En Passant

If there is any hope it lies in the proles. The most important battles in the weeks and months to come are likely to be by unions, in particular building unions. The Abbott government has signaled a brutal crackdown on the CFMEU and other building unions in the near future, especially through its soon to be revitalised Australian Building and Construction Commission.

To drive back the repressive state, we must join together with building unions to help them win their fight against repression and in their victory create the space for freedom to blossom.

Perhaps the difference in treatment in death is that police protect the profit system, whereas workers don’t. We workers make the profit for the bosses. We are expendable and our deaths at work are nothing to them compared to the death of a police officer.

By their eulogies shall ye know the bosses and their system.

One task for the Australian left is to link the fight for lives and against the bosses’ killing machine on building sites to the fight in Australia against the Australian ruling class’s killing machine in Afghanistan. That ruling class killing machine is in Afghanistan repressing Afghans to protect the system that produces Grocon’s safety practices and profits.

Having Grocon in charge of safety is like putting John Howard in charge of refugees. Only union reps on site can really help enforce safety. Only the ability to walk off the job without loss of pay over safety issues can really force the bosses to take the issue seriously. It has been a long long time since workers as workers have fought the bosses and their police so successfully and drawn in other workers in their own city and elsewhere. A long long time. What a great day.

Perhaps, just perhaps, it is Labor’s anti-worker policies that sees workers deserting it and some (though not that many) swinging to the Greens? Perhaps, just perhaps, it is Labor’s anti-worker policies that sees or will see many workers holding their noses and voting for the Liberal or National Parties or even Bob Katter’s Australian Party?

Far better to blame a bogey man party like the Greens than to actually analyse why Labor is on the nose with workers.

What does Labor stand for? Nothing I believe in or want,  even this side of the revolution. War? Yes, from East Timor to Afghanistan Labor is a party of warmongers. Imperialism? Yes. Its support for the US Alliance is a logical bourgeois analysis of what is in the best interests of Australian capitalism. Attacking aborigines? Yes, [...]

The only way to smash the ABCC is to strike and cut off the flow of profits to the building bosses. Workers did that in 1969 with Clarrie O’Shea. They struck and smashed the penal powers then. They can do the same today with the ABCC.

The ABCC is not about stamping out lawlessness but stamping out building unions, the one group of unions still committed to defending their membership by sometimes taking industrial action over shoddy work and safety practices and defending jobs and wages.

The ‘crime’ these unions commit is being real unions.

Why do we bother with elections if Clive and Tom and Marius and the other few thousand big boys (and occasional big girl) control our lives? Why don’t we just let them decide things? Oh, we do.

Julia Gillard is the Peter Reith of the Labor Party. Of course she’s more nuanced, more articulate and has more influence over the trade union movement than Reith. That makes her more dangerous to workers and more useful to the bosses. Her value to capital and closeness to the trade union and Labor Party bureaucrats explains why, if [...]