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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MASSIVELY INCREASE LOW-RENT PUBLIC HOUSING!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SANCTIONS ON RUSSIA DRIVE UP FUEL PRICES –
WESTERN POWERS’ ANTI-RUSSIA PROXY WAR
HARMS THE MASSES’ LIVING STANDARDS

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

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

BRING THE ECONOMY INTO PUBLIC OWNERSHIP UNDER WORKERS RULE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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