En Passant

There’s nothing like seeing the greed up close to dampen love of the Olympics writes Mark Steel in Socialist Worker US.

WHAT AN ideal opportunity that was, to at last engage local residents with the Olympics.

When it turned out there weren’t enough security staff, they should have employed East London’s famous criminal community. They’d have loved the chance to stand over people at the entrance gates, growling, “Now listen. I said LISTEN. Any misbehaving, and you’re going to make me upset. And you don’t wanna see me, not when I’m upset. So don’t even THINK abaht taking in non-sponsored foodstuffs or you’ll be sucking all your dinners through a straw. ALL RIGHT? Now go and enjoy yer mixed doubles quarter-finals in yer badminton.”

This would be more pleasant than armed soldiers patrolling the event, and other security measures, such as placing surface-to-air missiles on council estate roofs. If the Palestinians do that, they get screamed at for using civilians as a “human shield,” but we’re doing it to protect the 200-meter backstroke.

There’s now a bigger military presence in London than at any time since the Blitz. By the time the Games start, there’ll be a sniper on the diving board and swimmers in lane five of the pool will have to go around the periscope of a nuclear sub.

It’s been suggested that spectators should allow three hours to get into the site, which fits with the sense most Londoners have that we’re not wanted there. Even the route of the marathon has been changed to avoid images that might suggest that London has grubby bits.

A global festival is taking place in our city and we’re told every day to stay at home, work at home, and not even use the word “Olympic” unless we’re an official sponsor.

By next week, London will have become like the queue for a prestigious nightclub, with bouncers patrolling the streets telling anyone who isn’t good-looking or famous to go home, so we don’t damage London’s global brand image by revealing our unsightly people.

It ought to be fantastic, but many sports fans say they’ve never looked forward to an Olympic Games with less enthusiasm than the one in their own town. Maybe that’s because when it’s nearby, you can see the greed and sinister snobbery close up.

So people are cynical about the Olympics not because they hate sport, but because they love it, just as the more you love music, the more you’ll dislike One Direction and Justin Bieber.

So I wonder if it’s too late to have a fantastic Olympics by handing them over to France or Argentina, and as part of the deal, they can have Sebastian sodding Coe for nothing as well.

Mark Steel is a comedian, a columnist for the Independent newspaper, and a socialist and activist in Britain. He’s the author of two collections about contemporary Britain, It’s Not a Runner Bean: Dispatches from a Slightly Successful Comedian and Reasons to Be Cheerful–as well as Vive la Revolution: A Stand-up History of the French Revolution.

President Obama has gone to Aurora to comfort the families and friends of those slain in the Aurora cinema killings.

James Holmes is accused of murdering 12 innocent people and wounding up to 50 others in a crime that has shocked Americans and the rest of the world.

Obama did not name Holmes. Instead he said the perpetrator of this evil act would feel the full force of America’s justice system. Colorado has the death penalty.

Death and justice are synonymous across much of America as the state avenges itself and society, mainly on poor black men denied any real role in a racist society, in a dehumanising and degrading and disgusting dance of death with the killers or accused killers.

The United States is a deeply alienated and alienating society, the epitome of the free market at work with nearly 50 million Americans on food stamps, one quarter of the world’s prisoners locked up, and a high per capita execution rate.

It is system of incredible violence in the name of profit.

That violence is not just on the streets. It flows to and from the highest echelons of US society.

Obama is a bigger mass murderer than Holmes. He has killed more women and children than Holmes could ever be capable of.

The ongoing occupation of Afghanistan has seen hundreds if not thousands of women and children killed on Obama’s watch.

He has unleashed more drone attacks in one year than Bush did in his eight years in Office. Bush himself is no slouch in the mass murder stakes, with at least one million civilians estimated to have died as a consequence of his invasion of Iraq.

Here’s a list complied by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism of the drone strikes and who they killed in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.

CIA Drone Strikes in Pakistan 2004 – 2012
Total US strikes: 335
Obama strikes: 283
Total reported killed: 2,513-3,226
Civilians reported killed: 482-835
Children reported killed: 175
Total reported injured: 1,198-1,324

US Covert Action in Yemen 2001- 2012
Total confirmed US operations (all): 46-56
Total confirmed US drone strikes: 35-45
Possible additional US operations: 110-125
Possible additional US drone strikes: 57-66
Total reported killed (all): 329-957
Total civilians killed (all): 58-149
Children killed (all): 24-31

US Covert Action in Somalia 2007 – 2012
Total US strikes: 10-21
Total US drone strikes: 3-9
Total reported killed: 58-169
Civilians reported killed: 11-57
Children reported killed: 1-3

On the most conservative analysis of these figures Obama has killed 400 civilians.

His troops and drones in Afghanistan have killed more.

In addition Obama has signed orders that allow US citizens to be killed extra-judicially.

At the same time that Obama was in Aurora grieving with the families of those killed one of his drones blew up a car in Afghanistan and randomly killed Maulvi Abdul Qayum, an employee of the education department in Paroon, and a young girl.

There will be no tears for them from the US President, no grieving from the barbarians who run the US government for their deaths at the hands of the commander in chief of terror.

If James Holmes is a barbaric mass murderer for allegedly killing 12 innocent people (which he is if he is not insane and assuming he pulled the trigger) who will feel the full force of American justice (which he will), why isn’t the barbaric mass murderer Barack Obama going to receive the same treatment?

Are Pakistani or Afghan kids less important than American ones? To US imperialism they are.

The decline in US economic power and the growing strength of China and its challenge to US dominance make the US more and more reliant on military power to retain its pre-eminent position in the world. As the economic and political competition between the two increases so too will the military competition.

Of course China is a long way behind the US economically at the moment, about half the US in terms of GDP. And the US spends as much on its military as do the next 16 biggest military spenders in the world.

The war on terror, the invasion of Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq are part of the wider imperialist game by the US to encircle China and/or control the supplies of oil in the Middle East to it, something especially handy in times of crisis or conflict between the two superpowers.

The war on terror was a convenient smokescreen for these deeper motives of Chinese containment. But to drum up support for more war, the US ruling class ramped up the nationalistic and militaristic rhetoric.

In a society already awash with guns, the ideology of killing your enemies became further ingrained as part of the Chinese containment programme in the name of the war on terror.

Add to that a worsening of living standards and immiseration in the US and the increase in unemployment and a culture of killing mixed with a culture of aggressive wars creates the conditions for explosions of deadly rage on the streets of America.

A nation at war with the world is a nation at war with itself. The same systemic driver that forces US imperialism to use weapons against much of the rest of the world is the same logic that drives US capital to attack the living standards and jobs of its working class.

Both in turn interact to dehumanise American society.

It is not an accident that some of the alienated in a country ruled by a blood soaked American ruling class might turn to the violence that is preached to them every day and legitimised in almost every way, from drone bombings to popular culture the death penalty and the violence of an economic system that sends millions into poverty almost overnight.

Bring mass murderer Barack Obama to justice and this culture of death might begin to change.

Of course that isn’t going to happen.

The fight for a just society continues, and in that struggle the American working class long term have a key role to play in overthrowing the murderers who rule over them and instituting a new society of peace and democracy.

The letter below, from Socialist Alternative member Vashti Kenway, one of the Max Brenner 16, is about Monday’s wonderful victory against police charges of besetting and trespass in a public place (yes, trespass in a public place, I kid you not!) for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) demonstrations against the Max Brenner chain’s links to the Israeli Army.

Clearly the police charges were politically motivated, to silence the BDS campaign specifically and protests more generally. If the besetting charges had been successful then pickets and other industrial action could have been the next target.

Recently Socialist Alternative held a meeting at the Victorian Trades Hall Council (VTHC)on police racism and thuggery and the Police ‘union’ tried to stop it going ahead. When a big crowd turned out it went ahead and the cops withdrew from VTHC. Their colleagues in New South Wales have now withdrawn from the Labour Council.

It is possible, given the free speech success of BDS and the police annoyance at being rebuffed at VTHC and having them exposed once again as racist thugs, that Socialist Alternative and the campaigns we are involved in such as the Max Brenner protests, Equal Love, refugees and union community pickets, will come under much greater police attention and harassment. We shall see.

For the moment let us enjoy this victory for free speech while we can and prepare for the battles of the future to defend it.

John

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Friends and supporters,

The substantive charges against the Max Brenner 16 (besetting and trespass in a public place) have been dismissed this morning in court. 5 defendants are however still in court fighting specific charges of resist arrest and assault police.

The decision on the substantive charges is nonetheless a big win for our right to protest in public places in Melbourne. We have beaten back their attempts to criminalize dissent and their attempts to silence a public pro-Palestine voice in Australia.

The magistrate Simon Garnet found that QV square is a public place and is subject to the same laws as other public lanes and spaces in Melbourne. He said in his final ruling: “In my opinion, the owners of QV and therefore QV management, by virtue of the Square and lane ways being subject to the S173 Planning and Environment Act agreement and therefore a ‘public place’… did not have the legal authority to apply conditions on members of the public who wished to enter QV square.”

He also ruled that to convict on the basis of the signs that QV management erected to dissuade protest would be a contravention of the Victorian charter of human rights. These signs said that people who wanted to demonstrate “against the political or social interests of a retail tenant of this shopping center” would be trespassing.

To quote the magistrate’s ruling directly “To interpret s9(1)(d) as submitted by the prosecution would, in my opinion, contravene their right to “freedom of expression” as enacted in the Charter. In addition, a refusal to leave after being requested to do so on the basis that the protesters were; “demonstrating disapproval of the political or social interests of a retail tenant of this shopping centre” is also not compatible with those human rights.

Defence lawyer Rob Starry, who acted for some of the accused, said the decision had wide-ranging ramifications. “This case is really a landmark case in the annals of the criminal justice system because what it represents is people have a right to express themselves politically,” he said.

Mr Starry said the decision could affect similar Occupy Melbourne protests and current industrial protests including the Toll blockade. “The Toll blockade is an industrial dispute, it should not involve the police unless there is a breach of the peace or other criminal behaviour but that has not been the case,” he said.

The defendants would like to thank all those who have shown us both moral and material support during the trial and we would invite you to join us:

This Tuesday (tomorrow) 8pm onwards John Curtain hotel (opposite Trades Hall on Lygon St) for a celebratory drink

This Friday 27th at 5:30pm to an action RECLAIM QV SQUARE. It is vital, given the court’s decision to re assert our right to demonstrate in Melbourne’s public places.

Students for Palestine has invited both those who support Palestine and other progressive activists to join us in taking back our public squares from Melbourne’s corporations.

Yours sincerely
Vashti Kenway

Herald Sun article

The Age article

Readers might also like to look at Why Palestinian protests target Max Brenner.

The critics of Leninism often characterize his conception of a revolutionary party as some sort of isolated sect. Nothing could be further from the truth writes Paul D’Amato in Socialist Worker US.

SOCIALISTS WHO consider themselves Leninists are often criticized for wanting to create a “vanguard party.”

To the extent that critics of Leninism are denouncing what is, in fact, a caricature of Lenin–that any vanguard party will be top down and autocratic–there’s little to be said. There are, no doubt, self-declared “vanguard” organizations of a few hundred people or less that lead nothing and repeat worn-out clichés.

But Lenin himself was a leader of a mass party in Russia that led a successful revolution. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were a vanguard in the true sense of the word–not isolated cranks.

Lenin’s insistence on the need for a revolutionary party is based on the idea that the working class can’t be liberated by anyone standing over or outside its ranks. That’s why Lenin opposed individual terrorism, for example–since it created a passive majority waiting on a small minority to take action for them. He also rejected parliamentary socialism for viewing socialism as something accomplished by politicians on behalf of the working class.

In short, for Lenin–as for Karl Marx before him–the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself. But there are obstacles to working-class self-emancipation. Otherwise, capitalism would have been done away with long ago.

The employers can depend on the state to use force to keep people in line when necessary. But often, force isn’t necessary–because the majority of people more or less accept society as it is. Simple inertia is built into the structure of society–because people can’t imagine things being any other way.

Plus, the competitive nature of the capitalist system can pit workers against each other. And there’s what Marx called “the ruling ideas of society”–pushed by the corporate-run media and schools to try to convince us that we live in the best of all possible worlds.

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GIVEN THIS, workers have different degrees of consciousness about the possibility of change at any given moment. Some accept the profit system as the best system, while others reject it outright. Some reject racism in the name of solidarity among all workers, while others blame foreigners for their problems. This is why workers don’t change their ideas overnight.

Capitalism forces workers to fight–whether they’re gas workers in Chicago or autoworkers in Brazil. In the process of struggle, ideas of solidarity, equality and opposition to oppression come to the fore.

But workers don’t become aware of their position and power in society at the same time. Some move faster than others and are ready to take the lead. So, in any struggle, there will always be some kind of leadership. The question is what kind?

Without a clear alternative to the belief of most workers that they have to rely on others to change things for them, potentially revolutionary movements can be sidetracked by moderate leaders who want to keep the fight within the boundaries of existing society.

At the heart of Lenin’s concept of the “vanguard” party is the simple idea that working-class militants and other activists who have come to the conclusion that the whole system must be dismantled must come together into a single organization in order to centralize and coordinate their efforts against the system.

In his famous 1969 pamphlet Listen, Marxist! anarchist Murray Bookchin attacks Leninism, or a caricature of it, but then concludes:

[We] do not deny the need for coordination between groups, for discipline, for meticulous planning and for unity in action. But [we] believe that [these] must be achieved voluntarily, by means of self-discipline nourished by conviction and understanding, not by coercion and a mindless unquestioning obedience to orders from above.

Revolutionaries, Bookchin argues, must be organized to “present the most advanced demands” and “formulate the immediate tasks that should be performed to advance the revolutionary process,” providing “the boldest elements in action and in the decision-making organs of the revolution.”

Ironically, this sounds like a description of Lenin’s Bolshevik Party in 1917!

First published in the June 8, 2001, issue of Socialist Worker.

The defeat of the union campaign to defend the Australian National University School of Music and the effective sacking of 13 of the 32 staff there without a shot being fired raises important questions about how to fight the neoliberal assault on our higher education institutions.

Neoliberalism is ‘the market assuming centre-stage and governments deploying Universities for instrumental ends’ as Margaret Thornton puts it in her defence of social liberalism and the idea of the university ‘as a community of scholars engaged in the dispassionate pursuit of truth’ in her wonderful book Privatising the Public University: the Case of Law (Routledge 2012).

The School of Music offended neoliberalism because it allegedly ran at a book loss. The figures are disputed but what such a narrow bean counter approach to education means is that community benefit and public good is not only disregarded, it is discredited if there are no dollar signs attached to it.

This was a propitious time and opportunity to defend the internationally recognised and acclaimed School of Music from the onslaught of Ian Young, the chainsaw Vice-Chancellor, and his book-keeper advisers.

Students were angry, staff were angry, and there was massive community support as the demonstration of 1000 people for the School attests.

And yet today the Vice-Chancellor stands supreme, viewing, like an educational Sauron, his work, proclaiming satisfaction with what he has wrought and planning his next neoliberal assaults. Other ‘unprofitable courses’ will be under the microscope and ultimately attack.

The failure of the National Tertiary Education Union to mount an effective campaign to defend the School of Music can be put down to two things – the Labor Government’s industrial laws which effectively criminalise strike action except in certain narrow circumstances and the lack of a tradition in Australia over the last 30 years of fighting industrially and socially for rights, for jobs and for better pay and conditions.

This combination of conservatism and criminalisation was encapsulated in what was for me the defining moment of the campaign, the overwhelming rejection by a mass meeting of staff of a proposal for a stop work meeting to consider further action.

Only 4 members out of 120 voted for the proposal and from that point on, to me, the campaign had hamstrung itself and its ability to act quickly and decisively to defend the staff at the School of Music.

Most strikes and other industrial action in Australia are illegal.

Waterside workers, teachers, building workers, Victorian nurses and New South Wales firefighters have all recently undertaken industrial action which was ‘illegal’.

The outcomes, or possible outcomes since some disputes are still ongoing, have been or will be much more positive than the defeat at the ANU.

No doubt buoyed by his victory, the neoliberal Vice-Chancellor will now revisit a previous proposal to get rid of 150 staff and bide his time till the current bargaining period has ended before moving against other ‘unprofitable’ sections of the University.

The current enterprise agreement at the ANU expired on 30 June and negotiations are beginning.

They will take place against the backdrop of the School of Music defeat and a resurgent neoliberal Vice-Chancellor determined to make all university staff pay for his neoliberal plans. This will mean, as one example, freeing up more money to attract ‘super stars’. The best way to do that would be to hold down our wages.

The ANU has the second lowest pay scales of the G8 Universities.

This enterprise bargaining and the looming loss of hundreds of jobs after it is finished raises again the question of the best way to resist this neoliberal assault at the ANU.

To me the School of Music defeat shows that the way forward would have been members running the campaign, taking ‘illegal’ strike action and rallying community support to picket the University and shut it down.

The same sort of response will be needed during and after the Enterprise Agreement negotiations.

These neoliberal assaults are occurring not just at the ANU but across the University sector.

At the University of Canberra the neoliberal Vice-Chancellor there employs most new staff on precarious 7 year contracts (often reviewable after 3 and 5 years for ‘progress’). This creates a climate of fear, the endless pursuit of ‘publications’ which no one will read and the frantic search for grants which are tied almost exclusively to the needs of big business, not knowledge.

Since student scores count for employment purposes it also possibly means grade inflation so fail students now may pass and pass students may become credit or even distinction students. It is a fools’ paradise of mutual masturbation.

The University of Canberra may well as a consequence of the attacks on staff rise up the ratings scale of Universities but those scales are neoliberal instruments which measure overwork and stress in disguised terms.

They hide the terrible human cost where staff work longer and longer hours in an atmosphere of dictatorial and dysfunctional top down management and where many are looking to leave as soon as they can. The University of Canberra is a neoliberal factory of work fear and stress.

When other Universities respond to their fall, or the perceived possibility of their fall in the comparative rankings, by whipping their staff harder too, you end up with the hamster syndrome, where staff are running faster and faster in a wheel that goes nowhere.

It is not just Canberra where the neoliberal disease has infected our Universities. It is all of them.

At Sydney, RMIT, La Trobe, Swinburne, RMIT, to name a few, staff and courses are under assault as the neoliberal juggernaut spreads and attempts to completely destroy the idea of the university as a public good and to junk ‘unprofitable’ courses as an expression of neoliberal failure.

The fight backs have at best been half hearted because they shy away from real, ongoing, intense and, if needs be to protect the common good of education, illegal strike action.

In the words of the BLF ‘If you don’t fight, you lose’ and the results from university after university in Australia are showing how true that is.

There are lessons University staff and students can learn from overseas.

In Brazil University workers have been on an indefinite teaching strike for 2 months. 56 of the country’s 59 federal universities and 34 federal institutes of technology have been shut down in a strike over better pay and conditions and more staff to address the rapid increase in students. The staff are demanding much more government spending on higher education.

In Québec around 150,000 students have been on strike for months against tuition fee increases. The government criminalised their protests and 300,000 demonstrated ‘illegally’ against the action. The strike is set to reignite in the coming academic year.

In Europe university students and staff have been at the forefront of demonstrations and strikes against austerity, the austerity in universities of increased tuition fees and course and staff cuts.

In Chile, against a background of increasing student numbers, increasing fees, private educators and no new public universities having been built since the end of the Pinochet era, mass students protests since May 2011 have demanded an end to the school voucher system, a state public education system, the end of for-profit education and taxing the rich to pay for it.

In Sudan female university students have been the spark for a nation wide rebellion against the dictatorship.

There has been a common pattern across the Middle East where unemployed graduates and current students and staff have been heavily involved in the struggle against dictatorship and its economic concomitant, neoliberalism.

As the experience in other countries shows, university staff and students can and have fought back against neoliberalism and the commodification of education. It is a lesson students and staff at Australian universities are going to have to learn if we want to stop the rule of the educational barbarians and the horrific consequences that flow and will flow from their ascendancy.

Those educational barbarians are not just the Vice-Chancellors and other agents of neoliberalism in the higher education sector. They are the political parties vying for power and in Australia’s case the current Labor Party government.

Ultimately the demands have to be for more government funding for higher education and to tax the rich to pay for adequate public education. The way to win those demands is to shut the universities down when the neoliberals attack.

Guillaume Legault, one of the leaders of the Québec student strike, will be speaking at the ANU on Monday 30 July at 1 pm in room G 50 of the Haydon-Allen Building in a meeting organised by Socialist Alternative and Socialist Alliance.

John is a tutor in the School of Politics and Social Sciences at the ANU and a member of the NTEU there. He is writing in a personal capacity. He is also enrolled in a doctorate at the ANU. He is a former employee of the University of Canberra.

The bomb that destroyed some of the Syrian dictator’s inner circle might well be the symbol of beginning of the end for the regime. It may be another signal that we can dare to hope for the ultimate success of the popular uprising.

Certainly it reveals the strength of the opposition driven by the Syrian masses. The battles raging in Damascus and across the rest of the country shows that the revolutionaries are a real, dynamic and armed force capable of confronting the dictatorship.

The West hasn’t intervened partly because of imperialist deadlock in the United Nations. As a result the question of whether the US could do it on its own comes up. It can’t.

Importantly, the Syrian revolutionaries, those doing the fighting for freedom, and many of the Syrian masses appear not to want Western intervention.

Victory to the Syrian revolution. Victory to the Syrian revolutionaries.

In the Sudan protests against big price increases have intensified.

In Bahrain the US supported Government suppresses its people with the help of Saudi troops.

In Spain miners striking against austerity marched into Madrid and hundreds fo thousands turn out to support them.

In Brazil a university workers’ strike for the last 2 months has closed 56 of the 59 Federal universities.

In Quebec the student strike of over 150,000 is gearing up for next semester. Guillaume Legault, one of the leaders of the strike, will speak at the Australian National University at 1 pm on Monday 30 July in room G 50 of the Hayden Allen Building.

In Egypt, workers in Mahala, the cradle of the revolution in a real sense, are on strike and the strikes are spreading.

In London customs workers and bus drivers will strike against austerity during the Olympics.

In Australia Coles/Toll Holdings workers have been on strike for 11 days to win parity in pay and conditions with Coles’ distribution workers in other centres.

In the US, a deeply alienated society with access to guns for almost all, 14 people have been shot and killed and 50 injured at a premiere of the latest Batman film the Dark Knight Rises. Obama sets the example with his drone strikes and the killing of innocents in foreign lands.

Meanwhile the almost irrelevancy that is the Gillard Labor Government is trying to combat further rumours about a leadership change or challenge. I have a simple comment about this, which some of you may have read before. It’s not the seller of the shit sandwich who is the problem. It’s the shit sandwich that is the problem.

I am at an interesting conference in Sydney called Historical Materialism 2012. I’ll give some more feedback after day 2 tomorrow but it has been good. The opening panel discussion on Friday morning was interesting.

It was basically about the way forward for the Left from 4 different speakers. For me, unsurprisingly, what was missing was a discussion about the need for a revolutionary worker’s party and the ways to build that. One speaker dealt with the issue in reverse talking about her move from the revolutionary left to the Greens.

Nevertheless it was thought provoking to hear the different contributions on the global profit rate, the degeneration of the ALP and the major parties’ visceral hatred of politics and the nature of protest movements and Australian exceptionalism (or lack thereof.)

The fact we were not discussing building a mass revolutioanry party of the working class is itself instructive. Of course it wasn’t the point of the conference and it may be unfair of me to raise it. I am looking forward tomorrow to Rick Kuhn’s discussion of Henryk Grossman, Marxist theorist and revolutionary activist.

To have your say on these and other issues, or to see what others are saying, hit the comments button. As with all posts on this site, comments close after 7 days.

‘Look over there’ said the evil angel. ‘It’s the devil.’

That’s apparently why we have to vote for the evil angel Labor Party – to help ward off the Tony Abbott devil.

It is a non-choice. The devil is an evil angel.

The two major parties agree on basic economic policy – neoliberalism. This is the idea that the market knows best; that we should privatise government enterprises, cut back on government spending on social welfare, public education, health and transport, and use the state to restrict unions.

Abbott can use weasel words all he likes but business wants greater workplace ‘flexibility’. Workchoices in some form will be back.

What is missing from the debate however is that Workchoices hasn’t really left. Labor’s Fair Work legislation kept about 90% of Workchoices.

Strikes are illegal except in certain very limited circumstances.

The threat of fines for ‘illegal’ strikes is enough to stop much industrial action.

At my workplace for example the Chainsaw Vice Chancellor sacked 13 of the 32 staff in the School of Music. The unwillingness of staff to strike (‘illegally’ as it would have been) has seen the campaign against the sackings defeated.

The VC has destroyed the School of Music despite a demonstration of 1000 in support and a well attended union meeting of over 300 without so much as a union gun being fired.

The VC can now turn his attention to delivering a rotten Enterprise Agreement and sacking the 150 staff and more he mooted before the School of Music debacle broke out.

This is happening under Labor’s industrial laws, laws which are strangling the union movement.

Labor and the Liberals often have similar policies. Oh, they might fight over the detail – Malaysia or Nauru for offshore torture of refugees; a do nothing carbon tax or a do nothing action plan for addressing global warming; cutting public services; sacking public servants; tax cuts for companies and the rich.

Many times they agree. The war in Iraq; the war in Afghanistan; the US Alliance; keeping Aborigines in subjugation, women oppressed, gay marriage off the agenda and much much more come to mind.

About 80% of the time the Opposition supports the Labor Government’s legislation.

It is true that they sometimes disagree. It is always the case in families that the siblings will fight, but they are still part of the same loving family, in this case a family managing capitalism.

The decline of Labor as a party of social democracy has a number of fathers.

It is not just falling profits across the globe since the end of the post war boom (with ups and downs since then) but the capitulation of the trade union movement, in particular its leadership, to fighting the bosses.

Class collaboration has replaced class conflict, most infamously in the Accord.

Industrially the result has been a massive fall in union membership.

Economically the result has been a massive shift of wealth from labour to capital.

As I have pointed out before the share of national income going to the bosses is at its highest since records began to be kept in 1960 and that to labour its lowest.

Politically the result has been a capitalist workers’ party becoming a CAPITALIST workers’ party and embracing neoliberalism with little resistance.

Hawke and Keating laid the ground work for Howard. Howard laid the groundwork for Rudd and Gillard. Gillard is laying the groundwork for Abbott.

Abbott might pursue Labor’s general agenda of attacking jobs, wages, social services and public servants with more gusto. He will introduce even more restrictive industrial relations laws. If we let him.

The way to fight Abbott is to strike against Gillard Labor and its rotten anti-working class policies.

Otherwise we won’t have built up our muscle to take on a resurgent reaction gathered around Tony Abbott.

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What to do to save the 440 jobs at Ford? And all the other jobs that supply Ford? And the car manufacturing industry in Australia?

Why don’t we nationalise the lot instead of giving billions to a group of companies whose expertise in judging the market has them pumping out gas guzzlers for an audience of none?

Labor started the car manufacturing industry in Australia as both a matter of national pride and defence and economic security.

Taxpayers have subsidised the industry to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars since.

The car industry is the symbol of manufacturing in Australia, the backbone of the idea that our nation makes things; that we are part of the productive world.

There are about 56000 workers in the car industry (suppliers and manufacturers) across Australia.

It is under threat from the high Australian dollar and inadequate management vision. So for example some years ago 80% of new cars on our roads were Australian made.

The rise and rise of the Australian dollar, driven by the resources boom, has reversed the figures so that now 86% of new cars on the road are imported.

As an aside, Rudd’s Resource Super Profits Tax on all minerals would have slowed the mining boom down a bit and so perhaps kept the dollar a little lower and thus helped keep a certain level of car manufacturing competitiveness in Australia.

The Productivity Commission estimates that Australian consumers and taxpayers provide a net subsidy per year of $1.6 billion to the car industry through tariffs, grants and tax concessions.

A car assistance package from 2009 to 2021 will cost $6.3 billion.

At the beginning of the year the Gillard Labor Government gave $34 million to Ford to boost fuel efficiency and emissions performance of some of its key models. The Prime Minister predicted this would create 300 new jobs. 

Ford have trousered the money and announced they will sack 440 staff at Geelong and Broadmeadows. In April last year Ford sacked 240 workers.

This follows action by Toyota who in April this year sacked 350 workers- over 7% of its workforce. Holden got rid of 100 jobs a week later. 

Instead of giving all this money to Ford, General Motors and Toyota, why doesn’t a Labor government with all those Labor values we hear so much about just nationalise the car manufacturers? 

Ah but that would be inefficient wouldn’t it? Well maybe, but in 2011 the industry exported $3.3 billion worth of cars and parts.

But let’s think outside the box a little here. The looming environmental crisis caused by capitalism’s love affair with fossil fuels continues apace.  

Imagine having an industry with a skilled workforce and sophisticated modern machinery tooled up to supply the expertise, the tools, the different modes of public transport and so on necessary to address this threat.

Put simply why doesn’t Labor nationalise Ford, Holden and Toyota as part of a plan to turn Australia into a completely renewable energy country by 2025 and to turn out not just solar panels and wind turbines but public transport in the form of buses, light rail and high speed trains?

That would not only save jobs; it would create them.

How could we pay for this?

Tax the rich. It’s their pollution that is destroying the planet. It’s their money that should save it, and jobs.

The strike of Toll Holdings workers and their picket at the  Coles’ distribution centre in Somerton tell us much about Australian society today.

The workers want the same pay and conditions as workers at other Coles’ distribution centres.  They don’t currently get that because they are employed by a labour contractor, Toll Holdings, whom Coles outsourced the labour supply recruitment and management to.

Their pay for example is approximately 20% less than workers at other centres doing exactly the same work.

Labour hire is Coles’ way of driving down ‘costs’ and making even more profit.

If Coles and Toll Holdings win this dispute workers at other distribution centres will be under pressure to cut their wages and conditions to the level of the Toll holdings workers.

If the bosses are successful, the Toll Holdings ‘lower wages and conditions’ model will spread, which is why for all the workers in the industry the strike and picket at Somerton are very important.

It is wages versus mega profits.

Last year the Coles supermarket chain made $1.16 billion in profit. Toll Holdings’ net revenue predictions are over $400 million this financial year.

While workers at the distribution centre are paid a pittance, the Coles’ Chief Executive Officer is on a salary package of  over $15 million.

The strike exposes the rottenness at the core of labor’s heart. No significant ALP member has supported the workers.

Anthony Albanese evidently gave $5 to the strike fund. This is a man earning $320,000. His memory supports them, his current reality doesn’t. So his support is meagre and begrudging. And he is one of the ‘better’ ones. It is Labor to a tee.

Under Labor’s industrial laws strikes are illegal except when bargaining a new enterprise agreement. These lines from a song come to mind.  ’When they jail a man for striking, it’s a rich man’ s country still.’  That is Labor’s  legacy.

The mood on the picket line is strong and united. When workers at another distribution centre refused to handle scab supplies they were ordered back to work under Labor’s rotten industrial laws for their ‘illegal’ action.

On Tuesday it is no  surprise the Supreme Court ordered some union officials and others not to participate in the strike.  The number of times the courts have ruled in favour of striking workers you can count on your fingers.

No surprise there. The courts are enforcing the laws of the 1% against the 99%. They are part of the 1% or perhaps more correctly part of the institutions of rule of the 1%.

The Labor Government has been silent on the strike and picket. They too are part of the institutions of rule of the 1%. In power they manage capitalism.

They support the profit system so they support Coles in its drive for more and more profit.

Yet the Labor Party comes out of the labour movement, or more correctly the trade union bureaucracy, a special layer in society who bargain with capital over the price of labour power. This explains why the ALP is a capitalist workers’ party.

In today’s environment where the ALP has embraced the dominant ideology of neoliberalism and loosened its links to the trade union bureaucracy, but not cut them, it is a CAPITALIST workers’ party.

The strike is having an effect. Coles’ shelves are emptying and not being re-stocked. The lessons?  We labour; they profit. Without us they are nothing.

At the time of writing (Tuesday night) it looks as if Coles and the police will try to break the picket line early tomorrow morning.

It is no accident that the most effective form of action, strikes and pickets, is under sustained attack from the 1% and their institutions, the courts, the police, the media, the politicians.

I will update the post when more information on the attempts at strike breaking occur, if they do.

Community and political organisations like Socialist Alternative have supported the picket. There has been a large community presence at the picket line, helping the workers in their just claim for parity of pay and conditions.

The court order against 27 named National Union of Workers’ officials and others makes it imperative for all supporters of the labour movement who can be there to attend and support the picket at the corner of Union and Somerton roads in Somerton in Melbourne.

If other unions gave support and their members walked off the job to help man the picket line, the strike would conclude successfully in a short period of time.

Of course to do that would mean breaking Julia Gillard’s industrial laws.

And that raises a wider point. It is the trade union bureaucracy and Labor Party which through their class collaborationist policies have seriously weakened the strength of the union movement over the last 30 years.

The Accord and enterprise bargaining, both ALP or union bureaucrat initiatives, have destroyed rank and file control of unions where it existed. They have concentrated power in the hands of the retailers of labour power, the officials.

They have resulted in making strikes and other industrial action illegal except in certain very limited circumstances.

At the heyday of the union movement, when membership was over 50% of the workforce, unions fought for better wages and conditions. They took on the bosses. They rarely do that today.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s in some years over 1200 strike days were ‘lost’ per thousand workers. Today the figure is around five. 

This collapse in class struggle has meant the unchallenged rise of neoliberalism and the shift, nay shovelling, of the wealth we workers produce to capital.

The figures show the stark reality of that shift. The share of national income going to capital today is at its highest since records began to be kept in 1960 and that to labour its lowest.

And still, as the Coles/Toll Holdings strike shows, the bosses want more.

This is an important fight. If the Coles/Toll holdings workers win other workers might feel confident to try to win better wages and conditions and claw back some of the wealth that the bosses have won from them over the last 30 years.

If Coles and Toll Holdings win, other bosses may feel emboldened to attack workers’ wages and conditions and when workers strike to try to smash picket lines.

The one sided 30 year class war of the bosses has produced a fight back by Toll Holdings workers. The deserve our support.

Here is a communiqué from the Victorian Trades Hall Council about the situation and how you can help.

These workers will continue to face economic hardship. Every day they continue a strike that we all benefit from is another day they don’t receive pay from their employer.

By making a donation to the account below you will ensure those that are brave enough to fight against militant employers are still able to feed their families and live with dignity.

Account Name: NUW Vic Coles Somerton Relief Fund
BSB Number: 063 074
Account Number: 10014540
Branch: Commonwealth Bank

If you can get to the picket line it is at the Coles Distribution Centre, Union Road and Somerton Road, Somerton. You will be most welcome.

If you are in Melbourne, get down to the picket line to support the workers there. Victory to the Toll Holdings’ workers at Coles!

There’s always one nutter at high profile public meetings isn’t there? Well today it was my turn to be the nutter.

At the Australian National University today a high flying panel which included Ken Henry of Henry Tax Review fame and Nobel laureate Sir James Mirrlees of British tax review fame talked about tax, and in particular Ken’s review released back in the dark ages of 2 and a bit years ago when Kevin Rudd was still Prime Minister.

It was the usual dreary neoliberal line up, all concerned with efficiency, except for one ray of sunshine, Patricia Apps. She lambasted the Henry Review for its further embrace of family taxation and the adverse impacts this will have on women workers.

She showed the impacts of Ken’s suggestions for a flatter tax system would be an increase in effective tax rates on workers.

I asked a question, which was more a comment about neoliberalism producing a fightback in Europe, the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement.

Ken had stressed looking at progressivity as a whole, not in relation to just income tax but in relation to the tax and transfer systems overall.

I made the point that even according to the OECD’s Divided We Stand report there had been a massive shift of wealth to the rich and that Australia’s tax and transfer system had done little to address that shift. In fact his changes would speed that transfer up.

‘Viewed as a whole’ the system has become less progressive. According to the ACTU the average tax rate on the bottom 20% of workers is 26.7%. In other words the people who own only 1% of Australia’s wealth and earn a pittance pay just under 27 cents in tax for every dollar they earn.

The figure for the top 20% of income earners is 34.5%.  So the people who own over 60% of the wealth in Australia and earn motzas in effect only pay 34.5 cents in every dollar of income they earn, a mere 7.8 cents more per dollar than the bottom 20%.

What Ken’s proposals will do is make that difference smaller.

His vision is for an expanded Commonwealth GST, and for the States to impose their own GST, a tax called a business expenditure tax to replace stamp duties. He wants a progressive land tax, which is really about attacking working class wealth to fund lower taxes for companies and the rich.

The usual bourgeois wet dreams about removing the exemption on fresh food, education, child care and health from the GST came up, as did increasing the rate. Unfortunately this seed may not fall upon the ground.

The impact on the working class and poor of these changes would be big. For example one suggestion at the discussion was to increase the rate from its current ten percent to 20%.

Supposedly the extra $15 or so billion from extending the GST base could be used to improve the life of the poor and working class. Pigs might fly. What the bosses want is company tax cuts and cuts to the top marginal tax rate.

Supposedly company tax cuts are all about benefiting workers. That must explain all those workers’ demonstrations for big business to pay less tax.

But hang on. According to the ATO, between 2005 and 2008 40% of big business paid no income tax. So what do we want; that no big business pay income tax?

And Ireland, with its 12.5% percent company tax rate turned out well, didn’t it?

Ken talked about filling in the holes in the tax base to produce more equitable outcomes. I agree one hundred percent. All those tens of billions of tax expenditure benefits that the rich receive should be swept aside.

he said that he dare not ask the question whether the resource rent tax was worth it. of course not. This pathetic little tax has been designed to give the impression of taxing the miners without actually doing so. It is an example of the degeneration of social democracy in Australia.

Ken made the point that to fund the expectations of the community taxes might have to rise. 

I argued that all across the developed world the response was for governments of whatever persuasion not to increase taxes on the rich and capital but to cut welfare spending and spending on public goods like health, education and transport, as well as shift the tax burden from capital to labour.

Apparently in response to me putting the discussion in terms of capital and labour Ken also said that the idea of a top marginal rate of 66% was a joke. I hadn’t mentioned it, but would say it doesn’t go far enough.

In France Jen-Luc Mélenchon from the Front de Gauche wanted a 100% tax on all income greater than 360,000 euros. That’s about $430,000.

Taxing all income greater than $500,000 at 100% sounds good to me, and is perfectly defensible.

He suggested his fringe benefits and superannuation changes were about progressive.  Ken, ever heard the words mickey mouse to describe reforms? If your FBT and super changes are the sum total of progressivity then god help us.

A progressive tax system in which the rich and powerful and companies begin to pay more, to pay their fair share, won’t be won from their table by being nice. Certainly tax reviews by the one percent for the one percent won’t change the fundamental inequalities of society. We’ll have to shake their table for more than crumbs to fall off.

Readers might also like to look at A left wing Budget? and Well Wayne, why not tax the rich?