Above Photo: Workers at the General Mills food processing factory in Sydney’s west do a shift on the picket line during their weeks-long June 2021 strike for improved wages and better job security. The workers resolve and courage won them some important gains. If unshackled from the dead-end Laborite program of seeking common ground with the capitalist bosses on the basis of a mythical “common national interest”, the workers movement will be able to wage powerful class struggle that can push back against the nearly four decades of increased capitalist exploitation of workers in Australia.
Photo credit: United Workers Union Twitter page
Welcome China’s Anti-Capitalist Crackdown! Let’s Use it to Inspire Resistance Against
Privatisation and Exploitation in Australia
7 February 2022: There has been carnage in Australia. In just the first 38 days of 2022, over two thousand people have died here of COVID. Like previous pandemics, this COVID one is a natural disaster. But the catastrophic number of deaths in Australia two years into this pandemic is an entirely man-made calamity. The right-wing federal government and nearly all Liberal and ALP state governments alike chose to let COVID rip. Then they and profit-driven pathology companies and retailers intensified the virus spread by failing to ensure adequate PCR testing and affordable RAT test kits. However, decades before they let COVID rip, Australia’s rulers let another pandemic rip, the pandemic of poverty amongst low-paid workers and the unemployed. Australia’s billionaire-owned media have hidden the true extent of the suffering from this poverty pandemic. Low-income working class people were expected to “learn to live” with poverty and the terrible suffering which that brought. Today the attitude of the mainstream media is little different. Although, in 2022, people have been dying from COVID at nearly twenty times the rate that they have been dying from road deaths, the media have conspicuously avoided showing the pain of family and loved ones after COVID deaths that they often show following fatal traffic accidents. The capitalist media are trying to deceive us into “learning to live” with this COVID carnage.
The underlying force driving Australia’s governments, top bureaucrats and media to cause widespread poverty on the one hand and enable the COVID catastrophe on the other is one and the same: their intent to put the profits of wealthy business owners ahead of the well-being of the masses. In the case of the poverty pandemic, it is specifically the result of the ruling elite’s determination to help the capitalists that they serve increase their rate of exploitation of workers. Now the COVID pandemic has inflamed a new wave in this poverty pandemic. Latest ABS (Australian Bureau of Statistics) figures show that even as average prices rose by 3.5% last year, hourly wages increased just 0.1%. Moreover, it is the most exploited who have had their pay fall behind the most. Thus, over the last year, the hourly wages of women workers has actually fallen. Meanwhile, the weekly wage of a worker in the lowest bracket of earners (mainly part-time workers) fell by $29 per week. When one combines that with the reality that average rents rose by $30 per week in the same period (and don’t even mention fuel costs!), it is obvious why more and more people – including many who have some type of job – are being plunged into homelessness. Nearly three hundred thousand residents of Australia were homeless at some point last year!
The rate at which workers are being exploited has actually been increasing for decades. This is reflected in an index published by the ABS called the Unit Labour Cost, which tracks changes in the proportion of the fruits of workers labour that workers actually receive payment for. Well over the last 35 years this Unit Labour Cost has plummeted by 20%. In other words, Australian capitalists are now exploiting workers an average of 20% more than they were in 1986. This increase in exploitation took place firstly under the Hawke/Keating Labor government, further deepened during the Howard and Rudd/Gillard years and has intensified still further under the current right-wing government. Therefore, even as technological advances have made Australian workers more productive than ever, the living standard of large numbers of lower-paid workers has not risen for decades! This is the case not only in Australia but in much of the capitalist world. In the U.S. for example, real minimum wages have actually crashed 30% over the last 50 years!
The increased exploitation of workers has caused the share of income in Australian employee-hiring businesses going to wages and salaries – as opposed to capitalist profits – to plummet from 64% twenty years ago to just 52% today. Given that obscenely high CEO and director incomes are also classified as “wages and salaries”, this means that the share of business income going to actual workers is now likely less than 50% – that is less than half! In other words, in an average labour-using Australian private sector enterprise – small or corporate – for every $100,000 of value added by workers, less than $50,000 goes to pay those who actually do the work, while over $50,000 is diverted as profits to the plundering rich owners/shareholders. To add insult to injury, the capitalists then leach tens of billions of more dollars from us through the interest payments and fees of the banks that they own. They and upper-middle class layers also rip off the increasing number of us who do not own our homes by making us pay ever higher rents.
The Methods that Capitalists Use to Increase Their Exploitation of Workers
Being increasingly exploited not only brings financial hardship to workers. Many of us are also finding that our work lives have become ever more stressful. For capitalists and their manager henchmen are implementing schemes to not only bully workers into toiling longer for the same pay but to set worker against worker so that we are less united and able to resist our exploitation. Meanwhile, the governments and media that serve the capitalists use racist scapegoating to divert anger over the economic insecurities caused by increased capitalist exploitation onto minorities and First Peoples. The result of all this propaganda is reflected in a survey conducted last year: 42% of Australians were found to have “very negative” or “somewhat negative” feelings towards Iraqi Australians, 43% held such attitudes towards Chinese-Australians and 46% held these views towards people of Sudanese descent. In other words, about one out of every two Australians is now consciously prejudiced against one or several ethnic communities. Or put another way, a full half of this country is now openly racist! What this means on the ground is that people from vilified minorities are more and more often attacked on the streets, public transport, bars and schools. In particular, thousands of East Asian-origin people have been assaulted and verbally abused by extreme racists over the last two years. Such attacks have been incited by ruling class politicians and media disgustingly blaming China for the pandemic. Yet the pandemic has also destroyed many a racist myth. For one, it has demolished the claim that immigration is responsible for housing unaffordability. For during the pandemic, immigration into Australia has stopped and international student numbers have plummeted, yet house prices have risen at their fastest rate ever, soaring by 22% in the last year alone.
Spreading racism is one of the most powerful means that those who oversee capitalism use to suffocate resistance to exploitation. Yet it is hardly their only method. Over the last few decades, Labor and Liberal governments alike have ever more tightly restricted the right to strike. Meanwhile, capitalists have also forced huge numbers into insecure forms of employment. This facilitates increased exploitation, because without job security workers are more reluctant to stand up to greedy bosses. Now, the capitalists are driving large numbers, especially youth and international students, into a form of casual employment that gives workers even less security: gig work. Laboring in areas like food delivery, gig workers are often so exploited that they can toil long hours without making even the minimum wage.
To facilitate the capitalist drive to keep down wages, governments of all stripes have been hacking at the social safety net. By making life miserable for those who end up without a job, the ruling class want to intimidate those workers with jobs into submitting to attacks on their wages and conditions. That is why governments have kept unemployment payments at cruelly low levels and subjected the unemployed to ever more humiliating “activity tests”. Meanwhile, they have chipped away at the coverage that Medicare gives and have sold off so much public housing that the proportion of people living in public housing is now only half of what it was two decades ago. The dearth of public housing has in turn caused private rents to soar to such levels that last year not one single rental in Australian cities was affordable for a single or pensioner couple, an unemployed person, or a single part-time working parent.
Another key tool in the capitalist profit drive is privatisation. Over the last three decades, governments have sold off a large chunk of this country’s state-owned assets. To be sure, one should have no illusions that in countries presided over by a capitalist state, state-ownership genuinely means public ownership. In Australia, state-owned entities have failed to even provide basic services like post and electricity to many rural Aboriginal communities. Nevertheless, privatisation results in assets that could have been producing state revenue that would partly go into social services needed by the masses end up in the hands of private owners intent on using their newly acquired monopolistic control of strategic assets to extract super-profits. Most significantly, because private capitalists face even less scrutiny than governments, they are more easily able to slash workers jobs and rip off consumers. Therefore privatisation is always accompanied by attacks on workers rights and higher prices while delivering massive profits for the new owners. That is why governments run by all the different pro-capitalist parties have overseen privatisation. The Hawke/Keating ALP began the privatisation wave by selling off the Commonwealth Bank and Qantas. Then the Howard Coalition began privatising Telstra in 1997 – a sell-off completed by the Gillard Labor-Greens government in 2011. Most recently, Morrison’s conservatives have made clear that they intend to sell-off the NBN. The ALP “Opposition’s” tepid response has been only to object to an immediate sale, while leaving the door wide open to future NBN privatisation.
Fight for a New, Class-Struggle Agenda to Guide the Workers Movement
Ongoing strikes by NSW rail workers, rolling action by southwest Sydney bus drivers and the partially victorious, strike last June by food processors – many of whom were women and men from various Asian backgrounds – at western Sydney’s General Mills factory all give a glimpse of what is needed to smash the bosses’ incessant campaign to drive down wages. So does the inspirational February 2021 struggle by workers toiling for British-owned food delivery company, Hungry Panda. That partially victorious struggle, which was spearheaded by riders from the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) who had come here as visa workers or students, was the first strike in Australia’s history by gig workers. Yet such resistance is hampered by the social-democratic perspective of the current ALP leaders of the workers movement. According to this outlook, while more extreme attacks on workers should be resisted, the capitalist order as a whole is tolerable or, if not, then it is nevertheless too powerful to oppose. Therefore all factions of the ALP claim that while class struggle methods like strikes can sometimes be used, the main means to defend workers rights is to elect an ALP government to administer the current, capitalist, order in a fairer way for workers while ensuring that the system itself is strengthened. However, knowing how able the corporate bigwigs are to use their fabulous wealth to swing public opinion, the ALP leaders ensure that any opposition that they take to particular attacks on workers will not be strong enough to make the capitalists so outraged that they will campaign against the ALP. Yet it is simply impossible to both truly defend working class people’s rights and avoid getting into a head-on clash with the capitalist class. This is because, as founder of the communist movement, Karl Marx insisted, the capitalist system cannot survive without the capitalists seeking an ever greater rate of exploitation. Marx explained that the total profits that the capitalists as a whole extract depends on the proportion of the fruits of workers labour that they can seize for themselves. However, as these capitalists spend more and more on building up capital (which today includes buildings, equipment and IT infrastructure), they can only maintain the same percentage return on their now bigger capital outlays if they can increase the amount of profit that they extract – in other words if they grab a greater share of the value added by workers mental and manual labour. Thus accepting the needs of the capitalist system means accepting the increasing exploitation of workers. That is why ALP governments over the last nearly four decades have carried out much the same agenda as the openly capitalist Liberals/Nationals – privatisation, casualisation, public housing sells off, attacks on the unemployed – albeit with a “nicer” tone. Today, Albanese’s ALP is following this same path more than ever. At the upcoming elections, the working class should not put their trust in the ALP anymore than they should support any of the non-working class-based capitalist parties: the Liberals, the Nationals, the Greens, One Nation or the United Australia Party.
Although the strategy of the pro-ALP union leadership and their Labor parliamentary mates has on occasion retarded attacks on the working class, overall this program has allowed the capitalists to increase their exploitation of the masses. Over the last nearly four decades, our unions have been weakened, working conditions have been eroded, jobs have become more insecure, housing has become more unaffordable and to facilitate all this the ruling class has made society more racist and ugly. In short, the Laborite program has been a disaster for the working class masses. Unable to effectively defend workers against the class war of the capitalists, the ALP and other pro-capitalist parties that sometimes claim to stand by workers, like the Greens, are left with advocating schemes to restrict imports in order to favour local producers at the expense of producers abroad. However, such protectionist schemes only result in governments abroad taking reciprocal measures to favour their own producers against Australian-made exports. The end result is that no workers benefit while Australian workers are left divided from their overseas worker sisters and brothers leaving both sets of workers less able to mount resistance against their own exploiters.
In opposition to Laborism, we need a new agenda to guide our workers movement. Instead of our demands being curtailed to avoid angering the capitalists, the working class must fight for it actually needs. That means demanding huge wage rises to make up not only for rising costs but for the ever lower share of income going to workers over the last three decades. We also need to put a halt to all privatisation. Rip up the underhanded plans to sell off Australia Post! No to privatisation of the NBN! Instead of privatisation, we need to bring the extreme profits in sectors like mining and banking into the public budget by ripping these sectors out of the hands of billionaires like Andrew Forest, Gina Rinehart and Clive Palmer. That is the way towards acquiring the public finances needed to provide more nurses and hospital beds for our badly strained public hospitals, the extra teachers that we desperately need for our public schools and better funding for TAFE and universities. Most urgently, we need to fight for the confiscation of private aged-care homes from profit-making companies and their placing into public hands. These capitalists have already caused thousands of our elderly to die from this pandemic by, in their quest to maintain exorbitant profits, neglecting to provide adequate PPE for staff, refusing to hire adequate staff numbers and failing to follow basic pandemic safety protocols. We need to put a stop to this profit-driven carnage immediately!
An anti-privatisation agenda is urgent because the fact that large chunks of the “public” health system are actually in private hands is exacerbating the COVID crisis. Profit-driven pathology operations have not only negligently given hundreds of people the wrong COVID test results but have closed down dozens upon dozens of PCR testing sites … just when they were needed most! That is why pathology services must be nationalised right now. In China, whenever there is tiny outbreak in a city, their public-ownership dominated system is enabling them to PCR test the entire population of cities with over ten million people every two days (!) – usually with people only having to queue for less than 15 minutes. We need the same here! As well as fighting for a truly public health system, we need to demand the placing of all banks under state control. This is essential to directing credit for urgent pandemic response measures.
Our sole means to effectively fight for these demands are industrial action and other mass action by the working class and its allies. Therefore anything that harms such struggle must be flung out of the way. Anti-union laws must be opposed. Protectionist demands, which divide workers across national lines while undermining workers opposition to their bosses by encouraging the false notion that Australian workers have a common “national interest” with their local bosses, must be rejected. The poison of racism that the ruling class pours into society must be cleansed away. This can only be done by mobilising the workers movement to oppose racist atrocities from both governments and rednecks. The workers movement must support Aboriginal people’s struggle against the murder of black people by racist cops and prison guards. It must demand freedom for the refugees and the bringing here of all asylum seekers in Nauru and PNG with the full rights of citizens. Meanwhile, open provocations by violent racist groups must be shut down by mass mobilisations of trade unionists united with people of colour and all anti-racists. And in cases where the location and intended victims of potential redneck attacks are known – such as when an ethnic Chinese family has their home daubed with threatening graffiti – workers-led defence guards must patrol to prevent further attacks.
To strengthen their class struggle, the workers movement must draw into the struggle unemployed workers and the millions more enduring temporary employment or just a few hours of work a week. We must address the needs of these most vulnerable layers of the working class, including low-income single mothers, by demanding: Double the payments to the unemployed! Abolish all punitive “activity tests” on unemployed workers! For a guaranteed minimum wage for food delivery and other gig workers. For permanency, guaranteed minimum hours, leave and all the rights of permanency for all gig and other casual workers. Stop the sell-off of public housing – massively increase low-rent public housing instead! For free, nutritious lunches for all school students! For free, 24-hour childcare!
Whenever our unions ask for higher wages, the capitalists respond that this will lead to job losses. However, that is only true, if we allow them to employ as few workers as they want to. The bosses only employ as many workers as that which allows them to maximise profits. They keep their workforce ultra-lean. That is why when some workers are now off sick with COVID there are such shortages of food and other essentials. Moreover, even as they complain about a labour shortage, the capitalist bosses don’t want to hire any inexperienced workers because these greedy exploiters don’t want to pay a full wage to workers who will initially be not as productive as experienced staff. That is why we need to force the capitalists to increase hiring at the expense of their fat profits. Let’s force all companies making a profit to increase their number of full-time, permanent employees by at least twenty-five workers for every one million dollars of quarterly profit! The capitalist rulers will no doubt scream that this is “impractical.” We say that if it is “impractical” for the capitalists to utilise every labour resource available and provide those who labour with both job security and decent working conditions, then the means of production and distribution need to be ripped from their hands and brought into public ownership under workers control.
The Peoples Republic of China Heads in the Opposite Direction
The capitalist class and their economic “experts” would have you believe that there is no alternative to the agenda of privatisation, pro-landlord housing policies and “economic freedom” of capitalists to do whatever it takes to maximise profits. We are told Australia is merely headed down the path of “like-minded countries”. But there is a country that is actually headed in the opposite direction. And that country happens to be the world’s most populous country, the PRC. Last July, the PRC ordered food delivery companies to ensure that their delivery riders are always paid above the minimum wage and are additionally provided social insurance to cover these gig workers in case of loss of income from illness or unemployment. The companies were also ordered to provide workers with rider rest stations. The pro-worker measure had such an impact that it immediately wiped more than $A56 billion off the share market value of China’s leading food delivery platform. Indeed, the PRC is not shy of hurting rich capitalists to defend the interests of the masses. Last July, in order to protect parents from having to fork out ever larger amounts for their children’s after-school tutoring in an education rat race against other parents’ kids, the PRC dramatically banned all tutoring firms from making a profit. The new requirements caused the billionaire owner of one of China’s biggest tutoring firms, Gaotu to have $A21 billion almost instantly wiped off his wealth. However, Beijing’s measures to stop education being “hijacked by capital” are very popular with parents and students. Alongside the widespread rollout by Chinese schools of low-cost, school holiday daycare (which cost at most $A25 a week) involving extra-curricular programs in music, sport, dance, games and art, the measures suppressing capitalist tutoring firms are also aimed at giving kids a happier, less-stressful childhood.
Red China’s moves against profit-driven education firms are part of its broader moves – moves which it greatly accelerated from mid-2020 onwards – to clamp down on the “disorderly expansion of capital” and pursue “common prosperity.” The latter Beijing explains, involves curbing excessive incomes of the very rich and increasing the income of low-income groups. As a result, whereas in Australia it has been workers who have frequently been hit with fines and restrictions for standing up for their rights while tycoons like Gerry Harvey have been given huge payouts through Jobkeeper and other schemes, in China it has been the other way around. Last year, PRC authorities hit e-commerce giant Alibaba, one of the two main companies owned by China’s once richest man, Jack Ma, with a massive $A4 billion fine for monopoly behavior. They also forced the other of Ma’s main companies to restructure in a way that will greatly curb its profits. Companies owned by China’s other tech tycoons have also been hit with large fines and sanctions for suppression of consumer choice and unauthorised use of customer’s personal data, while being pressured to improve their workers’ rights. Meanwhile, the PRC has been vigorously pushing bosses to increase workers wages. As a result, the Global Wage Report 2020-21 produced by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) showed that Chinese workers enjoyed by far the fastest growing wages of any major economy. Although as a country catching up from the terrible poverty of her neo-colonial days, China’s per capita income and hence wages are still a fair bit lower than Australia’s, in the 2008-2019 period examined by the ILO, real wages in China not only more than doubled but were by 2019 approximately 2.3 times what they were in 2008 – a wage growth rate close to treble that in India and about twelve times that in Australia.
Another area in which the PRC is headed in the opposite direction to the capitalist countries is on the issue of privatisation. Over the last decade and a half, far from engaging in privatisation, the PRC has actually been carrying out some nationalisations. In the late noughties, China began re-nationalising privately owned mines in her coal sector by forcing greedy coal barons to sell their mines to the state for very low prices. The primary goal was to improve workplace safety. Private firms putting profits before workers’ lives had caused large numbers of workers to die in mining accidents. China’s nationalisations have indeed dramatically improved workplace safety. Last year, the number of deaths in China’s coal mining sector was 36 times lower than in 2002, despite production being two and a half times as high. More recently, the PRC has brought into public ownership several insurance companies, mid-size steel producers, property assets and one of China’s biggest mobile phone brands (Honor). Meanwhile, the PRC’s existing public sector firms continue to thrive through innovation in high-tech areas like high-speed rail and new energy. As a result, last year the revenue of China’s state-owned enterprises soared by more than two and half times the growth rate of her overall economy – indicating that the public sector has increased its weight in the Chinese economy.
A particular area where the PRC has been heading in the diametric opposite direction to privatisation is in the housing sector. In the decade from 2008 onwards, China provided an incredible 70 million new public housing dwellings to her low and lower-middle income people. This emphasis continues today. China’s 2021-2025 Five Year Plan has stipulated that a further 6.5 million new low-rent public housing units shall be built alongside millions of other types of public housing. Already, more than one in four of China’s households are living in public housing – a proportion eight times higher than in Australia. Meanwhile, the PRC has been administering her overall housing policy according to the motto: “Houses are for living in not for speculation.” Therefore, rather than giving huge negative gearing tax concessions to speculative landlords as occurs here, the PRC’s provincial governments have been curbing housing speculation through measures like bans on households buying more than two homes. This crackdown and the PRC’s emphasis on public housing are two of the reasons why, despite her per capita GDP still being some three to five times lower than Australia’s, China has a far lower rate of homeless than this country. Indeed, youth from the PRC who come to Australia for study are shocked at the level of homelessness that they see when they arrive here.
What China’s Reaction to the Woes of a Billionaire-Owned Developer
Says about the Path that She is Headed On
The direction that China is travelling in shows that the tyranny of the tycoons, privatisation and erosion of workers’ rights rampant in Australia is not the “natural order” of things. There is another alternative! And that alternative is being implemented quite successfully in Australia’s biggest trading partner. The working class and other low-income groups must fight to open up such an alternate path here! It is precisely this prospect of the toiling classes looking at China’s direction and demanding a similar path in their own countries that spooks the capitalist rulers of Australia and other “like-minded countries.” Aghast at the speed that China has been travelling on this roughly anti-capitalist road since mid-2020, a terrified major American news site complained in an article headlined, “Xi Jinping’s Capitalist Smackdown Sparks a $1 Trillion Reckoning”, 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” (Bloomberg, 2 August 2020). Around the same time, a report from U.S. banking giant Goldman Sachs whinged that, “Chinese authorities are prioritizing social welfare and wealth redistribution over capital markets in areas that are deemed social necessities and public goods” (CNN website, 4 August 2021).
Desperate to stop the Chinese road inspiring working class people in their own countries, capitalist ruling classes have been doing everything possible to discredit the PRC’s latest measures. Thus when it became clear that a major Chinese property developer, Evergrande was in financial trouble, the capitalist media triumphantly declared that this was a sign that the Chinese economy was in deep crisis. Their barely disguised message was: if you crack down on the “free-market” in housing, this will lead to economic doom. To sell their narrative that an Evergrande collapse threatens a broader economic implosion in China, Western mainstream media deliberately hid the fact that China’s housing industry is in fair part driven by public housing construction and state-owned developers rather than being solely dependent on private housing built by tycoon-owned companies likes Evergrande. Yet they were not the only media engaged in such deception. So were the media of those nominally socialist groups that have enlisted in the propaganda campaign against Red China. Thus, an article last October in the Socialist Equality Party’s (SEP) World Socialist Website cheered that, “the feverish property development and build-up of debt [in China] have created the conditions for a major financial crisis”. Not to be outdone, the Australian left group “Solidarity” also sounded much like the Murdoch media when they headlined, “Evergrande crisis shows Chinese growth figures built on sand.” Lying that China’s high growth rates were the result of debt-fuelled speculation, Solidarity excitedly claimed that “the Evergrande crisis is a major thorn in the side of President Xi Jinping’s government” (Solidarity website, 15 October 2021). The only difference between Solidarity’s article and the capitalist media line is that the former claimed that Evergrande’s troubles are a product of “Chinese capitalism”, whereas the real capitalists, rather more accurately, identified Evergrande’s plunge as a result of the PRC’s crackdown on capitalism. Whereas the mainstream media seek to intensify enmity to Red China from pro-capitalist sections of the population, “Solidarity” mobilises such anti-PRC hostility from anti-capitalists. To do so, Solidarity claim that “Chinese capitalism” is going through typical capitalist boom-bust cycles, with the Evergrande demise the result. They could only sell this fiction by hiding the truth that even while the capitalist world was plunging into the troughs of its boom-bust cycles, the PRC has not had any cyclic economic busts – not even during the mid-late 1990s Asian Financial crisis or the late noughties Great Recession. This is because the capitalist mode is not dominant in China.
By the start of this year, all those predicting and wishing for China’s economic collapse had … egg on their face! The PRC’s economic growth rate for last year came in at a whopping 8.1%. So just like umpteen other “predictions” of China’s demise over the last 25 years, the hopes of Western capitalists – and the half-baked socialists that capitulate to the latter’s anti-communist drive – went unrealised! As a result, the anti-PRC media switched focus to selling the line that the plummeting share price of Evergrande is a serious problem in itself as is the (very slight) fall in Chinese house prices over recent months. These anti-communist propagandists deliberately avoided mentioning that the PRC’s authorities have actually been intentionally curbing house prices in order to make homes more affordable for the masses – unlike Morrison’s conservatives who wants to drive up house prices to please their wealthy mates and Albanese’s ALP which lacks the courage to defy them. As for fact that the PRC’s measures to stop housing speculation is causing Evergrande’s billionaire majority owner, Hui Ka Yan – and some other property tycoons – to lose the majority of their wealth, this is entirely aligned with the PRC’s drive to “stop the disorderly expansion of capital” and curb excessively high incomes in order to uplift the position of lower and middle income groups.
The manner in which the PRC has responded to Evergrande’s liquidity crisis is also consistent with her “common prosperity” agenda. The PRC state has effectively taken over the restructuring of the struggling corporation and they have used that control to make clear that all the company’s moves must firstly guarantee the wages and jobs of their workers and the promised homes of their customers, while the interests of rich investors must come last. Already, PRC authorities have pressured Hui Ka Yan to sell over $A1.5 billion of his personal assets – including two private jets, several mansions, expensive art works and shares – to help pay off some of the company’s debt. Meanwhile, the PRC looks to be driving Evergrande down a similar path that it took another privately-owned conglomerate that was mired in debt, HNA Group. In that case, the PRC state re-allocated the company assets to several state-owned companies and private corporations in a way that has kept workers in their jobs, while HNA’s [ex-]billionaire main owners lost nearly all their assets. Already, Evergrande and some smaller developers in distress have sold off a number of property assets to PRC state-owned enterprises, while the state has also confiscated parcels of land and other assets owned by Evergrande. Just like the real estate and airport operations of HNA, Evergrande is set to end up in good part becoming yet another chapter in China’s post-noughties nationalisation story. That will be bad news for Hui Ka Yan and other filthy rich investors but more great news for China’s working class and middle class masses.
Socialism Works!
The reason that the PRC is able to push back wealthy business owners in order to decisively improve the rights of gig works, raise wages and defend housing accessibility for low income groups is because capitalists do not rule in China. You see, China is not a “like-minded country” to the likes of Australia, India, Indonesia and the USA! In 1949, the toiling classes of China seized power in the most massive revolution in human history. Although the Chinese working class exercises its power in an indirect manner through a middle class bureaucracy that controls political administration and although that bureaucracy’s pro-market reforms have allowed capitalists to gain a sizable foothold in parts of the Chinese economy since the 1980s, it is the public ownership system favouring working class people that continues to be the backbone of Chinese society. Although capitalists are very prevalent in retail, internet and light manufacturing, all of China’s strategic sectors including banking, oil and gas, steel, mining, power, infrastructure, ports, auto, train and aircraft manufacturing, shipbuilding, space technology, telecommunications, airlines, food processing, computer chips and pharmaceuticals – as well as many consumer sectors like movies, whitegoods and flat screen TV manufacturing – are dominated by socialistic state-owned enterprises. It is this socialistic system that enabled China to complete lifting all its residents out of extreme poverty by the end of 2020. This is a stunning achievement because before China was steered onto the socialist path 72 years ago she had been so subjugated by neo-colonialism that her per capita income was barely more than half that of India’s. It is the PRC’s public sector that played the key role in achieving her anti-poverty triumph. Over-riding the imperative to maximise profits at all costs, the PRC’s giant state-owned enterprises established industries in poorer parts of China and often hired workforce numbers far in excess of what would be most profitable for their operations. This socialist sector was also key to ensuring the Chinese economy’s great resilience during the pandemic. Thus during the worst period of the pandemic in China, the first seven months of 2020, the PRC’s state-owned enterprises actually increased their investment in fixed assets by nearly 4%, even as private sector investment collapsed by close to 6%. Meanwhile, the PRC’s public sector boosted its hiring of new graduates by a whole one-third in order to make up for decreased job opportunities in the capitalistic private sector.
Among the public sector enterprises most crucial to Red China achieving her social goals have been her banks. In China, alongside her three 100% state-owned policy banks specifically charged with advancing social development agendas, all her big six commercial banks as well as nearly all her medium-sized banks are majority state-owned. Very different to the notorious greed of banks in capitalist countries, the PRC’s socialistic banks have often foregone lending that would bring them higher returns in order to prioritise credit for areas like uplifting of impoverished areas, public housing, renewable energy and environmental protection. They also played a vital role in China’s pandemic response, helping provide the funding that enabled manufacturers, pharma-biotech firms and developers to quickly switch over their operations to the delivery of PPE, COVID testing kits and makeshift hospitals.
The work of the PRC’s public sector in responding to the pandemic have produced stunning results. The PRC has the lowest death rate per person from COVID of any country in the world with a population of more than one million people. Twelve days ago, she achieved an incredible milestone: Mainland China went through a whole year without a single COVID related death! And this in a country with one in five of the world’s people! Of course, the capitalist media have denigrated this success by lying that China’s suppression of COVID is only the result of widespread continuing lockdowns. Yet today, not one large city in China is under a city-wide lockdown. Indeed, a large proportion of China’s residents have never had to endure a full lockdown during the entire pandemic. Even China’s best known megacities Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chongqing and Shenzhen have, at most, only ever had lockdowns in small proportions of their giant cities but never a citywide, Sydney or Melbourne-style lockdown. Moreover, in rare cases when an outbreak did cause a whole Chinese city to lockdown, like Xian, which eased out of lockdown a few weeks ago, the lockdowns have been much shorter than the three to four months that Sydney and Melbourne residents endured in the middle of last year. Thus, even the worst hit parts of Xian were released from lockdown within 32 days. Over the last few days, although the PRC has had to take measures to prevent Winter Olympic teams from highly infected countries like Australia and Britain bringing the virus into China in big numbers, well over 99.5% of mainland China’s people enjoyed their seven-day (!) public holiday for Chinese New Year with more social freedoms than people have here. People packed into tourist spots and literally millions of people travelled on China’s famous high-speed trains every day. Nearly all of China has no restrictions on dancing and singing at clubs as we have in most Australian cities. Although the Chinese workers state has sometimes taken strict measures – putting the masses lives before business profits – China’s success in responding to the pandemic is not mainly because of this. What has separated the PRC’s response from all the capitalist countries is the ability of her socialistic system – where not only is the public sector the backbone but where private companies are subordinated to the workers state – to provide massive testing of people in COVID-affected cities, to move every COVID-affected person into medical care and quarantine in an existing or makeshift hospital and to give all hospital workers, aged care workers and other exposed workers full coverage PPE.
Socialistic Rule in China: Terrible for Capitalist Exploiters Worldwide,
Great for the Working Classes of the World
It is not only China’s pandemic response and her common prosperity drive that Western capitalist ruling classes are seeking to denigrate. They, their media and the “independent” “human rights” NGOs that they fund are looking for every possible angle to attack the PRC. One of the main fronts in their propaganda offensive is over the situation of the Muslim Uyghur minority in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). The U.S., Australian and other Western imperialist regimes – the same ones who destroyed Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen through either direct invasion or proxy wars, who committed the most hideous war crimes in the countries that they invaded or bombed and who prop up Israel’s murderous oppression of Palestinian people – claim that China is committing “genocide” against Muslim Uyghurs. They make this ridiculous claim even while largely admitting that China is somehow committing this “genocide” without actually killing any Uyghurs??!! Instead they claim that China is supposedly imprisoning millions of Uyghurs in re-education camps. This is a truly whacko conspiracy theory on par with some of the nuttiest Q-Anon “theories”. To try and give some “credence” to this conspiracy theory, the capitalist powers have relied on the fabricated “accounts” of those under the influence of either, ultra-rich capitalist Uyghurs who want to overturn socialistic rule in the XUAR, or extreme religious fundamentalists who want to turn the XUAR into a version of ISIS’ Caliphate. However, Western regimes’ claims that Uyghurs are being subjugated by China have been strongly rejected by the overwhelming majority of Uyghurs living in Xinjiang who are instead proud of their anti-poverty advances – especially over the last twelve years – and who are freely enjoying the rich Uyghur language, music and dance. The section of the Uyghur community that most strongly opposes anti-PRC propaganda and the increasingly small number of right-wing Uyghur terrorists are Uyghur women. These women are terrified at the prospect of having their current secular lifestyle and freedoms inside the PRC being taken away and their status being thrown back to the much lower position endured by women in most of the neighbouring non-socialist countries to their west; which includes Afghanistan where both under the Western occupation and now under the Taliban, women are subjugated in a way that the religious fundamentalist component of anti-communist Uyghur forces would like to see.
Furthermore, the accusations against China over Uyghurs have been rejected by most of the world. The only countries to sign-up to these claims are the Western powers – the very same ones that have been subjecting their own Muslim communities to racist stigmatisation and heavy-handed policing – and a handful of ground down neocolonies, like Nauru, whose Australian imperialist overlords have turned into a concentration camp for refugees. In all, those regimes making the claims of Uyghur oppression rule over only one in eight of the world’s people. Notably, not one Muslim-majority country has consistently signed onto these anti-PRC claims. Indeed, with the exception of Japan, not a single country in all of Asia, the Middle East, Africa or South America has signed on. Instead, far, far more countries have signed statements that not only denounced “the groundless accusations against China based on disinformation” but which positively “commends the efforts of the People’s Republic of China in providing care to its Muslim citizens” in the XUAR. As a small number of Western mainstream media outlets have had to report, at UN meetings, around 70 countries have signed statements lauding China’s treatment of Uyghurs and in all around 90 countries have openly weighed in behind China on the issue. Notably, this includes the vast majority of the world’s Muslim-majority countries, including those as different from each other as Palestine, Pakistan, Nigeria, Somalia, Iran, Iraq, Algeria, Turkmenistan and Qatar. Indeed the claims about China subjugating Muslim Uyghurs are so ridiculous that even thoroughly U.S.-allied Muslim-majority countries like the UAE, Kuwait, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan have rejected the anti-China claims and instead praised China’s advancement of Uyghur human rights through development.
It is no surprise that capitalist ruling classes would do everything possible to vilify the PRC. After all, we know how viciously capitalists, their media and their governments attack trade unions that staunchly defend workers rights like the construction workers CFMEU – and especially its militant Victorian branch. Therefore we can expect that the capitalist class will be even more fanatical in attacking organisations – like the Chinese workers state – formed when the toiling classes not only assembled to fight for improved rights but actually united to takeover a country. After all, the existence of the PRC workers state is greatly impeding the ability of the powerful “multinational” capitalists of the richer countries to exploit a workforce of some 800 million people! Moreover, the existence of a workers state in the world’s most populous country provokes the greatest fear of the capitalist rulers of Australia and other “like-minded countries”: that the working class of their own countries will look at China and decide that they also want to grab state power. The fact that the PRC state has been more clearly showing its pro-working class character of late by cracking down on greedy capitalists and improving the rights of gig workers makes capitalist ruling classes the world over all the more nervous.
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, economic insecurity, growing racism and a society that puts the profits of wealthy business owners above the lives of workers, our parents and our grandparents. 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. Down with the U.S./Australia/Britain military build-up against the PRC and North Korea! No nuclear submarines for the Australian regime – No to AUKUS! U.S./NATO/Australia out of the South China Sea! Rebuff the lying “human rights” attacks on the PRC over Uyghurs, Tibet and Hong Kong! Oppose U.S. funding for capitalist counterrevolutionary groups in China!
China’s Socialist Advances Face Serious Threats –
All the More Reason to the Defend the Workers State
The pro-working class measures that are being implemented within China are meeting much resistance – even from certain elements within the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC). China’s capitalists hate the recent measures with a vengeance. But they dare not say so openly. So they get establishment bodies like their All China Federation of Industry and Commerce to lobby behind the scenes for “respect” for the “rights” of capitalist exploiters. Meanwhile, various experts, economists and academics that are close to these capitalists, like liberal Peking University economics professor Zhang Weiying, have been speaking out against the common prosperity drive. Given that the CPC is the only truly mass party in China, it is inevitable that the party would house those holding a range of viewpoints – including those that are protective of the capitalists. Indeed, even China’s number two, premier Li Keqiang seems to be quietly obstructing president Xi Jinping’s common prosperity push by favouring the private sector – as opposed to the socialistic public sector – in his tax policies and statements. In the face of this blowback, there was some retreat by the PRC leadership in their public stance about the crackdown on “disorderly expansion of capital.” PRC officials sought to reassure domestic capitalists and foreign investors that there were limits to how far the recent moves would go.
On the other hand, the Chinese masses have been egging on the PRC’s crackdown on big-time capitalists. Chinese workers and youth have, quite correctly, flooded social media with posts calling out Jack Ma as an “evil capitalist” and a “bloodsucker”. A commentator who cheered that “Ma will definitely be hung from the lamppost” received well over a hundred thousands likes for that post! Pushed by such mass sentiment, last August, some of the biggest Chinese state media outlets chose to run an article by popular leftist blogger Li Guangman that encouraged the crackdown on capitalists to deepen, calling them a forerunner of “profound revolutions” that would see a “return to the original intentions and quintessence” of socialism. Meanwhile, despite right-wing sections of the CPC having made headway in lobbying for legal guidelines stipulating that economic transgressions by “entrepreneurs” (by which they mean capitalists) will in future be dealt with as civil matters rather than jail-carrying crimes, major sections of the PRC state are not relenting on their moves to bring aggressive capitalists and those that protect them to heel. Last September, after HNA’s state administrators had wiped out their wealth, the now ex, billionaire former owners of HNA Group, its ex-chairman and ex-CEO, were arrested. Then, last week, the CPC expelled from the party and handed over to prosecutors the recent, former CPC chief of Hangzhou city, Zhou Jiangyong for not only taking bribes but for having “colluded with some capital elements and backed the runaway expansion of capital”. Sensationally, Hangzhou is the city where Jack Ma’s corporations are based. Speculation is mounting that among the “capital elements” that Zhou colluded with in backing “the runaway expansion of capital” is none other than Jack Ma himself. Many in China are excited that Zhou’s downfall will be the prelude to the final takedown of China’s most well-known capitalist exploiter, Jack Ma.
In summary, there is a fierce tug of war going on between on the one end, the Chinese working class and its allies both within and outside the CPC and on the other, the capitalist class and those upper middle class elements and groupings within the CPC aligning themselves with the private “entrepreneurs.” In some sense this is no different to the class conflict taking place in the capitalist world. However, the big difference between the contest running in China and that in the capitalist world, is that in China, the seizure of state power by the toiling masses in 1949 and the resulting emergence of a society centred on working-class, that is collectivised, property forms has given the working class the decisive advantage in the class war. However, they have far from achieved final victory. The excessive openings to capitalists made by the CPC from the mid-1980s to the mid-noughties greatly strengthened the pro-capitalist side. Most importantly, capitalist restorationist forces within China are boosted by the fact that all the most powerful countries in the world, other than for China itself, remain under capitalist rule. Their presence not only emboldens Chinese capitalists to demand ever more “rights” but helps rightist sections within the CPC to prosecute the case that with such strong external forces opposing socialist rule, Beijing has no choice but to “compromise” with and “adapt” to global capitalism. This is another reason why those particular socialists (in Australia this includes Solidarity, Socialist Alternative, the Australian Communist Party, Socialist Alliance and the SEP) who use the existence of a degree of capitalism within China as an excuse to support anti-communist forces attacking the PRC state – like Hong Kong’s pro-colonial, rich people’s opposition – are actually helping strengthen pro-capitalist forces within the PRC establishment. By increasing the hostile pressure on the workers state, they are helping empower Chinese “Gorbachevs” who should they gain the ascendancy would open the gates for outright capitalist counterrevolutionaries to storm through and take power.
In contrast to those leftists who capitulate to the anti-PRC Cold War, we in Trotskyist Platform work hard to mobilise active solidarity with the Chinese workers state. In October 2019, we joined together with the Australian Chinese Workers Association and others to build a united-front action that saw 70 people march through Sydney city calling to “Stand with Socialistic China.” When word got back to China about this action, those staunch Chinese communists who heard about it were thrilled. We need more of and more powerful such actions! For these actions not only inspire anti-capitalist workers within China to resist the capitalists and their advocates but emboldens them to push for the crackdown on “the disorderly expansion of capital” to intensify. And China’s anti-capitalist crackdown does need to go much further than president Xi wants. To fortify working class rule and ensure the PRC’s further progress towards “common prosperity”, the power of Jack Ma and his ilk needs to be smashed. The tech, real estate and light manufacturing sectors need to confiscated from these capitalists and brought into public ownership. The danger of the socialistic economy being white anted by a large number of smaller-scale capitalists needs to be averted by ending premier Li Keqiang’s concessions to small and medium sized private “entrepreneurs”. Rather than rescuing such private enterprises by giving them handouts, promising such enterprises should be nationalised when in trouble. Let’s help advance China’s socialistic public sector! Let’s do so by mobilising in solidarity with the PRC here in Australia!
Let’s Seize on China’s Anti-Capitalist Measures to
Motivate the Struggle Against Australia’s Capitalist Exploiters
We should point to the existence of socialistic rule in China to not only popularise the need for a future socialist revolution here in Australia but to motivate a fightback right now against growing exploitation and privatisation. Every time that we demand any serious measures to restrict the “right” of capitalists to “freely” exploit it poses the questions: how far are such restrictions going to go and what should be done if such measures cause the capitalist engine to grind to a halt. The current pro-ALP leadership of the workers movement responds to these questions by telling the masses that while there should be restrictions on capitalist exploitation such measures should be mild so that they allow the current (that is capitalist) system to function properly. However, the fact that a socialistic system is operating in the world’s most populous country and running rather successfully – even though the workers state there is weakened and distorted by hostile pressure and capitalist intrusion -shows that the workers movement does not have to moderate our demands to ensure the success of capitalism. The dead end of Laborism can be rejected. The working class can and should fight for what it actually needs! For if making headway on those demands causes the capitalist order to start coming apart – as it inevitably will – then so be it; that is no issue because replacing capitalist rule with socialistic working class rule has been proven to work in China and is what we desperately need. Through our publications and discussions with the masses, through seeking to steer progressive struggles in a direction that enhances the working class’ trust in their own power and diminishes their illusions in any wing of the capitalist class and in any organ of the capitalist state and through ourselves initiating actions with the same purpose, Trotskyist Platform works hard to win broader and broader layers of the working class to the need for a future workers conquest of state power, while advancing the building of the revolutionary workers party that would spearhead the struggle for such a socialist revolution. We understand that the struggle for a socialist Australia will be advanced today by the working class fighting through class-struggle methods for what it needs. That is why we draw the Australian working class’ attention to the anti-capitalist measures being taken in China and seek to use that to inspire workers to mobilise right now in action to demand: A guaranteed minimum wage and all the rights of permanency for all gig workers! For big wage rises! For a massive increase in public housing! No to privatisation of the NBN – stop all privatisations! Nationalise the banks, aged care sector and pathology services!
