on the nominal behalf of the working class masses, social democratic politicians, union leaders and NGO heads gain a highly respectable position in society as well as privileged incomes compared to their support base. They also acquire personal links with the big end of town that facilitate future lucrative careers in the corporate world. All this entices them to bow down even more subserviently to the capitalist bigwigs whenever the latter get angry that social democratic leaders are demanding “too much” on behalf of their support base.
Any working class based political party in a capitalist country faces not only the direct pressure of the capitalists but also the pressure of the state institutions. Despite the state being a body that nominally “treats everyone equally”, in practice, in capitalist societies the government departments, the bureaucracies, the courts, police, army and secret police all act as upholders of the interests of the racist, capitalist exploiting class. Just look at what has been revealed during the course of the Royal Commission into the former Morrison government’s despised “Robodebt” scheme, in which the regime’s computers, supposedly checking for “over-claiming” by welfare recipients, automatically sent messages to nearly half a million of this country’s most economically vulnerable people unlawfully demanding payments of non-existing debts, in some cases of up to tens of thousands of dollars. What testimony during the investigation showed is that it was not just Morrison and his ministers who were driving the Robodebt scheme. So were many highly-paid, senior government bureaucrats who shared the anti-working class Liberal government’s determination to suck every cent that they could out of low-income welfare recipients. Indeed it was bureaucrats from the Department of Human Services rather than Coalition ministers that first proposed Robodebt. Later, after the harm caused by Robodebt became widely known, calls by lower down staff for the scheme to be seriously overhauled were met with hostility by upper bureaucrats.
Meanwhile, two months ago, there were revelations of just how intense racism and hostility to leftists is within Queensland Police ranks. In recordings taken at the Brisbane city police watch house, a large number of cops engaged in discussions expressing their extreme hatred of black Africans, Muslim people, Aboriginal people and leftist protesters and also their contempt and concocted “fear” of being overwhelmed by Africans, Chinese, Indian and Muslim people and migrants more generally. Chillingly, some officers even discussed the possibility of beating to death and burying black Africans and expressed their wish to violently attack anti-racist, climate change and refugee rights protesters.
Given the racist, anti-leftist and anti-working class character of bureaucratic organs in Australia and other capitalist countries, any party that comes into government promising progressive, pro-working class measures would face sabotage of their agenda from the state agencies nominally under their “control”. Understanding this, we communists understand that in order to implement thoroughgoing, progressive social change, the working class, united with all the oppressed, must first grab state power by replacing the existing capitalist state with its own organs built to defend the interests of the working class masses and all the downtrodden. On the road to such a workers revolution, the exploited and oppressed can win immediate gains and concessions from the ruling capitalists through class struggle and other mass actions provided that they maintain complete political independence from all institutions of the capitalist state. In contrast, the approach of social democrats – whether of its most right-wing practitioners like the ALP or it’s most avowedly pro-socialist, left-wing elements – is to seek to wield the existing capitalist state in the service of the masses. Yet given that this state has been built up and maintained to enforce the interests of the capitalist ruling class, social democrat-administered governments, aware of the resistance that they would face from their own state agencies, almost always recoil from implementing the more progressive aspects of their agendas, even in those cases where pressure from their working class base pushes them to promise a more radical program.
In very rare cases when a social democratic party in government still insists on following through on a more explicitly pro-working class agenda, their government ends up being overthrown by the state institutions that they nominally head. Most infamously in September 1973 in Chile, the elected Socialist Party-led government of then Chilean president Salvador Allende, which had nationalised some industries and sought to improve workers’ living standards, was overthrown in a coup by the Chilean military backed by the country’s police. That the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) helped the American CIA to conduct a destabilisation campaign against Allende in order to foment the right-wing coup underscores the intensely pro-capitalist political character of Australia’s state organs. A few months before the coup, the then newly elected ALP government led by Gough Whitlam found out about the ASIS operation in Chile. Whitlam did order the ASIS operation to be disbanded. But this was only because he feared that it would be politically damaging if the plot was exposed. Indeed the ASIS chief at the time made clear to fellow spies that “personally he [Whitlam] would have wished to approve” the operation. Moreover, while ordering the end of ASIS’s role in the destabilisation plot, Whitlam facilitated the ongoing CIA operation against the elected Allende government by choosing not to expose it. This did not stop the CIA from carrying out a covert destabilisation campaign against Whitlam’s own administration! That culminated in the November 1975 overthrow of the Labor government in a right-wing coup executed by the British monarchy’s representative and long-time participant in CIA front organisations, then Governor General John Kerr. Although Whitlam was far more conservative and far less principled than the avowed Marxist, Allende, the American regime felt that he was still not a reliable enough backer of the critical Pine Gap U.S./Australia spy base in the Northern Territory. That the most progressive Labor government in Australian history was overthrown in such a coup shows the impossibility of realising even the rather modest aims of the Laborite project. That Whitlam had earlier stabbed his fellow social democrat Allende in the back by keeping him in the dark about the CIA destabilisation operation and by refusing to publicly expose the American interference plot only shows how the social democratic perspective of seeking to govern with the tolerance of the capitalist bigwigs and their state agencies inevitably means betraying the interests of the working class.
WHEN IT IS USEFUL TO GIVE CRITICAL ELECTORAL SUPPORT TO A SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY AND WHEN TO DO SO WOULD BE A BETRAYAL
Despite the political bankruptcy of social democracy, there are certain times when mass working class based social democratic parties, like the ALP, could be pushed by their base to stand on a more explicitly pro-working class platform. This would be at a time of left-wing radicalisation of the working class and during a period of greater class struggle. Leaders of social democratic parties may then use the strengthened activity of their base to try and pressure the capitalists into granting some concessions to their base in order to dampen their mobilisation. At the same time, social democratic parties may put forward more overtly pro-working class demands and push to the fore more left-wing elements of their parties in order to maintain the authority of their base, so that they will be able to contain the radicalising working class and prevent them from heading in a revolutionary direction. In such circumstances, especially if the social democratic party has been out of government for a lengthy period, the working class masses could have serious expectations that should the party win office they would institute major pro-working class reforms. Although, in the event of a working class radicalisation, the worried capitalist class will be looking to social democracy to save their system from a resurgent working class, the demands that a social democratic party may be pushed to put forward could be too much for the capitalists to accept. In such scenarios, the capitalists as a whole may choose to actively campaign against the election of the social democratic party to government. If that were to happen, it may be worthwhile for communists to give electoral support to the mass social democratic party in order to deliver a political defeat to the capitalists and, thereby, embolden the anti-capitalist sentiments of the working class mases. Moreover, given that major pro-working class measures can only be implemented against the resistance of the capitalists through the powerful push of class struggle mobilisation, having a social democratic party in government when it actually stands on an anti-capitalist agenda can help intensify class struggle. However, any electoral support given by communists to a social democratic party like the Labor Party would be given with unyielding criticism of that party. We would point out that the social democratic party is incapable of realising its more worthy promises because it always ultimately seeks an accommodation with the capitalist exploiting class and because it is loyal to the capitalist state that enforces the interests of the exploiting class. Communists would warn the working class masses that the social democrats in government would inevitably betray them. We would insist that only class struggle action that is based on maintaining complete political independence from all the arms of the capitalist state can ensure major advances for the working class in the present; and that such gains can only be secured and reach decisive levels if the working class is able to lead all the oppressed in the seizure of state power. Thus, even in situations where it would be appropriate to give electoral support to a social democratic party, communists would be, in the words of Russian Revolution leader V.I. Lenin, seeking to support the social democratic party “in the same way as the rope supports a hanged man.”
When Lenin wrote the above words in April-May 1920 he was outlining why he believed that communists in Britain at the time should call for a vote for the British Labour Party while explaining to the masses that a Labor government would inevitably betray its working class supporters. Since then, nominally Marxist, left social democratic groups have seized on Lenin’s words to advocate giving electoral support to mass social democratic parties in every election, irrespective of the platform that those parties may claim to stand on. However, when Lenin advocated giving critical electoral support to the British Labour Party, the latter was claiming to stand on a program very different to Albanese’s Australian Labour Party today. With the most politically advanced layers of the British working class inspired by the socialist revolution in Russia two and a half years earlier and demanding a struggle for socialism in Britain, the leaders of the British Labour Party at the time knew that they would need to show some socialist credentials if they were to retain the loyalty of the British working class. In February 1918, notably just three months after Russia’s socialist revolution, the British Labour Party wrote into its constitution a commitment to socialist public ownership of the economy. They adopted Clause IV into their constitution, which stated that: “To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.” In contrast, not only does the ALP today not even pretend to stand for nationalisation of the economy and socialism, it is known by the politically engaged masses for having supported privatisation. Indeed, it was the 1983-1996 Hawke/Keating ALP governments that unleashed the privatisation wave that has swept Australia over the last four decades. That Labor government sold off the Commonwealth Bank and Qantas. Then, in 2002, the Carr NSW Labor government and the Bracks Victorian Labor government joined with the then Howard federal Liberal-National government to privatise the bulk of Australia’s rail freight operations. Meanwhile, state Labor governments have sold off public housing and state-owned electricity generation and retail with almost as much vigour as their right-wing opponents.
Another major difference between the British Labour Party of 1920 and today’s ALP was in their respective attitudes to the capitalist war drive against the then biggest workers states of their times. To be sure, in 1920 the leaders of the British Labour Party were as hostile to Soviet Russia (the only workers state then) as the ALP leaders are today towards socialistic China. However, Britain’s Labour Party heads also knew that there was considerable sympathy for the Soviet workers state amongst the most politically active ranks of the British working class. This sympathy combined with war weariness (following World War I) and pacifist sentiments led to a number of protest actions against the British government’s military intervention in Russia that was supporting anti-communist forces that were waging a civil war to overthrow the young Soviet workers state and restore capitalist-landlord rule. There were even a series of daring mutinies by British forces in Russia who demanded to be sent home. Meanwhile, within Britain itself, troops staged mutinies against plans to send them to Russia. Then during the very weeks in April-May 1920 when Lenin was writing the book, “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder, where he made that call for British communists at the time to give critical electoral support to the Labour Party “in the same way as the rope supports a hanged man”, there were two very powerful actions by British workers in opposition to the government’s shipment of arms and munitions to the capitalist Polish regime that was waging a war against Soviet Russia. In one, seamen sabotaged barges carrying munitions to the Polish troops causing the barges to sink. Then dock and coal workers refused to load and supply the ship Jolly George that had been scheduled to send munitions to Poland. In these various actions and munities, rank- and-file Labour members participated. Aware of this, when the British government weeks later announced that it would be sending troops to Poland to help fight against Soviet Russia, the Labour Party leaders and pro-Labour trade union heads called for protest actions to oppose the intervention. They built Councils of Action across the country to oppose the expedition to Poland, organised a series of massive protests and even threatened a general strike should the intervention go ahead. As a result, the British government had to abandon its plans to openly support the Polish regime’s war on the Soviet workers state. How different was the stance of the British Labour Party in 1920 towards the war drive against the Soviet workers state from the policies of today’s ALP towards the war drive against socialistic China! Today, even before the elections, Albanese’s ALP vowed to prosecute the rapid anti-China expansion of the Australian military, expand the presence of U.S. forces in Australia aimed against Red China and continue the Australian navy’s participation in provocative Western military incursions into China-claimed waters off her coast.
None of the above changes the fact that Britain’s Labour Party in 1920 was just as much an enemy of the fight for workers revolution then as the Australian Labor Party is today. The British Labour Party was fresh from having criminally led workers into supporting their “own” capitalist exploiters in the horrific inter-imperialist slaughter that was World War I. Labour Party leaders even took up cabinet posts in a wartime coalition government led by the Liberal Party. It was for good reason that Lenin had labelled social democratic parties like the Labour Party a “stinking corpse”. The British Labour Party leadership’s pro-socialist posturing was largely about maintaining its hold over a radicalising working class. In 1919, British workers had unleashed a massive strike wave that continued into 1920. Labour parliamentary and union leaders while nominally supporting the strikes worked overtime to ensure that they did not reach the level that would threaten the stability of the capitalist order. This is despite the unions representing the miners, railways workers and dockers and other transport workers having earlier formed themselves into a Triple Alliance promising to stand as one to fight for their demands. However, when each section of workers was facing major disputes with their bosses in 1919 and 1920, the pro-Labour Party union leaders refused to call out their members to strike as one as the Triple Alliance promised. Labour leaders held the same attitude to the promises of Clause IV as they did to the Triple Alliance. Clause IV existed to express a sentiment that would maintain the allegiance of pro-socialist workers to Labour but provided no program of action as to how an economic system in Britain based on “common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange” was going to be actually achieved. This was because the social democratic Labour leaders were unwilling to mobilise the revolutionary struggle needed to win such a system.
However, for most British workers it meant a lot that the leaders of the party that they saw as their party was promising to nationalise the mines and railways, greatly increase the provision of public housing and significantly redistribute income from the capitalists to the workers should they win the next election. To be sure, Lenin pointed out that the most politically advanced section of the British working class already distrusted Labour Party leaders and their commitment to deliver on their stated agenda. They had been convinced of this through communist propaganda and theory. However, the majority of workers could not be educated in this way. They needed to be shown through their own experience that social democracy is incapable of bringing a fundamental redistribution of power and wealth in society towards the working class – let alone open the road to socialism. Thus Lenin argued that it was necessary to get Labour elected to government and be put to the test. At the same time, communists must explain to the mass of British workers that communists are helping them to get the Labour Party elected in order to prove to them that the Labour Party will surely betray working class people. Communists would say to the British workers: we will prove to you that only our communist program can bring you lasting improvements in living standards, public ownership and socialism.
Yet such a tactic only made sense because British workers at the time could have genuine illusions that the Labour Party would nationalise key industries, seriously redistribute income towards the workers and make steps toward socialism. No politically engaged worker in Australia could have had illusions before last May’s elections that Albanese’s ALP was going to do any of these things. For not only did the ALP never promise any nationalisations, it was careful to not even speak about redistributing wealth from the capitalists to the masses in even the mildest way. Indeed, while the ALP did promise to stop the decline in real wages, it also promised to follow through on implementing the Coalition’s planned tax cuts for the rich – a promise that they dutifully kept!
Lenin’s advocacy of the tactic of critical support was also shaped by the attitude of the British capitalist class towards the Labour Party. Openly declaring his fear of a Labour victory, then prime minister from the capitalist Liberal Party, Lloyd George, compared the Labour Party to the Bolsheviks! He was of course completely wrong! However, such statements from capitalist leaders could only reinforce illusions amongst politically conscious British workers that the Labour Party would advance the country towards socialism. Moreover, the anti-Labour rants of Lloyd George and his then secretary of state for war, Winston Churchill, showed the then gulf between the agenda that the Labour Party had been pushed by their base to promise and the level of pro-working class reforms that the capitalist class were prepared to accept. In such a situation, an electoral victory for the Labour Party against the openly capitalist parties would be seen as a victory for the working class over the capitalists that would raise the fighting morale of anti-capitalist workers. This situation definitely did not occur in Australia around the May 2022 elections. A gauge of what the big end of town thought about the triumph of Albanese’s ALP in the last federal elections can be seen by comparing Australia’s stock market index immediately before and after the May 21 election. Not only was there no dramatic fall but the index actually rose slightly. This proved that much of the capitalist class were either mildly sympathetic or ambivalent towards the Labor victory over the conservatives. There was certainly no fear amongst wealthy investors that a Labor election would lead to a major reduction in the rate of capitalist profits.
The most important reason why Lenin and the other Bolshevik leaders, like Trotsky, thought that British communists should give critical electoral support to Britain’s Labour Party is because, at the time, that party had never previously led a national government. That meant that the majority of Labour’s working class base still had many illusions that should the party take over the government, this would lead to a substantial improvement in their living standards and major advances towards socialism. Many workers held the social democratic illusion that since workers make up the majority of the population, they could take over society through “democratic elections”. These hopes were reinforced by the then still expanding suffrage in Britain that was expanding the right to vote to workers who had been previously disenfranchised by laws restricting the right to vote to those who owned more than a specified amount of property. It was only in 1918 that all property requirements for male voters were scrapped granting the right to vote to the 40% of males hitherto denied suffrage because they lacked sufficient property; and that the right to vote was at long last extended to a large number of women (provided that they were over 30 and had some property – it took until 1928 for British women to be granted the same voting rights as men). British working class people expected that this expanded suffrage for working class people, the prospect of a future expansion of suffrage to low-income women lacking property and to younger women and the hoped-for scrapping of laws allowing business owners and other, mostly wealthy, individuals to vote twice, would open the way for workers to finally bring their numbers in society to bear in the political field. Lenin and the other leaders of the Communist International understood that it would take the experience of Labour in government to dash the hopes of the mass of politically engaged British workers that there could be an electoral road to socialism.
More than a century later, when workers in both Britain and Australia have been subjected to many Labour/Labor governments over the decades, such illusions amongst workers have been disappointed many times over. Indeed, over the last four decades, the Australian Labor Party has headed the federal government for a full half of this period. Therefore, right now, working class people in Australia do not have unrealistic expectations that a Labor government would fundamentally restructure society in their interests. That means that for communists to today consider applying the tactic of critical support towards the Labor Party, the ALP would need to stand on a far more emphatic pro-working class agenda than would have been required for communists to apply critical support in the period before the ALP first headed a majority government or in the period when it had been out of office for several decades (as was the case when the Whitlam Labor government was elected in 1972). The leaders of the anti-revolutionary ALP would only proclaim such an agenda if they were pushed to do so by a huge surge in militancy and left-wing radicalism of their working class base. Yet when the socialist consciousness of working class people reaches the next level – when the majority of the politically active section of the toiling masses is not only intent on resisting capitalist exploitation but desire the sweeping away of the entire capitalist order – then the time for electoral tactics becomes superseded; and communists will need to immediately organise a direct struggle for the working class seizure of state power. Therefore, while it still exists, the window, in terms of working class consciousness, in which the tactic of critical support to mass social democratic parties is applicable is narrower than it was a century ago.
What is called for before determining whether the tactic of critical support should be applied towards a particular social democratic party is a careful examination of what the party is claiming to stand for, what attitude the capitalist class is taking towards that party, what the sentiments of the working class are and what the general state of the class struggle is. What is definitely not needed is to mindlessly campaign for the victory of mass social democratic parties at every election based on what Lenin advocated towards the British Labour Party more than a century ago ‒ a position that was based on the particular circumstances at the time where that party had never previously led a government and, pushed by the striking growth in pro-socialist sentiments amongst their base following the October 1917 Russian Revolution, was proclaiming its intent to nationalise key industries and oppose its own rulers’ war moves against Soviet Russia. Those far-left groups that advocated a vote for the ALP at last year’s federal elections when the ALP was not even pretending to stand on an anti-capitalist program achieved the very opposite of Lenin’s tactic of supporting a mass social democratic party “in the way that a rope supports a hanged man.” Instead of helping to break the working class masses from allegiance to the ALP in the direction of support for communism, their call for support to the ALP pushed the masses, disgruntled at the Labor Party’s subservience to the capitalist bigwigs, back towards the Labor Party. No matter what else they said, by calling to support Albanese’s ALP, these pseudo-Leninist groups sent a message to those that they have influence over that no matter how much the ALP upholds the domination of the big end of town at home and the international agenda of that class abroad, workers have “no choice” but to support the ALP as “a lesser evil”. This can only breed despair and demoralisation amongst the working class. It harms the building of class struggle resistance to the capitalist exploiters.
WHAT ABOUT THE GREENS?
Given how small are the differences between Labor’s agenda and that of the Liberals, the Greens have gained a growing following amongst progressive-minded youth and the small-l liberal, middle class. They are attracted to the Greens by some progressive policies that the Greens advocate. This includes the Greens platform calling for dental to be covered by Medicare. Unlike the ALP, whose plan to grow “social” housing only involves a small increase in privately owned, “community housing” rather than any increase in public housing, the Greens stand for actually increasing public housing, albeit at a modest pace. However, to implement such reforms, let alone really substantial anti-poverty measures, requires standing up to inevitable resistance from the majority of the capitalist class. The Greens cannot do this because they reject a class struggle outlook. This is because the Greens actually embrace wealthy capitalists in their own party and a dominant role in their party is played by upper-middle class elements who gain part of their income from capitalist share investments. For example, one capitalist investor, Duncan Turpie, has personally donated over a million dollars to the Greens over the last few years. Therefore, lacking both the will and ability to challenge capitalist power, any Greens in government will inevitably bend to the demands of the powerful capitalists.
That is why in the early 2010s, when the Greens had two ministries in the then Tasmanian government, they were part of a joint government with Labor that cut nursing jobs and public housing maintenance. Federally, as part of a defacto coalition with Labor from 2010 to 2013, the Greens helped oversee the final privatisation of Telstra begun under John Howard. Today, they back the rest of the capitalist class’ drive to strangle socialistic rule in China. Indeed, while opposing the AUKUS nuclear submarine plans, the Greens are even more rabid than either Labor or the Coalition when it comes to spewing the lying “human rights” tirades against China that “rationalises” such military escalation. In this the Australian Greens are similar to their German counterparts who today form a key part of Germany’s coalition government alongside the Social Democratic Party and the avidly neoliberal, Free Democratic Party. The leader of Germany Greens, Annalena Baerbock, is that country’s foreign minister. While preferring to wrap their meddling imperialist agenda in more “human rights” packaging than their right-wing counterparts, Germany’s Greens are so extreme in supporting both Western imperialism’s proxy war against Russia and its Cold War drive against socialistic China that they would make neoconservatives blush! A future Greens role in the Australian government, either as a coalition with Labor or alone, would similarly see them act as imperialist warriors with a “progressive” face. Although the Greens call for lowering defence spending to 1.5% of GDP that would still be much higher than the likes of Canada and Japan and, on a per person level, nearly five times higher than China’s. The Greens international agenda is to support essentially the same imperialist interests of Australia’s capitalist class that Labor and the Coalition uphold, while pushing to supplement military might with greater use of “human rights” propaganda, increased support for pro-Western opposition movements in countries targeted by Western imperialism and deeper utilisation of Australian government aid as a means of political manipulation.
The Greens unwillingness and inability, as a party, to resolutely stand up to the rest of the capitalist establishment has sometimes even been evident when their own members have been targeted by other sections of the ruling class. Greens politicians are frequently pilloried by Far-Right parties, right-wing Coalition MPs, the Murdoch media, conservative think tanks and other organs of the hard right-wing of the capitalist class. Copping such, often vicious and personal, attacks is indeed part of what gives the Greens credibility with progressive-minded people. A favourite target of the rabid right-wing is the federal Greens First Nations portfolio head – DjabWurrung Gunnai Gunditjmara Aboriginal woman and senator from Victoria, Lidia Thorpe. Before becoming a Greens senator, Thorpe had been well known as a staunch activist for Aboriginal rights. Thus, her entry into the Greens gave the party increased authority amongst many Aboriginal people and leftists. In May 2017, at the Uluru Aboriginal convention where supporters of constitutional recognition created their petition calling for the establishment of a First Nations “Voice” enshrined in the Australian Constitution, Lidia Thorpe was one of the staunch activists who walked out of the convention in protest at the direction it was heading in. She stated at the time, “We as sovereign First Nations people reject constitutional recognition. We do not recognise occupying power or their sovereignty, because it serves to disempower, and takes away our voice,” insisting that, “We need to protect and preserve our sovereignty.” When the new Albanese government announced its intention to push for the implementation of the advisory “Voice”, Thorpe made clear that she was not going to simply roll over and accept the scheme that was being championed by small-l liberals, social democrats, “progressive”-liberals and many mainstream conservatives. Lidia Thorpe insisted that a Treaty between the government and Aboriginal people, a Truth Commission to lay bare all the genocidal crimes that have been perpetrated against Aboriginal people, the stopping of Aboriginal deaths in custody and providing proper compensation for Aboriginal people who were stolen from their families when children, all took precedence over the “Voice”. As a result of this stance, the centrist and “progressive” sections of the ruling class establishment joined their right-wing counterparts in setting their political gunsights on Thorpe. It was, indeed, the supposedly centrist-“progressive” ABC News that led the renewed witch hunt against Lidia Thorpe. They sensationalised an “exposé’” about how Thorpe had once briefly dated a former Victorian leader of an “outlaw” bikie gang. Quickly, the rest of the racist establishment joined the beat up claiming that Thorpe had a potential conflict of interest because she sat on a parliamentary “law enforcement committee”, even though the person she dated had years before left the motorcycle group and had no criminal convictions and despite the committee having not even inquired into outlaw motorcycle groups during Thorpe’s time as a member. Indeed, the man Thorpe briefly dated, who is a strong supporter of Aboriginal rights, seems to be a saint relative to the greedy, often corrupt and frequently racist capitalist exploiters that most parliamentarians associate with. Yet, less than an hour after the ABC unleashed this revamped witch-hunt against Lidia Thorpe, Greens leader Adam Bandt cowardly forced his First Nations portfolio head to resign as the Greens deputy leader in the Senate. Bandt also publicly condemned Thorpe for showing a “significant lack of judgement”, while saying nothing against the obvious beat up against her. A party that cannot even defend one of its own leaders against a ruling class witch hunt, moreover one laden with large amounts of racism and misogyny, is incapable of standing up to the rest of the capitalist ruling class more generally. The Greens should be given no political support – including at election time!
Several socialist groups that stood to the left of the Greens also ran in the May 2022 federal elections. Unlike the Greens, these parties proudly proclaim themselves anti-capitalist organisations. Among these groups is Socialist Alliance. Whereas the Greens advocate maintaining the U.S.-Australia alliance – only calling for it to be “renegotiated” – Socialist Alliance rightly demand an end to the alliance. Moreover, while the Greens leadership refused to defend their own First Nations portfolio head, Lidia Thorpe, from the reactionary witch hunt unleashed against her five months after the elections, Socialist Alliance had the decency to condemn the attack upon her. However, Socialist Alliance tied their 2022 electoral campaign to the Greens. They called not only for directing preferences to the Greens but for a vote to the Greens in seats where their own party was not standing. This is despite Socialist Alliance and other pro-Greens socialists sometimes acknowledging the capitalist essence of the Greens. By advocating a vote for the Greens, Socialist Alliance and other pro-Greens socialists are undermining class struggle by, in effect, promoting the false notion that a wing of the capitalist class – represented by the Greens – can improve workers’ lives. This is as harmful to the building of militant unions as the false notion at the workplace level that workers can improve their lot by helping “nicer” managers to become their top bosses.
The tailing of the Greens by the likes of Socialist Alliance not only reflects their failure to insist on the independence of the working class movement from all wings of the capitalist class – including the “progressive”-liberal wing represented by the Greens – but also the fact that these reformist socialist groups share not only the Greens’ progressive positions but also share its reactionary loyalty to the key global strategic agendas of the Australian capitalist class. Thus, Socialist Alliance, like the Greens, are avid supporters of the U.S.-NATO-Australian regimes’ proxy war against Russia. An 18 September 2022 Socialist Alliance resolution even supported the supply of arms to Ukraine by these Western regimes. Still more harmfully, Socialist Alliance apes the Greens in lining up behind the principle strategic goal of the U.S. and Australian imperialist ruling classes: to destroy the Chinese workers state. Socialist Alliance excuses this position by ridiculously claiming that China is just another “capitalist” country and, what’s more, one dominated by “authoritarian nationalist politics.” With these rationales, Socialist Alliance, while rightly opposing the U.S.-Australia military build up against China, fervently support the Western imperialists’ anti-communist propaganda assaults on Red China over “human rights”. They also support all the forces attacking socialistic rule in China from within – from the pro-colonial, upper-middle class, anti-communist opposition forces in Hong Kong to the Taiwanese capitalist ruling class seeking to guarantee its rule of exploitation through securing independence from socialistic China to last November’s Chinese version of the Far Right-instigated, anti-COVID response “Freedom” protests. Unless Socialist Alliance both dumps their support for the imperialist-driven campaign to undermine the Chinese workers state and breaks free from the orbit of the “progressive”-capitalist Greens, they should not be given even critical electoral support – including at the upcoming NSW state election.
WHAT THE MAY 2022 ELECTION RESULTS SIGNIFIED
The Greens gained significantly during last May’s federal elections. With an increasing share of the vote, they boosted their numbers in the Lower House from one seat to four seats and their Senate numbers went up by to twelve seats from the nine held previously. Although the Coalition were badly defeated, the ALP’s first preference vote actually fell slightly. The loss in Coalition vote in affluent areas was in good part siphoned off to so-called Teal “independents” that advocated greater action against climate change, gender equality and more small-l liberal social policies. Their success represented a rebuff by the liberal sections of the upper class and upper middle-class to the Liberal-National’s increasingly extreme, rightward course on social policies, resistance to action on climate change and male chauvinist internal culture. These “independents” grabbed six formerly safe Liberal seats in urban and suburban areas in addition to those that they held prior to the elections. However, these Teal independents are as committed to anti-working class, neoliberal economic policies as the conservatives. Their campaigns relied on lavish funding from corporate bigwigs and other wealthy individuals. Some of this went directly to TEAL candidates and the rest was funnelled through campaign groups like Climate 200, which alone provided nearly $6 million dollars to TEAL candidates. Among those making donations well in excess of $1 million to the TEALs and Climate 200 were Australia’s fourth and fifth richest capitalist exploiters – Atlassian cofounders Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar – and the CEO of trading outfit VivCourt, Rob Keldoulis. Also providing big bucks for the TEALs is Climate 200 convenor, Simon Holmes à Court, a capitalist investor and one of the heirs to the wealth of his father, Australia’s first billionaire, ruthless corporate raider Robert Holmes à Court. On the opposite political flank of the Coalition, the Liberals and Nationals lost votes to the Far-Right parties. The parties to the right of the Coalition increased their vote by nearly 60% relative to the previous elections. That means that last May’s elections saw one in eight people vote in the Lower House for a range of extreme right-wing parties including the racist Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and Liberal Democratic parties and billionaire Clive Palmer’s ultra-nationalist, United Australia Party. This reflected the dangerously growing right-wing extremism of a chunk of Australia’s disgruntled middle class and self-employed layers – a result of their economic insecurities in the context of the decaying capitalist order and the present failure of the workers movement to provide a powerful anti- capitalist alternative that could channel the legitimate component of middle-class grievances. The splintering away, in either direction, from the main parties of the capitalist class, the Liberals and the Nationals, ultimately reflects the crisis of confidence that the capitalist class feels internally as it agonises over the economic and social crises of its own system, on the one hand, and on the other, panics over the implications posed by the successes of socialistic rule in the world’s most populous country.
Given that there was no mass workers party running on an anti-capitalist platform in last May’s elections, the most crucial aspect of the election results to examine was the proportion of people who did not cast valid votes. It turns out that the number of people who risked a fine by neither showing up to vote nor filling out a postal ballot increased by 25% from the previous elections – reflecting fading hopes in the supposedly “democratic” political system. Over one in ten voters did this. More interesting still is to analyse the number of people who turned up to the ballot boxes to get their names ticked off to avoid a fine and then did not cast a valid vote. Some of these people even wrote messages criticising the political parties instead of numbering the boxes. More than eight hundred thousand people in this way “voted” Informal at last May’s federal elections. Although a very small proportion of these people may have simply filled out the forms in error, for the most part, their Informal “vote” represented distrust of all the political parties running in the elections.
Such anti-establishment suspicion could come from a number of different standpoints. In the worst case it could reflect people’s adherence to any number of crazy, inherently right-wing, conspiracy theories or to the fact that each extreme right-wing party was not on the ballot in every seat where there were people who wanted to vote for them. However, the greatest share of the Informal vote came from working class voters – often from people of colour backgrounds – who would never dream of voting for the Liberals or Far-Right parties but are understandably disillusioned with the ALP for not standing up for their interests. This is proven by the big disparity in the Informal “vote” between the wealthy electorates and the strongly, pro-ALP working class electorates. Thus in the rich Sydney electorate of Wentworth, which includes plush suburbs like Bellevue Hill, Point Piper, Rose Bay and Vaucluse, just 2.5% of people “voted” Informal. Wealthy residents trust the political system and their casting of valid votes reflects their understanding that they have a voice in how the system operates. In contrast, the opposite sentiment is significant in working class areas. Thus, in the Sydney electorate of Blaxland, which largely consists of heavily Asian, Middle Eastern, African and Islander working class suburbs like Auburn, Bankstown, Chester Hill and Villawood, the Informal “vote” was well over four times higher than it was in wealthy Wentworth. Nearly one in nine voters showed up to the ballots in Blaxland only to cast an Informal “vote”. Indeed, in particular voting booths in Sydney’s multiracial southwest, the Informal vote was even higher. In the Blaxland polling booth in Auburn West, nearly one in five voters cast an Informal “vote”. In the Villawood North polling booth in the seat of Fowler and the Fairfield Heights booth in the McMahon electorate, the Informal “vote” was also more than 18%. By contrast, a ten times lower proportion of voters cast an Informal “vote” at the polling booths in the wealthy Double Bay and Bellevue Hill South areas. Some mainstream political commentators, eager to cover up the distrust in the “democratic” system amongst the working class masses, patronisingly claim that the much higher Informal “vote” in migrant, working class areas is due to poor education and lack of English ability causing people not to know how to vote properly. However, while such problems caused by socio-economic disadvantage is a minor factor, it is not the main one. This is proven by the reality that the Informal “vote” in the Senate, where people have greater choice in the parties that they can vote for, is more than a third lower than it is in the Lower House vote. The fact that the Informal “vote” mostly represents a conscious choice to reject all the parties running in the elections is further proven by the fact that the Informal vote fluctuates widely from election to election. After all, if unintentional errors in filling out ballot papers were the cause of the Informal vote it should not swing so wildly from election to election.
Indeed, the narrow defeat of high-profile Labor candidate Kristina Keneally to a local independent in the multiracial, working class, southwestern Sydney electorate of Fowler can be, in good part, put down to the fact that well over one in ten voters – no doubt mostly potential Labor voters – turned up to the ballots to get their names ticked off and then cast an informal “vote”. Indeed, when a Trotskyist Platform supporter in this electorate explained to Labor election day canvassers why he would be “voting” Informal, the reaction of the Labor activists was along the lines off: Oh no, not you as well, please don’t waste your vote like so many other people! This indicated that many others in the electorate were “voting” Informal as a conscious rejection of all the parliamentary parties and in particular as a rebuff of the party that they see as the party which should represent them but which they rightly understand has betrayed them – the ALP.
WORKERS DO NEED A PARTY – BUT ONE BUILT TO ORGANISE INTRANSIGENT RESISTANCE TO THE CAPITALIST CLASS
That proportion of working class people who would never support the conservative or Far-Right parties but are disillusioned with Labor can be a key force for organising class struggle action to fight for the rights of working class people and all the oppressed. However, that is only if their disappointment with Labor and the whole system does not lead to them becoming skeptical of the possibility of achieving change and cause them to become depoliticised. Especially when plunging living standards and economic insecurity constantly impel people into political activity, political demoralisation can sometimes be people’s first step to turning towards the Far Right whose stock in trade is, after all, to turn despair at the possibility of resisting the big end of town into scapegoating of the most downtrodden layers of society.
That is why it is crucial that there be built a working class party that will provide a genuine alternative to the many disillusioned former Labor supporters. However, such a party must be completely different to the ALP. We do not need another party vying for administrative leadership of the capitalist system in order to try to tweak the system to serve the masses’ interests, which is the mission impossible that the ALP seeks to fulfil (at least in the most generous evaluation of the party’s ethos). What we need instead is a workers party that is committed to organising intransigent mass resistance to the capitalist exploiting class and their system. Right now, the potential to mobilise such class struggle resistance is especially evident in Europe where the masses living standards are plunging particularly rapidly. Angered by surging inflation and crumbling public services, hundreds of thousands of French transport workers, teachers, oil refinery workers and others went on strike last Friday against French president Macron’s moves to raise the age at which people can get the aged pension. Meanwhile, workers in Britain have unleased the biggest wave of industrial action there in decades. In the last two months, rail workers, bus drivers, teachers, nurses, paramedics, postal workers and others have waged a series of strikes against falling real wages. To mobilise such struggle here and, most importantly, to ensure that the struggles are both raised to the level of intensity and guided to the direction that can ensure victory (which is a challenge also acutely faced by the rebelling workers movements of France and Britain given their social democratic misleadership), it is necessary to not only positively motivate the need for such actions but to knock down the serious political obstacles impeding militant class struggle resistance.
One such obstacle is the widely held illusion that a Labor government is, in some way, a workers government. A more left-wing version of this myth is the idea that even though an ALP government is far from ideal, the ALP in office can be made to serve the interests of the masses through political pressure and campaigning. Unfortunately, such illusions are being reinforced by many Far Left groups – due to their social democratic skew away from authentic Marxism. This includes the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). Thus, an open letter sent last June by the CPA’s National President to prime minister Albanese praises his government’s stance on a number of issues while politely urging him to take a more progressive stance on others. The letter begins by expressing warm solidarity with the new government:
“Dear Prime Minister Albanese, The Communist Party of Australia wishes to congratulate you on the election of a Labor government and the more diverse Cabinet of MPs and Senators. We recognise you will face many challenges from the nine years of the corrupt, dysfunctional Coalition government with its anti-worker, union-bashing record.”
The CPA letter then covers up the Albanese government’s failure to seriously push for real wage rises and its backing of a minimum wage increase that it knew would not be sufficient to match the widely predicted increase in inflation in the following months by cheering that “We warmly welcome your government’s swift action to support a cost-of living increase in the minimum wage. The outcome is a start to arresting the decline in real wages experienced by low and middle-income workers over recent decades.” Well it wasn’t even a start! Real wages have plummeted at an even greater rate in the seven months since! The CPA letter even praised the Albanese government’s stance on the Palestinian issue by stating that: “We congratulate your government on its stand at the United Nations in not supporting the US-led opposition to an inquiry into human rights abuses by Israel in the occupied territories of Palestine.” Yet, even then it was clear that the new government had no intention of reversing the Australian regime’s long-standing support for Israel’s brutal oppression of the Palestinian people. Indeed, over the last few months, the ALP government has been amongst just a small number of other governments around the world to oppose UN motions aimed against the Israeli regime’s tyranny over the Palestinian people and other Arab peoples in its neighbourhood.
The most harmful aspect of the CPA leadership’s warm open letter to the head of Australia’s capitalist regime is the false notions that it promotes amongst the party’s supporters that the Albanese government deserves some level of support and can be pressured to take a basically progressive course. Such ideas are completely wrong. The Labor Party is, to be sure, a party with a working class base. However, its leadership and program support the capitalist order. Moreover, the Albanese government heads a state machine that has been built up to enforce the interests of the exploiting class. As the last eight months of plunging real wages, skyrocketing rents and continued military build-up against socialistic China proves, the Albanese government is an enemy of the working class and oppressed. Although the CPA and other reformist Far Left groups say that “grassroots campaigning and direct action” is necessary to “push Labor to the left and force progressive policy on key issues”, their semi-favourable portrayal of the ALP government and their sugar-coating of its actions acts to deter the building of truly intransigent class struggle. For it reinforces the false notion that militant anti-capitalist struggle – whether aimed against reactionary policies of the Labor government or against particular capitalist bosses – should currently be avoided, lest it undermine a Labor government that should be given some level of support. Today, the wide acceptance of this idea by politically active workers and progressive youth is the main reason why, despite working class people’s plummeting living standards here, the Australian workers movement and Left has yet to unleash, even, the level of class and other progressive social struggle seen in the likes of France and Britain.
Another widely held misconception holding back class struggle right now is the idea that the new Albanese government has won a “mandate” through its election and should not be opposed in the first half of its term, at least when it is carrying out policies that it took to the elections. However, under capitalism, such “mandates” are not truly “democratically” chosen by the people. For in capitalist societies, any elections and the political discourse leading up to them do not express the interests of the majority of people – the working class masses. For starters, this is because it is capitalists who thoroughly dominate ownership of the media and, thus, ensure that it is only the policies that serve their class that are being promoted by the news media. Moreover, through their incredible wealth, it is the capitalists who are, in great disproportion to their numbers, able to dominate funding of political parties, buying of political advertising, hiring of lobbyists and establishing of those supposedly “independent” think tanks and “movements” (like the right-wing Advance Australia) that have such a great impact on public opinion. Disclosures about political donations in Australia are not yet available for the 2021-22 financial year when the federal elections were held and, thus, when the biggest donations would have been made. But records do show that in the previous financial year, a whopping $177 million dollars flowed into Australia’s political parties – most of it through undisclosed donations and receipts. From the records of the small portion of donations that are disclosed, we do know that in the last two financial years for which records are available, 2019-2020 and 2020-2021, Australia’s fifth richest person with a total wealth of $24.3 billion, Anthony Pratt and family (owners of packaging and paper giant Visy Industries) donated nearly $2.9 million to the Coalition. Meanwhile, in the same period, Australia’s seventh richest person, Clive Palmer, donated nearly $6 million to his United Australia Party, which helped it win a Senate seat in Victoria at the recent federal election. And if you are wondering why the Coalition and Labor keep on allowing the bank bosses to ruthlessly plunder from their customers despite these corporate bigwigs admitting to rip-off practices like charging customers account management fees for no service, here is some part of your answer: from 2019 to 2021 the four big banks donated a combined $580,000 to each of Labor and the Coalition. With such huge money flowing into the “democratic process” from the corporate elite, what chance do the working class masses struggling to pay bills have to significantly shape the “mandates” of the dominant parliamentary parties? The fact is that these “mandates” primarily represent the will of the super-rich capitalist exploiting class. We should not be bowing down before any such “mandates”!
In all the imperialist countries, at all times, among the biggest obstacles to working class resistance is the notion that the capitalist class on the one hand and working class people and other downtrodden sectors on the other have substantial common interests. This false notion is continuously drummed into the working class masses by the currently social democratic, ACTU leadership of our unions. The capitalist ruling class also actively promotes this lie. In large part they do this through whipping up nationalism and the false notion that accompanies it: that all people of the nation regardless of their class position have a common “national interest”. In actual fact, it is the very opposite that is true: that the rights of the working class and all the downtrodden can only be advanced at the expense of the immediate economic interests of the capitalists … and vice versa! This was true even a century ago when Britain’s Labour Party promised substantial reforms benefiting working class people without challenging the capitalist order. However, it is even more so today. For capitalism has reached a still more senile and diseased state than it was in a century earlier. Even by a century ago, the capitalist system had outlived the period when it could still provide some progressive benefits to humanity. The appalling slaughter of World War I where the rival capitalist powers sent the masses of their own countries and their colonies to kill each other for the sake of their competing claims over spheres of exploitation showed this all too clearly. By 1921, Britain and the rest of the capitalist world was in the midst of a sharp post-war recession. Yet, in a longer-term sense, capitalism today is afflicted by a still more severe malaise. The economic collapse in the capitalist world during the late noughties Great Recession was the clearest indicator of this. Most major capitalist economies had never fully recovered from this plunge when they were buffeted by new crises associated with first, COVID and now, out of control inflation. The latest available figures (for 2021) show that since the eve of the late noughties Great Recession, average incomes (adjusted for inflation) have plummeted by 8% in Britain, 9% in Italy, 15% in Brazil and 37% in Greece. The real incomes of the working class section of the population in these countries have fallen still more steeply. If Australia did not suffer to the same degree from the Great Recession and its aftermath, it is solely because China’s booming socialistic state-owned enterprises bought up an ever greater amount of exports from Australia. Indeed, much of the capitalist world has only been saved from still greater disintegration by the rapid growth of the market provided by a socialistic country, in China, combined with the inflation-lowering impact of imports from Red China. To be sure, the wonderful capacity of us humans to innovate occasionally injects some vitality into the shrivelled up veins of late-stage capitalism. However, the system is unable to deliver the benefits of such innovation to the masses. Instead, the capitalist bosses’ only “effective” means to prop up their system is to ever more steeply increase the rate at which they exploit their workers. In by far the biggest capitalist economy, the U.S., real wages are today what they were 50 years ago. In Australia, real wages are lower than they were 12 years earlier. With their system mired in economic and social stagnation and decay, the capitalist bigwigs are even more loathe to grant concessions to the masses than they were a century ago. It will take very intense class struggle to win any substantial gains for the exploited and oppressed masses.
If it is to be able to build large-scale resistance against the ruling class, the workers party that we need will have to oppose nationalism and consciously dispel the myths about the possibility of “win-win” collaboration between the capitalist exploiters and the exploited workers. It will have to convince the masses that every setback for the capitalist rulers strengthens the struggle to advance the rights of working class people and all the downtrodden. That means that such a party would resolutely oppose the extreme exploitation of PNG, East Timor, Fiji, the Solomon Islands and other South Pacific nations by Australian-owned corporations; while opposing the neo-colonial meddling in the region that the Australian regime engages in to facilitate such plunder. Understanding that any setbacks for the U.S./NATO/Australian proxy war against Russia in Ukraine can only make the Western ruling classes more vulnerable to resistance from their masses, a class struggle workers party would stand for the defence of Russia in this conflict – despite the reactionary, capitalist nature of Russia’s ruling class. It would demand an end to all weapons supplies to Ukraine and the immediate droppingof 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 Aboriginalpeople 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 maintainanti-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.
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: thatChina 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!
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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 thatit 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.
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!
Photo Above: The British nuclear submarine HMS Vigilant test fires the Trident II nuclear ballistic missile. Because of their capacity, nuclear-powered submarines are ideal for carrying nuclear weapons or for later being adapted to carry such weapons. All of the U.S. and Britain’s massive arsenal of submarine-launched nuclear missiles are carried on nuclear-powered submarines.
Torpedo the AUKUS Submarine Deal!
Stand with Socialistic China to Stand by Working Class Interests
23 September 2021: Australia’s rulers have dragged the Asia Pacific another step closer to a catastrophic war. Last week, they announced a deal for the U.S. and Britain to help equip the Australian military with nuclear submarines. The deal will replace the contract that Canberra awarded to France to provide the military with French-designed conventional submarines. Like that previous project, the nuclear submarine plan is squarely aimed against the world’s most populous country, the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). Even Washington and Canberra’s announcement of the deal was meant to antagonise China. It sure succeeded in doing that! A Chinese spokesman responded by rightly pointing out that the nuclear cooperation deal has “seriously undermined regional peace and stability.”
In rushing to announce the submarine deal before
details were finalised, Joe Biden, Scott Morrison and Boris Johnson were hoping
to distract from their regimes’ humiliating defeat in Afghanistan. Their
nuclear submarine bombshell came as part of announcing the formation of a new alliance
between the three regimes, called AUKUS. This will see even more U.S. troops
and bomber aircraft stationed on Australian bases. The Liberal government claims
that the new alliance “would help to provide peace and stability to the
Indo-Pacific region.” What utter rubbish! During their occupations of Iraq and
Afghanistan and their air strikes on Syria, the U.S., Australian and British
militaries callously killed hundreds of thousands of civilians through
“accidental” bombings of wedding parties, hospitals, civilian vehicles and
residential homes. In Afghanistan, Australia’s highly paid special forces
troops massacred farmers, executed unarmed prisoners, flew racist Nazi and
Confederate flags, tortured villagers and slit the throats of teenage boys. In
2011, the joint U.S.-Australia Pine Gap spy base in the Northern Territory was
used to pinpoint NATO air strikes on Libya that killed tens of thousands of
civilians and left that country in bloody turmoil ever since. The AUKUS regimes
are the world’s biggest purveyors of terror. They unleash their military might
to bash the world into a “stable” political shape that maximizes the ability of
the corporate bosses that they serve to superexploit the labour and natural
resources of poorer countries. AUKUS will enhance the ability of all three
regimes do this. Although its main target will be the PRC and her socialistic
neighbour and ally, North Korea, AUKUS will inevitably also be deployed in new
colonial expeditions in the Middle East and Asia. Most of the world’s masses,
especially the youth of today, are rightly concerned about the grave threat
posed by climate change. However, we must understand that the threat to
humanity from imperialist war is an even more immediate threat and one that has
already taken millions of lives in the 21st century. Let us resist! Down with AUKUS! Oppose all
U.S., Australian and British military interventions! Let us demand: Not one
submarine, not one missile, not one warplane, not one soldier for the
Australian imperialist military! All U.S. troops and bases out of Australia!
Close Pine Gap!
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The Added Threat Posed by
Nuclear Submarines
Given popular aversion within Australia to nuclear
weapons, the Liberal government insisted that the new submarines would not lead
to the deployment of nuclear weapons. However, that section of the ruling class
that dream of becoming a nuclear weapons power will surely use the acquisition
of war machines using nuclear energy as a beachhead from which to make a future
push for such weapons. Moreover, the added capacity of nuclear submarines makes
them ideal platforms for the future deployment of submarine-launched nuclear
missiles. That is why the only six
countries that currently possess nuclear submarines are simultaneously the world’s
six biggest nuclear weapons powers.
However, even Australia’s acquisition of nuclear
submarines by themselves is a major escalation of the anti-PRC, Cold War. Nuclear-powered
submarines have much greater range than conventional ones. In other words,
Canberra is getting these submarines for use far from Australia’s waters. In
particular, they are meant to be deployed in the South China Sea. As the name
South China Sea indicates, these are
waters off China’s coast – thousands
of kilometres from Australia. The excuse that the AUKUS powers give for their warship
intrusions into the South China Sea is that they are “defending maritime laws”
in waters through which a great deal of world trade passes. But most of that
trade involves the passing of goods to and from … China! Does China really need
to be stopped from harming China’s trade
with other countries?! As for the Australian regime’s actual commitment to international
maritime law, it is enough to note that successive Australian governments spat
on the international law of the sea by trying to impose sovereignty over
resource-rich waters that belonged to East Timor. When East Timor resisted, Canberra
gained the advantage in border negotiations by secretly installing listening
devices in East Timorese government offices … under the cover of an aid project!
Issues over the South China Sea were actually once but
a low-level border dispute involving not only China but also competing claims
between other Asian countries. However, Washington, Canberra and London then
interfered in order to inflame the disputes and seek to gang up regional allies
against China. Now they claim that it is actually China that is the “threat.”
However, not only is the PRC the only
world power not to have fought in an actual shooting conflict this century, she
has actually never been involved in a single war for the last more than forty
years. Despite having four times the U.S. population, China only has
one-third of the military budget of the U.S. and eighteen times fewer nuclear
weapons. Per person, Australia’s
military expenditure is six times higher than China’s (of significant
powers only the U.S., Israel and Saudi Arabia have higher per capita defence
spending than Australia). And
with the nuclear submarine project and the Morrison government’s announcement
last year of $270 billion of new weapons – including long-range missiles – that
gap is set to get even greater. So it is actually the PRC that is facing
intimidation. Fearsome fleets of U.S., Australian and British warships are
provocatively ploughing through China-claimed waters not far off the coast of
major Chinese cities. We aren’t seeing Chinese aircraft carrier fleets sailing
off the coast of Sydney, are we? Although, if the AUKUS powers keep on
threatening the PRC that is how she may end up responding.
A Cold War Drive against
a Socialistic State
So why are Australia’s rulers putting so much public
money into antagonizing China? Morrison has refused to give a price tag for the
new type of submarines but all experts agree that it will be much more than the
previous French contract – perhaps well over $150 billion. That is a lot more
than the federal government’s entire annual expenditure on Health and Education
combined! Moreover, this could be just a drop in the ocean of the full economic
cost of the Cold War escalation. To appreciate why, consider this. See how
angry the French got when they lost the $90 billion submarine contract? Then
imagine if Australia, a country with an economy just half the size of France’s,
were to lose an even bigger contract than that one … every six months! Well,
that is what is being risked by provoking China. In the first six months of
this year alone, Australia obtained a whopping $103 billion from exports to
China. Imagine then if the Chinese government did to Australia what Morrison
just did to France! And they are certainly being provoked to do so!
Given that Australia’s population is made up of roughly ten million households, every Australian household would receive $20,600 each year if the benefits from exports to China were divided up evenly between all households! Unfortunately, Australia’s capitalist system means that while working class people do gain much from exports to China it is the likes of billionaires Gina Rinehart and Andrew Forest who obtain a greatly disproportionate share of the benefits. So, given that this layer is the ruling class, the class that all Australian governments serve, why are Australian governments then risking the massive profits of their masters for the sake of confronting the PRC? We can understand why if we look at some of the latest political developments within China itself. In July, PRC authorities decreed that platforms employing food delivery workers must guarantee drivers and riders the minimum wage and must provide their workers with social insurance. Food delivery workers in Australia would love to have these same measures applied here but are far from gaining such rights. July also saw the PRC send the stocks of multi-billion dollar education corporations crashing by banning all firms providing private tutoring from making a profit. The new rule has the stated aims of reducing inequality in education between those who can afford expensive tutoring and those that cannot and at preventing education being distorted and “hijacked by capital.” Several months earlier, the PRC began a crackdown on tech corporations in a bid to curb “disorderly expansion of capital” in the sector. The companies are owned by many of China’s richest capitalists. Authorities first targeted the two giants owned by China’s then richest person, Jack Ma. One of the Ma companies, Ant Financial, was forced to cancel a share sale that would have netted Ma billions and then had to restructure the company in a way that will greatly curb its profits. The other of Ma’s firms, e-commerce giant Alibaba was hit with a nearly $4 billion fine. With his firms being brought to heel for their monopolistic behavior and exploitation of workers, Ma even chose to disappear from the public eye to avoid demands for him to be arrested to multiply on Chinese social media. Ma feared meeting the same fate that so many other greedy billionaires before him have met in China. Could you imagine James Packer or Gina Rinehart having to do that here? And that is the point! In the PRC, the capitalist class does not rule like they do in Australia. Capitalists do exist in China and unfortunately PRC authorities have allowed them to gain way too much influence. However, it is still the working class that has ultimate state power in China, albeit in a deformed, incomplete and fragile form. And alongside this, it is socialistic state-owned enterprises that dominate the PRC’s backbone economic sectors. All this the Australian capitalist rulers and their U.S., British, French and Japanese counterparts find threatening, to say the least. This is despite PRC leaders repeatedly making it clear that they have no intention of helping workers in the West liberate themselves from capitalist rule (PRC leaders are wrong about this – they should be backing workers class struggle in the capitalist world). Australia’s capitalist rulers view the PRC in just the same way that capitalist owners of an individual business view the growth of very strong and militant trade union branches in other workplaces in their industry. They find it terrifying! Australia’s ruling class are willing to risk short-term profits, even hundreds of billions of dollars of it, to snuff out what they know is an existential threat to their rule of exploitation.
When it comes down to it, the hostility between the U.S. and Australian capitalist rulers on the one hand and the PRC on the other is an international expression of the struggle at the enterprise level between capitalist business owners and the workers that they exploit. In this conflict, working class people in Australia, the U.S. and indeed the whole world are on one side: the side of the PRC. The working class and its allies – all the opponents of capitalism – must unite in mass actions to defend the PRC workers state and demand: U.S./Australia/Britain – Get out of the South China Sea! U.S. troops out of South Korea! End your military encirclement of the PRC and DPRK! Stop your funding for anticommunist groups within China – including the anti-PRC opposition in Hong Kong! Down with your bogus “human rights” attacks on the PRC over Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong that are used to justify your Cold War drive! Stop your persecution of sympathisers of the PRC and DPRK in Australia: Repeal the McCarthyist “foreign interference” laws! Dismantle the anti-PRC “Universities Foreign Interference Taskforce”!
The Cold War and the Australian Left
The ALP wasted no time in declaring its support for AUKUS
and the nuclear submarine project. This is hardly a surprise! The ALP is as
committed to the Cold War as the right-wing Liberal-National coalition. In contrast,
Greens leader Adam Bandt stated that the submarine decision increases the
prospect of nuclear war. Yet, at the same time, The Greens are a key part of
the PRC-bashing propaganda campaign. Bandt joins the imperialist condemnation
of China’s moves to contain the violent, pro-colonial forces in Hong Kong.
Similarly, The Greens have endorsed the completely
hysterical claim that China is “committing cultural genocide” against her
Muslim Uyghur minority in Xinjiang (a claim that most Muslim-majority countries
and, indeed, much of the world have rejected – instead praising China’s treatment of Uyghurs). In truth, the anti-China
Uyghurs that the Western imperialists and The Greens back make up but a small
proportion of the Uyghur population. They are led by filthy rich capitalists
who want to overturn China’s socialistic system; and who mobilise behind their
cause extreme fundamentalists that want to drive down the relatively liberated
status that Uyghur women in the PRC enjoy to the level which women have been
enduring in neighbouring Afghanistan ever since the leftist, pro-Soviet
government there was toppled by Western-backed reactionaries in 1992. As over
Hong Kong, The Greens have actually taken an even more combative anti-PRC
position on Xinjiang than the right-wing Morrison government –even demanding that the government launch sanctions on China. In doing so, The Greens do much to feed the anti-PRC
hostility that underpins the nuclear submarine project – thereby undermining
their own opposition to it.
Most of Australia’s Far Left groups have adopted a broadly
similar stance to The Greens. The closest to The Greens in terms of China
policy is the Socialist Alternative (SAlt) group. They do say that, “Australia
isn’t a victim of Chinese bullying” and appeal that, “We have to stop the
coming war with China.” Yet like The Greens, SAlt assists the anti-PRC war
drive by spreading just about every lie spewed by the big business and
government-owned media outlets about the life of China’s masses. Indeed, they
do this so rabidly that they would make the most pro-Trump Sky News hack or extreme anti-China, far-right MP (like George
Christensen, Craig Kelly and Andrew Hastie) proud. The Solidarity and Socialist
Alliance groups take a similar stance to SAlt except that Solidarity, at least
nominally, place slightly greater emphasis on opposing the U.S. and Australian
imperialists in the Cold War and Socialist Alliance put still somewhat greater emphasis
on standing against Western imperialism. Yet just like SAlt, in 2019,
Solidarity and Socialist Alliance joined together with anticommunist Hong Kong international
students, opponents of the Vietnamese Revolution and other apologists for Western
imperialism in rallies supporting the Washington-backed, rich-kid rioters in
Hong Kong. Meanwhile, all these groups have echoed the imperialist lie campaign
claiming that China is committing “genocide” in Xinjiang. In summary, what these groups are doing is equivalent
to what many liberals did in the lead up to the 2003 U.S./Australian invasion
of Iraq: they stated opposition to a war but insisted on condemning Iraq for possessing
the weapons of mass destruction that they never had; and in doing so helped echo
the bogus claims that were used to justify the invasion.
Socialist anti-PRC groups attempt to give a “Marxist”
basis to their hostility to the PRC. In particular, following the “teachings”
of late British leftist Tony Cliff, Socialist Alternative and Solidarity both
claim that the PRC is just another capitalist state. Yet, the fact that the PRC
has been able to crack down against many of its very biggest capitalists over
the last few years is only possible because the capitalist class does not hold
state power in China. Indeed, the capitalist bigwigs in the West know this all
too well. Read the panic in the Western mainstream media’s finance pages –
where the capitalists strategise amongst themselves. “Xi
Jinping’s Capitalist Smackdown Sparks a $1 Trillion Reckoning”
headlines Yahoo Finance on August 2,
complaining that, “true to their Communist roots, China’s leaders have no
problem trampling on the interests of venture capital, private equity or stock
investors when they conflict with its long-term development plan.” Moreover, there is absolutely no way one can explain
why the Australian capitalists that gain such gigantic profits from exporting
to the PRC (the source of a whopping 35% of this country’s export revenue)
would risk those profits for the sake of confronting China, other than for the
fact that they are congenitally opposed to the PRC because she is a workers
state. If China were just another capitalist country, Australia’s
capitalists would instead do everything possible to have good relations with
China. They would also seek to persuade the U.S. to pull back from harming the
goose that lays the Australian capitalists’ golden eggs. Instead, the very
opposite is happening: Australia’s rulers are egging on the U.S. to be ever
more confrontational towards the PRC.
Socialist Alternative and Solidarity’s ludicrous claim
that “China is capitalist” is not just a product of bad analysis. Ultimately,
the line is a bending to the anti-PRC hostility of larger Laborite, green and
progressive-liberal milieus and, more generally, an accommodation to the
anti-communist “public opinion” created by capitalist propaganda. That is why
even left groups that are, in the abstract, completely opposed to Tony Cliff’s
theories end up with an almost identical line to the Cliffite groups. Thus, the
Australian Communist Party (ACP) and the Communist Party of Australia
(Marxist-Leninist), i.e. the CPA (M-L), which are both avowedly
“Marxist-Leninist” groups sympathetic to Stalin, join their Cliffite rivals in
claiming that China is “capitalist” and, therefore, the Chinese state needs to
be opposed. Although the CPA (M-L) have declared, “No to nuclear-powered
submarines!”, in their very statement announcing that position, they feed into the
lying anti-communist and nationalist fear campaign that China could potentially
subjugate Australia by stating that: “We no more want to be under China’s thumb
than we do to remain under that of the US. But supporting the provocations of
one imperialist power against another is not an act of independence. It is not
in our interests.” Left groups have their different symbols and different claimed
ideologies. These are all important. But in the end: actions speak louder than
words! On the crucial defining question of China, the ACP and CPA (M-L) are but
Cliffites in “Marxist-Leninist” clothing. Even
if one were to make the contentious claim that all these anti-PRC groups do slightly
more to hinder the anti-China war drive than they do to fuel it – by feeding
into the anti-PRC propaganda that energises the war drive – it remains the fact
that these anti-PRC leftists stand on a program that would assist the
imperialists to achieve their counterrevolutionary war aims by other means:
that is, by the internal destruction of the PRC state.
That leaves the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) and
ourselves in Trotskyist Platform (TP) as the only two active socialist groups
in Australia that sympathise with the PRC and that refuse to feed into any of
the imperialist propaganda that is being used to “justify” the war drive
against her. Unfortunately, other than for determined cadre in their Queensland
Branch and some members in Sydney, the CPA is, at the moment, too timid when it
comes to taking actual action in defence of the PRC and shies away from
consistently emphasizing the class character of the PRC as a workers state.
Apparently, this is partly a result of the group seeking détente with some of
their own members who have an anti-PRC bent. It seems likely to also be a consequence
of the party seeking a broad popular front alliance with the strongly anti-PRC
Greens and similar forces. We say that if seeking a popular front alliance with
The Greens is undermining a workers’ party’s defence of the PRC then that only
underscores our point that working class interests cannot advance through
alliances with capitalist parties like The Greens. Defence of working-class
state power in the world’s most populous country cannot be an optional extra
for communists! It is a duty and one that has enormous implications for the
fate of humanity.
We need to heed the lessons of the gigantic defeat
suffered by the international working class when the former Soviet workers
state was destroyed by capitalist counterrevolution in 1991-92. The USSR
collapsed not only because, weakened by bureaucratic deformation and the
resulting depoliticisation of the masses, it was unable to bear the enormous
weight of imperialist pressure upon her but also because the working class and
Left movements in the imperialist countries failed to mobilise action to
relieve that pressure. We must not let that happen to socialistic China! We in TP
commit to work hard to build actions in defence of the PRC workers state and in
opposition to the PRC-bashing political campaign. We look forward to joining in
united front actions with other genuine leftists committed to these same goals.
A taste of the kind of action that we fight for was seen on the October Labour
Day Public Holiday in NSW in 2019 when a united front action, built mainly by
the Australian-Chinese Workers Association and ourselves in TP, saw up to 70
people march
through the streets of Sydney calling to “Stand With Red China” and “Condemn
Hong Kong’s Pro-Colonial Rich Kid Rioters”.
Opposing the Anti-China War Drive Means Opposing Australia’s Capitalist Rulers
Other than for the serious failure of much of the Far
Left to actually take a stance in defence of the PRC, there is another big
problem with the Left’s response to the Cold War. To the extent that groups and
individuals oppose the anti-China war preparations, their strategy is largely to
try and pressure the Australian ruling class to seek greater independence from
the USA. A clear codification of this perspective was expressed in an article
in the CPA Guardian issue of 13
September titled, “McCarthyism on the Rise in Australian Universities.” We
actually do not want to single out this article for criticism because most of
the article happens to be a very useful piece that courageously exposes
McCarthyist attacks on supporters of China and rebuts some of the “human rights”
propaganda against the PRC. However, as the conclusion of the article gives a
succinct outline of the current perspective of most of those on the Left that
don’t buy the Cold War, it is worth quoting here. The article concludes that: “The
actions of the Chinese nation speaks volumes over the deceptions of the US
empire, and will be trusted moving forward. Australian politicians need to
recognise this and put themselves on the right side of history. Any delay in
this will only see Australia follow the US into isolation from the rest of the
world.” This formulation is based on two notions. Firstly, that Australian
ruling class politicians are currently acting against their own self interests
by waging Cold War against China. And secondly, that Australia’s involvement in
this campaign is only driven by a wish to follow the USA. However, both these propositions
are false.
Capitalist ruling classes have always been very
conscious of what is good for their class interests. Australia’s pro-capitalist
politicians are confronting socialistic China precisely because that is what
the class that they serve requires of them. Even though Australia’s capitalists
gain huge profits from trade with China they are willing to risk all that to confront
China for three closely intertwined reasons. Firstly, by engaging in mutually
beneficial economic relations with the ex-colonial countries, China is
obstructing the ability of the Western and Japanese imperialists to exploit the
peoples of these “Third World” countries. Secondly, capitalist ruling classes
calculate, quite correctly from their point of view, that no matter how much
they gain from trading with China they could gain many times greater profits if
they could smash the PRC workers state and turn all of China into a giant
sweatshop for imperialist exploitation. Thirdly, as China’s economy
strengthens, Australia’s rulers fear that her society will become more and more
attractive to working class people in the capitalist world. They worry that
Australia’s masses will eventually start to know about how the PRC used its
socialist system to control COVID in a way that no other large country has been
able to and about how – despite the pandemic – in 2020 the PRC reached her goal
of lifting every single resident in China out of extreme poverty. The
capitalist ruling class is terrified that workers here will then draw the
conclusion that what they need to do is to fight for socialism here. These three
reasons are, indeed, the very same reasons why the American capitalist class is
also targeting the PRC. And that is the point! The Australian rulers are not
“following” the U.S. into a hostile stance against China. Rather both regimes
are coming together based on common opposition to the PRC. The ANZUS and now AUKUS
alliance have always been about shared imperial interests. Australia’s rulers
are not puppets of the U.S. but imperialist predators in their own right. To be
sure, they are junior partners in the alliance with America. But this is not in
the same way that, say, PNG is subjugated by Australian imperialism. Instead,
it is in the same way that a local mafia crook hooks up with the godfather to
make sure that his local sphere of plunder is more secure. Australia’s capitalists are neither being pressured nor tricked by Washington
into hostility towards China. Australia’s capitalists need the might of the U.S.
to help them pull off their own ambition to crush socialistic rule in the PRC.
Indeed, it has been apparent that the Australian imperialists have been even more confrontational towards
the PRC than their American counterparts. To some degree, they have been
dragging their U.S. allies into an ever more openly aggressive anti-PRC stance.
A Wikileaks exposé
of a 2009 meeting between then prime minister, Kevin Rudd, and then U.S.
Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, shows that it was Rudd who was trying to
convince Clinton of the need for “preparing to deploy force” against China. Part
of the reason why Canberra is more extreme than Washington is that Australia is
part of the Asia and western Pacific region that is also China’s neighbourhood.
The semi-colonial countries that Australian capitalists rob in large amounts – like
PNG, Fiji, East Timor, Indonesia and the Philippines – are all fairly near
China and have each already developed significant ties with the PRC. In
contrast to Australia’s capitalists, the U.S. giant has many other neocolonies
elsewhere. Australia’s capitalists thus find that a greater proportion of their
imperial interests are being impeded by China than what their U.S. counterparts
are experiencing.
All this means that it is impossible to convince the
Australian ruling class – and those elements of the middle class that accept
capitalist rule – to pull back from hostility to the PRC. Nor is it possible to
convince them to abandon their alliance with the U.S. and Britain. They are
doing all this because it is good for them! However, what we can do is mobilise such a level of struggle that we force the
Australian imperialists to retreat from implementing their Cold War projects.
But how are we to build such powerful resistance? Our starting point must be the understanding that while this Cold War
drive against the PRC is in the interests of Australia’s small capitalist
ruling class it is completely against the interests of the entire working class
and most middle class people too. Therefore, we must build the movement
against the nuclear submarine project and in defence of the PRC workers state
by appealing to the working class. However, one cannot appeal to the working
class and its class interests if one is simultaneously appealing to capitalist
interests. It is one or the other! Thus, the strategy of appealing to the
Australian capitalists to be “on the right side of history” and to “achieve
greater independence” undermines the fight to mobilise working class resistance
to the Cold War drive.
What we need to be saying to working class people is
something like this: Your greedy capitalist bosses and their state have been casualising
your jobs, attacking your unions, making you bear the economic pain of COVID
while giving huge handouts to their own mates (like the huge Jobkeeper grants
to Gerry Harvey) and killing Aboriginal people in custody and now they want you
to be prepared to help them fight a war for their interests against the world’s
most populous country. They want you to sacrifice huge amounts of public money –
resources that could be used for providing badly needed public housing, public
aged care centres, more nurses and improved TAFE – for the sake of this war
drive. And they want you to risk losing your jobs in an economic collapse that
may well follow their further antagonizing of this country’s biggest export
market. All this to confront a state where it is the working class that holds
state power. We must resist this! Our interests lie with defending the targeted
state, the PRC, where it is public ownership – the form of economy that favours
working class interests – that is dominant. By standing by the PRC we are
standing by its nationalization of the banks, by its provision of huge amounts
of low-rent public housing for its people and by its crackdowns on capitalist
bigwigs. And by doing so we will be helping our fight for the same things here.
Although working class rule in the PRC is deformed and contested its continued
existence is a huge conquest for working class people all over the world. It
must be defended, just like we must always defend a trade union against any
attack by bosses trying to destroy it.
The Inevitability of Horrific Wars under Capitalism
The Morrison government hoped
that other countries would accept their nuclear submarine plans. Instead, the
leaders of two large Asian countries, Malaysia and Indonesia, have already criticised
the project. Although these capitalist rulers share the Australian rulers’ fears
that the growing strength of an Asian socialistic power could eventually
inspire threats to their own rule, they also appreciate China’s mutually
beneficial economic relations with their countries. Those relations with China
have enabled these ex-colonies to gain trade, capital and technology (including
high-speed trains and more recently safe Chinese COVID vaccines) without being
exploited. Malaysia and Indonesia worry that if the PRC is totally contained,
their countries will again be bullied and ripped off by the Western
imperialists.
Meanwhile, people in the U.S.
and Australia have been shocked at just how strident France has been in
opposition to the AUKUS deal. For the French capitalists, it is not only that they
lost a $90 billion contract. They are furious that major strategic decisions
are being made by the Anglo powers behind their backs. For the same reason both
Germany and the president of the EU (Ursula von der Leyen) also condemned the
secret negotiation of the AUKUS pact. All this is a reflection of the serious imperialist
rivalries that exist between the U.S.-led Anglo powers, on the one hand, and
Germany, France and some other continental European imperialists on the other.
After Trump emphasised the divergent interests of the U.S. from its sometimes
European allies, Biden had been hoping to forge a pan-imperialist alliance
against socialistic China. That is what Washington successfully pulled off to
help defeat the Soviet Union. However, as the current blow up over AUKUS shows,
this time the major imperialists will have a harder time building such an
alliance. This is because capitalism is in a more advanced state of economic
decay than it was thirty years ago. The major capitalist powers have never fully
recovered from the late noughties Great Recession. And now they have all
handled COVID in a disastrous way. What all this means is that each of the
imperial powers more desperatelyneeds to seek out new markets, new
sources of raw materials to grab and new masses of cheap labour to exploit in the
“Third World” in order to stave off economic crises at home. That means that each imperialist power must inevitably come
into sharp conflict with other imperial powers seeking to grab the same spheres
of exploitation. Nevertheless, all the imperialist ruling classes do understand
that the emergence of a giant socialistic power in the form of the PRC
threatens all their interests. This is the case not only for the Anglo rulers
but for the rulers of France, Germany and Japan too. For example, the French
capitalists as one of the most active imperialist predators in Africa are
fearful that China’s ever increasing development assistance and mutually
beneficial cooperation with African countries will more and more impede French
ambitions in Africa. In the end it is not impossible that the various capitalist
powers will again be able to temporarily contain their rivalries enough to
allow them to forge a grand anti-communist alliance.
Whichever way global relations
play out, decaying capitalism, if it is not
first stopped by revolutionary struggle of the working class led masses, is
inevitably driving humanity towards
a new calamitous world war of some type. This could be an inter-imperialist war
between the different imperialist powers like World War I. Or, if the
imperialists do succeed in suppressing their own rivalries long enough to all
gang up against the PRC workers state, it could be a class war like the 1950-53
Korean War and the later Vietnam War. Quite possible is a hybrid type of world
war that involves inter-imperialist battles simultaneously with class battles
between capitalist powers and a workers state – just like World War II was. The
frightening thing is that in the next world war all sides will be armed with
nuclear weapons. That is why, in mobilising
actions to resist the anti-PRC Cold War drive, we must wage these struggles in
such a way that they always advance the masses towards the revolutionary
overturn of capitalist rule. Only when capitalist rule is swept away in all the
imperialist countries can we be sure that the present, blood-soaked rulers of
the U.S., Australia and Britain do not end up destroying humanity. To fight for
such international socialist revolution we must defend the conquests that the
toiling classes have already won. That is why – however deformed by hostile pressure they may be from the “ideal” – we must stand by the Chinese, Cuban, North
Korean, Laotian and Vietnamese workers states. Now more than ever the working
class masses of the world must unite!