April 2013

Background info: Hunger strike at the Broadmeadows gulag

So I just spent a weekend camped outside a detention centre.

On more than one occasion during the weekend a supporter asked if those of us outside had any message we wanted to pass on to the hunger strikers. I was lost for words. “Stay strong”, “We’re with you” and other such sentiments all seemed grossly inadequate.

The refugee movement is a shadow of it’s former self.

As one person put it to me over the weekend, the outrage of 2001, “How could this happen here?!” has been replaced with resignation, “oh well, this happens here”.

We must clearly, unequivocally and without hesitation support every act of resistance that comes from within the camps.

The most significant, effective and important resistance to Australia’s barbaric treatment of refugees has always come from refugees, within the detention centres.

Riots, hunger strikes, burning buildings, and sewn lips demand a response, not just from the state but also from anyone with an ounce of compassion. Resistance inside the detention centres is what spurs and demands a response from supporters outside, and in turn solidarity from the outside gives confidence for stronger and repeated acts of defiance inside.

If the refugee movement in Australia is to be rebuilt, active and visible support for resistance from within detention centres must be maintained.

Perhaps there is one thing I’d liked to have passed on to the hunger strikers, “Thank you”.

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I have just spent the weekend at the vigil outside the MITA detention centre in Broadmeadows. Twenty seven refugees face their eighth day without food. They’ve politely asked the Australian government to free them or kill them.

Statement from the hunger strikers at the MITA detention centre in Broadmeadows, Melbourne:

MESSAGE FROM THE ASIO REJECTED REFUGEES AT MITA, MELBOURNE:

We are 30 people here – 25 Tamils, 2 Tamil Muslims, two Burmese and one Iranian. We have been here for three and four years. We cannot tolerate it any longer. We need to be released to save our lives.

At 2 a.m. today (Monday, April 8, 2013) we began a hunger strike together. All 30 of us plan to keep doing this until there is solution, one way or the other.

We will gather together in the grounds of the detention centre and stay there until we get a solution. If the Australian Government does not release us, we ask that they kill us mercifully.

We have painted banners as part of our protest. There is one that shows many people hanging. That is what we want to happen to us if we are not released.

People in here are jumping off the roof, they are going on hunger strikes, they are taking tablets, they are trying to hang themselves. It is a cruel and inhumane environment for everyone.

We plead with you, the Australian people, to help us. We are on the edge of life and don’t know how much longer we can stand it.

We ask Prime Minister Gillard, Immigration Minister O’Connor, Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus Opposition leader Abbott and ASIO director David Irvine to stop this torture of all of us… of men, women and children, who have done nothing to warrant this cruel treatment that is destroying our minds.

We ask the authorities: You say we are a threat to this nation. So if we are such people why have they now put women and children and families in here with us? We are willing to be released into the community under strict orders if they think we are threats, which we aren’t. But whatever they want we will do.

But we can’t keep living like this. We are not in detention. We are in a cemetery. We don’t want to die. We left Sri Lanka because we fear to die. We came to Australia to live, not die. But death would be better than the life we have.

SIGNED

ASIO REJECTED REFUGEES.

Links:
Campaign Blog: MITA Hunger Strike
ABC Radio, Hunger striking Tamil refugee says he’s afraid to die
Jeff Sparrow at The Drum, Australia’s Guantanamo isn’t offshore: it’s in Melbourne

Upcoming Actions:
Ongoing, 6:30pm Nightly Vigils in solidarity with MITA hunger strike
April 16, 11:00am, Protest outside Brendan O’Conner’s Office (immigration minister)
April 28, 1:00pm, Protest at Broadmeadows Detention Centre (in solidarity with the National Convergence)

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Another Easter, another conference! Socialist Alternative’s set piece Marxism 2013 went off without a hitch.

Banner's on display at the conference bookshop.

Banner’s on display at the conference bookshop.

The organisation is claiming victory, a record 1140 tickets were sold and keynote sessions with John Pilger and Billy X Jennings were packed out. The queue for Brian Jones’ Australian premier of Marx in Soho snaked through the UMSU building long before it was due to start.

At the Opening Night, Socialist Alternative officially sealed the deal with the Revolutionary Socialist Party and the twenty or so activists who remained in that organisation were proudly showing off their new membership cards. The honeymoon was clearly on, John Percy in particular was walking around with lovehearts swirling in his eyes as he sang the praises of his new comrades in Socialist Alternative!

The theme of the conference was Socialist Alternative’s “left unity” project, in practice their pitch for assimilating much of the far left into Socialist Alternative (Resistance is futile!). Having absorbed RSP, SAlt has clearly set it’s sights on the rump of Socialist Alliance. I say “rump” because it was pretty clear that SAlt will not achieve a smooth merger with Socialist Alliance. Merger with Socialist Alternative will probably cause a split in Socialist Alliance; it’s members expressed significantly different attitudes towards their Alternative hosts in sessions like “What sort of organisation do socialists need?”. But smooth merger or troubled split, either way it seems likely that Socialist Alternative will soon neutralise it’s main rival on the left.

For the reasons I go to this conference, 2013 was significantly less impressive than 2012. Corey Oakley on Syria just can’t compare to Malalai Joya on Afganistan. Toufic Haddad and Antony Loewenstein are interesting speakers on Palestine, but they simply do not compare to hearing from activists who are struggling inside Palestine today. Billy X Jennings was interesting, he presented some biographical anecdotes and a few snippets of video, but for a conference subtitled “Ideas to Change the World”, his presentation was notably superficial.

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On the up side, I heard excellent things about most of the sessions in the “Organising workers” stream, and the session with Bob Carnegie highlighted the new vector of attack we can expect employers to deploy against “community pickets”.

Carnegie was instrumental in the success of a community picket at the Queensland Children’s Hospital site last year that forced Abigroup to concede pay equality for subcontractors. In response Abigroup is pursuing Carnegie for nearly ten million dollars damages using the common law tort of nuisance. He is also facing numerous contempt of court charges. If this attack succeeds, we can expect to see it deployed against “community pickets” across Australia.

Of particular relevance to my own political history was Simon Butler’s session on Marxism and ecology. Making the case that capitalism is the cause of the ecological crisis is critical to the future direction of the environment movement. Having wasted years in The Greens, these were arguments that convinced me to abandon reformist politics.

Unlike last year, in 2013 I made an effort to attend SAlt’s sessions on anarchism.

In “Be the change you want to be: Marxism and prefigurative politics” Roz Ward presented a passable critique of lifestylism that had about as much to do with anarchism as dumpster diving. It would have been more interesting to see Ward try and engage with the anarcho-syndicalist conception of “building the new world from within the shell of the old“, which is more of an argument about the importance of mass working organisation before, during and after revolution.

Sarah Garnham in “Anarchism: Spontaneity, horizontalism and organisation” spent a deal of time denouncing the likes of David Graeber and John Holloway before moving onto platformism. Her critique of platformism amounted to the contention that Nestor Maknho was a bad man because he didn’t have the support of the Petrograd soviet, and modern platformists are evil because they differ in approach to that of the Bolshevik idolisers. Apologies, I will make a more serious attempt at engaging with what Garnam said in the platformism part of her talk in due course.

Finally there was Damien Ridgwell with “Anarchy versus authority? The debate between Marx and Bakunin”. This was largely a potted and poor reproduction of an SWP talk that has been doing the rounds. It was clear that Ridgwell and SAlt don’t actually understand what a state is, what authority is, or even the most cursory details about the life of Bakunin. I really hope we have a full recording of this session, because again it’s one I intend to come back to in a later post.

Speaking of serious attempts to engage, pointing out that these conferences are no forum for the reasoned presentation of ideas about anarchism, is to state the f-cking obvious.

The sessions are tightly controlled, speakers in the Q & A carefully picked, there is never going to be enough time to adequately respond to the party speakers pro-longed presentation in the three minute speaking session. Socialist Alternative members who have done the set readings will be chosen for at least every second speaking spot in the brief discussion, and then the whole affair is subject to a “summation” by the presenter.

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But some of my fellow anarchists sure made it easy for them. It is one thing to grate at the strictures of a discussion managed by a group who’s intent is to “put our politics on display”, but those who wanted to say this repeatedly in each session allowed the chair to appear to call anarchists to speak without any danger of substantive anarchist ideas being injected into proceedings.

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If we just want to call Socialist Alternative wankers, we’d be better off taking the approach of the Sparts. They had a lovely sectarian leaflet that they distributed outside the conference, without having to go through the grating experience of a condescending thirty minute lecture.

When I attend a conference like this, I have different goals.

We can’t seriously hope to “nullify their arguments” in this environment (as one anarchist friend proclaimed), but we can try and use three minutes speaking time to intelligently plant a seed or two that might lead some of those present to look for information on anarchism beyond the caricature presented by Socialist Alternative. We wont achieve this by pouting, storming out in an angry huff, or by hurling insults. I hope that those who did re-evaluate their strategy.

This was still an enjoyable, if emotionally draining, Marxism conference, but it lacked the lustre of last year. None the less I still consider it worth the effort, for much the same reasons I outlined last year, and I will probably return in 2014.

Asides

A few random things I couldn’t be arsed incorporating into a proper narrative.

The children’s program is a very welcome development and a significant improvement on past years. However lectures on philosophy, social justice and the history of the America held in a dark basement probably weren’t the best ideas for kids escaping the tyranny of school over Easter. I get the feeling this was somewhat inevitable:

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The conference’s strict “no drugs” policy (in this setting basically a no weed policy) seemed oddly moralistic whilst in each session conference attendees were reminded that “the bar is open all weekend!”

Other left groups made a much more concerted effort at trolling this years conference. The Sparts leafleted outside, FSP, Workers Liberty, Solidarity and a person calling themselves “Communist Left Australia” leafleted inside. I must have been the only non-SAlt member who wasn’t distributing a “statement” trying to link Socialist Alternative to the SWP cluster f-ck, or in the case of Solidarity (who are actually linked to the SWP), to racism.

I am told that for inter-Leninist stoushes, Solidarity vs SAlt in the 457 visa session was a must see.

A special mention has to be made for the lone Libertarian Communist* who wandered into the conference, seized a table and set himself up in the stall space without so much as a ticket or a stall fee. He distributed copies of Marxist Missionary Cults, Leaving a Marxist-Leninist Cult, and Ideological Intransigence as well as a variety of anarchist and insurrectionist material. I am told Socialist Alternative went to some lengths to throw him out of the conference, or at least stop him distributing his material, and failed.

* That’s how he described himself, in conversation his politics struck me as more insurrectionist.

Other Reviews of Marxism 2013:
Liam M, Anarchist Affinity, Left Unity in confusion, the first part in a series he has prepared on the conference.
Martin Thomas, Workers Liberty, Big turn out at Australian left conference, comments on the truly imporant issues the conference raised, namely the number of young women in Socialist Alternative.

See also:
Socialist Alternative’s Marxism 2012: Worth our engagement
Anarchist Contingent for Marxism 2013

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