En Passant

I was reading Brecht today
Not in any normal way
There is no normal with Bertolt
Except the normal gestalt
Of a rational society
To come

Which means our eyes sometimes meet
And his words greet me
Down the paths of time
Without rhyme
Just truth

What to do?
You should read him too

(c) John Passant 17 March 2016

Fairfax workers have gone on strike against management plans to cut 120 jobs from The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian Financial Review.

 
Here is how the union, the MEAA, puts it:

‘Fairfax Media has announced it will be cutting another 120 FTE [fulltime equivalent] jobs from its Sydney and Melbourne newsrooms – equivalent to about a quarter of the editorial staff.’

Here is an example of the impact of the strike.

Lights out in Fairfax’s Parliament House bureau (Bevan Shields, Federal politics editor The Age and Sydney Morning Herald)

 
The workers won’t return until Monday. The next few days’ editions of The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian Financial Review will be cut and paste jobs from the wires, with scabs doing the commentary. I wonder if suspended Islamophobe Paul Sheehan, the man who published made up stories about Middle Eastern Rape Culture and police inaction, will return to the scab paper?

The strike is, under bourgeois law, illegal. Technically these wonderful workers and their union can be fined thousands a day. Such is their justifiable anger that despite this threat they have gone on strike to defend their jobs.

It would be good to see the Labor Party, the ACTU and the Greens unite to defend these workers and to mobilise their members to do just that.

How then can we show solidarity to these brave unionists? If there are picket lines, join them. If there are protests, attend. Send messages of support and money to the MEAA if they ask for it.

If there are any striking Fairfax workers who want to publish their story, email me at en.passant@bigpond.com

I will print your stories (with you remaining anonymous if you want) on my blog to get the truth out there about the sackings.

John is a member of the MEAA.

This is a statement by socialist group Solidarity on 15 March 2016 on the need for unity in the fight against Turnbull

Socialism is about more than just voting for one person in one election. But what else? Eric Ruder in Socialist Worker US looks back at the centuries-old socialist tradition to provide some answers.

SPEAKING AT a campaign event in Iowa last August, Bernie Sanders said:

‘Let me tell you something that no other candidate for president will tell you. And that is no matter who is elected to be president, that person will not be able to address the enormous problems facing the working families of our country. They will not be able to succeed because the power of Corporate America, the power of Wall Street, the power of campaign donors is so great that no president alone can stand up to them.

‘That is the truth. People may be uncomfortable about hearing it, but that is the reality. And that is why what this campaign is about is saying loudly and clearly: It is not just about elected Bernie Sanders for president, it is about creating a grassroots political movement in this country.’

Sanders is absolutely right.

He promises that if elected president, he would push for tuition-free college education, free universal health care, an end to lower wages for women and people of color, and a living wage for every worker–and that’s just for starters.

This package of sweeping reforms is both impossibly ambitious–and utterly practical.

It’s impossibly ambitious because Sanders would have to fight not just the Republicans who control Congress, but congressional Democrats as well, since they could also be counted on to oppose these reforms as “handouts” that would be “too costly.”

But at the same time, all of these reforms are utterly practical because the resources to make them a reality already exist. The only problem is that they are flowing into the wrong places.

The share of national income that goes to wages, for example, has fallen below 50 percent for the first time in 60 years, and in the last decade alone, there has been a shift of about $750 billion annually from labor to capital–truly Robin Hood in reverse.

This highlights one of capitalism’s most obscene contradictions: The system has created such enormous productivity increases that it would be possible to pay workers more money for a shorter workweek–yet the exact opposite is taking place. Workers are putting in more hours and getting paid less–while profits grow and the already super rich get super richer.

The labor movement has historically provided a brake on the trickle-up of economic growth, but its steady decomposition means that today, the U.S. has the most extreme inequality in the developed world. To illustrate the point, the amount of money handed out in bonuses alone on Wall Street in 2014 was twice the amount earned by all minimum-wage workers in the country.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

OVER THE last 30 years, the worldwide slam-dunk victory of neoliberal capitalism–with its emphasis on free markets, deregulation, cuts in social services, and tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy–explains why a new generation is seeking out alternatives.

But paradoxically, this victory also means that those seeking out socialism as an alternative to capitalism must do so in a political landscape where the term itself is up for grabs.

Some conceive of socialism as nothing more than state intervention in or ownership of the economy–which is why Newsweek famously proclaimed on its cover, in the early days of the Obama administration, when a massive stimulus package of tax breaks and government spending was in the works, “We’re all socialists now.”

But even state control of the economy doesn’t guarantee that society’s resources will be used to the benefit of workers and the poor–as the bailout of Wall Street itself demonstrated when the big banks got rescued, but not the homeowners who lost their homes or the workers who lost their jobs.

For socialism to be worthy of a movement to fight for it, it must offer something more than simply a greater role for the state in society’s affairs.

Indeed, the state under capitalism already plays a massive role in defending the status quo–from gargantuan military spending to enforcing the tax code with its dramatic shift of the tax burden from corporations to individuals.Specifically, socialism can only work if it is based on the mass democratic participation of working people in managing the day-to-day affairs of the economy and society.

In calling himself a democratic socialist and holding up the Scandinavian countries as a model, Sanders is signaling his allegiance to the tradition of social democracy, which aims to shift the economy by electing socialists into office who can carry out certain changes by legislating from above.

But there are two central problems with this vision.

First, this is precisely the brand of socialism that has retreated as neoliberal capitalism has advanced. The Scandinavian countries, for example, are carrying out some of the fastest and most sweeping privatizations of the last 15 years. Around the world, social democrats have accommodated neoliberalism, not challenged it.

Second, and more fundamentally, the social democratic project has historically made its primary objective the conquest of political power within existing institutions. But this leaves intact the power of capital in the factories, offices, transportation systems and other economic institutions. This means the captains of industry maintain control over society’s most important domain, the workplace, where most workers spend a large part of their time. The employers also maintain the power to set wages and benefits.

It’s true that Sanders doesn’t think putting a socialist in the White House is sufficient, as his Iowa appeal for a “grassroots political movement” shows. Sanders and other social democrats understand that grassroots pressure from workers and social movements is critical in providing sufficient leverage to push past obstacles that inevitably stand in the way of even basic reforms.

In the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt relied on workers’ struggles as an essential part of overcoming the resistance of the American capitalist class to his New Deal legislation.

But a genuine socialist alternative must be based on workers’ struggles as the central ingredient in a strategy to transform the economy and society.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

AS KARL Marx and Frederick Engels put it 150 years ago, socialism must be “the self-emancipation of the working class”–the mass participation of the majority of society in organizing to take economic and political power away from the superrich and to construct a post-revolutionary society on the basis of mass democracy that extends into every corner of social life.

In that sense, every strike provides a glimpse of workers’ power in its most elemental form–the coordinated decision by workers in a particular workplace to withhold their labor.

And when strikes and other forms of workers’ protest grow in terms of their duration, militancy and concentration, they begin to accumulate sufficient power to pose an alternative to the capitalist status quo.

The 1934 Minneapolis general strike, beautifully chronicled in Farrell Dobbs’ Teamster Rebellion, was the result of a citywide strike by truck drivers that had the power to shut down the city’s whole economy.

But the truck drivers went further, using their power to authorize trucks to transport essential goods to meet the needs of the city’s working class, while using flying picket lines to stop trucks operated by employers to undermine the strike.

This power of the working class to run society in its own interests–which would require workers in every city to coordinate an uprising against employers on the scale of the Minneapolis truck drivers–must be at the heart of the socialist project.

Total state control over the economy–as the degeneration of the Russian Revolution into the totalitarian regimes of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc illustrates–is meaningless if the people who produce the wealth don’t have real democratic control over the fruits of their labor.

Capitalism has made it possible to meet all of the world’s needs, but control over capitalism’s output remains in the hands of a tiny minority. By placing the means of production under the democratic control of the workers who make the gears turn, socialism offers a way to use society’s resources to meet human need.

By putting the workplace at the center of socialist democracy, the direct and daily participation of workers in exercising their voice in all of society’s decisions can be raised to the highest level. Workplace councils would have the ability to determine all manner of workplace-level decisions, such as safety procedures, scheduling hours and time off and so on.

And workers would also be in a position to immediately recall any representatives they might elect to higher decision-making bodies at the moment a majority feels that representative no longer represents their will–unlike in American democracy, where it’s practically impossible to recall a politician even if they break every single campaign promise they make.

And it should go without saying that elected representatives would be paid the same as their co-workers–thus eliminating the incentive of personal enrichment that animates many seeking elected office today.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

ULTIMATELY, THE challenge facing those who want to see a socialist transformation of society is how to coordinate such a massive wave of workers’ militancy.

But as the Occupy Wall Street movement’s rapid sweep from New York City to practically every city in the country demonstrates, the challenge isn’t the coordination of the uprising. The challenge lies in developing durable and rooted organizations that can coordinate a response to the defenders of the status quo.

The Occupy movement was crushed in the course of a couple weekends by a coordinated effort–organized by the Obama administration and predominantly Democratic mayors–to clear its encampments by means of police repression and mass arrests.

A revolution in the control over the American economy, not just public spaces, would obviously entail a confrontation on a far higher level–the American ruling class is not going to simply let workers lay claim to the source of their wealth and power without a fight.

But it’s precisely in the course of a revolution that workers themselves learn all the lessons about how society works and begin to internalize the political lessons they need to stand up to capitalism–to learn the lesson of solidarity and to unlearn the scapegoating the divides workers along racial, gender and religious lines.

As Karl Marx put it, “[T]his revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.”

New Matilda gets around the Facebook censor. Image Chris Graham

 
Celeste Liddle is a wonderful Arrernte woman and proud unionist, feminist and activist. She gave a great speech about feminism and Aboriginal woman as part of International Women’s Day.

It was so good New Matilda, a progressive online  daily magazine, published it.  Because Celeste made reference in her talk about being banned from Facebook for sharing a photo of ‘topless desert women painted up for ceremony engaging in traditional dance’ New Matilda included a photo of  Aboriginal women from the remote Central Australian community of Ampilatwatja performing at a public ceremony in 2010 to protest against the Northern Territory intervention.  Here is that image:

Aboriginal women perform at public ceremony (Image Chris Graham.)

 
Both Celeste and New Matilda were banned from Facebook for this image.  The reason? Nudity was against Facebook’s community standards.  A re-post I did of the article was removed for breaching those ‘standards’ and I had to swear on 7 bibles that my other photos also did not contain nudity. A change org petition also contained the photo and Facebook removed it too.

ABC Radio’s lunchtime political show,  The World Today, ran an account of the story. You can read the transcript here.

As Celeste says, the decision to ban her over a photo of traditional Aboriginal women

“Facebook’s standards are a joke. They are blatantly racist, sexist and offensive. They show a complete lack of respect for the oldest continuing culture in the world. They also show that Facebook continually fails to address their own shortfalls in knowledge.

“Finally, they show that Facebook is more than willing to allow scurrilous bullying to continue rather than educate themselves.

Here is Facebook’s response

 
Celeste has an answer.

“Facebook’s standards are a joke. They are blatantly racist, sexist and offensive. They show a complete lack of respect for the oldest continuing culture in the world. They also show that Facebook continually fails to address their own shortfalls in knowledge.

“Finally, they show that Facebook is more than willing to allow scurrilous bullying to continue rather than educate themselves.’

This latter point refers to the fact it appears to be racist misogynistic trolls reporting the photo who got Celeste banned.

I look forward to the right taking up Celeste’s case. George Brandis? Tim Wilson? Andrew Bolt? Their silence condemns these faux friends of ‘free speech.’

As an aside, the Facebook censorship of Celeste has got the rusty lawyer in me thinking. From the Human Rights website: ‘The High Court has held that an implied freedom of political communication exists as an indispensible part of the system of representative and responsible government created by the Constitution.’ However, it is probably not applicable to Facebook and those it censors. ‘It operates as a freedom from government restraint, rather than a right conferred directly on individuals.’

It is also against some of the various Federal, State and Territory Human Rights Acts to discriminate against a person because of their political views. Discrimination can be direct – we don’t hire reds here – or indirect. An indirect example was police height restrictions in recruitment. You had to be taller than 5 foot six inches. On its face it appears non-discriminatory but in practice it is. The height requirement mainly excluded women. So why isn’t Facebook’s blanket (but not always enforced) removal of nude pictures as applied to Celeste’s article discriminatory on the basis of politics, gender and race?

Facebook’s community ‘standards’ are the ‘standards’ of rich white men who find women’s bodies offensive if they aren’t titillating them. The power Facebook has is overwhelming. This abuse of its power reflects the dominant ruling class paradigms of misogyny, racism and sexism. Facebook’s decision to censor a photo of traditional Aboriginal women and ban Celeste Liddle is Donald Trump writ small. Where is our Chicago in response?

The situation at whichever one of Clive Palmer’s companies owns Queensland Nickel is grim. Having sacked over 200 workers in January, today the remaining 550 workers are unemployed. It is not clear they will be re-employed in the short term or the long term.

Workers want their jobs back. How can they win that?

As the Commonwealth Liberal and Queensland Labor governments do nothing, and Palmer blames every one but himself, desperate times demand desperate measures. The time for talk is over.

The sacked workers could consider occupying the plant and demand Palmer pay them all out of his own wealth until money starts flowing again from refining nickel. It appears it will take at least 2 months before new contracts can be negotiated and ore shipped to the refinery. Palmer can afford it.

He can also afford to pay the workers out of his own wealth till the price of nickel improves.

Five hundred workers occupying the plant would change the game. Unlike constant but fruitless talks, this at least has a chance of winning and gives workers real bargaining power, especially if the community mobilises behind them, which it is likely to do.

Monday is the time of silence
When all the doors are closed
When hooded men hunchback the streets
And the petty boys are nosed

This is the land where talk commands
A febrile passing glance
And strangers kiss in open fields
To meet again in dance

This is the place where echoes lace
The spirit of the mind
Where looks askance are saving grace
And kids are lost to find

So take the quiet in the crowd
And shout its name, loud and loud
The deaf can hear, the blind can see
The world is this totality

Gather not the shoes of poor rich men
But ask the question and answer when
The moneyed ones are ever jailed
If that is all then we have failed

I see the sandman very near
The Corban blessed, lighting fear
In hardened hearts near streets and walls
Glutted bulls win their falls

Monday is no longer silenced
Its rages burst their cone
Unveiling torment’s terrible truth
We are many, they are alone

(c) John Passant 12 March 2016

Mike Pezzullo, the head of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection, has attacked those who point to the militarisation of the Department and others, like me, who argue that the immigration detention centres on Manus Island and Nauru, and here in Australia, are concentration camps.

Why is this important? A recent badly worded Departmental press release raising holocaust denial concerns was in part a response to Psychiatrist Michael Dudley. In Australian Psychiatry Dudley said this about Australia’s detention centre policies:

‘Such policies misuse helping professionals to underwrite state abuses and promote public numbing and indifference, resembling other state abuses in the ‘war on terror’ and (with qualification) historical counterparts, e.g. Nazi Germany.’

The department then clarified its meaning and this only heightened the problems. New Matilda captures the issues well.

Even a slight familiarity with history would help Pezzullo and others understand that the offshore and onshore detention centres are in fact classic examples of concentration camps. As I have written elsewhere:

‘Just as the British imprisoned without charge or trial Boer non-combatants, mainly women and children, to further their war aims, and the Nazis imprisoned without charge or trial their left wing political opponents to consolidate their power and drive wages down to restore profits, so the Australian government imprisons innocent refugee and asylum seeker children, women and men to further its class war on workers and the poor by diverting our attention away from that class war.’

Pezzullo is not about historical truth; he is about denying the truth of history. If we as a society were to call these detention centres what they are, concentration camps, then the reality of our brutality would become obvious. So too would the role of the leadership of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection in managing and defending these concentration camps.

Bernie Sanders’ shock wins keep coming in the US Democratic Party Presidential nomination race writes Charlie Kimber in Socialist Worker UK.

Bernie Sanders addressing a crowd in Flint, Michigan

 
Bernie Sanders’ extraordinary win in Michigan yesterday, Tuesday, was described by a respected analyst as “one of the greatest shockers in presidential primary history”.

Harry Enten added, “any thought that Sanders would exit this race in the foreseeable future has been put to rest by a stunning victory.”

Just days before polls had shown the establishment candidate Hillary Clinton 21 percentage points ahead.

After last night’s results, Bernie Sanders has won four of the last six Democratic Party primaries or caucuses to decide the party’s presidential candidate.

It shows that Sanders, who calls himself a socialist, is far from finished—despite the media’s confident predictions that Clinton was now certain to win. And in Michigan Sanders did better among black voters than he had in other contests.

Exit polls suggested he had won half of black voters under 45. As in previous contests, he won a huge majority among young people. The primary also saw a massive turnout.

Last weekend Sanders won contests in Kansas by 68 percent to 32 percent, in Nebraska by 55 percent to 45 percent and in Maine by 64 percent to 36 percent.

Sanders’ Michigan victory by 51 percent to 49 percent was undoubtedly assisted by anger at the water poisoning scandal in Flint, which is in the state.

At a debate in Flint two days before the vote, Sanders and Clinton clashed sharply. Sanders said, “I have to tell you what I heard, and what I saw literally shattered me. And it was beyond belief that children in Flint, Michigan, in the United States of America in the year 2016 are being poisoned.”

Clinton tried to attack Sanders for not supporting the bailouts of the banks and the giant auto firms in 2008 but he responded by denouncing the crisis “where some of your friends destroyed this economy”.

Some of Sanders’ real weaknesses were also on display as he repeatedly blamed bosses for exporting production abroad rather than focusing on their profiteering in general.

Clinton is expected to do well in the five states voting on 15 March—although after Michigan Sanders will now have stronger hopes in Ohio and Illinois. But according to analyst Nate Silver, “the calendar turns very friendly for Sanders in late March and early April”.

Clinton remains the favourite, not least because she has a mountainous lead of 460 to 23 among the 717 unelected “superdelgates”—over 230 are yet to declare.

But Sanders’ continuing appeal confirms that he is partly reflecting the exciting radicalisation in the US in recent times from Occupy Wall Street, to Black Lives Matter to the climate change movement to the fight for a $15 an hour minimum wage to teachers’ strikes and stirrings of revolt among steel workers and auto workers. He taps into a deep bitterness in US society.

In many ways this is of far greater long term significance than the Sanders campaign itself.

The crushing frustration is that instead of giving it further momentum, he is on course to lead it back into the dead end of the Democratic Party.

A 34-year-old Iranian refugee on Nauru was savagely attacked by two Nauruans on Saturday night, 5 March, around 10pm, writes the Refugee Action Coalition Sydney.

Two Nauruans on a motor cycle approached the man who was walking alone near the Nibok settlement. The man was struck across the top of the head by a machete, while the attacking Nauruans said, “Fuck refugees.”

The Iranian man was left with a deep head wound that required 8 stitches.

The following night, Sunday, 6 March, locals returned to attack the accommodation at Nibok that the man shares with his wife.

The husband and wife barricaded themselves inside their accommodation and screamed for help, as the attackers yelled, “Fuck refugees. We will kill you.” Other refugees in the area rallied to support the couple.

Nauruan police were called but they took one and a half hours to attend to the scene of the attack. Police told the refugees there was nothing they could do.

Now the couple are living in fear of a further attack. Neither the police nor Immigration or Connect will provide a guard for their accommodation.

“We cannot sleep for fear we will be attacked again,” the victim’s wife told the Refugee Action Coalition.

“The unprovoked attack once again reveals both the real danger and the complete absence of official willingness to protect refugees on Nauru. The lack of security at Nibok and other camps on Nauru leaves refugees open to attack,” said Ian Rintoul, spokesperson for the Refugee Action Coalition.

The Nibok attack comes at the same time as reports of growing numbers of both thefts and incidents of Nauruans armed with knives threatening refugees at the Fly Camp that accommodates single men.

The dangers for refugees on Nauru form the backdrop to the on-going “Let Them Stay” campaign calling on the Turnbull government to allow the 267 asylum seekers presently in Australia from Nauru and Manus Island, to remain in Australia.

“There is no prospect for enduring protection or care for asylum seekers and refugees on Nauru,” said Rintoul, “The 267 must be allowed to stay and the camps must be closed.”