En Passant

If we want to fight Abbott, we need to build a fight back beyond parliament – on the streets, on campuses and, most centrally, in our workplaces, where in our millions workers have real power. Already there are protests in defence of refugee rights and for same-sex marriage planned in the first few weeks of the Abbott government. We can guarantee there will be strikes. The new round of attacks, while profits are sacrosanct, will see to that.That means we need to build a political alternative, a new socialist movement that doesn’t think it can win change through parliament, but instead looks to the struggles outside of parliament as the basis of a working class mass movement to overturn the whole rotten system. We are a long way from that yet, but we have to and can make a start now.

The spin from Labor is that disunity cost them the election. This is fantasy land stuff. If only they had all united behind rabid neoliberalism then Labor would still be in power. Yeah, right. I have a bridge in Sydney to sell you too.

The disunity theme means that the real reasons – Labor’s massive shift to the right economically and socially over the last 3 decades and the collapse of class struggle over that period – can be and will be ignored by the neoliberals who are the ALP.

There is an alternative. Its name is struggle.

With the notion that Labor is any better than the Liberals on refugees now dispensed with, what else are we left with? A contest between two parties beholden to big business, both equally committed to confronting the end of the mining boom with cutbacks and austerity. Two parties who refuse to take any meaningful action on climate change. Two parties willing to spend whatever it takes on militarism and border protection, but who refuse to provide decent health, education and social welfare

Australian Prime Minister Rudd thought that support for refugees was so weak that he could get away with implementing this murderous new policy with no opposition. The passionate response by thousands of people, not just in Melbourne but across the country, indicates that it doesn’t have to be this way. The road ahead, under Abbott or Rudd, will be long and bitter. But the uplifting protests of the last few weeks should galvanise every supporter of refugees to get onto the streets and join the struggle.

I am proud of banners that say F**k Labor. This expresses the justified anger many have with Labor over its plans to deport asylum seekers to Papua New Guinea. It is part of the Left relating to that section of society disgusted with the ALP’s actions and which is an audience for ideas of not just anger and rage against Labor but understanding why Labor does this. The real hope is in the ten thousand people who demonstrated last weekend against Labor’s disgraceful action and who will continue to fight for refugees.

Panos Petrou in Socialist Worker US writes that the resistance to austerity and social crisis in Greece has united behind a workers’ occupation of the state TV and radio station ERT after the government – for the first time since Greece was ruled by a military junta – tried to shut down the broadcaster.

As the BLF used to say: ‘If you don’t fight, you lose.’ The stark choice facing students and staff at Universities today is to fight to defend higher education or to surrender.

Let’s build the campaigns against the many rotten aspects of capitalism today. Let’s understand they are all linked and that ultimately it is only in the struggle against the system that its systemic repressions can be challenged and ultimately overcome. Workers have that power. The struggles today if they are strong and militant enough can roll back racism.

However since racism is integral to the rule of capital in Australia we cannot defeat it unless ultimately we defeat capitalism. In the struggle today lies the future.

Only overthrowing the current system can abolish the racism inherent in society, racism that breaks out regularly in football. That doesn’t mean waiting for the revolution. It means fighting racism in all its forms here and now.

It means defending refugees, defending Aborigines, defending 457 visa workers and making demonstrations for freedom and justice bigger and better, dogging Abbott and Gillard wherever they go and challenging the very system that produces the sickness in society that is the racism of capitalism.

It means supporting workers who have come here from across the globe who are in struggle and challenging the rule of capital. And it means building an organisation that links the various oppressions that arise to their underlying cause – capitalism. That is what Socialist Alternative is trying to do. Join with us in the fight for a world free of racism.

Today the capitalist system is in crisis internationally. It is inflicting experiences on people that undermine neoliberal ideas in the eyes of millions. The struggle against this austerity and the system is also, with various ups and downs, developing internationally. If we want ideas to change, and we do, our job as socialists is to raise the level of that struggle. We also need to make sure that at the heart of the struggle is a political movement systematically arguing for a real change in the system.