FREEDOM FOR THE REFUGEES! NO TO OFFSHORE OR ONSHORE DETENTION! BUILD A PRO-WORKING CLASS REFUGEE RIGHTS MOVEMENT

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March 20 – Thousands of people have protested in recent weeks against the Abbott regime’s brutal war on refugees. The latest atrocity to spark protest was a rampage against refugees by guards at Australia’s Manus Island detention centre in PNG. On February 17, these guards unleashed murderous violence. Backed up by PNG police – who like other state institutions in Papua New Guinea are largely subservient to Australian imperialism – they attacked the detainees with sticks and machetes, murdering 24 year-old Kurdish asylum seeker, Reza Berati, and injuring 77 other refugees.

The recent large pro-refugee rights rallies have brought out a wide variety of people. Many are youth passionately opposed to racism. Some are small-l liberals who see the cruelty against refugees as a blot on the copybook of an otherwise fair society. Yet the despicable treatment of refugees is actually typical of the record of capitalist Australia – from genocidal terror against this country’s first peoples to the anti-Chinese pogroms of the late 1800s and right through to the 2005 white supremacist riot at Cronulla Beach. Indeed, just three days before the Manus Island rampage, supporters of slain Aboriginal youth TJ Hickey marked ten years of the cover up of his murder by racist police in Redfern. The previous week, one of the four police officers who were surrounding an Aboriginal woman, Sheila Oakley, in her own home south of Brisbane, barbarically fired a taser straight into her eye and blinded it.

The Coalition’s war on refugees is naked. Scott Morrison and Tony Abbott rant hardline refugee bashing speeches. ALP politicians have made some criticisms of Morrison’s lies about the Manus events. But, in case anyone thought that the ALP was considering shifting its own racist policy, ALP immigration spokesman, Richard Marles, made his party’s stance all too clear:

“We cannot afford for the Manus Island detention facility to fall over.”
“It is the cornerstone of Australia’s strategy in terms of reducing the flow of boats from Indonesia.”
- ABC News Online, 19 February

Indeed, it was the Keating ALP government that first introduced mandatory detention in 1992. And let’s not forget that the Rudd government Version 2.0 introduced the extreme policy of sending all refugee arrivals to the Manus hellhole. The ALP leaders have as much of the blood of Reza Berati on their hands as does the right wing Coalition!

There are some within Labor ranks that do oppose aspects of the war on refugees. However, the ALP leadership fully embraces anti-refugee racism because that flows naturally from their support for the capitalist order – a system of exploitation that necessarily compels the ruling class to promote racism in order to divide and divert the working class people that they exploit and thus prevent the exploited masses from rising up against them. Today, as the ultra-rich bosses intensify their attacks on workers’ unions and savagely slash jobs – from WesTrac to Holden to Qantas – they and their hounds in government are intensifying the scapegoating of refugees and migrants. That’s why if the working class is going to be able to focus its own against the powerful capitalist enemy then it must actively challenge racist scapegoating of refugees. Mobilise trade union power to demand: Close all the detention centres! Residency with full citizenship rights for all refugees and migrants imprisoned in Manus Island, Christmas Island, Villawood and everywhere else!

Importantly, at recent pro-refugee actions there has been a presence from some unions including the MUA, Teachers Federation and ASU. This now needs to be urgently converted from the presence of a small number of officials to the actual mass mobilisation of union ranks – thereby laying the basis for actual industrial action. Because striking workers can bring industrial production to a standstill, the working class has the power to defeat all the schemes of the racist, rich ruling class. But how can mass union support be achieved? It is not simply a matter of lobbying union officials. To be able to win significant union support, we must convince the most active layers of the unions that defending refugee rights is an important part of bolstering the union’s very ability to resist the greedy bosses. That means pro-refugee demonstrations need to feature slogans in their rally leaflets that clearly point out how defending refugees is crucial for strengthening workers’ unity across racial lines and achieving the kind of solidarity that can lead to the defeat of the powerful capitalist bosses. The refugee rights movement must bring together the fight for refugee rights with the struggle for workers emancipation into one, unbeatable whole. Continue reading →

MOBILISE UNITED ACTION OF ABORIGINAL PEOPLE, TRADE UNIONS AND “ETHNIC” COMMUNITIES TO DEMAND: JUSTICE FOR TJ, JAIL FOR THE RACIST MURDERING COPS

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MOBILISE UNITED ACTION OF ABORIGINAL PEOPLE,
TRADE UNIONS AND “ETHNIC” COMMUNITIES TO DEMAND:
JUSTICE FOR TJ, JAIL FOR THE RACIST MURDERING COPS

It’s one of the most horrific crimes imaginable: a police vehicle ramming the back wheel of a 17-year-old boy’s bicycle and sending him flying through the air to be impaled on a spiked metal fence. Ten years ago, this is exactly what happened to an Aboriginal boy called TJ Hickey after racist cops in another police vehicle chased him through the streets of Redfern. Then, violating the standard emergency procedure of sawing off the fence so that the stake could be carefully removed in hospital, police barbarically ripped TJ from the fence and threw him to the ground. Even as TJ lay bleeding, police proceeded to search him rather than immediately call for an ambulance! The next day, TJ died of his gruesome injuries.

TJ’s killing has been followed by ten years of cover up by the police, courts and various governments. In the meantime, the rate at which black people die at the hands of state authorities continues unabated. In one case in January 2012, Kwementyaye Briscoe died in Alice Springs after being taken into supposed “protective custody” for merely being drunk. Even NT coroner, Greg Cavanagh, admitted that police flung Briscoe onto a desk, left him bleeding on the ground, dragged him along the floor to his cell and failed to give him any medical treatment even though they knew he was by then in a comatose state. Their heinous actions caused Kwementyaye to die. Since 1980 over 500 Aboriginal people have died in custody.

Without any doubt, Aboriginal people cop the worst police brutality in Australia. However, the racist authorities also target working class youth of African, Asian, Islander and Middle Eastern origin. Last June, 17 year-old Sudanese youth, Einpwi Amom was tasered by police even when he was handcuffed and surrounded by six cops. Einpwi’s alleged “crime” was that he had sworn at officers. When Einpwi tried to run away from them, he hit his head on the stairs of Blacktown station. He lost consciousness for two minutes only to wake finding cops brutalising – and then tasering – him. Fortunately, a friend managed to capture footage of the attack on her phone. Yet such cop brutality is all too common in working class suburbs. Even low-income white people – such as public housing tenants – can face police harassment. Indeed, the simplest Marxist analysis shows that the main role of the police, courts, army, Royal Commissions, prisons and other state organs in a capitalist country is to enforce the rule of the rich, big business owners over the working class that they exploit. Although cops sometimes do catch real criminals, whenever the exploited masses stand up for their rights the police’s main function becomes all too clear. Thus, in August 2012, mounted police in Melbourne violently attacked the picket lines of building workers who were struggling against the attempt of greedy tycoon Daniel Grollo’s firm, Grocon, to undercut workplace safety and drive out the CFMEU union.

The racism of the police force comes directly from their role as the bully boys for the ruling class in Australia. The all important unity of the working class is constantly threatened by the bosses’ divide and rule tactics in which whipping up racism plays the lead role. And the ruling class seeks to divert onto Aboriginal people and non-white “ethnic” communities the masses’ frustration about the constantly declining state of social services and their day to day basics of existence. But the ruling class’ oppression of Aboriginal people has an added dimension – it is aimed at perpetuating and justifying the conquest of the first peoples of this land. Indeed, the “culture” of the police and legal system in this country is inherited from one of their major founding functions – to drive Aboriginal people from their land, to carry out murderous “expeditions” against Aboriginal people who resisted and to at various times attempt outright genocide.

Yet, despite this vicious capitalist state determination to bury the truth about TJ’s murder, his family has courageously continued to demand justice. Upon every anniversary of the police crime against TJ, they and their anti-racist supporters have marched in protest. This year’s 10th Anniversary March will rally at 10:30am, February 14 at the corner of George and Phillips Streets in Waterloo. Trotskyist Platform urges all our friends to join this march and to do so understanding that no justice will be granted by any benevolent act of the racist, capitalist authorities. It will have to be won by united action of all those targeted by the state that murdered TJ – Aboriginal people, militant trade unionists, ethnic minorities and the poor.

JUSTICE FOR TJ CAN STILL BE WON BY THE UNITED FORCE OF ALL THOSE WHO ARE TARGETED BY THE SAME STATE THAT MURDERED HIM

Those running the campaign for TJ have sincerely been through every legal process in the book in their quest for justice. First, they had to bear listening to the findings of a police inquiry into TJ’s death that was, as expected, a total cover up. Then the coronial inquiry was yet another whitewash. Eyewitnesses who saw TJ’s bike being rammed were prevented from testifying and the bike itself was held by the police and not presented to the coroner. Then, last April, TJ’s mother, Gail Hickey, and the Indigenous Social Justice Association met NSW Attorney General, Greg Smith. Smith made vague promises but ten months later nothing – of course – has happened. The state institutions have continued to cover up TJ’s murder whether NSW has been administered by the ALP regime that was in power when TJ was killed or by the current conservative coalition. Federal governments have impeded justice – and will continue to do so – whether it is the Liberal/Nationals or the ALP or even the ALP/Greens who are in power. With the authorities slamming one door after another, some involved in the campaign have become demoralised and fear that justice can never be won. Instead, they think that the best that can be achieved are token gestures such as an apology from the NSW parliament. Yet what the denial of justice for TJ really proves is that justice certainly cannot be won through the current presiding strategy of the campaign. The hope that in some corner of the system there will be someone willing to stand up for justice has been dashed every step of the way. All the whitewashes demonstrate this. Rather than appealing to state institutions, justice for victims of police brutality can only be won by mobilising in opposition to this state. A united opposition of all those who are ultimately in the gun sights of the racist, bosses’ state. A campaign that is so uncompromising that the authorities out of fear are forced to concede justice.

Many Aboriginal people do understand that the state authorities are their enemy. This was seen in the heroic February 2004 struggle of hundreds of mainly Aboriginal youth in Redfern. In response to TJ’s murder, they held back heavily armed cops in a nine hour pitched battle that resonated with and inspired oppressed people all over the world. This Redfern struggle, along with the November 2004 resistance on Palm Island (that saw up to 15% of the island rise up to burn down the police station and courthouse in response to the whitewash of the police murder of Mulrunji Doomadgee) will one day take its place alongside the heroic deeds of Pemulwuy, Yagan, Windradyne, Jandamarra and many others who led Aboriginal resistance to the colonial invaders. The heroes of Redfern and Palm Island demonstrate the courage needed to really oppose the racist, rich people’s state. But to triumph today, Aboriginal resistance must also have behind it the support of “ethnic” communities (who themselves face racism), anti-racist activists and most crucially the industrial power of the organised workers movement. Once big business owners who run the country see their profits being hurt by trade union industrial action against racist police terror then they will be forced to rein in their marauding thugs in blue.

How the idea of working class action in defence of Aboriginal people can be made a reality was seen in the campaign in defence of Palm Island resistance hero Lex Wotton. The Sydney-based campaign simply demanded that the enemy drop all charges against Lex. It made no appeals to any state institution whatsoever to be a vehicle for justice. Instead, the movement openly appealed to the common class interests that workers have in defending Lex and in opposing state oppression of Aboriginal people. Thus the calls for the rally in the lead up to Lex’s trial emphasised that:

The subjugation of Aboriginal people is an extreme form of the repression that the authorities are also unleashing against trade unionists who stand up for workers’ rights. The ABCC construction industry police are spying on and intimidating CFMEU construction union members and continue to initiate jail-carrying charges against individual union activists.

Thus the movement was able to win the support of the Sydney Branch of the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA). This culminated in a stop work action by all Sydney port workers on 7 November 2008, the day Lex was being sentenced by a Townsville Court. Although it was not powerful enough to stop Lex being jailed, the burgeoning movement and the MUA stop work compelled the authorities to give Lex a notably lighter sentence than the ten years plus sentence that they had been planning.

Today, with the Abbott regime openly threatening repression against unions, especially the CFMEU, there is much potential to show workers the common interest that they have with others targeted by the bosses’ state – like Aboriginal people. A strategy like the one that the campaign for Lex’s freedom was waged on is what we need for the campaign for TJ. However, success will not simply depend upon what the campaign itself does. To ensure that the MUA stop work in defence of Lex is the norm rather than the exception for the union movement, we must struggle to replace the pro-ALP ideology and leadership that currently dominates our unions with a Marxist program of struggle based on opposition to this racist, capitalist state. As that struggle develops then not only will we be able to more powerfully fight for justice for TJ, Mulrunji, Eddie Murray and Brazilian student Roberto Laudisio, to sadly name but a few of the victims of racist state terror in Australia. We will eventually be able to sweep away the entire capitalist state so that not only horrific racist state crimes – like the murder of TJ – but also the incessant exploitation of long suffering workers will be but things of the past. Justice for TJ!

PDF Version of Article: TJ10thAnniversaryRally1_for_colour_print

STOP CAPITALIST JOB SLASHING THROUGH CLASS STRUGGLE! FORCE BOSSES TO INCREASE HIRING AT THE EXPENSE OF THEIR PROFITS!

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STOP CAPITALIST JOB SLASHING THROUGH CLASS STRUGGLE!

FORCE BOSSES TO INCREASE HIRING AT THE EXPENSE OF THEIR PROFITS! 

8 January 2014 – Billionaire Kerry Stokes has been “busy” cruising around in his luxury yacht. He is riding high. But the same can’t be said for the workers whose toil made him his fortune.  Last month, workers at one of Stokes’ Seven Group subsidiaries, heavy machinery supplier WesTrac, were told that 630 of them would be retrenched.  These workers are among tens of thousands who are being laid off across the country.  Last September, Telstra announced that it was axing 1,100 workers. And this is after its owners made an obscene $3.9 billion profit last year. Although the media like to focus on jobs lost through off-shoring, these recent Telstra cuts – like most job slashing in Australia – has little to do with that. Most of the Telstra jobs axed in this latest round are those of line maintenance technicians – hardly roles that can be off-shored. Telstra’s latest profit grab is about cutting jobs by driving remaining workers harder and by reducing service quality to the public.

What has especially highlighted the jobs crisis was General Motors’ announcement last month that it will axe 2900 jobs and end manufacturing in Australia in 2017. This follows Ford’s announcement that it will slash 1,200 jobs and stop manufacturing here. The combined effect of the closures on parts manufacturers means that over 50,000 workers in all could lose their jobs in the automotive sector. This will not only be devastating for workers but shows the basic irrationality of capitalism in that skills built up over many decades will now be lost. And the trend of workers being ripped away from permanent jobs in unionised workplaces and dumped into insecure, casual jobs – where workers have little chance of learning skills and enjoy minimal rights – will be all the more deepened. As usual, the car bosses have justified the layoffs by crying poor. This is a scam! The $153 million loss that GM made last year in its Australian Holden operations – after paying for fat management salaries – is dwarfed by the $4.9 billion profit that it made worldwide.  Thus GM’s owners, who include billionaire Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway which holds a $1.4 billion portion, would only lose 3% of their profits if they kept the jobs of the soon to be axed Holden workers.

Enough is enough! It is high time for the working class and its allies to act. We cannot allow the likes of Kerry Stokes’, whose Seven Group made a huge $486 million profit last year, to get away with his firm axing jobs at its WesTrac subsidiary just so that he can suck even higher profits to buy even more extravagant mansions. We need to say to the capitalist owners: we are simply not going to allow you to slash jobs. We are going to force you to keep employing more people than you think would be ideal for maximising your profits and you will have to wear this. And if that means you are going to have to sell one of your luxury yachts and delay buying your private jet – then tough!  And if having a larger workforce means that you will be pushed to lower your prices in order to sell the extra production that a larger workforce could bring then all the better for it!

However, the corporate bosses-loving Abbott regime sure isn’t going to help us stop company owners from slashing jobs! Indeed, many in his ministry seemed to be partly happy about the crumbling of the car industry – since they know that workers in this sector are a bastion of trade unionism and once upon a time even had a reputation for class struggle militancy. Yet whether it is the ALP, the Greens or the Palmer United Party, none of the opposition parties also ever talk of measures to make it illegal for the corporate bosses to cut jobs. Thus, while the ALP leaders would actually like to be able to appease their working class support base by campaigning to save the jobs of GM and other workers, their subservience to the capitalist “order” and its principle that business owners have the “right” to do whatever it takes to maximise their profits means that they are completely incapable of preventing the job cuts. All the ALP could propose over the crisis facing Holden workers is to offer more handouts to GM – an idea they soon dropped. For the over $2 billion that governments handed over to the Holden bosses over the last 12 years did not stop them from axing their workers’ jobs. In the end, what handouts to companies actually do is to divide workers as workers in other sectors, whose taxes in good part fund government handouts, are made to feel resentful that they are propping up workers in a particular sector when their own jobs are also on the line. Indeed, any handout to GM effectively means that workers are, in good part through their taxes, handing over tens of millions of dollars to the likes of the billionaire Warren Buffett. One is reminded of the obscene spectacle that took place in November 2008 when the heads of GM, Ford and Chrysler flew into Washington to beg the U.S. government for a bailout, all arriving in their luxurious private jets!

If the Capitalists Can’t Provide Jobs for Workers Then the Economy Should Be Taken Out of Their Hands

Despite the nature of all the current parliamentary parties, the working class is far from powerless to stop job cuts. Strong union industrial action could force companies planning job cuts to retain their workers. For such action could compel business owners to realise that industrial action could cost them far more than the profits they will save by having a smaller workforce. The potential to stop the job cuts at Telstra and WesTrac is especially strong as not only could workers’ strikes shut down their hugely profitable operations in Australia but many of the workers in these firms are union members.  Moreover, solidarity action by workers at other parts of Stokes’ Seven Group – including Channel 7, equipment hire company Coates Hire and lighting supplier AllightSykes – could really bulldoze his moves to bury jobs at his WesTrac subsidiary.

The situation is slightly different at Holden given GM plans to shut down its manufacturing in Australia. Yet, if Holden workers were to occupy GM plants at Elizabeth (in Adelaide) and Port Melbourne insisting that they will not allow GM to sell the billions of dollars in equipment there then these workers would find thousands of workers at supplier companies and hundreds of thousands of other sympathetic workers supporting their battle to save their jobs.  However, to override GM’s job slashing also requires workers at GM’s profitable operations in places like South Korea and the U.S. to take solidarity action with Holden workers here. Workers at GM’s South Korean subsidiaries have already waged militant struggles and although U.S. GM workers have not taken such action for years, U.S. GM plants are still among the most unionised sites in the U.S.A.  In 1998, the knock-on effect from a 54 day strike by over 9,000 workers at GM’s Flint component plant in Michigan ended up shutting down nearly 30 GM assembly plants and 100 components plants across the U.S. and ended up costing GM bosses nearly $3 billion.

However, if we are going to have the struggle that we need, there needs to be a radical change in our unions. Reflecting the politics of their ALP mates in parliament, most current union leaders accept the notion that for workers’ jobs to be safe, company profits must be maximised. Yet it is precisely in the drive to maximise profits that bosses are slashing jobs. The dominance of this ideology that workers’ welfare depends on capitalist business success has allowed the bosses to gut workers’ rights, casualise large chunks of the workforce and weaken our unions without our side putting up the resistance that could have smashed these attacks. Furthermore, the union tops’ approach makes the workers movement vulnerable to bosses’ threats that unless workers accept reduced conditions, profits will suffer and the bosses will be “forced” to cut jobs. This is precisely the threat that Toyota is making as they callously feed off workers fears following the Holden layoffs.

Workers at unionised workplaces will be the spearhead in the fight to defend jobs and a powerful struggle waged by these workers could spur on the building of unions at currently non-unionised sites. However, in the struggle against job losses, we need to unite union workers with workers at currently non-unionised sites as well as with unemployed workers and with working class youth worried about their future job prospects. To build such united struggle, we should launch a campaign of industrial action and rallies to demand laws that restrict the “right” of profitable businesses to slash jobs. In waging a struggle for such demands we should have no illusions that the pro-capitalist governments will in any way be on our side. Instead, we should see our fight as being aimed at forcing concessions from the enemy – just like in the past our struggles have won laws granting certain minimum leave entitlements and maximum working hours. Among the demands that such a movement could fight for are:

That no enterprise can retrench workers’ jobs if it or its parent company is currently making a profit.

That no firm can slash jobs if its total profit over the previous four years exceeds the total wages of all the potentially axed workers.

An end to and a reversal of all the draconian public sector job cuts which Liberal and ALP state governments have implemented in recent years and which Abbot’s Liberal/National Coalition want to deepen at the Federal level.

Fighting for such demands will help start to mobilise action around the truth that fighting to save workers’ jobs means forcing the bosses to wear lower profits. As a class-struggle movement for jobs develops, our demands should not stop with this. We must emphasise the demand for full employment at the capitalist bosses’ expense – through reducing the working week with no loss in workers’ wages to the level needed to spread the available work around among all those who want to work.

As we fight for such demands, the capitalists will howl that this will drive them out of business – just as they do every time workers call for a pay rise. To this we must respond: if you cannot operate enterprises in a way that provides jobs for workers then you should not own these enterprises. They need to be ripped from your hands and brought into public ownership so that production can be planned to provide jobs for all and to utilise all available labour to serve society. However, not only are all current parliamentary parties thoroughly hostile to this idea of confiscating the factories, banks, transport systems and mines from the capitalists, any party that in the future attempted to do so would face fierce resistance from the judiciary, police, army and top echelons of the bureaucracy. For the current state apparatus has unbreakable, generations-old connections to the rich capitalist elite. That is why for our struggles to triumph, they must culminate in the working class leading all of the oppressed in a revolutionary movement to sweep away the current capitalist state and to build a new workers state that will implement a socialist system – a system based on people’s common ownership of the economy.

Turning the Slogan The Workers United Will Never Be Defeated Into a Reality

Key to unlocking the necessary fight back is to expose any illusions that local workers’ jobs can be protected through collaborative schemes with the bosses. Today, manufacturing union heads run a “Make it Here Or Jobs Disappear” campaign that appeals for government support for manufacturing firms and protectionist laws to favour local firms over overseas producers. Yet, the experience with Holden proves how little handouts to companies actually guarantee jobs. Protectionist measures don’t save jobs either for just as one country can take measures to protect its own firms, other countries can do the same. In the end all that protectionist appeals do is to set workers in different nations against each other while their greedy bosses – happy that workers are divided and looking out for the interest of their “own” firms rather than uniting against the bosses internationally – are left laughing all the way to the bank.

Yet, despite the failure of protectionist appeals to save jobs, most union leaders continue to make such calls because they fear the alternative: a strategy based on hard-fought industrial action. About the only time that most union leaders are taking any stand against job losses is if these layoffs are the result of off-shoring. The capitalist exploiters indeed do seek out lower paid labour they can find overseas just as they seek to replace workers here with lower-paid youth. However, our response to off-shoring should not be to counterpose the interests of local workers to their overseas comrades. That only serves to undercut the global workers’ unity that we so badly need if we are to defeat job slashing by multi-national corporate giants like Rio Tinto, Ford and GM, all of which have operations in many countries. Instead, we should say: we are happy if our working class comrades overseas get new jobs but there should be absolutely no job cuts locally. Furthermore, when a firm sets up a new operation in any country, we will fight for those workers to get the same conditions as the best paid workers at any of the firm’s global operations. Yet, instead of such an approach, Laborite union leaders promote divisive slogans like “Stop Aussie Jobs Going Overseas!” Similarly, instead of uniting the struggle of local workers with 457-Visa workers in the fight to defend the conditions of all workers, the current line of most union leaders is to make the divisive call to “Keep Out Guest Workers.”

We can see how campaigns that pit local workers against their overseas counterparts play out when we look at the results of the July 2012 “Local Workers First” rally in Perth. The trigger for the rally were moves by greedy billionaire Gina Rinehart and the likes of Rio Tinto to bring in overseas labour for their projects. Yet, when this same Rio Tinto announced last November that it was axing 1,100 jobs – including those of many Aboriginal workers – at its Gove alumina refinery in the NT, union leaders failed to organise any serious opposition. They could mobilise nearly 10,000 people to march for the blatantly divisive demand that Australian workers’ jobs be put ahead of those of overseas workers yet when capitalists are actually slashing Australian workers’ jobs in a move that had nothing to do with bringing in overseas workers, the union officials concerned didn’t want to organise any resistance at all. By channelling local workers concerns about their jobs into opposition to overseas workers, pro-ALP bureaucrats have diverted workers from the struggle that is actually needed – the one against the job-slashing exploiters.

Furthermore, consider what the July 2012 Perth rally means for potential efforts to save jobs in the automotive sector. Among the guest workers being rebuffed by the “Local Workers First” campaign are Korean workers. Yet, workers in South Korea’s GM plants are key to any struggle to stop job losses at Holden, not only because South Korea is where GM’s profits could seriously be hurt by solidarity strikes with Holden workers but because currently South Korean workers are much more willing to take action against their bosses than Australian workers are. Last month, rail workers in South Korea courageously faced down violent police attacks in a weeks long anti-privatisation struggle that triggered massive solidarity rallies by other workers. Yet, how in hell are Korean workers going to be convinced to risk their jobs to support their Australian sisters and brothers at Holden when they see Australian workers marching to put Australian workers ahead of overseas workers?

The influence of Laborite nationalism is so insidious that even many left wing groups like Socialist Alternative (Socialist Alternative, 3 July 2012) and the Communist Party of Australia (The Guardian, 11 July 2012) hailed the July 2012 “Local Workers First” rally. To be sure, these groups sought to distance themselves from the most jingoistic aspects of the rally. Yet, no matter in how cleansed a form they present it, as the rally’s main banner slogan “WA Kids Miss Out When Miners Use Overseas Workers” made all too clear, this is a poisonous campaign that pits local workers against their overseas comrades. It is a complete violation of the main call of The Communist Manifesto, which all nominally Marxist groups claim to stand on, “Workers of All Countries Unite.” It is not that there are no healthy feelings of solidarity toward overseas workers amongst sections of the Australian working class. After all, on January 2, officials of the MUA, CFMEU and the Rail, Tram and Bus Union held a rally outside the South Korean Consulate in solidarity with Korean rail workers. Yet what is needed is not only a show of solidarity but Australian workers truly standing as one with their overseas comrades. As The Communist Manifesto stresses:

The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality ….

That means just as at an individual workplace one group of workers should not ask the boss to favour them at the expense of other workers, workers in one country should not ask capitalists to favour them at the expense of their overseas comrades.

Trotskyist Platform works to contribute to the building of union leadership that will be based on The Communist Manifesto’s principles. We do, of course, understand that capitalists hire guest workers in order to drive down wages. Yet, we maintain that this should be entirely met by union demands for guest workers to be given the same wages as the best paid local workers, to be given citizenship rights and to be fully unionised and not at all by divisive demands to “keep out guest workers.” If you understand that the only way to protect jobs is by struggle against job-slashing bosses then you will do everything to build workers unity – without which struggles are doomed to failure. That is why our unions must also oppose racist scapegoating of Aboriginal people, refugees and “ethnic” communities which is used by the exploiting class to divert workers’ anger away from the true source of their problems – the corporate bigwigs. Kerry Stokes epitomises how the capitalists use such methods. Although Stokes likes to present himself as an enlightened person – all the better to promote his Asian business interests – the Channel 7 station that he owns churns out a stream of hostile stereotyping against the likes of refugees. How better for Kerry Stokes to divert workers at his WesTrac subsidiary from the fact that it is his greed that is the sole cause of the job cuts there!

The class struggle leadership of the unions that needs to be built must be linked to a revolutionary party that will organise the workers struggle in all political arenas. Such a party would draw around the class struggle all those downtrodden by capitalism – from Aboriginal people suffering terrible racism, to “ethnic” youth, to working class youth facing joblessness and to low-income women and single mothers facing hostile stigmatisation and enforced poverty. We badly need such a struggle against capitalism. For capitalism has proven that it cannot guarantee workers’ livelihoods and periodically falls into crises that bring untold suffering – like the Great Depression of the 1930s and the recent Great Recession that has ravaged the masses in Europe, America and the rest of the capitalist world. If workers here did not suffer the same unemployment level during this recent crisis it is only because the Australian economy was saved by surging exports to socialistic China’s booming state-owned steel and energy producers.  Yet China’s ruling Communist Party is moving that country to focus more on services and high-end manufacturing – that is, to an economy that will need smaller increases in imports of Australian iron ore and liquefied gas. This means that when the inevitable, next capitalist crisis hits or if this one lingers for much longer, even socialistic China will not be able save the Australian economy. Unless we reject the capitalists’ “right” to sack workers whenever their profits demand it, as part of beginning to challenge their whole system, we will end up here with the catastrophic situation that our working class sisters and brothers in Greece and Spain face right now – where three out of every five young workers is unemployed.

 

Defend Syria FROM Imperialist-Imposed Regime Change!

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Sydney, June 15: Hundreds march through the streets of Sydney to oppose the NATO-backed Syrian “Rebels.” Secular Syrian community members united together in the action with supporters originating from other parts of the Middle East as well as a core of anti-imperialist leftists. Trotskyist Platform had a contingent at the rally carrying the banner shown below. There is also a slowly growing number of leftists who are not part of any group but are joining the Hands Off Syria rallies. This is despite most of the left groups in Australia – including Socialist Alternative, Solidarity and Socialist Alliance – supporting the imperialist-backed “Rebels.” Especially as the massive scale of imperialism’s drive to impose regime change on Syria becomes increasingly clear – via their “Free Syrian Army” proxies, their extreme religious fundamentalist allies and directly through U.S. and British special forces/intelligence operatives on the ground – any left group that either supports the “Rebels” or takes the cowardly position of neutrality is betraying the struggle against imperialism and thus also the struggle for socialism.TP banner_fmt

june 15 rally_fmt 2155579_fmt 2155576_fmt 2155491_fmt

An Eye Witness Account of Capitalist South Korea

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In the latter part of last year, Trotskyist Platform comrade Samuel Kim, who is of Korean ancestry, travelled to South Korea. Here is his account of his experiences.

AN Eye Witness Account of Capitalist South Korea

I met relatives for the first time at Incheon Airport, South Korea. As we travelled towards Seoul, I looked out the car window. Out there were signs of highly urbanised life: tall, twenty storey buildings clumped together in the distance and we hadn’t even reached Seoul, the capital city, just yet. I remember being eager to see every aspect of South Korea, especially the ‘development’ of an ‘Asian Tiger Economy’ under capitalism. In the following article I will share my experiences of and some of my discoveries about South Korea: conversations with the people, a rally for workers’ rights that I attended and my thoughts on the situation in general of socialists and left-wing activists in South Korea.

The Journey to Korea

In the first place, I have to mention that it has been a painful and long journey for our family to finally return to South Korean soil again after many years of living in Australia. As a child I remember the threat of repression from the immigration authorities and the fear of deportation from Australia despite having actually been being born and raised in Australia, myself. Here in Australia I witnessed the denial of equal rights that in its turn gave way to exploitation at the hands of greedy bosses. My parents often worked as subcontractors for supermarket cleaning companies, pushed trollies and worked in the textile industry. The pay was meagre, $500 a week for full time work. Today, our working class situation is one of many where migrants and all working class people endure exploitation at the hands of the Australian capitalist system.

The Plight of the Elderly in South Korea

An elderly working class man doing it tough in South Korea: it is common to witness many resorting to collecting recyclables for petty cash in a country where an aged pension is virtually non-existent.

An elderly working class man doing it tough in South Korea: it is common to witness many resorting to collecting recyclables for petty cash in a country where an aged pension is virtually non-existent.

I was catching a taxi to the nearest bus station to travel to Daegu, a city of industry and technology. The taxi driver was a middle aged man and he was curious about my accent so I told him I was from Australia and he responded by telling me that Australia was a “good country.” I was wondering what he thought was that “good” about the imperialist nature and colonial origins of wealth in Australia but he then started to talk about the plight of the elderly in South Korea, something he was obviously very worried about. He said that a big problem in South Korea was the high rate of suicide amongst the elderly in the country. He was very aware that Australia was a so-called social democratic ‘welfare state’ that has some sort of welfare system and assistance for the elderly in place in contrast to the right-wing South Korean system where traditional Confucianist family principles dominate and there is very limited social welfare. I expressed my sympathy with him about the fact that there needs to be lots changed in South Korea towards providing assistance for the elderly. But without much time left, I quickly explained how Australia won a social welfare state and basic free health care as a result of workers’ struggles, also mentioning how Australia likewise has lots of changing to do especially around the issue of xenophobia and attitudes to migrant workers. If I had more time, I would have explained that Australia is an imperialist country where racism is a big problem. That the system and media scapegoat migrant workers so much that it often leads to racist attacks on migrants. That a system that has been founded on a white supremacist agenda of colonialism has always been racist towards the Aboriginal people. That the socio-economic disadvantages suffered by Aboriginal people stems from the historical and ongoing bloody theft of their property and that even to this day Aboriginal people die in state custody at a terrifying rate due to the brutality of the capitalist police. That Australian-owned businesses super-exploit the toilers of Australia’s Asia-Pacific neighbours and that some of the crumbs of this looting finds its way into funding social services within Australia and that, nevertheless, despite this hundreds of thousands of people in Australia live in abject poverty and are forced to skip meals and skip prescription medication just to get by on welfare. Continue reading →

An Eyewitness Account of North Korea and Its People: Bravely Building a Friendly, Socialistic Society While in the Cross Hairs of Imperialism

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An Eyewitness Account of North Korea and Its People: Bravely Building a Friendly, Socialistic Society While in the Cross Hairs of Imperialism

A scene from the 2012 Arirang performance hails the socialist alliance between North Korea and the Peoples Republic of China.

A scene from the 2012 Arirang performance hails the socialist alliance between North Korea and the Peoples Republic of China.

As my trip to North Korea approached, I started to feel excited. I was going to see for myself what this country was really like – this country that has been so vilified by the mainstream Western media.

I will not pretend that I went to North Korea with no pre-conceived ideas. This is unlike the Western capitalist media who pretend to be “unbiased”, “neutral” observers who are supposedly “shocked” when they go to North Korea for an “investigative” report. Before I went to North Korea – or, as it is properly known, the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea – I understood it to be a workers state. By this I understood that capitalist rule had been smashed in North Korea and a state defending socialistic, collectivised property to be ruling there. This represented a huge step forward for social progress and for the global struggle of socialism against capitalism. However, the way that the socialistic system was run in the DPRK was somewhat deformed from the way a truly socialist order would be run because the administration of the country was monopolised by a bureaucratic layer that kept the masses out of real decision making power. Nevertheless, the DPRK was courageously holding out for socialism in the face of both economic sanctions and the most intense military threats from U.S. imperialism and its South Korean capitalist and Japanese and Australian imperialist allies. I understood that this intense pressure on the DPRK brought hardship to the North Korean people and made the bureaucratic deformations to its socialistic system more significant. Yet despite these difficulties, as a workers state embodying great gains for the exploited and oppressed of the whole globe, the DPRK must be unconditionally defended from military or propaganda attacks by capitalist countries and from external or internal forces seeking to undermine socialistic rule there.

My experiences during my trip to the DPRK confirmed this analysis of the DPRK and, more importantly, the political conclusions about what socialists in the imperialist countries should do about issues concerning capitalist hostility to the DPRK. Yet, in the detail there were several things different in North Korea to what I had expected. I found that, although I had even prior to the trip rejected the Western mainstream media’s demonization of North Korea, the trip made me realise that even my own prior perceptions of the country had been distorted somewhat by the capitalist-owned media. So, the trip was very useful. And I encourage all those leftists serious about knowing what the DPRK is really like to go see for themselves too! Continue reading →

THE LENINIST UNDERSTANDING OF THE STATE AND HOW TO MAKE THE TRANSITION TO A SOCIALIST SOCIETY

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THE LENINIST UNDERSTANDING OF THE STATE AND HOW TO MAKE THE TRANSITION TO A SOCIALIST SOCIETY

TROTSKYIST PLATFORM

Leninism, Social Democracy and Left Unity.

The Nature of the State and How to Fight for the Transition to a Socialist Society.

Appendix: Theses on the Communist Parties and Parliamentarism.

PDF format of this article. 46 A4 pages, 1.62mb

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Rome, Italy, September 2012: Workers from aluminium maker Alcoa’s Sardinia factory try to break police lines to storm the Industry Ministry in an attempt to defeat threatened job losses.

Leninism, Social Democracy and Left Unity

25 February 2013 – Why can’t the Left all get together? This is a refrain repeated by many within left-wing activist circles. Such a viewpoint is especially in vogue right now when there are unity talks underway between several far-left groups. Unity negotiations between Socialist Alternative and the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) are at an advanced stage. At the same time, the Socialist Alliance is also pursuing unity talks with Socialist Alternative and is at an early stage of discussions with the Communist Party of Australia (CPA.) Those that argue for unity point out that most nominally socialist groups share the same vision of an egalitarian society where the economy will be under collective ownership and control. Yes, socialist groups largely do, in an abstract way, share this vision of an ideal society. However, the key issue remains: how do we get there? And it is this question of what needs to be done – and especially what needs to be done right now – that determines a political organisation’s program and practice. Continue reading →

Racist Scapegoating of Refugees and 457 Visa Workers Is Aimed at Attacking Workers’ Rights. Trade Unions: Win Freedom for Refugees! Defend 457 Visa Workers’ Rights!

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Racist Scapegoating of Refugees and 457 Visa Workers Is Aimed at Attacking Workers’ Rights

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Official figures show that as of 10 June 2013, there are over 1,850 child refugees being detained in Australia.

Trade Unions: Win Freedom for Refugees! Defend 457 Visa Workers’ Rights! 

July 10:  “Nauru Same as Guantanamo!” Referring to the notorious U.S. jail and torture site at Guantanamo Bay, that was the chant of asylum seekers locked up in Nauru during desperate protests earlier this year. Whether imprisoned in Nauru or in the malaria-infested Manus Island camp or on mainland hellholes like Villawood Detention Centre, asylum seekers fleeing to Australia are today being treated every bit as inhumanely by this ALP government as they were by the former Howard government … and then some!

Cynically, ALP and Coalition politicians – and the racist radio hosts that egg them on – are claiming that their “get tough” on refugees policies are, in part, aimed at saving refugees from drowning at sea. So, people are imprisoned in hellholes that drive many to attempt suicide out of “concern” for their welfare! The same kind of “concern,” no doubt, that was shown when the Australian Navy and Customs callously abandoned the search for the bodies of 55 Tamil refugees who drowned earlier this month.  There is no way that would ever happen if the victims had been upper class white people! With such hostility to refugees, no wonder some are dying at sea. Instead of providing help to refugee boats in trouble, Navy and Customs are obsessed with seizing for imprisonment those who do make it through.

When Julia Gillard was ousting Kevin Rudd three years ago, Rudd said he was being targeted, in part, because his rivals wanted to move to the right on the refugee issue. But now, the new Rudd regime is moving even further to the right on refugees. Barely had Rudd’s counter-coup been completed when foreign minister Bob Carr ranted that most asylum seekers are not fleeing persecution and called for the Refugee Review Tribunal to knock back more asylum claims (Yahoo 7 News, 28 June.) Labor’s Carr is sounding just like despicable Liberal Shadow Immigration Minister Scott Morrison. The ALP’s ever crueller stance is in turn pushing Abbot’s right-wing Liberals to take an ever more extreme anti-refugee policy. However, when it comes to disgustingly blaming 457 Visa workers for taking local jobs, the ALP outdoes the Liberals. In March, then PM Gillard ranted that she wanted to “Stop foreign workers being put at the front of the queue with Australian workers at the back” (Herald Sun, 14 March.)

Yet it is not 457 Visa workers who cause local job losses. No, that is caused by greedy business owners who try to maximise profits by shedding jobs and making those who remain work faster. Thus, the way to save jobs is to mobilise workers’ industrial action – including strikes, occupations and secondary boycotts – to force the greedy bosses to retain their workers at the expense of their profits. Make these vultures have to do with a lesser number of luxury yachts and extravagant holiday homes! However, for militant workers to organise the action that is needed, they need their co-workers to be as clear as possible as to who the real enemy is. And they need the greatest unity between workers – including between local and 457 Visa workers. That is why it is crucial to oppose the ALP government’s divisive attempts to blame 457 Visa workers for unemployment. To be sure, the exploiting class does seek to force vulnerable guest workers into accepting substandard conditions in order to drive down the working conditions of all. Yet, that is what they do with all of the more vulnerable workers – including apprentices and casuals. Our response should not be to see these workers as rivals but to demand that they be given exactly the same conditions as other workers. In particular, so that the threat of deportation cannot be used to intimidate guest workers, we must demand they get the full rights of citizens. And to protect these workers against abuses, we must also demand 100% union membership for all 457 Visa workers … and indeed we must fight for 100% unionisation of all workers (including casuals) full stop! Continue reading →

SMASH RUDD’S RACIST SCHEME! IMMEDIATE ASYLUM IN AUSTRALIA FOR ALL REFUGEE ARRIVALS!

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Heroes face court. Some of the, over 150, refugees arrested over the July uprising in Nauru, face court. Nearly all the 540 asylum seekers imprisoned in Nauru took part in the struggle which saw the hellhole detention complex burn to the ground (below). The Australian Left and trade union movement must call for the immediate dropping of all charges against the arrested refugees and for the granting of immediate asylum to them and all the other asylum seekers. The Australian workers movement could do well with the injection of people with the audacity and defiance as those who participated in the courageous July 2013 Nauru resistance struggle.

Heroes face court. Some of the, over 150, refugees arrested over the July uprising in Nauru, face court. Nearly all the 540 asylum seekers imprisoned in Nauru took part in the struggle which saw the hellhole detention complex burn to the ground (below). The Australian Left and trade union movement must call for the immediate dropping of all charges against the arrested refugees and for the granting of immediate asylum to them and all the other asylum seekers. The Australian workers movement could do well with the injection of people with the audacity and defiance as those who participated in the courageous July 2013 Nauru resistance struggle.

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Sydney, 20 July 2013: Protestors in Sydney join others all around the country in the first defiant response to Kevin Rudd’s announcement of his cruel and racist “PNG Solution.”

Sydney, 20 July 2013: Protestors in Sydney join others all around the country in the first defiant response to Kevin Rudd’s announcement of his cruel and racist “PNG Solution.”

july 20 photo b_fmtSMASH RUDD’S RACIST SCHEME!
IMMEDIATE ASYLUM IN AUSTRALIA FOR ALL REFUGEE ARRIVALS!

July 20 – Many of us know that Liberal shadow immigration minister Scott Morrison is whipping up hardline racism against refugees. Yesterday, ALP Prime Minister Kevin Rudd totally trumped him. Rudd yesterday announced a scheme that is considerably worse than anything the racist Howard regime ever implemented and more extreme than what Abbott’s right-wingers have up till now been proposing. Under the Rudd plan, all asylum seekers arriving by boat will be processed at the malaria-infested camp on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island or elsewhere in PNG. More significantly, all those granted refugee status will have to settle in PNG. No asylum seeker arriving by boat in Australia will be allowed to settle here. This filthy racist measure would even make a European fascistic group, like the British National Party, proud.

The Rudd plan is all the more hideous because many fleeing for asylum are doing so as a result of suffering caused by the Australian imperialist ruling class and its U.S. senior partner. Thus, Iraqis are leaving a country that was first starved by imperialist sanctions, then destroyed by the 2003 U.S./Australia invasion and then torn apart by sectarian bloodletting fostered by the divide and rule policies of the invaders. Tamil refugees, meanwhile, are fleeing the results of Sri Lanka’s brutal war on the Tamil rights movement – a war that was backed by Australia and other Western governments which assisted their servants in the Lankan regime by banning the Tamil Tiger separatist movement.  Meanwhile, the Lankan regime’s murderous scapegoating of the Tamils was aimed at buttressing a system that allowed Western multinationals to super exploit Lankan workers. Among the most prominent of these corporations – and the ones with the worst record of exploiting Lankan workers – are Australian ones like Ansell. Indeed, immediately after the Lankan military’s genocidal victory over the Tamil resistance in mid-2009, the Lankan division of Ansell (which owns a huge sweatshop making surgical gloves) made a high-profile donation of money and gifts to the Sri Lankan military!

It is especially outrageous that the Australian government will not allow refugees arriving by boat to settle here given that this is a resource rich country that is sparsely populated. Of course, those refugees who have managed to settle here have never been a burden on this country in the least. Refugees work (at least when they are allowed), pay taxes and buy goods and services – they create as many jobs as they take up and produce as many services as they use. Now they will be dumped in PNG, a country that, because it has been bled so dry by Australian neo-colonial exploitation (including having its natural wealth plundered by Australian mining giants like BHP, Newcrest Mining and the part Australian-owned Rio Tinto) suffers from poverty and social dysfunction – including high rates of violence and crime. Thus refugees, many of whom have suffered so much in their home countries, will now be thrown into an entirely new form of suffering.  

Today, refugees imprisoned on Manus in an Australian-controlled detention camp already live in atrocious conditions when there are less than 150 locked away there. Imagine the horror that refugees will face when Manus reaches its proposed capacity of 3,000 under the Rudd plan. The government says that it will be providing resources to PNG for the scheme. However, this will only allow the Australian ruling class to further increase its neo-colonial stranglehold over PNG – a country whose judiciary and bureaucracy is littered with Australian officials. Yet all that is a Rudd wet dream. Rudd the aggressive imperialist – who proclaimed his vision for capitalist Australia as an “active middle power” “punching above its weight” – swaggers around the region with all the colonial arrogance of the Australian District Officers that lorded it over the local people during the period of direct Australian colonial rule over PNG.

UNITE THE STRUGGLE AGAINST RACISM WITH THE WORKERS STRUGGLE AGAINST THE CORPORATE BOSSES!

The ALP government’s racist scheme must meet with mass opposition. It is great that activists have called an emergency protest rally for 12 noon today at Sydney’s Town Hall. We must demand that everyone who makes it to this land is immediately granted residency with the full rights of citizens. Free all the refugees! Close all the detention camps!

Crucial to efforts to crush the ALP government’s latest racist measure is the need to mobilise the industrial power of the organised workers movement behind the struggle. There is potential to do this because ultimately the blows against refugees are blows aimed against the working class. The scapegoating of refugees is aimed at whipping up racism to divide the working class. It is aimed at diverting working class people’s frustrations at rising unemployment, poor public services and a lack of affordable housing away from the true cause of these problems – the capitalist exploiters – and onto a vulnerable target. This diversion serves to weaken workers’ resistance to the business bosses that exploit them and thus make it easier for the corporate owners to cut jobs and attack working conditions and for the governments that serve these greedy tycoons to neglect social services and slash social welfare.

Yet for the potential for linking up the needed trade union struggle with the refugee rights campaign to be realised the refugee rights movement must re-design its slogans such that they appeal to the class interests of the working class. So we urge all anti-racists to join today’s emergency rally but to do so bearing signs calling to unite the needed union struggle against the corporate bigwigs with the defence of refugees and 457 Visa workers. Now, if some upper middle class elements  concerned  about  refugee rights are  put  off  by  this  …  that’s tough! For the workers class struggle and the anti-racist struggle will either go forwards together or fall back separately. The struggle against racism cannot ultimately triumph unless it becomes part of the struggle against the capitalist system that actually breeds racism.

There is, however, an obstacle to mobilising the working class in defence of refugees … and, indeed, in defence of its most direct economic interests. And that obstacle is the ALP’s leadership of the workers movement. The Labor Party social democrats act as the agents of the exploiting class within the workers movement. They pretend to stand for workers’ interests but, in fact, act to stifle workers struggle while all the while diverting workers’ hostility against their exploiters into nationalist resentment against refugees, guest workers and overseas producers. Speaking at the Second Congress of the Communist International, Russian Revolutionary leader V.I. Lenin aptly described how the social democrat opportunists within the workers movement “defend the bourgeoisie better than the bourgeoisie itself.” Rudd’s announcement yesterday proves that yet again. It was Paul Keating’s ALP government that first introduced mandatory detention of refugees in the early 1990s and now it’s Rudd’s ALP that has taken the cruelty of Australian asylum seeker policy to a new low.

All this underscores why none of the current parliamentary parties should be given any support at all at the upcoming elections. The many nominally socialist groups (most openly today the Solidarity group) who ritually call for a vote for the ALP – either openly or backhandedly by calling for them to be preferenced ahead of the Liberals – and who are already calling for such support for the ALP at the coming election had better re-consider. For a vote for the ALP is a vote to legitimise the racist Rudd plan, not to a mention a vote to legitimise the war in Afghanistan, a vote for the slashing of payments to low-income single mothers, a vote for cutting higher education funding etc. It is simply a political crime for any supposedly socialist group to in any way advocate a vote for Rudd’s ALP. If any left-wing group is asking you for your vote then first ask them if they are calling for preferencing the ALP (no left group would, of course, ever consider preferencing the right-wing Liberals). Only those left groups standing in the elections that refuse to give any support to any of the pro-capitalist parliamentary parties should be under consideration as being possibly worthy of your vote.

Sisters and brothers, the social climate is getting uglier and more racist. As unemployment rises and the capitalist crisis spreads into Australia, the political servants of the exploiting class are increasingly scapegoating refugees and 457 Visa workers. Let us politically prepare a serious fight back against the reactionary policies of the current ALP regime and against the inevitable racist and anti-working class attacks of whichever party wins the next election. Let us do this by convincing class conscious youth and anti-racist activists that they don’t have to resign themselves to choosing between which party is going to kick them in the guts less hard. For there is another road! The road of mobilising the industrial muscle of the working class united together with all of the oppressed. One that builds a true political alternative. A socialist road that completely rejects this decaying and racist capitalist system and all the parties that prop it up!