Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group

This is the text of a presentation given by a MACG member during a debate on the class struggle approach to Anarchism held at the Melbourne Anarchist Bookfair on Saturday 8 August 2015. It was delivered almost verbatim.

Thanks. I’m going to take it for granted that we want an Anarchist society – one where capitalism and the State have been abolished, where all forms of social oppression are eradicated and the human race lives sustainably and in harmony with the Earth. What we’re debating here is how to get there – the path from present day capitalism to an Anarchist society.

The traditional Anarchist view of the route to an Anarchist society is through a workers’ revolution, which occurs as the culmination of a progressively intensifying phase of class struggle. This is the position I support. I think workers’ revolution is both possible and necessary, for reasons I will go on to elaborate.

First of all, though, I’d like to clear up the concept of class, since it is often a source of great confusion. The working class is composed of those with nothing to sell except their labour. You don’t have to work in a factory to be working class, or even to have a job at all. You don’t have to be a white, heterosexual male, either.

Now, I’m going to read out a list of categories of people. See if you’re in any of them:

* Your main source of income is interest, rent and/or dividends;

* You own a business and work inside it for your main income, regardless of whether you employ anybody else. It doesn’t count if the so-called “business” is the supply of your own labour to a single employer that supervises your actions as it would an employee and is only doing it to avoid taxation and/or industrial relations laws;

* You are a manager in the public or private sector with the right to hire and fire;

* You are a copper, a prison warder, a military officer or member of the security services (e.g. ASIO);

* You are a Member of Parliament or a local government Councillor, or a judge, magistrate or person with similar powers (e.g. member of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal).

* You are employed by a trade union, political party or NGO as an organiser or office bearer.

* You are reasonably confident that, in the next five or ten years, you will be in one of the above categories. It doesn’t count if you’re just hoping or if you’ll need a bit of luck for it to come off;

* You stand to inherit, whether from a spouse, parent or otherwise, millions of dollars over and above a house to live in.

If you’re in one of those categories, can you put your hand up? You don’t have to say which one it is, because there are some it may be embarrassing to admit to being a member of. OK. Everyone who didn’t put their hand up is a member of the working class. You have an objective interest in getting rid of capitalism, over and above any ethical commitment you may have. Those of you who did put your hand up, you can still join the struggle as an ally, provided you have the ethical commitment to do so. You’re just not in the same position to have an impact.

So, what’s important about the working class? As we’ve just shown, it comprises the vast majority of society. You can’t change society without having at least a majority of the working class on your side and, if you want a revolution, the vast majority. Second, it is the experience of co-operation in the capitalist workplace that provides the experience that is necessary to co-operate in the class struggle. Solidarity in the struggle is based on the solidarity learnt in production. This is fundamentally different from the experience of small business traders or of peasant farm-owners in the Third World.

Many people point to the large numbers of workers who hold reactionary, Right wing ideas and conclude that this makes workers’ revolution impossible. All this proves, however, is that we haven’t had a revolution yet. It’s true that many workers are sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic or hold to other oppressive ideas. The key is to realise that class struggle is the way to overcome them. The classic case is the Great Miners’ Strike in Britain, where the consciousness of miners and the rest of the mining communities achieved advances in a year that took the working class in the big cities a generation. I’ll come back to this role of class struggle later.

The decisive arena of struggle in capitalist society is the workplace. This is because the workplace is where the capitalists derive their power. Therefore, to take this power off them, the workers need to organise in the workplace to take the power themselves. There are other important arenas for struggle, but they are secondary. If we leave the workplace to the capitalists, we hand over the resources of the entire economy to them.

Other strategies

It should be noted here that the unemployed and most students are working class, but they have virtually no social power. Students will achieve far less by withholding their study than they would through withholding the labour of flipping burgers and waiting on tables that they do to support themselves while studying. In the Third World, the peasantry are, almost everywhere, thoroughly integrated into and subordinated by the global capitalist market. They can mount no systemic challenge. While the Zapatistas are an inspiration, their struggle hasn’t been able to spread beyond the Chiapas and won’t do so. The decisive levers of power are in the cities and can only be reached by the working class.

Insurrectionism is an approach to Anarchism that Anarchist Communists like me reject unequivocally. Insurrectionists often have a good class analysis, but they only use it to identify who is on what side – i.e. who they’ll throw rocks at and who they won’t. They never use their class analysis as a guide to deciding how to act, how to struggle. Insurrectionism takes on the State at its strongest point, its armed wing. Except in some passages of high-flown rhetoric, it substitutes the militancy of a small minority for the self-organising activity of the class as a whole. Taken to its logical conclusion (which it was by some in the 1970s in some countries), it leads to guerrilla warfare, which is a recipe for bloody defeat.

Parliamentary reformism is another dead end, though I don’t expect many adherents here. The record of reformist political parties should be enough to show that this doesn’t work, but there are two deeper reasons for concluding that Parliamentary reformism can’t work. The first is that this is an inherently national form of struggle, based on capturing the machinery of the nation State. In the era of neo-liberal globalisation, there is no possibility of using that State for substantive reforms, let alone the abolition of capitalism. As the recent experience of Syriza in Greece has shown, winning government is merely a way of putting yourself in the position of imposing brutal attacks on the working class that voted you into office. You don’t have a choice to do anything else.

The other reason it can’t work is that it bypasses the class struggle that is essential to burning out the Right wing prejudices that infect the working class and divide it against itself. Only the process of class struggle, escalating to the point of revolution, can build the iron solidarity which is necessary to found society anew on libertarian and co-operative lines. Workers will transcend greed and selfishness by the act of revolution and thereby allow society to operate upon new principles.

The Simpler Way

Now let me turn to the politics of Ted Trainer, whose position [name deleted] here largely defends. Ted posits that capitalism must be abolished and a radically non-authoritarian society established, but rejects class struggle. Instead, he wants people to turn away from the system and build sustainable alternatives. He sees that the State and the capitalist system it defends will collapse from people withdrawing from under it, in a situation aggravated by resource scarcity and environmental collapse.

The first thing that must be said about Ted’s strategy is that it is remarkably similar to that of the Utopian Socialists who flourished in the first half of the 19th Century. It especially makes me think of Charles Fourier, one of the most libertarian of them. The difference is the environment in which Ted Trainer thinks the movement will grow. The old Utopian Socialists weren’t expecting resource scarcity or limits to growth.

The second thing to say is that Ted is over-egging the pudding somewhat when it comes to the sort of ecological limits within which humanity has to operate. The abolition of capitalism will enable the abolition of large sectors of the economy, which exist solely to maintain the current distribution of wealth and power. Advertising, finance, real estate, insurance, the military and the State bureaucracy can be abolished at a stroke, thus saving all the resources devoted to them and allowing an immediate reduction in the working week through the reallocation of labour that entails. And that’s only the start.

In addition, high quality goods that are made to last can replace the shoddy ones that prevail today. Hands up everyone who’s sick of kettles and toasters that break down as soon as the warranty expires.

And the last part of Ted’s over-egging is energy. We will have a budget of renewable energy within which to work, but it will be relatively generous. Wind farms and solar power can be backed up by hydro-electricity to provide a substantial amount of energy, perhaps as much as currently generated today.

Altogether then, it will be possible to reduce resource consumption greatly, even as Third World living standards are considerably increased. We can dispense with private jets and dune buggies, but everyone deserves modern health care and clean hot and cold running water.

The final thing to say about Ted Trainer’s strategy is that it can’t work. It won’t get to where he wants to go. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, property. Resources in a capitalist society are owned by capitalists or the State. This counts especially for land, which is crucial to Ted’s vision. The working class was created by the enclosure of the commons and the State maintains the enclosures. If you want those resources, and we definitely need them, we have to fight for them. And secondly, I return once more to the necessity for class struggle. Without class struggle, only tiny minorities will become interested in ideas of transcending this society. To get the mass of the population on board (i.e. the working class), it is necessary for workers to learn the lessons through the struggle for their own interests. Without that, most workers, and therefore most people, will remain committed to some form of capitalism. It is only in the crucible of class struggle that the human race can forge and become committed to the vision of a new society.

The Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group calls on the Australian Government to drop the charges against Jamie Williams and release him unconditionally. He was arrested on 27 July and charged with “preparing for incursions into foreign countries for the purpose of engaging in hostile activities”. The substance of the charge is that he attempted to leave Australia to join the YPG forces in Syria fighting Daesh, which styles itself as the “Islamic State”.

We do not know whether Jamie Williams was actually trying to join the YPG, but we would have only admiration for him if he was. The YPG-YPJ (People’s Protection Units – Women’s Protection Units) of the PYD (Democratic Union Party) are defending the Kurdish communities of Rojova in Syria against the barbarous forces of Daesh and are doing so very effectively. Further, in the areas of Rojova the YPG-YPJ are protecting, there is a social transformation being conducted which has the potential to be greatly liberatory and to inspire revolutionary workers’ movements across the region.

We say only “potential” because the PYD are allying themselves with US imperialism in its military assault on West Asia, something that undermines the libertarian socialist goals for which the PYD claim to be struggling. While this alliance brings certain tactical benefits (having F-22s take out Daesh vehicles and field HQs definitely made defending Kobanê easier), they are greatly outweighed by the strategic disadvantage of the barriers it puts up between the Kurdish and Arab peoples of the region. The MACG therefore calls on the PYD to break with the United States and throw its lot in with the workers and oppressed masses of West Asia instead. US intervention in West Asia will kill far fewer jihadis than it will recruit for Daesh, something not unconnected to the fact that the US has killed far more people in the region than Daesh ever will.

Regardless of the PYD’s short-sighted choice of friends, however, its struggle against Daesh is greatly progressive and should be supported by workers in Australia and around the world. And if workers in Australia like Jamie Williams decide to join the YPG-YPJ or radical bands allied to them, the Australian Government shouldn’t stand in their way.

FREEDOM FOR JAMIE WILLIAMS!

LONG LIVE THE ROJOVA REVOLUTION!

This announcement originally appeared in The Anvil, Vol 4 No 3, published in June 2015

The Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group is pleased to announce that, after several years of discussion, the Anarchist Federation Australia has formed on a provisional basis. It was founded at a meeting in Sydney on 14 June by (in alphabetical order) Jura Books, the Melbourne Anarchist Club, the Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group and Perth Libertarians. As is good practice in federalism, the members of the AFA are its affiliated groups. Individuals do not join the federation directly, but instead join an affiliated group.

Being only a provisional organisation, the AFA will spend the next few months attempting to reach agreement on a Constitution and making arrangements for a founding Congress. Until then, it will have no external activities. Discussions around draft Constitutions have reached an advanced stage and the groups are confident that an agreement for the formal launch of the AFA can be reached around the end of the year.

Documents will be published when the AFA is launched.

This article first appeared in The Anvil, Vol 4 No 3, published in June 2015.

Now that the East-West Link has been put to bed by the new Labor Government in Victoria, the mainstream environment movement is turning its attention to climate change. In particular, it seeks to achieve something practical by closing Hazelwood power station, the most intensive greenhouse gas polluter in Australia. It’s a worthy objective, but the means used will be crucial to prospects of achieving continuing and timely climate change mitigation in Australia. And given Australia’s position as the most greenhouse gas intensive society in the developed world, failure here would be a setback for prospects globally.

The Old Divide and Rule

Under capitalism, capitalists not only exploit their employees and despoil the environment in the pursuit of profits, but they exercise control over investment decisions. Capitalists decide what gets produced, how it is produced and whereabouts it is produced. They decide this, of course, on the basis of what is most likely to produce a good return on investment. Even those few capitalists who take account of social or environmental criteria necessarily give overriding priority to making a profit. If they don’t, they go broke.

When the interests of profit conflict with the interests of the environment, the capitalists’ first response is the old divide and rule. Workers in environmentally destructive enterprises are put in the position of defending their livelihoods by defending their bosses’ environmental vandalism. The bosses cry crocodile tears over the prospects of unemployment for their workers and, in large scale cases, the destruction of communities (needless to say, there is a different tune played when these same bosses axe jobs to increase their profits). Capitalist control of the economy pits the short term interests of workers against the environment, to the political benefit of the capitalists.

The Biggest Climate Vandal

Hazelwood power station in the Latrobe Valley is the biggest threat to the climate in Australia today and its closure is a burning necessity. Effective mitigation of greenhouse emissions in Australia can’t be done otherwise. The current owners, International Power, have been responsible for emitting 16m tonnes of CO2 equivalent annually for 19 years, while they made large profits every year. Given that the dangers of climate change were known well before they bought Hazelwood, International Power shouldn’t be compensated – they should be prosecuted.

A Just Transition

There is a conflict between society’s need to avert dangerous climate change and the workers’ need to protect their livelihoods in their Latrobe Valley communities. It can only be resolved in favour of both if it is resolved to the detriment of capital. Only by ripping the economic resources of society out of the hands of the capitalists can communities dependent on environmentally unsustainable activities re-orient to sustainable ones. In the case of Hazelwood, this would mean the confiscation of International Power’s assets in order to fund a just transition. To fund such a transition for the entire Australian economy, however, would require the assets of most of corporate Australia. We’re effectively asking for the abolition of capitalism.

And so the question arises – who can abolish capitalism and how can we manage to do it? Again we say the only way to abolish capitalism is through workers’ revolution. By organising in the workplace and taking control out of the hands of the capitalists we can stop the capitalists destroying the environment and begin active reconstruction of economic processes. We can use the campaign to close Hazelwood to open discussion with workers who want to save the planet, but don’t want to become human sacrifices in the process.

Let’s knock the whole wall down

It looks like we are in for another round of Reclaim Australia’s Islamophobic, racist and anti-Left mobilisations around Australia, particularly in Melbourne. Lately we have seen the racist, Fascist thugs raise their heads, ready to fight not only Muslim communities, but also anyone who opposes Islamophobia.

The ugly United Patriots Front (UPF), a split from Reclaim Australia, tried to storm Richmond Town Hall in the belief that they could destroy those they imagined were the main organisers against their April rally in Federation Square. They thought they could destroy the Left and the antifascist movement. Instead, a few dozen thugs wearing swastikas and other Nazi paraphernalia failed to “give the Left a lesson”.

We believe that, in order to resist and effectively kick out the new round of hate mobilisations on 18 July, the whole antifascist movement must not repeat the faults apparent on 4 April. There is an urgent need for trade union and mass community mobilisation. We need migrant communities to participate in the counter-rallies and other activities planned for 18 July in Melbourne and for 19 July in the rest of the country.

The counter-rally on 4 April was comprised mostly of white activists, most of whom were Anglo-Australian militants. With the important exception of activists from Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance (WAR), and some non-white supporters of larger organised Left and Anarchist groups, the non-white and the migrant communities were simply absent. The same happened in the most recent counter-rally against United Patriots Front at Richmond Town Hall on 31 May.

This description of the weaknesses of the mobilisations so far is not meant to discredit the efforts of the organisers of these events. Every effort towards kicking the Fascists out and building an effective antifascist movement is welcome. Rather, we say this to emphasise that the task in front of us is larger than the work we have done so far.

The task we face is to draw the mass of the working class into direct and active participation in the movement. On the one hand, the Muslim and Asian communities who are the immediate target of Reclaim Australia need to join us. On the other hand, the union movement, which is the Fascists’ ultimate target, needs to come on board. Without these two sectors, the anti-racist, antifascist mobilisation is likely to be seen as one side of a war between fringe groups of our society to which few will pay attention. This orientation, however, does not mean we allow the leaders of the Muslim communities or the union movement to have a veto on our activities.

Through our mobilisations we seek to halt the progress of the far Right. We must also realise they are only a symptom of the government push to criminalise Muslims, indigenous people, immigrants and people of colour. They label them as potential terrorists who are enemies of some imagined “Australia”.

We must go a few steps further, therefore, than just engaging in anti-racist and antifascist organising. We must fight the ongoing displacement of Aboriginal people from their homelands in Western Australia. We must fight the mass incarceration and illegalisation of people seeking asylum in this country. We must confront all these “single” issues. They are part of an entire attack against the working class and our communities by the Government, capital and the State.

Capitalism generates racism and produces the potential for Fascist groups to emerge. To abolish racism and to eliminate the Fascist threat for good, we need a workers’ revolution to overthrow capitalism.

This article was originally published in The Anvil Vol 4 No 3, published in June 2015.

Reclaim Australia and the United Patriots Front are planning to hold a racist rally against Islam and Muslims at Parliament on Saturday 18 July. The UPF also want to “smash the Left”. The Campaign Against Racism and Fascism is, together with other groups, organising a counter-rally to take the space of the Fascists and defend ourselves against their attempts to build their murderous conspiracy.

For more details, see CARF’s Facebook event:

https://www.facebook.com/events/1600263403576857/

The MACG is a participant in CARF.

By Dimitri

(A member of MACG)

To clarify my position I am not with SYRIZA neither following any dappled shade “Europhiles”. I am resolutely and unequivocally against Europe of creditors, fascists, butchers of every human dignity, regardless which political party they belong and any misleading reason they articulate.

However, during these critical, decisive moments, not only for Greece, but for Europe and for the whole world -as the whole issue and the point has reached is a creation of capitalism- has nothing to do with the referendum itself. It has to do with the actual subject which was absent from any negotiating framework during these five months – and always. It is this subject that will be required to pay all costs, either “Yes” or “No” prevailing. I talk about the workers, unemployed, precarious, pensioners, immigrants.

Things are very simple: possible victory of “Yes” will be completely devastating not only for the working class and the social movement, but for the whole society, because it will open the appetite for a final attack by the greedy Capital aiming to establish a callous political and economic dictatorship. Already the current mobilisation of the European and international Capital and its supporters in Greece (those who by all previous governments ravaged literally the country and the lives of human beings) are in favour of this outcome and are now indicative.

Possible prevalence of “No”, despite all the relevant rhetoric has been developed by almost the entire spectrum of the Left in Greece, although, in my opinion, is a clear partisan, class choice of those who prefer it -and I stand alongside all those who choose this answer- I think it also entails many dangers. Because even if they manage to keep themelves in governmental power SYRIZA and their allies in their effort to manage the debt and put back the country on track again they will be de facto forced to push painful measures for the people -and not only financial-, whether they be baptised “left”, “alternative” or something else …

I feel also that some games being replaying behind the backs of this people. Why, for example, this government refused the taxation of big business and described the issue as one of the thorniest ones of the whole negotiating process with creditors? If not big businesses taxed wildly now that there is a chance for a new beginning, based on a truly popular and alternative policy, when it will happen? Marinakis*, Melissanidis*, Alafouzos*, Copelouzos*, Vardinoyannis* and Latsis*, still murdering workers in Hellenika Petrelaia (ELPE – Hellenic Petroleum), even leading and manipulating municipal councils, evading taxes solemnly –possing of course themeselves as patriots- and associating themselves with the big European and international Capital.

In this direction, the only road of struggle is, in my opinion, one way, and has to do just about everything that the grass-roots, base, class and broader social movement in Greece created and put into practise in recent years: the forms of solidarity economy, the solidarity movements provide medical care to those who can not afford or shelter for the homeless Syrian migrants who cross-borderd, co-operative factories and workplaces, self-managed restaurants and cafes, collectives in bookshops and publishing area, popular markets without intermediaries and open free bazaars, social clinics, peoples’ neighborhood assemblies and any such open, grass-roots structures, alternative schemes based on direct social action, direct democracy, non intermediation, outside and beyond any political party control or embrace and away from every commodity logic of profit.

All these projects represent a hope for the future – the only and the most appropriate. And to defend ourselves I consider as more than a serious need to defend first the whole working class, united as a fist. The daily training of ourselves and others, the horizontal, unmediated organisation of all of us, the everyday, gradual emancipation of our class is required and offers the only solution.

Therefore there are not dilemmas. If the broader class, base, social movement in Greece can gradually and through perseverance and faith in the struggle to oppose resolutely and practically the confide of the lives of workers, unemployed, pensioners, immigrants in the hands of State, governments and authority generally wherever it comes from, and put into immediate operation and extend grass-roots structures like those cited above, this will be a great victory, a huge (re)starting forward, especially now, these critical moments for everybody – now that the masks have been fallen.

*Names of owners of ships, factories, TV Channels, newspapers etc in Greece.

 *Also published at http://www.anarkismo.net/article/28319