Smash the Cutback to Sunday Penalty Rates through Class Struggle Action
Above: Health Services Union members protest against the NSW government’s attempt to privatise healthcare by stealth by outsourcing hospital services to private businesses. Women workers – suffering both exploitation as workers and male chauvinism – are key to the working class struggle for liberation.
International Women’s Day 2017 comes at a time of heightened attacks on women – especially working class women. That is not only because a hard-core misogynist and racist, Donald Trump, has become the president of the most powerful country in the world. Working class women in Australia have to cop lower wages than men. Unaffordable childcare restricts women’s full participation in economic and social life. Meanwhile, many low income single mothers continue to be ground down by the former Gillard ALP government’s cruel cut to the single parenting payment four years ago. As always, the fate of women’s rights goes hand in hand with workers’ rights and the rights of all the oppressed including Aboriginal people, LGBTI people, coloured “ethnic” people and the unemployed. Alongside attacks on women’s social position, we are seeing the right-wing Turnbull government attack our trade unions – targeting especially the CFMEU construction workers union – and undercut weekend penalty rates for hundreds of thousands of low-paid workers. Meanwhile, all the current parliamentary parties – Pauline Hanson’s fascistic One Nation, the Liberal/National coalition, the Nick Xenophon Team, the ALP and The Greens – are all in various way inciting poisonous nationalism that inevitably targets coloured migrant-derived communities by variously blaming refugees, guest workers or overseas producers for the unemployment and insecurity caused by the capitalist system itself.
Russia, International Women’s Day, 1917: Mainly female textile workers go on strike for bread sparking a general strike and the toppling of the Tsar. The resulting revolutionary period that was opened up culminated half a year later in the October Socialist Revolution. The banner reads “Glory to the Women Fighters for Freedom!”
Women’s rights are so closely bound to the overall state of the class struggle between capitalist business owners and the working class because women’s oppression is actually built on the foundations of class-divided societies. Under capitalism’s social structure a large proportion of women are denied economic independence. With women denied the opportunity to participate equally in economic and political life, male chauvinist attitudes are spawned that “justify” and perpetuate this reality. That is why we must fight for women’s full economic independence through demanding jobs for all and for equal pay between men and women workers. We must also call for free abortion on demand and freely available access to all forms of contraception. To allow women the greatest chance to participate in economic life, we must fight for free 24-hour childcare, for free school lunches at all public schools and for after-school sports, music and cultural activities provided for free by the state alongside free transport from school to these activities. All these demands, however, clash head on with the current system because the capitalists who control the economy are not going to want to sacrifice their profits to make these social programs and full employment possible. Thus, while we can make headway in women’s emancipation through winning concessions through struggle under capitalism, we will only fully open the door to women’s complete liberation when the capitalist system is replaced by a socialist one.
However, women are not just victims of capitalism and will not simply be a major beneficiary of socialism. Working class women, who have the most to gain by ripping up this current system, will also be the key drivers of the struggle to overthrow capitalism. The most powerful example of this occurred on International Women’s Day in 1917 in Russia. It was then that in the Russian capital of Petrograd tens of thousands of mainly women textile workers walked off the job to demand bread. Their struggle sparked off a general strike and a revolt against the tsarist monarchy. The resulting revolutionary period that was opened up culminated half a year later in the October Socialist Revolution. Exactly one hundred years later and this struggle remains the shining path for the fight for women’s emancipation and for the liberation of the masses more generally.
Today, women workers alongside coloured “ethnic” and youth workers are not only amongst the workers most targeted by the slashing of Sunday penalty rates but are crucial to any fightback against this vicious attack.
In February, the “Fair Work” Commission announced its despicable decision to slash Sunday penalty rates between 25% and 50% for hospitality, restaurant, fast food, retail and pharmacy workers. The decision also cuts these workers’ public holiday pay by up to 25%. This will mean a loss of up to $6,000 per year for some workers. The Fair Work Commission’s decision, done with the backing of the Turnbull government, will hurt some of the lowest paid workers in the country. Many of these workers are already on perilous incomes, not only because their pay rates are low but because many are in insecure, casual jobs where they are forced to work less hours than they want to due to the bosses and the bosses’ capitalist system making inadequate work available. The loss of penalty rates will thus mean a huge proportion of their income will be lost. For many of these workers, the loss of penalty rates could be the difference between scraping enough to pay their rent and simply not being able to make ends meet.
Thus far, the pro-ALP leaders of our trade unions have been relying on petitions and parliament to oppose this cruel attack. However, we should not rely on a future ALP government to reverse the cuts. Although the ALP Opposition is now calling for the government to legislate against the Fair Work Commission decision, before the election ALP leader Bill Shorten announced that a future ALP government would not try to reverse a cut to penalty rates if the Fair Work commission ruled in favour of it. So, what exactly would the ALP do if it ended up being the current gang of politicians in government running the rich bosses’ state? What we can expect from the openly anti-working class, Liberal-National government, of course, goes without saying!
What we need is the mobilisation of the power of the working class in mass action – especially including industrial action – to smash the attack on the weekend and holiday pay of hospitality, restaurant, fast food, retail and pharmacy workers. This should not just be the task of the workers directly affected. This slashing of penalty rates is an attack on the entire working class. If the bosses get away with it they will be targeting penalty and shift rates of other workers. Many of those targeted by the recent attack toil in small workplaces where ruthless “small business owners” are able to get away with bullying them. That is why we need workers in larger, more heavily unionised workplaces to also flex their industrial muscle to help crush this attack on penalty rates. Such a mobilisation will also help cement ties between different components of the working class. For example if militant construction workers and maritime workers unleashed their power behind the hospitality, restaurant, fast food, retail and pharmacy workers targeted by this recent attack, they will likely see more of these lower paid workers joining their picket lines when they face impending full frontal attacks from the capitalist rulers.
CFMEU national secretary Michael O’Connor has stated the union’s opposition to the slashing of penalty rates and insisted that the CFMEU would “not stand by and watch” as the Government introduced cuts to pensions, family supplements and attempted to regain welfare overpayments. O’Connor continued that:
“The CFMEU stands ready to fight.
“This war on battlers must end.
“The war on the fair go must stop.
“Where the fightback takes place — wherever there is a picket, a rally, a campaign, whatever it is — you will see us there standing shoulder to shoulder with those under attack.”
These statements now need to be followed by actual industrial action by the CFMEU and other unions to smash the attacks on penalty rates, pensions and welfare payments.
If we can defeat this attack on penalty rates through industrial and other mass action, the union movement will win thousands of new workers – especially younger workers – to joining our ranks. We will also become more united and confident to challenge other attacks that we face including the Liberals ABCC – as well as the anti-strike provisions of Labor’s 2009 Fair Work Act – cuts to public housing and draconian cuts to social welfare for the poor.
The Fair Work Commission (FWC) decision proves once again that the industrial courts in Australia – like all the courts here – are not “independent umpires.” Rather, they form part of a capitalist state – which includes also the police, the military, prisons and the bureaucracy – that was created and is maintained for enforcing the interests of the capitalist exploiting class over the working class. Even when the FWC, on a rare occasion, makes a decision less harmful to workers’ interests then that is not because of any inherent sense of justice in the system but merely reflects those cases where workers have won the struggle on the ground in the industrial and political battlefield and the FWC is forced to accept this reality in order to maintain its credibility. That is why we should not bow to the authority of these courts even if the rules under which it operates are changed. The only law that the workers movement should be bound to respect are our decisions on what is in the interests of the working class and oppressed.
The excuse of the greedy business owners and theirFWC for slashing Sunday and holiday penalty rates is that this helps bosses hire more workers. To this we must say: No – we are not going to let you gouge the incomes of already exploited workers even more as the price we must pay to let you supposedly hire more workers. Instead, we are going to forceyou to hire more at the expense of your already bloated profits. We demand that profitable businesses be banned from cutting the size of their workforce and that profitable firms be forced to increase hiring in proportion to their profits. If the greedy business owners complain that this will make their operations impractical then we say that this only proves that the economy should not be in the hands of these capitalists but should be brought into the socialist, collective hands of working class people.
A Soviet poster advising the woman worker to take up her rifle!
Unleash the Full Power of Lower Paid, Youth, Women & Coloured “Ethnic” Workers
The FWC’s penalty rate cut will especially hurt people from the most oppressed sections of the working class – including lower paid workers, women workers, youth workers and workers from coloured “ethnic” backgrounds. These workers are crucial to the overall cause of the working class. All the obstacles that stand in the way of these workers being able to unleash their full fighting strength – like male chauvinism, skilled worker arrogance towards unskilled workers and racism – must be knocked down. Indeed, one thing that this widely hated attack on penalty rates has done is that, in the face of bi-partisan attacks on refugees and Aboriginal people, the growth in support for the extreme racist One Nation party and everyone from the Coalition to the ALP to the Greens trying to emulate the economic nationalism of hard-right, U.S. president Donald Trump, it has highlighted the truth that the cause of Australian workers’ hardships is not in the least refugees, guest workers or overseas producers but the Aussie capitalist exploiters – and the governments and state institutions that enforce their interests. We need to build a leadership of the workers movement that is committed to explaining this basic truth to the masses. One that will face down the lies of the bosses media and pro-capitalist political parties that try to divide the exploited masses with nationalism and racism. This is part of the struggle to reorient our unions away from trust in the “Australia-First”, ALP and the institutions of Australia’s capitalist state and onto a program of militant class struggle against the greedy Aussie capitalists.
Let’s smash the Australian ruling class’ attacks on hospitality, restaurant, fast food, retail and pharmacy workers! Let’s unite all workers in this country – and win crucial international solidarity action by uniting as one with our working class sisters and brothers abroad – to fight for this goal! Let’s unleash the industrial muscle of the united working class! Let’s win this battle so that we can begin to roll back the over three decades of setbacks that the workers movement has suffered!
UNLEASH INDUSTRIAL ACTION TO DEMAND JOBS FOR ALL! CAPITALIST “DEMOCRACY” IS A SHAM: ONLY WORKERS UNITED WITH ALL OF THE OPRESSED CAN BRING ABOUT REAL CHANGE
Above: The Handover or Phony Hope Shakes the Hand of Blatant Bigotry. A moment that ought to finally dispel anyone’s lingering illusion that capitalist democracy can ever be reformed into a system that operates in the interests of the working class. Obama prepares to calmly hand the administration of the U.S. capitalist state over to Trump just as George W. Bush did for him eight years earlier. The teetering edifice of the capitalist state requires both left and right pillars to keep it from completely collapsing beneath the dead weight of its own contradictions.
November 9 – Hard right-wing candidate Donald Trump – a billionaire capitalist exploiter and extreme racist and misogynist – will become the next president of the U.S.A. In yesterday’s election, he defeated the candidate supported by the mainstream of the American capitalist class, Hillary Clinton.
Like most far-right demagogues (including Hitler), Trump poses as a “rebel” and “anti-establishment” figure. Actually, he is a tycoon who is very much part of the capitalist ruling class and a key part of his economic program is big tax cuts for the rich. His main beef with the mainstream of the racist establishment is that they are not openly racist and economically nationalist enough for his liking. His blatant racism serves to protect the capitalist establishment by dividing the masses and diverting their economic frustrations and insecurity onto minorities and other groups in society who are made into scapegoats for the mass inequalities that capitalism inevitably creates. Similarly, his protectionism diverts anger about job losses onto overseas workers, thus shielding the capitalist exploiters in the U.S. from any blame and making the masses think that they have a common interest with their own exploiters in protecting American business.
Eight years ago when Obama was first elected, Trotskyist Platform actually predicted that the inevitable failure of a small-l liberal led regime to improve the lives of the masses could well lead to the eventual takeover of hard right forces in America (and, indeed, in his language Obama was the most liberal-sounding U.S. president in decades). Here is an excerpt from the article we wrote upon Obama first taking office:
That the Obama electoral triumph, if anything, dulled workers’ class consciousness means that even the present shift away from the conservative right wing is fragile. Without an understanding that it is the capitalist profiteers who are responsible for unemployment, recession and decay the masses will be vulnerable to right wing demagogy when they see that the new Administration is no more able to satisfy their aspirations than the previous one. The conservatives are waiting in the wing. And they will be able to mobilise right wing activists from amongst the all too many bigoted elements who were horrified that a black person should become President. Hence, there is a real danger that the rise of the liberal Obama could turn out to be just a prelude to a right-wing regime more frightening than Bush’s – perhaps led by a Sarah Palin-like figure. While the left rest on their illusory laurels, the frighteningly fascist right are now surely mobilising their forces, stirred up like a wasps’ nest ready to strike!
Only by mobilising their own power to squeeze concessions out of the exploiters can the working class begin to address the needs of the American masses and stop the re-emergence of the right. The working class can through industrial action force companies to avoid shedding jobs. And its power can be mobilised in a campaign to demand free health care for all. In all such struggles of the American workers movement, black workers will be at the forefront. These workers will join together the multiracial workers’ movement with the ghetto poor in the fight for black liberation.
Although Trump’s views and agenda are certainly fascistic, fascism has not yet triumphed in the U.S (nor does it currently hold sway in any other country). Fascism is not just a government of people with a really right-wing agenda but involves the mass mobilisation of the middle class and some of the unemployed (and even politically backward workers) to violently smash all workers’ organisations – like independent trade unions and left-wing parties – and institute a capitalist regime which dispenses with the formalities of parliamentary “democracy.” Such a regime can only be instituted by physically defeating an inevitable degree of resistance from the politically conscious, working class masses. Nevertheless, Trump’s triumph will greatly encourage fascist outfits in the U.S. and will spur the development of fascist militias. American blacks, First Peoples, Hispanics, Asians, gays, women seeking abortion and leftists will face ever more violent attacks.
Regardless of Trump’s particular policies, the normal workings of the capitalist boom and bust cycles mean that in some four to twelve months there will be an economic downturn in the U.S.A and a consequent rise in the unemployment rate. Given the chaotic state of major capitalist economies, this could turn out to be another serious global economic crisis. In that context, mass struggle led by conscious working class and anti-racist forces could weaken the right-wing regime and undermine support for it. However, in the absence of such struggle, the increased economic insecurity could further fuel the flames of fascism.
Trump’s ascendancy will also embolden far-right and fascist forces here in Australia. Hard-right Liberal politician Cory Bernardi as well as the LNP MP George Christensen openly backed Trump. And Trump’s victory was hailed by the fascistic senator Pauline Hanson of One Nation infamy. Indeed, at a fascist rally in the northern Melbourne suburb of Eltham last weekend against a refugee centre, some of the fascist scum were wearing Trump T-shirts.
Trump’s rise will not only boost organised far-right forces but will also incite violent tendencies amongst garden-variety rednecks in Australia. The latter are people who may not be politically active in an extreme right-wing movement but are, nevertheless, simply filled with racial hatred. A couple of months ago, one such redneck murdered 14-year-old Aboriginal youth, Elijah Doughty, near the Western Australia town of Kalgoorlie. Then late last month, Indian-origin bus driver, Manmeet Alisher was cruelly murdered by being set alight with a fire bomb by a man of white Anglo-Saxon appearance, Anthony O’Donohue. O’Donohue, formerly an accountant, was known to harbour fascistic, crackpot conspiracy theories against trade unions. Although the media and cops have done their best to cover up the racist nature of this Brisbane murder the victim’s family are sure that it was motivated by racism. Several people with origins from the Indian subcontinent have told Trotskyist Platform comrades the same thing. They pointed out that the Indian man was specifically singled out. One man of Indian background, in explaining how Manmeet’s killing was a racist murder, told us that while living in the same multi-cultural Brisbane suburb where the murder took place, Moorooka, he had been attacked by racists and once had to literally run for his life to escape from a white racist who was threatening him.
All this underscores the need to build, here in Australia just as much as in other capitalist countries, a mass mobilisation of trade unionists, Aboriginal people, non-white “ethnic” people and all anti-racists to drive the fascist filth off the streets. This is an urgent necessity of self-defence for all the intended victims of the fascists. Although self-defence action against fascist groups will not directly stop the daily and incessant racist attacks and abuse from the innumerable garden-variety rednecks scattered throughout this country, by landing blows against organised fascists we can send a message to the garden-variety racists out there that they had better pull their heads in. These racists must learn that the organised and united multiracial working class has both the will and the power to stand up and defend anyone who is vulnerable to their racist, cowardly attacks.
On October 28, Indian-born Brisbane bus driver Manmeet Alisher (Bottom Left) was murdered by Anthony O’Donohue (Top Centre). The killer boarded the bus and heinously set the driver alight in what was manifestly a racist attack. The attack by the white terrorist also caused the bus to burn down, threatening the lives of many passengers when the bus (pictured Top Left)was stopped in the multiracial suburb of Morooka. O’Donohue was known to hold fascistic views – including anti-union conspiracy theories. The election of hard right wing racist, Donald Trump, to the U.S. presidency and the ensuing emboldening of far right Australian politicians like Pauline Hanson (Top Far Right – posing for a photo with notorious Sydney Nazi, Ross “Skull” May) will incite further white supremacist terror. Mass moblisations of trade unionists and all the intended victims of the fascists must drive violent racist filth off the streets – such as happened in Brisbane on 2 May 2014 (Bottom Right). On that day a large contingent of unionised construction workers joined tother with anarchists, Trotskyist Platform supporters and other leftists and anti-racists to shut down an attempted march by the fascist Australia First Party.
No to Divisive Protectionism: For a Class Struggle Program of Jobs For All!
Trump’s victory will also encourage various forces here to more rabidly push for protectionism. In fact, economic nationalism was one of Trump’s main points of attraction for the U.S. masses, especially in the Mid-West rust belt. To be sure, when the media reports that working class people in the Mid-West were supporting Trump this can be a bit misleading since, in actual fact, Trump still did not do that well in cities. What they mean by “working class” is people with a lower income rather than in terms of their actual relationship to the means of production. Trump’s support came not so much from currently employed industrial workers as it did from laid-off workers now trying to hustle a living as self-employed contractors or small businessmen or those now in insecure, non-union casual jobs or, perhaps, still unemployed or forced into early retirement. Unionised workers who are brought together at the point of production and united together in unions are, overall, less susceptible to right-wing demagogy than isolated self-employed and unemployed people. And, though it is true that even a portion of unionised workers did vote for Trump, analysis of exit polls actually revealed that the higher the income, the more likely you were to vote for Trump.
We need to firmly oppose economic nationalism here not only because it fuels racism but also because it directly undermines the fight to build actual struggle against the greedy bosses at home. However, we can only successfully oppose protectionism if we counterpose to it a class struggle program of jobs for all – that is, by highlighting the demand that profitable enterprises be forced to increase hiring at the cost of their own profits and then linking this demand to the fight for the ultimate confiscation of the means of production from the capitalist class by the working class. Trotskyist Platform has been emphasising opposition against any form of protectionism and promoting a class struggle program of jobs for all but we will intensify this work by fighting to build more actions promoting this essential perspective.
Unfortunately, much of the Left either themselves embrace economic nationalism – while trying to rid it of it of its openly racist aspects – or just try their best to ignore it. However, any leftist force that capitulates to economic nationalism is an obstacle to the fight for workers’ rights whether it happens to call itself socialist, Trotskyist, Marxist-Leninist, anarchist or any other kind of ist. The protectionist ideology of the pro-Democrats, American union bureaucracy has pushed a section of American unionised workers – and many laid off industrial workers – into the arms of far-right populism. The economic nationalist slogans of the current, pro-ALP Australian union leadership should also not be allowed to push Australian workers into the filthy arms of Hanson’s One Nation and its ilk who, after all, are the most consistent nationalists of all. Challenging the economic nationalist ideology that is currently dominant in the Australian workers movement is key to unleashing a class struggle fightback to defend our unions, protect workers rights and win jobs for everyone.
Implications for the Leninist Program on International Questions
On international policy, Trump has not disguised the fact that he is going to push an even more openly hostile stance towards socialistic China. He wants to draw capitalist Russia into this task by building an alliance with Russia that would bring the world’s two most powerful military powers into a capitalist super alliance. Part of the aim of this perspective is also to weaken the U.S.A’s European NATO allies cum imperialist economic rivals. Additionally, there is ideological affinity between the hard right wing in the U.S. and the Putin government. Putin, as well as being a hero to right-wing , “Third Way” (i.e. “neither socialism nor capitalism”) conspiracy theory types is also a hero to fascist groups throughout the West (the Australian Defence League here, for example, has openly hailed him) as well as to more mainstream right-wing forces (like racist, Islamophobic senator Jacqui Lambi) because of his government’s hard line anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim policies as well as his homophobia.
However, whether Trump and the Far Right’s proclivities for an alliance with Russia will be implemented remains to be seen. Trump’s regime will be, in effect, an alliance of hard line right wingers like himself and more mainstream figures from the right wing of the Republican Party. The latter are less inclined to an alliance with Russia as they believe the U.S. is strong enough not to share its spoils with any emerging power and do not want to allow a new player into the imperialist club. Furthermore, Putin himself would probably play hard to get with Trump since he knows the U.S is a weakening empire. He would also not want Russia to play second fiddle to the U.S. too much and would hold out for as many concessions as possible. Furthermore, the Russian bourgeoisie may be hesitant to be pulled in too brazenly into an anti-China alliance since, despite their hostility to socialism (the Russian government from Putin down were, after all, active in the counterrevolution that destroyed the USSR and brought capitalist class rule back to Russia) they stand to make a fortune from selling oil and natural gas to neighbouring China which has few of these resources itself.
Nevertheless, a U.S.-Russia capitalist super alliance is certainly quite possible and if it does transpire this may affect the position that communist internationalists should take towards events in Syria. Whatever effect a Trump presidency has on U.S.-Russia relations, one thing is pretty certain: the Trump ascendancy will see an intensification of open U.S. hostility to the Chinese workers state. So, despite the bureaucratic deformations and capitalist incursions into China – and we must remember that nearly 60% of her economy is controlled and nearly all of her economy’s commanding heights (that is, the heavy industries, finance, transport, telecommunications etc) are fully owned by the Chinese workers state, a bigger slice of the economic pie than that enjoyed by the Soviet Russian state during Lenin’s time – authentic socialists need to be ready to intensify our struggle to defend socialistic China against imperialist attack and imperialist-backed, anti-communist NGOs.
We live in scary times. The ascendancy of Trump to the U.S. presidency will – in the absence of mass resistance – incite in both the U.S.A and Australia a further escalation of racist attacks on coloured ethnic minorities, Muslims and First Peoples communities. However, we should be aware that the rising of fascistic forces is a sign of the utter decay of capitalism which in its death throes is releasing such noxious fumes. But the system will not die by itself. It needs to be overthrown by the conscious working class-led masses united with all of the oppressed. It is our job to advance the struggle for such a socialist revolution. This is a time when every major capitalist country is seeing the rise of sinister far-right forces: from the U.S.A to Australia to most of Europe to Russia and the Ukraine. In Indonesia a violent racist movement has erupted and targeted the governor of Jakarta purely for his being a member of an ethnic and religious minority. In India a sinister fascistic mass murderer is the prime minister. In fact, the one great socialistic power in the world, Red China, looks rather good by comparison. It is the one large nation where far-right racist forces based on the majority ethnic community are not on the march.
Why, in Australia, must the flower of Aboriginal youth fall victim to murderous, racist rednecks or become prey for a relentlessly systematic kind of brutal “justice” that continues to send young Aboriginal men and women to languish in jail cells or detention centres for years on end or worse? They are victims of the essentially immoral 200 year-old Australian capitalist racket. As are the brave children, women and men who have been held hostage in the Nauru, Manus Island and Christmas Island hellholes. Can anyone seriously argue that if these asylum seekers came from, say, England or Denmark instead of mainly from the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East that they would be treated in the same heartless manner? In fact, the Australian capitalist state’s border control policy provides tacit official sanction to every act of racist violence and xenophobia perpetrated out there on the streets of Australia.
A mighty, radical shift is needed. Any deluded notion of a middle ground that social democrats might be clinging onto is fast falling away beneath their feet and the pieces being greedily gobbled up by the awaiting, wide open fascistic jaws of your Donald Trumps and Pauline Hansons. Now is not the time for sitting on fences. The fence has already collapsed under the combined weight of too many fat, middle class rumps. Increasingly, humanity is faced with a choice between fascism and communism. Behind fascism stands the capitalist, property-rich ruling class which is willing to unleash its nazi dogs as a last resort to protect its ill gotten gains and its global control of immense human and industrial resources. Behind the prospect of communism stands the organised, international working class which is willing and able to seize control of the world’s business from the tiny minority of capitalist owners in the name of all the people and then commence work towards a collective, humane and socialistic organisation of society. A handful of countries have already – bravely and with sometimes seemingly intolerable sacrifice – embarked on the road to a communist future despite the perpetual harrassment and often bloody resistance put up by the imperialist powers. We workers of Australia must offer our sincere respect, our immense gratitude and, most of all, a comradely – critical if necessary but always helping – hand to these frontier workers states because our futures are inextricably linked. Let’s work hard to advance the struggle for communism here too! Let’s promote a class struggle fight for jobs for all workers! Let’s fight to unite the working class masses right around the world by uncompromisingly standing against both racism and economic nationalism! You’d have to be blind now not to see capitalist democracy for what it really is – a filthy, rich man’s game. But the riches of the world have always really belonged to the working many and not to the exploiting few. The exploiters can choke on the racism, hatred and division they sow. The fruit of our labour is of a different sort altogether. Already the workers of the world have begun to unite in order to form a community of kindness which can embrace all of our common humanity without exception. From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs. Friends, the time to mobilise and to strike back is now.
PROTECT THE GREAT BENEFITS FOR WORKERS & THE RURAL MASSES WON THROUGH THE REVOLUTION:
STOP IMPERIALIST FUNDING FOR THOSE NGOs THAT SEEK TO OVERTHROW SOCIALISTIC RULE IN CHINA
6th September 2016: Determined supporters of socialistic rule in China rallied this evening on the steps at the entrance to Sydney Town Hall. In this demonstration called at short notice, participants hailed the gains of China’s 1949 anticapitalist revolution and opposed the U.S. and Australian-backed anti-communist Chinese exile groups seeking to promote capitalist restoration in China.
The 1949 Chinese Revolution was one of the most momentous events in humanity’s entire history. The long-suffering Chinese masses overthrew their exploiters and took power. Tens of millions of downtrodden people participated in this heroic struggle. They achieved victory after a bitter three year civil war. On one side of the war stood the oppressed tenant farmers, workers, working-class women and idealistic students. They were organized by the Communist Party of China (CPC) which was led by Mao Ze Dong. On the other side were the brutal landlords and capitalists. These oppressor classes were served by the Kuomintang (KMT) government of Chiang Kai-Shek. The KMT was heavily armed, trained and advised by the U.S. regime. But still they lost to the Communist-led revolutionaries.
The 1949 anti-capitalist revolution freed the peasants from the tyranny of the landlords, made headway in liberating workers from capitalist exploitation and freed the Chinese people from humiliating subjugation by imperial powers. The revolution greatly uplifted women’s status from the horrific reality they faced under the previous Kuomintang regime – when many women were subjected to forced marriage and the barbaric practice of Continue reading Long Live China’s 1949 Anticapitalist Revolution!→
From the moment the DPRK soccer team arrived in Sydney for the January 2015 Asia Cup Finals, the capitalist-owned media went all out to demonise the team as highly secretive, repressed and without support. This is part of their general propaganda war against socialistic North Korea. The aim of this campaign is to justify to the Australian masses the Australian ruling class’ participation in the relentless imperialist drive to crush the DPRK workers state through military, economic and political pressure. However, the media narrative took a blow when soccer fans coming to watch North Korea’s match against Uzbekhistan as well as Sydney public transport users came across a contingent of supporters of the socialistic DPRK coming to support the DPRK team. The contingent – including supporters of Trotskyist Platform, the Australia-DPRK Friendship Society and the Communist Party of Australia – chanted: “D-P-R-K! Workers State is Here to Stay!”
Above: Democracy in capitalist South Korea? Leftist South Korean parliamentarian Lee Seok-ki shouts as he is escorted into prison by security agents in September 2013. The Unified Progressive Party (UPP) MP was jailed for nine years on bogus charges of inciting a socialist insurrection. Later, the South Korean regime banned the UPP and kicked all its MPs out of parliament. Until it was banned, the UPP was South Korea’s third largest parliamentary party with a vote share equivalent to The Greens in Australia.
“Human Rights” Attacks on Socialistic North Korea & the Trade Union Royal Commission Here:
Both are Campaigns of Lies to “Justify” Attacks on Anyone Standing in the Way of Capitalist Exploitation
22 August 2015: This month, people around the world marked the 70th anniversary of the two most horrific terror attacks on civilians ever perpetrated in the whole of human history. Seventy years ago the U.S. regime, fully backed by the Australian ruling class, was responsible for the nuclear incineration of the people first of Hiroshima and then of Nagasaki. Yet these very same ruling classes have the hide to wage a campaign against the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea) over “human rights.”
Indeed, the DPRK is probably the last country that the Western powers should be raising the issue of “human rights” about. During the 1950-53 Korean War, the U.S. and allied militaries – including those of Australia and South Korea – killed between two to three million North Korean citizens. In the beginning of January 1951, American General Mathew Ridgway ordered the air force to hit the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, “with the goal of burning the city to the ground with incendiary bombs,” which they did in two strikes on January 3 and January 5 (“Consequences of the ‘Forgotten War,’” Bruce Cummings, printed in Le Monde Diplomatique, December 2004). Pyongyang and just about every other city in North and Central Korea was again levelled by U.S. bombing in December 1952. Those North Koreans that survived were by then literally living in caves.
Yet the capitalist powers and the big business-owned media that serve them have never shied away from gross hypocrisy and never been bound by the truth. Recall, for one, their now infamous lie that Iraq possessed nuclear weapons. Such lies are spread for a purpose. In the case of the lie about Iraq it was used to justify the 2003 U.S.–led invasion and conquest of that oil-rich country. Here, the Liberal/National Party regime’s lies demonising our trade unions are used to grease the skids for further union-busting attacks and anti-strike laws.
So why are they lying about North Korea then? Because the workers and farmers of North Korea have dared to adopt a socio-political system that is not based on capitalist exploitation. The masses of North Korea have dared to insist that they will not subordinate themselves to Western imperialism. For this “crime,” the imperial powers have slated the DPRK for destruction. Their outrageous claims about “appalling human rights abuses” in North Korea are used to justify the ongoing stiff economic sanctions on that country as well as the extreme military pressure that the U.S. and its allies exert on the DPRK. Not only are tens of thousands of U.S. troops stationed in South Korea to threaten the DPRK but U.S. aircraft and warships regularly move in and out of North Korean airspace and waters to amplify this threat. Ultimately, the imperialist powers see the “human rights” crusade against North Korea as a means of preparing the population in their own countries for a future, full-scale military assault on that country – something that has to date only been stymied by Red China’s alliance with its socialistic sister, the DPRK.
As part of the big lie campaign against the DPRK, the South Korean Consul General in Sydney – in other words the South Korean government – hosted a week of events in Australia from August 17 to August 21 titled “North Korea Human Rights Week.” These events were timed to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the liberation of North Korea from Japanese colonial occupation on 15 August. The Sydney Branch of the Australia-DPRK Friendship Society protested outside the Opening Ceremony of this “Human Rights Week” at Sydney City’s main cinema strip near Town Hall station. Participating in the snap protest were several Trotskyist Platform comrades as well as supporters of the Australia-DPRK Friendship Society including one member from the CPA and a representative from the Supporters of the Iranian Peoples Fadaee Gureillas. Among the placards we carried were signs that read, “Human Rights” Attacks on Socialistic North Korea Are Like the Trade Union Royal Commission Here: A Campaign of Lies Used to Justify Attacks on Organisation/s Standing In the Way of Capitalist Exploitation and “Human Rights” of imperialism = bombing Afghanistan, torture at Guantanamo, killings of Aboriginal people in custody, support for murderous regimes in Egypt, Israel, Philippines and Colombia. How dare they attack socialistic DPRK, China and Cuba over “human rights.” Some passers-by stopped to express sympathy with the protest. Among these were a woman who knew much about the South Korean regime’s jailing of trade unionists and a woman of South Korean origin whose husband was a political activist murdered by the capitalist South Korean regime.
For the brutal, anti-working class South Korean regime to be talking about “human rights” is truly the height of hypocrisy. Yet its attacks on the socialistic North are totally expected. Whilst the DPRK was founded by Korean leftists who heroically fought the Japanese imperialist occupiers and with the vital assistance of the Soviet Red Army freed the Northern part of the peninsula from colonial rule, South Korea was established by the U.S. using many local collaborators with Japanese colonial rule as their henchmen. Among these U.S. henchmen were rich industrialists and big landlords during Japanese rule who defected from the North after the new socialistic power there nationalised industry and divided big landholdings amongst the impoverished poor peasants. Thus for a long time many amongst the Korean masses viewed North Korea as the real Korea and South Korea for what it really was – a U.S.-occupied puppet state. The South Korean regime and its U.S. patrons could only maintain their rule through the most bloody terror and the support of the occupying U.S. military forces.
14 November 2015, Seoul: Capitalist South Korea’s brutal police unleash water cannon, pepper spray and tear gas to disperse a 70,000 strong anti-government demonstration of workers and civil rights activists.
Against the lies being spread by the South Korean regime and the U.S., British, Japanese and Australian ruling classes, we present here some important facts:
In the DPRK there is full employment. All workers have a right to work. This does not exist in capitalist South Korea and certainly not in capitalist Australia where greedy bosses feel that they can even get away with sacking workers in strongly unionised workplaces by text message!
The liberation in the latter part of World War II of the Northern part of Korea from Japanese colonial rule by the Soviet Red Army and communist-led Korean partisans led to the establishment of a workers state in North Korea. This workers state is, however, weakened by bureaucratic deformations. Thus, although the DPRK defends a pro-working class system based on collective ownership of industry, agriculture and services, the bulk of the working class is kept away from political administration which is in the hands of a relatively narrow bureaucratic layer. There is also a personality cult around leader Kim Jong Un and his late father, previous leader Kim Jong-Il and his deceased grandfather, founding head of the DPRK and former anti-colonial resistance leader, Kim Il Sung. Furthermore, those who form the administrative layer of the DPRK have special material privileges (although these pale in comparison to the extreme wealth of big business owners in capitalist countries). Yet despite these bureaucratic deformations, the existence of a workers state in the Northern part of Korea represents a significant conquest for the international working class. Furthermore, fixing the bureaucratic deformations that weaken the DPRK workers state demands relieving her of the tremendous pressure that is bearing down upon her from the imperialist powers and their South Korean ally.
Working in a society where workers have guaranteed jobs and are proclaimed as the ruling class means that North Korean workers enjoy a relaxed, friendly work environment. Indeed, if Aussie bosses saw how laid back North Korean workers were and how much they like to talk to each other whilst working on a production line then they would truly have a fit!
In contrast to the North, most South Korean workers toil in insecure casual or temporary jobs. Though the trade union movement there has waged many brave struggles for their rights in the face of fierce repression, still workers are forced to work very long hours. In fact, South Korean workers endure amongst the longest working hours in the world and the large number of workers forced to work part-time there means that the statistics, actually, hide the full extent of the reality.
Despite an industrialised economy, in capitalist South Korea, large numbers of homeless people sleep every day in railway subway tunnels. Many frail elderly people are forced to collect recyclables for petty cash since an aged pension barely exists in this country. In contrast, in North Korea, homelessness is non-existent and all citizens are guaranteed heavily subsidised public housing.
Despite being devastated in the 1950-53 Korean War, over the following two decades the DPRK built the second most advanced economy in Asia. Up until the late 1960s, the DPRK not only had much better health care, social welfare and education than South Korea but a higher average level of income. At that time, the U.S. decided to massively subsidise South Korean economic development as the U.S. rulers feared that hatred of the South Korean regime and sympathy for the North amongst the South Korean masses would lead to revolution. Thus, South Korea’s industrialisation was based on huge U.S. backing as well as cruel exploitation of its own workers.
Up until the collapse of the USSR in 1991-92, North Korean citizens continued to enjoy a high standard of living. However, the destruction of the USSR had a devastating effect on the DPRK. Faced with sanctions from the capitalist world, trade and technical exchanges with the former Soviet Union had been the DPRK’s economic lifeline. Furthermore, the USSR acted as a guarantor of the DPRK’s defence. Now, the DPRK had to provide for its own defence (China’s military was, especially at that time, not comparable to the USSR’s and incapable of providing the same deterrent to imperialist threats to the DPRK) at a time when the imperial powers felt more emboldened than ever. This forced the DPRK to divert a much larger proportion of its economy to defence which in turn squeezed her economy. A period of serious hardship in the country followed. However, by the start of the 21st century this started to turn around and especially over the last few years the DPRK economy has picked up. The military encirclement and the sanctions still hurt the DPRK – for example there is a shortage of fuel and spare parts for machinery and automobiles. Yet the North Korean masses are standing strong much like defiant workers who lose wages whilst on strike. Embarking on the struggle against their enemy brings hardships but they stand firm understanding that victory will open the road to a brighter future.
The Australian capitalist regime that attacks the DPRK over “human rights” has overseen the death of over 500 Aboriginal people in state custody since 1980. Some of the more well-known cases of Aboriginal people being outright murdered by racist police or killed as a result of racist treatment while in custody include: Eddie Murray (Top Left) who was killed by police in June 1981 in Wee Waa, northern NSW, within an hour of being arrested (merely for being allegedly drunk); 17 year-old TJ Hickey (Top Right) who in February 2004 was chased by racist police in Redfern who then rammed his bicycle causing him to fly through the air and be impaled on a fence; Mulrunji Doomadgee (Bottom Left) who was barbarically beaten to death by racist police officer Chris Hurley in Palm Island in November 2004 and Julieka Dhu (Bottom Right) who while imprisoned in WA’s South Hedland watch house in August 2011 was repeatedly denied medical assistance by racist police as she cried out for help. When eventually taken to hospital on two occasions she never got to see a doctor as police lied to hospital staff that, “she was faking it.” She eventually died as a result of this torture-like denial of medical assistance 48 hours after being jailed for unpaid fines.
In the above sense, North Korean defectors can be compared to weak workers who sneak back to work during a strike because they are looking for short-term economic security at the expense of the long-term well-being of their fellow workers. Some of these defectors, either out of the quest for fame or because of cajoling from the South Korean and Western governments and anti-communist NGOs, have given harrowing tales of life in North Korea. Yet such tales have often been exposed as lies. These included the tales told by the most famous North Korean defector, Yeonmi Park. Her lies were so blatant that even anti-communist news agencies had to report on it. Meanwhile, hundreds of defectors disillusioned with the cut-throat life in the capitalist South with its unemployment and underemployment have, actually, defected back to the North.
Even despite the hardships that being squeezed by powerful capitalist powers brings, the North Korean masses manage to have their basic needs met. Contrary to the utter lies of the Western mainstream media there is no starvation in North Korea. Indeed, even statistics compiled by Western agencies hostile to the DPRK reveal this. Thus, the list of the percentage of a country’s population under the age of five who are underweight due to malnourishment estimated by the CIA – an institution thoroughly hostile to and biased against the DPRK – shows that North Korea is not only not among the top ten countries with the highest proportion of malnourished children but not even in the top 40! Indeed, not only do India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka have much higher rates of malnourished children but so do other strong Western allies like Indonesia, the Philippines and Papua New Guinea.
Similarly, the UN’s World Health Organization estimates life expectancy in the DPRK at 70 years. This is not only decisively higher than in India, Pakistan and PNG but also, actually, slightly higher than in Russia (suffering as Russia is, of course, from the capitalist counter-revolution that dismantled the world’s first workers state, the Soviet Union, in 1991) as well as the Philippines.
Despite the external pressure it faces, the DPRK has completely free health care and education. As a result, the DPRK has one of the highest literacy rates in the world for both women and men and a highly educated population.
North Koreans enjoy a rich social and cultural life. Peoples’ favourite hobbies include sports, dancing and playing music. As in much of Asia, people love karaoke. A recent craze there are amusement parks which have started springing up all over the country.
North Korea is a sports mad country and you can often see people jogging in the streets, playing in parks or training in the country’s many sports pavilions. At the last Olympic Games in London, the DPRK finished 20th in the medal tally – punching above its weight for a country of its size.
Many North Koreans play musical instruments and sing. Classical Korean and classical Western music, light semi-classical Korean tunes and pop music are all popular. The most popular band in North Korea at the moment, the extremely talented, all-female Moranbong Band plays all these styles alongside Western pop pieces.
North Korean children having fun at a playground near a housing complex. Photo: Trotskyist Platform
In South Korea (the Republic of Korea), the very tough work environment for workers and the cut-throat nature of the capitalist society in general has led to it having the second highest suicide rate in the world. To put this in perspective, the suicide rate in South Korea is more than two and a half times that of Australia’s and nearly four times that of the Peoples Republic of China.
Despite having the hide to attack the DPRK over “human rights,” it is South Korea that has an appalling record of crushing the human rights of workers. The Seoul regime regularly arrests and imprisons trade union activists, including several trade union leaders who were arrested only two months ago .
Many people are persecuted under South Korea’s draconian National Security Law. In 2010 a woman was given a two year jail term for possessing MP3 files of instrumental music that was alleged to have pro-North Korea titles!
Last December, the South Korean regime banned the country’s third largest party in parliament, the left-leaning Unified Progressive Party (UPP), and stripped its MPs of its parliamentary seats. The UPP was accused of organising a pro-North Korea rebellion as the party’s actually quite critical attitude to the DPRK is, however, not hard line enough for the South Korean authorities. The UPP had won over two million votes (just over 10% of the total) in the proportional representation side of the last South Korean elections in 2012.
Capitalist rule in South Korea was consolidated by fanatical right-wing terror. From April 1948 to May 1949, the U.S. military government and their South Korean henchmen killed over 30,000 people on South Korea’s Jeju Island after the population rose up following repeated police shootings of pro-communist activists. Even the South Korean regime’s own commission – some 60 years after the fact – accepted that at least 20,000 people jailed for participation in the Jeju uprising were later massacred shortly after the outbreak of the Korean War.
More broadly, at the start of the Korean War, the South Korean rulers with the connivance of the U.S and Australia killed communists and those suspected of being communist sympathisers in what was known as the Bodo League massacres. Estimates of the number of people murdered ranged from 100,000 to 1.2 million. For decades in South Korea those who even spoke of these massacres were jailed. Although today South Korea flaunts an image of “democracy” and finally acknowledges, in part, the Bodo League massacres, it remains ruled by a brutal anti-working class regime.
In May 1980, the South Korean military and police massacred over 2,000 people in the city of Kwangju after leftist students and workers there staged a rebellion demanding an end to martial law and an increase in minimum wages.
The South Korean regime for decades either pressured or coerced local women to work as “comfort women” prostitutes for stationed American troops. They then stigmatised the women and left them to live in poverty. Over 120 surviving comfort women are now suing the South Korean regime.
The South Korean regime is far from the only hypocrite amongst those falsely attacking the DPRK over “human rights.” So are the rulers of the U.S., Britain, Australia and other Washington allies. In Vietnam, these forces killed over two million Vietnamese people in their cruel but, ultimately, futile and losing war against the heroic Vietnamese revolutionaries. Over the course of the 1991 First Gulf War attack on Iraq, the subsequent starvation-causing UN sanctions on Iraq and the 2003 invasion and occupation, the U.S., British and Australian regimes caused the death of over one and a half million Iraqi people. In 2001, they invaded Afghanistan to replace the fundamentalist cutthroats that they, themselves, had helped bring to power with a new lot of misogynist tyrants that are, however, even more slavish to them. In the process they bombed Afghanistan back to the stone-age and massacred thousands of civilians in countless “accidental” air strikes on wedding parties and civilian travel convoys. In neighbouring Pakistan, U.S. drone strikes unleashed against the wishes of Pakistan’s government kill hundreds upon hundreds of civilians. Meanwhile, four years ago, the NATO imperialists, egged on by the Australian government, violently deposed the then Libyan government. In doing so they not only killed tens of thousands of Libyan people in savage air strikes but turned that once peaceful and affluent country into a nightmarish “failed state” ruled by rival gangs of religious extremists and warlords and caused tens of thousands of Libyans to flee in dangerous boat trips to Europe.
Workers at North Korea’s Taedongang Tile Plant. North Korea has a relaxed and friendly work environment where at least two people are stationed at assembly line node points that would, in places like Australia or Indonesia, have only one worker doing all the work. Photo: Trotskyist Platform
As part of all these neo-colonial wars of conquest, the U.S. and their allies have used torture to advance their goals. There was the notorious torture of Iraqi political prisoners by the U.S. at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, NATO’s torture in Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Base and the ongoing U.S. hellhole prison camp at Guantanamo Bay.
The Australian capitalist ruling class has perpetrated such atrocities not only as junior partners of the U.S. but sometimes from neo-colonial interventions it has itself led. In the late 1980s, when the people of the PNG-controlled island of Bougainville rose up to resist the terrible destruction of their livelihoods by Australian mining company CRA (this company which operated the huge Panguna mine in Bougainville with callous disregard to the local people later merged with British RTZ to form Rio Tinto), the Australian regime and its PNG government henchmen orchestrated a brutal war and naval blockade against the Bougainville people. As a result 15,000 to 20,000 Bougainville people perished – all for the sake of the profits of Australian capitalist bigwigs.
Here at home, the Australian rulers who attack the DPRK over “human rights” continue to preside over genocidal attacks on Aboriginal people, including forcibly closing down Aboriginal communities, stripping Aboriginal children from their families and police killings of Aboriginal people in custody. Meanwhile, refugees arriving in this country are thrown into hell-hole offshore detention camps where they face beatings, torture and in some cases murder at the hands of camp guards.
In the U.S., racist police and white supremacists murder blacks, Asians and Hispanics at an alarming and seemingly ever increasing rate. Meanwhile, the U.S. has the largest prison population in the world – more than the entire population of Brisbane! The rate of imprisonment in the U.S. is close to four times that of Venezuela and nearly six times that of China.
People get set for a ride in one of North Korea’s many fun parks. Visiting amusement parks is one of the latest crazes in North Korea. You certainly would not know that from the mainstream Western media coverage about North Korea which seeks to do everything possible to demonise the society. Photo: Trotskyist Platform.
The truth is that the only “rights” that those waging the anti-DPRK “human rights” campaign are truly concerned about is the right of greedy corporate bigwigs to exploit the toil of working class people and the right of their mouthpieces to propagate the “virtues” of such a system. These rights do not, thankfully, exist in North Korea. And let’s keep it that way!
Defend the DPRK workers state! Down with the right-wing campaign of lies about North Korea! U.S. troops get out of South Korea and Japan! End all sanctions against North Korea! Remove the U.S. troops from Darwin and the U.S. spy facilities at Pine Gap and elsewhere in Australia which are used primarily for furthering U.S.-Australian ruling class threats against the DPRK and the Peoples Republic of China!
Apart from facilitating attacks on the socialistic DPRK, the lies about the “human rights” situation in the DPRK are used to distract the masses in South Korea, the U.S.A and Australia from the distinct lack of rights that working class people have in their own countries. So we demand: Repeal South Korea’s fascistic National Security Law! Revoke the ban on South Korea’s Unified Progressive Party! Free all imprisoned trade union activists in South Korea! Free all the refugees in Australia! Down with the police murder of Aboriginal people in state custody in Australia! End the Australian regime’s forced closure of remote Aboriginal communities! For the guaranteed right to a full-time job in Australia – just like people enjoy in North Korea!
Above: In Melbourne, April 2015, fascists (on the left of picture) participating in the ultra-Islamophobic “Reclaim Australia” rally threaten and use violence against anti-racist counter-demonstrators. Fascist forces not only have disgusting views but are people organised to commit violence against Aboriginal people, non-white ethnic communities, leftists and the workers movement. The idea that fascists can be peacefully debated is not a viewpoint based on reality.
WORKING CLASS-BASED MASS DIRECT ACTION vs LIBERAL/SOCIAL-DEMOCRATIC PACIFISM
The first “Reclaim Australia” rallies on 4 April 2015 were the biggest open mobilisations of far-right racists in Australia in a long time. With the notable exception of Melbourne, in most places where they rallied on April 4 the racist extremists outnumbered anti-racist counter-protesters. In Sydney, Australia’s largest and most multiracial city, the April 4 counter-demonstration was particularly weak. Many long-time anti-fascists did not turn up to the anti-racist counter-rally, organised mainly by the Solidarity group, because the rally leadership’s avowed strategy of ruling out any attempt to shut down the white supremacist “Reclaim Australia” mobilisation either positively turned off – or otherwise did not inspire – many staunch anti-fascists.
When the fascists again rallied in cities throughout Australia on the weekend of July 18/19, anti-racists throughout the country were more determined. A somewhat more purposeful intent shown in the building for the July 19 anti-racist counter-action in Sydney – in comparison with the strategy proclaimed for the earlier April 4 Sydney rally – saw anti-racists this time outnumber the extreme right-wing racists by two to one. However, in Queensland the far-right racist rallies again exceeded in numbers the size of the counter-demonstrations. Furthermore, again with the partial exception of Melbourne where a determined picket set up by anti-racist counter-protesters blocked some of the fascists from entering their race-hate rally’s assembly point, the rednecks were still able to hold their actions unimpeded and turn central parts of major cities into de-facto no-go zones for people with non-white skin. Moreover, the July 18/19 “Reclaim” rallies received more mainstream backing than the previous April 4 mobilisation with one sitting government MP speaking at a rally and the police even more blatantly siding with the fascists against anti-racist counter-demonstrators.
In the wake of the fascist danger shown by the 4 April 2015 – and then July 18/19 – “Reclaim” rallies there has been much debate amongst leftists and other anti-racists about how best to counter the far-right offensive. This is not a bad thing. Such debates give an opportunity to clarify the strategy that we need to defeat the threat from extreme racists. The lines of these debates focus on several related questions but a key one is whether the goal of counter-demonstrations should be to simply protest against the views of the far-right racists or, on the other hand, should they also seek to physically stop the fascist mobilisations. Amongst those advocating the former perspective – that is, a continuation of the pacifist strategy that the Sydney 4 April 2015 anti-racist rally was built on – are various small-l liberals including many supporters of the Greens as well as the left groups Socialist Alliance and Solidarity. Strongly defending this outlook is also the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). An article in the CPA’s The Guardian newspaper by Peter Mac, analysing the April 4 racist and anti-racist demonstrations, denounced the Melbourne anti-racist counter-action for being “violent” and continued that:
The likelihood of an eruption of violence was boosted by one group’s declaration that the Reclaim Australia rally provided a golden opportunity to shut it down, that `the neo-Nazis … must be swept off the streets’ and its recommendation to `drive the violent white supremacists out of stolen Aboriginal land!’
As a result during the Melbourne confrontation Reclaim Australia’s chant of `Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi. Oi’ was met with shouts of `Fuck off racists’ by some of the counter demonstrators, accompanied by spitting, punches and bloodshed on both sides.
“Lessons from Reclaim Australia protests”, The Guardian, 22 April 2015
The “one group” that the CPA is here attacking happens to be us – Trotskyist Platform. To properly understand our strategy that the CPA is condemning, one needs to read not just the couple of phrases from our leaflet plucked out by the The Guardian but, at the very least, the entire paragraph which we copy below:
It appears that the organisers of the Sydney anti-racist counter-rally want the event to simply challenge the views of `Reclaim Australia’ and expose its racist nature. That is certainly necessary. However, it is far from adequate. What distinguishes the fascists from mainstream racists is that they have a program of using violence to achieve their aim of a `pure’ whites-only society. These are the same groups that helped incite the notorious 2005 Cronulla Beach white supremacist riot. Their neo-Nazi slogans have helped to foment the wave of violent – and sometimes even murderous – attacks on Indian, Chinese, and most recently, Korean students as well as helping to incite the unceasing redneck violence against Aboriginal people. If these white supremacists get away with openly inciting racist hatred on April 4 it will encourage every garden-variety redneck watching to radicalise their racist stance. If such hate parades continue it will be inevitable that we will see here horrific incidents like that which happened in North Carolina last month when three young Muslim American students were murdered in a racist attack. Furthermore, the organised presence of violent white supremacists in the heart of Sydney – no matter if they are interspersed with less extreme racists who they have sucked into their rally – will intimidate and physically endanger the many Muslim and non-white people visiting the area. That is why the `Reclaim Australia’ action must not only be protested against – it must be shut down! The neo-Nazis pulling the strings in organising `Reclaim Australia’ must be swept off the streets. Let’s drive violent white supremacists out of stolen Aboriginal land!
“Shutdown the ‘Reclaim Australia’ Race Hate Rallies”, Trotskyist Platform leaflet, 28 March 2015
George Christensen (Centre), an MP from the federal Coalition government, spoke at the 19 July 2015 “Reclaim Australia” racist rally in Mackay. Small-l liberal figures and their social democratic promoters claim that mainstream politicians can be won over to the struggle against far-right racism. But, actually, these politicians are a big part of the reason why the extreme racist forces are growing.
Unfortunately, at this point what was warned against in our leaflet is, for the moment, coming to pass. The white supremacists largely got away with being able to foment their race hate on 4 April 2015 (and indeed on July 18/19) and as a result those unorganised racist bigots sitting at home watching became more radicalised. This has contributed at least in some way to the increase in racist attacks on the streets over the last few months. The one partial exception on April 4 (and also on July 18/19) was Melbourne, where the fascists’ ability to hold their race-hate provocation was at least challenged by the large counter-rally and some of the racists were blocked from joining their counterparts at their rallying point. Yet, sounding completely like small-l liberals rather than the communists that the CPA proudly claims to be a party of, Peter Mac’s article condemns the “spitting, punches and bloodshed on both sides” thereby equating the determined and laudable anti-racist resistance of many Melbourne anti-“Reclaim” demonstrators with the thuggery of neo-Nazis attempting to crush any obstacle to advancing their violent racist objectives.
Lenin’s Strategy for Defeating Fascists
CPA comrades, as avowed supporters of Lenin’s communist program, should consider the attitude of Lenin’s Bolsheviks to the Russian far-right racists of Lenin’s time, the Black Hundreds. Ardent monarchists, the Black Hundreds were most notorious for perpetrating violent attacks on Jewish people – usually with the connivance and often even the active support of the Tsarist authorities. As well as espousing extreme anti-Semitism, these rabid Russian chauvinists also whipped up hatred against Polish people and opposed any recognition of Ukrainians as a distinct nationality. Like today’s fascists in Australia, the Black Hundreds also staged mass, “patriotic” demonstrations to denounce the influence of non-Christian, ethnic minority, leftist and liberal groups. Yet, unlike the CPA’s newspaper that condemns those taking action to physically impede fascist provocations in Melbourne, Lenin instead condemned those liberals and pacifist leftists who denounced as “reckless” the calls to organise mass, militant self-defence against the Black Hundreds. Thus, when in June 1906 the Black Hundreds perpetrated a horrific pogrom against Jewish people in the town of Belostok (sometimes spelt Bialystok) in the western part of the then Russian empire (in today’s Poland), Lenin wrote:
… there are those who, seeing these phenomena of Russian social life, think, and say, that somebody or other is `recklessly’ calling upon the people to resort to `extreme measures’! One must be, not reckless, but a poltroon, politically corrupt, to say such things in the face of events like the burning of the People’s House at Vologda (at the time of the opening of the Duma) or the pogrom in Belostok (after the Duma had been in session a month). A single event like this will have more effect upon the people than millions of appeals. And to talk about `reckless’ appeals is just as hopelessly pedantic and as much a sin of a deadened civic conscience, as to condemn the wild cry for revenge that is going up from the battlefields of Vologda and Belostok.
“The Reaction is Taking to Arms”, V.I. Lenin, June 1906, Collected Works, Progress Publishers
The perspective of Lenin’s Bolsheviks to the Russian fascists of their time was thus very far from that of Peter Mac’s attitude to Australia’s Black Hundreds of today. Thus, while Mac speaks of the need to “persuade” Reclaim participants saying that it would be “a grave mistake to assume that Reclaim supporters are incapable of changing their minds,” Lenin’s attitude to those who were inciting and perpetrating physical attacks on ethnic communities and leftists can be summed up by the following call he made to respond to the Black Hundreds. Lenin called for revolutionaries to:
… at once find out who organises the Black Hundreds and where and how they are organised, and then, without confining themselves to propaganda (which is useful, but inadequate) they must act with armed force, beat up and kill the members of the Black-Hundred gangs, blow up their headquarters, etc., etc.
Tasks of Revolutionary Army Contingents, V.I. Lenin, October 1905, Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers
Although that particular call was written during the height of the 1905 Revolution in Russia when the physical clash between opposing forces was at white heat and thus the specific tactical methods advocated are particular to such a period, the call nevertheless expressed an overall political perspective completely relevant to “normal times”: that the fascists need to be shut down rather than merely debated.
The Capitalist Authorities Are Not Allies in the Struggle against Fascism
Sydney, 19 July 2015: Police brutalise anti-racism activists counter-demonstrating against a rally by the extreme racist “Reclaim Australia” movement. Since police serve the same capitalist ruling class whom the fascists and their race-hate ideology truly serve, they are heavily biased towards supporting the fascists in any standoff with anti-fascists.
Since the CPA stance is representative of that of the whole liberal-pacifist wing of the anti-fascist movement it is worth analysing their strategy further. This strategy is outlined in a favourable assessment that Peter Mac makes of an Adelaide anti-Reclaim protest organiser:
Adelaide pastor Brad Chilcott observed with regard to the public’s impression of events: ‘Your audience is not the racists you’re shouting at, but the people watching at home. … [But] those watching at home … couldn’t tell the difference between the good guys and the bad. Then politicians have to condemn the violence on both sides, rather than [giving] an undiluted message condemning bigotry.
“Lessons from Reclaim Australia protests”, The Guardian, 22 April 2015
So we see that the strategy of the CPA and small-liberals like Chilcott is for anti-racist rallies to be tepid enough to encourage mainstream politicians to condemn bigotry. But it is precisely the policies and statements of the mainstream pro-capitalist politicians that are encouraging the bigots! Barely a week goes by without the right-wing Coalition government heaping a new insult upon Aboriginal and coloured ethnic communities. And barely a week goes by without the ALP Opposition signing onto or otherwise acquiescing to such insults.
How openly the ruling class politicians are contributing to the rise of the fascists was seen when government MP, George Christensen, actually spoke at the 19 July 2015 Reclaim demonstration in Mackay, Queensland. Furthermore, when asked about Christensen’s decision to openly support the event, foreign minister July Bishop refused to make even the faintest condemnation of Christensen or the “Reclaim” movement, deviously claiming that, “I don’t know anything about the organisation. I certainly haven’t been briefed on it.” Even before this outrage, the mainstream politicians had already openly pumped up the “Reclaim Australia” forces. Barely a month after the first set of “Reclaim” rallies, the Senate decided to hold an inquiry into halal certification (under the guise of an inquiry into food certification) thereby giving credence to the looney premise of the “Reclaim” fascists that money paid for halal certification is being used to “finance terrorism.”
Melbourne, 18 July 2015: Police viciously attack anti-racism protesters demonstrating against a rally by the far-right Reclaim Australia/United Patriots Front groups. Police did everything to facilitate the rally by the racist violence-inciting fascist groups.
Sorry, Mr Chilcott and the CPA: the mainstream politicians are a big part of the problem and are not and cannot in the future be part of the solution! Indeed, especially after the global capitalist recession that commenced in 2008, ruling politicians around the capitalist world have brought far-right forces more and more into the mainstream. They have done this through adoption of their ideas, through sanctioning of them as “legitimate” voices to be addressed and even – in the cases of Switzerland, Latvia and Ukraine – through their inclusion in coalition governments. Here, the same trend is happening and it is driven by, more or less, the same economic reality. As the fall in the prices of iron ore and other commodities (from the exorbitant levels with which Australian mining bosses had previously been ripping off Asian neighbours with) reduces the profits of the Australian capitalist ruling class, they are seeking to make up for this by more viciously exploiting the masses. To enable them to achieve this, the ruling class is seeking to kill off the chance of working class resistance by poisoning mass sentiments with a large dose of nationalism.
Reflecting worry amongst their working class base, a very small number of ALP politicians have spoken out – albeit mostly quite meekly – against the “Reclaim” movement. Yet, even in the highly unlikely event that mainstream politicians were to do a U-turn and formally stand en masse against the fascists that would not do all that much to stop actual violent racist attacks. Any legal measures instituted against the white supremacist thugs would have to be implemented by a police force and court system that has proven itself, time after time, to favour the far-right racists against anti-racists. This was seen all too clearly over the 18/19 July 2015 weekend. In Melbourne, police went all out to ensure that the Reclaim racists and their even more extreme United Patriots Front (UPF) breakaway group could hold their racist-violence manufacturing hate rallies. This included indiscriminately unleashing pepper spray against anti-fascist protesters. Police were so gung-ho about attacking anti-fascists with pepper spray that one of their capsicum spray barrages even hit street medics treating anti-racist protesters who had previously been overcome by the spray as well as these same victims of the spray who were receiving treatment. A widely circulated photograph showing the police high-fiving a UPF fascist (!) at the Melbourne race-hate rally, quite neatly and horribly captured the essence of the police stance.
Showing which side they are on! A policeman publicly high-fives a member of the fascist United Patriots Front during their 18 July 2015 race-hate rally in Melbourne. As a core part of the capitalist state, the police in this current system cannot be allies in the anti-fascist struggle but are, instead, a major force impeding the fight against fascism.
Yet, an Editorial in the CPA’s The Guardian issue just after the July 18/19 events promoted the police as a force against the rise of the fascists. This Editorial stated:
Police, including NSW deputy commissioner Nick Kaldas, are worried about the proliferation of right-wing racist and white supremacist groups….
“The deputy commissioner is on the right track about incidents taking place overseas and those in Australia seeking to take advantage of them.
The Guardian, 22 July 2015
This same police force and police leadership that the CPA is praising in its Editorial just days before attacked the Sydney anti-“Reclaim” protest on July 19. Even before the official start time for the anti-fascist event was reached, the police physically and aggressively dragged anti-racist protesters away from their planned rally point so that the fascists could rally there unimpeded. The NSW police arrested five anti-racist protesters. Meanwhile, they devoted many resources to organising protective escorts for extreme white supremacist groups entering and leaving the “Reclaim” rally. One group of anarchist, anti-racist protesters was, on the other hand, roughed up by police after they left the anti-racist demonstration with at least one anti-racist being hurled by police against a telephone booth.
To be sure, the CPA Editorial did also make some very good points about how the “leadership of this wave of intolerance can be found at the very `top’ of society, including in Australia’s parliament” – correct arguments that actually undercut the perspective promoted by Brad Chilcott which was lauded in the earlier article by Peter Mac. However, to promote the police as a force against fascism not only flies in the face of police actions against anti-fascists on the 18/19 July 2015 weekend and the whole ongoing history of racist police terror against Aboriginal people but directly contradicts Lenin’s teachings on the nature of the state. Leninists understand that in a capitalist society, the state – which the police, courts, army and prisons are at the core of – consists of armed bodies of people whose job it is to enforce the rule of the capitalist class over the exploited masses. Thus, the capitalist state organs like the police serve the same class as the fascists do. The police do the daily work of maintaining capitalist rule. The fascists back that up by acting to poison working class unity and intimidating staunch anti-capitalists while the ruling class keeps them as an attack dog on a leash ready to be unleashed when serious threats to capitalist rule emerge. That is why not only have the police been siding with the fascists in the standoffs with anti-racists over the last period but in the future the capitalists’ police can never be an ally in the struggle against fascism. Defeating the growing threat from far-right extremists can only be accomplished through mass, direct action on the streets by the organised working class united with coloured ethnic communities, Aboriginal people and all the other intended victims of the fascists.
Learning Lessons from the Past
In basing their anti-fascist strategy on the hope that either mainstream capitalist politicians or the capitalist state organs themselves can be pushed into stopping the fascists, the CPA is aping the disastrous policy of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) in the period leading up to Hitler’s Nazis’ seizure of power in the early 1930s. Then, as SPD workers and youth began to courageously fight Nazi forces on the streets, the leadership of the SPD, at the time the biggest party based on the German working class, quelled this struggle. They turned the Iron Front for Resistance against Fascism, which the SPD had itself created, into an electoral machine for electing the monarchist capitalist politician Hindenburg whom they hoped would save them from Hitler. The curbing of the struggle to physically stop the fascist forces allowed the Nazis to grow stronger, take physical control of more and more streets and gain much in confidence. Meanwhile, far from saving the SPD from the Nazis, Hindenburg eventually appointed Hitler as chancellor as the mainstream of the ruling class realised that only fascism could save capitalist rule in Germany!
Unfortunately, the German Communist Party (KPD), which had by then degenerated alongside the bureaucratic degeneration (but not destruction) of the Soviet workers state, also followed a bankrupt approach, albeit from more sincere intentions. The KPD first underestimated the danger of the Nazis and, partly in reaction to the very real anti-working class treachery of the SPD, refused to organise united-front actions with the SPD to oppose the Nazi threat to both their organisations. Later, as Hitler’s forces grew stronger, KPD leaders became paralysed and came to see a Nazi triumph as inevitable.
However, Hitler could have been stopped! The murderous beheading of the German workers movement, the Holocaust of Jewish people and the brutality of the Nazi’s war on the USSR could have been prevented! What was required at the time was what the Trotskyist Left Opposition was urgently calling for: a united-front of the working class to physically stop the fascists – something which the most conscious workers felt the need for but which was counterpoised to the reformist capitulations of the SPD leaders and which the zig-zagging KPD could not bring itself to fight for. Understanding that the pacifist SPD leaders would always resist and foot drag on such a strategy and that in the long-run fascism could not be defeated without breaking the rank and file supporters of the social democracy away from their sellout leaders and winning them to allegiance to the communist party – Trotsky (following the program of Lenin’s Bolsheviks) outlined that the basis of united front struggle is not only unity in action but complete political independence of the different components of such a front including full freedom to criticise each other’s programs.
Right now, Australia is not in immediate danger of a Hitler-style takeover. However, the growing fascist forces are already doing harm to workers’ unity and are already perpetrating and inciting the preliminary test-runs of the huge future pogroms that they would like to commit. We need united-front action of the working class right now to physically crush the fascists while they are still crawling out of their eggs.
And that is the point! To tell anti-racists to confine themselves to politely explaining what is wrong with racism in the face of a movement that perpetrates and incites violence is to disarm and damage the anti-racist struggle. It is following the road of the German social democratic leaders who in the lead up to Hitler’s seizure of power were saying that so long as the Nazis do not quit the ground of legality, there is no room for an on the streets fight to physically stop them! That is why as part of the struggle to build a working class-based mass movement to sweep the racist filth off the streets, those activists who understand the need for such a perspective must explain to other anti-fascists why a strategy of seeking to pressure the capitalist authorities to act against the right-wing extremists is, as history itself proves, inevitably doomed to fail.
In September 2010 racist police used the bogus pretext of a noise complaint to brutalise Aboriginal woman, Tisha Hickey, at the end of her own 21st birthday party. The violent police attack caused bruises and cuts to her leg, arms and abdomen. Tisha is a relative of TJ Hickey, the 17 year-old Aboriginal youth who was killed by racist police in Redfern in February 2004. Since TJ’s murder, police have used violence and harassment to persecute his family and relatives for their refusal to give up the fight for justice for TJ. The official violence of the police, detention centre guards and spy agencies emboldens the violent far-right racist groups.
Above: China, May 2013: Prospective tenants visit a new public rental housing complex in Shanghai. In the first nine and a half months of 2015, socialistic China had started construction of almost 7 million public housing units. The Chinese government has planned for 18 million public housing dwellings to be built or rebuilt between 2015 and 2017.
STOP THE SELL-OFF OF PUBLIC HOUSING!
MASSIVELY INCREASE PUBLIC HOUSING JUST LIKE SOCIALISTIC CHINA IS DOING!
On 16 July 2015, a speakout rally was held in the multi-racial working class Sydney suburb of Auburn to oppose the cuts by governments of all stripes to public services. The protest was held under the slogans, Smash the Cuts to Services Working Class People Need the Most! Stop the Sell-Off Public Housing. Massively Increase Public Housing – Just Like China is Doing. No to Abbott’s Squeezing of Public Hospitals and Schools. Rollback the Former ALP Government’s Cut to the Sole Parent Payment.
The demonstration was held because the capitalist big-end of town and the governments that serve them are waging all-sided attacks on the services that working class people need the most. These attacks, alongside bosses’ cuts to workers’ conditions, are making life harder and harder for working class people. Whether we are employed workers, unemployed workers, single mothers, pensioners or students, we are all feeling the pinch.
One of the crucial public services that are under attack is public housing. We need public housing because the greedy private sector developers who determine what is built in the private sector know that they can make a lot more money building expensive homes for the wealthy rather than affordable homes for the masses.
Bulli, 11 October 2014: Members of the Illawara-based Public Housing Union and pro-public housing activists from Sydney – including Millers Point residents and Trotskyist Platform supporters – protest the sell-off of yet another public housing dwelling as yuppy real estate agents conducting the sale look on.
So we need low-rent public housing to alleviate this situation. But what are governments doing? The very opposite! From Millers Point and the Rocks in the inner city to Auburn, Bonyrigg and Claymore in western and south-western Sydney to Bellambi and Wollongong in the Illawara, the authorities are selling off or demolishing public Continue reading SMASH THE CUTS TO SERVICES WORKING CLASS PEOPLE NEED THE MOST!→
Down with Capitalist Australia’s Military Build Up!
U.S., Australian Militaries: Stay Out of the South China Sea!
26 February 2016 – In October 2015, the U.S. warship, the USS Lassen destroyer (pictured above) sailed through waters, not far from mainland China, that are claimed by the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) as its territorial waters. This provocative action in the South China Sea was fully backed by the right-wing Australian government and the ALP Opposition. Moreover, yesterday’s Defence White Paper released by the Turnbull government announced a massive military buildup for the Australian Defence Forces (ADF) which the White Paper could not hide was squarely targeted at China. The government “defence” plan announced that the ADF would have its troop numbers boosted to 62,400 in five years. That means that the Australian military as a percentage of the population will be over 60% larger than the PRC’s military which, in contrast, is in the process of reducing troop numbers by 15%.
The White Paper also announced the ADF’s massive expansion of military hardware including the acquisition of 12 new submarines, 9 warships, 12 patrol vessels, 75 joint strike fighters, two fleets of drones and additional helicopters for special forces troops. Excited by this announcement, racist former defence minister in the Abbott government, Kevin Andrews called for Australia to join the U.S. in sending warships into China’s claimed territorial waters in the South China Sea. Yet it is not only hardline right-wingers like Kevin Andrews who are demanding such aggressive actions. Months earlier, Labor shadow defence minister Stephen Conroy started demanding the same thing(5). Meanwhile, Liberal defence minister, Marise Payne yesterday refused to rule out the possibility that the Australian Navy may take such incendiary action in the future. Continue reading Defend Socialistic China Against Military Intimidation By Capitalist Powers→
WecallourselvesCommunists.What is a Communist? Communist is a Latin word. Communis is the Latin for “common”. Communist society is a society in which all things – the land, the factories – are owned in common and the people work in common. That is communism. – V.I. Lenin, The Tasks of the Youth Leagues
The Transition from Socialist Revolution to Communism. On the Tasks of the Workers State in the Transition to Equality and Stateless Society
“Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge” Famous Russian Civil War poster. “Whites” was the name given to the capitalist-landlord forces that sought to overthrow the young Soviet workers state. By the great Soviet designer/artist El Lissitsky, this poster was made in the Byelorussian town of Vitebsk and flyposted on its streets in 1920 at the time of the threat of invasion by the forces of bourgeois and landlord Poland. A fusion of Bolshevism’s new communist politics and Kasimir Malevich’s equally new art movement of Suprematism, it became an almost mythical symbol in the revolutionary struggle, representing as it does the Reds, surrounded by light, stabbing the heart out of the old feudalist and capitalist world surrounded by darkness.
GreetingsComrades.In our socialist struggle we must prepare for the future struggle and the victory of our working class. The question of the state immediately arises and is of fundamental importance in determining our strategy. So what is the state? Marxist Leninists assert that, in essence, the state is an apparatus of repression serving the interests of whichever class it is that dominates – that is, rules over – society. This power – this state machine – that arises out of the ruling class’ need to oppress their rival class places itself above society and alienates itself more and more from it. [28]
Under capitalist rule, the ruling capitalist class has built up its mighty capitalist state machine – which at its core consists of the police, courts, prisons, legal institutions, army and other bureaucratic institutions – to preserve their class rule over the working class via oppressive means. Therefore, in order to even begin the task of moving towards an egalitarian communist society, the first step for the working class is to overthrow this oppressive capitalist state. If we are to then help guide humanity to communism, we as Marxist Leninists believe it is a fundamental strategic necessity to establish a workers’ state after this overthrow of capitalism.
But what is communism? Communist society is one where the toiling classes are completely liberated from the yoke of capital, where there is full equality, no classes and, thus, no need for an oppressive state at all. The capitalist system of poverty, unemployment, wars, racism, sexism and homophobia will be no more. People will receive according to their need and give according to their ability. Economic, productive and creative achievement would be at its utmost, fullest potential. There will be no government/ state to manage/administer the affairs of the community as the individuals that compose the masses will manage their own community affairs with a self-determined and community-motivated spirit and culture.
Most groups in the Marxist and anarchist Left tend to share this vision of a future communist society. However, there is a controversy between the different tendencies of the left about how we actually get to communism.
The three main left wing tendencies are the social democrats, the anarchists and the communists (Marxist Leninists). The social democrats, even those that truly believe in fighting for socialism, act on the premise that they can reform capitalism into socialism without overturning the current capitalist state structure. The social democrats deny needing to overthrow the current capitalist state.
In Australia the left wing of social democracy is made up of nominally far-left groups like Socialist Alliance, the Communist Party of Australia, Solidarity and Socialist Alternative. These groups claim adherence to Marxism and Leninism (and even sometimes claim to be revolutionary) but in their daily activities and stances on current political issues tend to promote illusions in the current capitalist state and, specifically, the illusion that pressure can be maintained upon the institutions of the capitalist state in order to successfully force them to play a more progressive role.
In contrast to the social democrats, the best of the anarchists of the Anarcho-Communist and Anarcho-Syndicalist perspective just like Marxist Leninists understand the need to overthrow the capitalist state to open the road to communism. Over the last few years in Sydney, Australia, Trotskyist Platform has been engaged in various united front campaigns with certain militant class- conscious anarchists (who too are quite varied). These campaigns have been various on the street struggles such as campaigns against racism and for public housing rights. We have found that some of these anarchists have been very dedicated to oppressed people’s struggles and often have been very courageous. Some of the most pro-working class and determined of the anarchists have been in the vanguard of organising important anti-racist actions such as the recent anti-fascist action in Cronulla on the 10th anniversary of the horrific white supremacist riot there. Notably, both communists and the best of the anarchists share ideals of a stateless, classless, egalitarian society; we have the same ideological determination to oppose class and racial oppression, capitalism, poverty, unemployment and homelessness; we share the same hatred of the bourgeois exploiters, of the capitalist state institutions and of the far-right enemies of the working class. However, on the practical and strategic questions of how we achieve revolution and then defend it, Leninists and even the most left-wing and pro-working class of the anarchists fundamentally differ.
In the fight for the revolution Leninists insist that we need to establish a revolutionary workers’ party to bring revolutionary consciousness to the masses and lead the revolutionary struggle to a successful conclusion. Anarchists reject the idea of the workers party. Leninists also insist that after the revolution we require a workers’ state which, in the interests of the working class, will defend the revolution and facilitate the progress to communism. However, the anarchists outright reject the need for a workers’ state or a party to lead the transition from a workers’ revolution to communism. They, unfortunately and quite falsely, believe it is possible to skip to a stateless society immediately after the overturn of capitalist rule.
A Young Revolutionary Society
“Women Workers, Take Up Your Rifles” declares a poster from the early days of the Russian Civil War, circa 1918, calling upon working class women to join the fight against the increasingly foreign-armed enemies of the workers’ and peasants’ revolution in Russia.
Afterthe workers’ revolution, the working class will now be the new authority and power. The capitalist state– that machine designed to keep the masses down and the rich in power – will have been thoroughly dismantled and the exploiters heavily defeated. It will be the birth of a new world. But is this the end of the struggle? Do we just lay down our guard and declare that communism has been achieved? Or will we – somewhat more realistically – say that, though it is still distant, communism will eventually and inevitably be achieved without the need for a new workers’ state to ensure its progress? Many anarchists do believe this to be the case. Furthermore, can we actually wipe out the power of the capitalists – built up over many centuries – in one go? Especially when, after the socialist revolution, the capitalist rulers still in power around the world would fight tooth and nail to help their deposed capitalist brethren destroy the newly established authority of the revolution? Can we abolish the hundreds of years of capitalist thinking and cultural conditioning overnight? To all these questions, Leninists say “No” and we will explain why below.
Economic Control
The biggest triumph of the workers’ revolution will be the seizure of workplaces, factories, infrastructure, housing and land from the control of the capitalists. Indeed, this is both the beginning and the end of the revolution as more and more of the economy – starting with, most importantly, its commanding heights – becomes collectivised. We must make sure that the means of production – the engine house of any society – are run by the workers and the workers’ councils.
However, this task of seizing the means of production will be resisted not only by the capitalists but also by some petit bourgeois and reactionary layers (which could include small businessmen, supervisors, managers and some of the highly paid technical workers as well as former cops, spies and military officers who would have spent their whole adult life defending capitalist rule) and even some ordinary workers who are still close to the bosses. Therefore, the task of collectivisation cannot simply be performed by the self-activity of the entire people (even the entire non-capitalist people). It will need to be performed by the defence organs of the revolutionary workers – that is, by a workers’ state.
Dealing with the Capitalist Class and Counter Revolution
After the October 1917 workers’ revolution in Russia, the deposed capitalists and world capitalist powers joined together to organise a bloody civil war to attempt to overthrow the new socialist-based system. Right: Officers from Western imperialist powers meet with representatives of counter-revolutionary Russian leader Alexander Kolchak.
March 1920. Troops from the counter-revolutionary Russian White Army march forward.
Wemust be on high alert after the workers’ revolution for the former exploiters will still have plenty of money, the networks, the connections, the knowledge and the expertise to inflict harm upon the fledgling, socialist society. We can have no doubt about it: these vestiges of the former ruling capitalist class will agitate for a counter-revolution.
It is exactly for this reason that, immediately after the revolution and defeat of the reactionaries, it is paramount that we are ready to defend the revolution. Precisely because they cannot exploit the working class like they used to, the layer of extremely wealthy bourgeoisie, though bruised and dispossessed of a large part of their wealth, will be itching for counter-revolution. Because the bourgeoisie internationally are very well connected the threat may very well come from abroad. Back at home, the more right wing of the middle classes, wedded as they are to the very idea of private property, as well as many of the former henchmen of the capitalists – including both the armed personnel of the former capitalist state’s police and military organs and the capitalists’ former workplace enforcers (i.e. higher up managers and foremen) – will also be seeking ways to undermine the revolution at every turn. This is why the working class must build a workers’ state to defend the revolution and suppress a resurgent and desperate capitalist class along with all of its reactionary allies.
Red Army women snipers during the Soviet Union’s struggle to defeat capitalist Nazi Germany’s invasion during World War II. It is completely unrealistic that a victorious workers’ revolution will be able to immediately build a socialist society without constructing a workers’ state to defend the toiling masses’ conquests against the deposed capitalists seeking to restore their rule and against international capitalist powers determined to destroy any example of a socialist society.From the time that they overturned capitalist rule in the 1917 Russian Revolution, the Soviet working class had to mobilise the forces of armed power to defend their liberation. In this picture, founder of the Soviet Red Army, Leon Trotsky, motivates troops in 1918 during the bloody Civil War against insurgent armies attempting to restore capitalist power.
The very idea of a socialist or workers’ state often comes as a shock to many left-liberals, pacifists and anarchists. Understandably, the word “state” has negative connotations in the context of feudal and capitalist societies. The anarchists are right to regard the state in this present capitalist society as an oppressive bureaucracy and authority that brutally crushes the First Nations people, attacks striking and picketing workers and sponsors troops to fight ruthless capitalist wars abroad. It is absolutely natural that a proletarian or oppressed or exploited person has a healthy hatred of the state and authority in today’s capitalist society. However, the future workers’ state will embody the living, fighting force of the formerly oppressed and exploited masses and will, inherently, act in a way that is diametrically opposed to the actions of a state set up to serve a rich, capitalist and exploiting ruling class.
We ask the anarchists or the left-liberals: which class will be administering the workers’ state? For whose benefit will the workers’ state operate? The proletarian majority or the bourgeois minority? In fact, the socialist workers’ state will be nothing like the current capitalist state that we know all too well. In place of arresting picketers and strikers, harassing homeless people, kicking out single mothers who are behind on their rent or oppressing minorities the workers’ state will, instead, crush racists and ban hate speech, massively increase public housing, further advance the seizure of empty dwellings owned by the wealthy so that they can be used to house the homeless and needy, organise the economy to ensure full employment and, most importantly, continue socialising and collectivising the means of production. In other words, the working class will be dictating to the overthrown capitalists and their allies via the power of the workers’ state. We do not recoil from this word: the workers’ state will, indeed, be a dictatorship of the proletariat. It will be the liberator of the toiling and oppressed classes and become the primary means of defending the working class from counter-revolution, the conspiracies of the bourgeoisie and all the influence that they can still muster both at home and overseas. Perhaps most importantly of all, it will also serve to facilitate the masses’ march towards communism.
1966: A Vietnamese communist woman fighter marches a captured American airman through the jungle during the Vietnam war.2014: Women soldiers in the army of the Vietnamese workers state in training. The founding personnel, traditions and culture of the Vietnamese workers state’s organs were, like those of the other workers states in China, Cuba, North Korea and Laos, formed during the heroic liberation struggle against capitalism and imperialism. An important part of these new traditions and culture included placing women’s role in society at a much higher level than where it had been during pre-revolutionary times.
For World Socialist Revolution
When a workers’ revolution is victorious in one country, attention must soon turn to fellow workers in other lands who may not be as fortunate. They will still be suffering under the capitalist yoke or undergoing the struggle to overturn capitalism. We should, therefore, ensure that we support other socialist revolutions around the globe. The very act of defending the revolution at home will be viewed by the international bourgeoisie as an act of aggression against world capitalism and quite rightly so! Hand in hand with defence– in fact, its very corollary – is the possibility of the workers’ state engaging in strategicoffensivecampaigns.
When supporting international revolution, we will need to demonstrate the utmost respect for the plight and the national aspirations of peoples abroad in order not to frighten the workers of these other nations – especially if they are already living under colonial or neo-colonial oppression – into thinking that we are yet another exploitative or oppressive force. Our main means of solidarity support to struggles overseas will be propaganda and an ideological internationalist perspective. But we must not discount direct military support of international revolutions via volunteer and professional armies where required to assist the liberation of fellow working class people when they are in the midst of direct revolutionary combat with their capitalist enemies. We need a workers’ army and a workers’ state not only for the immediate defence of the revolution at home but also to assist revolutions abroad. This is not only in line with our communist ideals of internationalism but, also, essential in guaranteeing the defence of the revolution at home.
The Middle Class Masses: Friends or Foes?
Fightingtosupport socialist revolutions abroad can be complicated. And the fight to stop the inevitable counter-revolutionary efforts of the overthrown capitalists will be a difficult task. Nevertheless, the methods and strategies required for these tasks are quite clear cut. A much more complicated and nuanced task will be integrating the far more numerous petit bourgeoisie – the so-called middle classes – into the new socialist society. What Marxists refer to as the petit (or petty) bourgeoise is that class of the population who are generally neither exploiters of labour nor wage workers directly exploited by capitalist business owners. Included in this intermediate class are self- employed plumbers, electricians, gardeners, farmers, artists and craftspeople and self-employed grocery, small restaurant, repair shop and hairdresser owners as well as doctors, dentists, accountants and other consultants of various types with their own private practice. Their income may range from that of the very poor to that of the very comfortably well-off. Although not enduring direct exploitation of their labour by capitalists, some of these petit bourgeois layers, to a greater or lesser extent, suffer under the capitalist system – from bullying by the banks, from brutal competition with big monopolies, from the greed of big landlords and the wild economic swings and chaos of the capitalist “free market.” On the other hand, their means of deriving an income induces many petit bourgeois people to have a capitalistic and individualistic mentality. Many dream of turning their small, self-employed businesses into bigger businesses that hire and fire exploited labour. That is, they dream of becoming capitalists. Hence, the petit bourgeoisie, both as a class and as individuals, can swing wildly between the two poles of supporting the working class and supporting capitalism. Historically, the proletariat in significant part arose from the dispossessed members of this class who – out of the pure needs of survival – gathered around the lathe and anvil, the loom and production line of modern industry to form a new, proud and powerful class – the proletariat – whose destiny is, indeed, to usher in communism. [29]During the struggle against capitalist rule, the Marxist strategy is to seek to win over as many of the petit bourgeois to the side of the working class and the struggle for workers’ revolution as possible. We will, in particular, appeal to the poorest and most oppressed sections of the petit bourgeoisie while ensuring that their capitalistic and individualistic tendencies do not infect the revolutionary workers or divert them from their ultimate goal of a society based on common ownership of the means of production.
After the socialist revolution, the ruling working class will seek to maintain the support of those sections of the petit bourgeoisie that did support or, at least, accept the revolution. On the other hand, there will also be some sections of the petit bourgeoisie who will fanatically oppose the revolution, all because of their devotion to private enterprise and their personal closeness to – and even fawning worship of – the big time capitalists. Therefore, after the workers’ revolution, the counter-revolutionary efforts of these middle class layers will need to be stopped. Furthermore, to the extent that they remain self-employed people engaged in private enterprise and not employees of socialist public enterprises, even many of those petit bourgeois people who accept and even support the revolution will still be infused with a selfish, hustler-type mentality.
This outlook, though essential to surviving the cut and thrust of the daily dog eat dog environment of a capitalist economy, becomes outright dangerous to the unity of a collective economy run for everyone’s mutual benefit in a society where trust between and kindness towards one’s fellow workers is of paramount and vital importance. The petit bourgeoisie’s support for the revolution needs to be nurtured and any positive qualities individual members of this intermediary class may possess should be harnessed for the good of the new socialist society. But any tendency towards harmful profiteering, hoarding and speculating from petty bourgeois business people will need to be put under the watchful eye of the revolutionary society and, if necessary, firmly stopped in its tracks. If not checked in time, such dubious economic activity will inevitably corrode the socialist economic sector.
The socialist revolution itself will win many petit bourgeois individuals to a more collectivist, community-minded outlook and later so will the emerging socialist culture of the new revolutionary society. However, as long as those who were petit bourgeois before the revolution remain self-employed business owners afterwards, their economic reality will still push many of them back towards an individualistic, hustler-type view of the world and social relations. This problem is all the more significant because, while the workers’ revolution will forcibly seize and collectivise the means of production owned by the big capitalists, it will not forcibly collectivise the business owned by petit bourgeois self-employed people and may not even forcibly nationalise all the business owned by the smallest of the capitalists. This is not for any moral reason or principle – far from it. Rather it is to avoid a massive revolt that could threaten the hard- won revolution. Unlike the relatively few big capitalists, the smallest-scale capitalist exploiters together with the petit bourgeoise make up a relatively large proportion of the population – in Australia a bit less than 25% of the entire workforce. [30] Therefore, a young revolutionary society will consist of not only masses of revolutionary workers and a tiny number of overthrown big capitalists as well as a small number of their former state and workplace henchmen but also a large number of petit bourgeois individuals, some sympathetic, some hostile to the revolution but most still infected with an attachment to private profiteering and all the social backwardness that this brings (though there will, of course, be some petit bourgeois people who will be able to completely turn their backs on their old outlook and the best of these will even become valuable members of the revolutionary workers’ party).
This existence of a large petit bourgeois layer in a young revolutionary workers’ society was a major difficulty that the Soviet Union faced in the first decades after the October 1917 Russian Revolution. At the time of the 1917 Revolution, Russia was a backward, mainly agricultural society which, thus, had a relatively small proportion of wage workers and a larger number of self-employed peasant farmers. The peasants were, in fact, largely sympathetic to the workers–led revolution because it freed them from the burden of having to pay a large proportion of their income/produce as rent to greedy big landowners. However, at the same time, the relatively better off peasants in particular had a strong attachment to private ownership of productive land and were infused with a profiteering, individualistic outlook.
Ultimately, the petit bourgeoise can only be fully integrated into a socialist society through their gradual evolution into proud employees of socially-owned enterprises – that is, by turning them into proletarians. This will be achieved through a variety of pathways. The society will offer incentives to small self-employed producers – like cheaper credit and free equipment – to amalgamate into bigger and bigger cooperatives and eventually into large scale collectives. In other cases, large, efficient state-owned enterprises will compete with the petit bourgeois small producers while at the same time offering good wages and guaranteed and generous leave entitlements (something that many of the struggling petit bourgeois shopkeepers currently do without) to entice individual producers into becoming employees of these enterprises. The publicly owned enterprises may also offer special incentives for self- employed rivals to sell off their equipment to the public enterprises, abandon their businesses and become well-paid employees of a socialist enterprise instead.
In dealing with small-scale capitalist exploiters of labour – as opposed to those who are strictly petit bourgeois and use no hired labour at all – the revolutionary workers’ society will have to use other means at its disposal to make it ultimately more profitable for these people to abandon their businesses and, hopefully, themselves move into well-paid jobs in the socialist sector instead. Today, these small-scale capitalists often exploit their workers with even more ruthlessness than the large scale capitalist monopolies do. After the revolution they will be forced to improve the wages and conditions of their employees and this would gradually drive down their profits. In part, the wages and conditions of their workers would be improved via workers’ state law and regulations. More importantly, their employees would, as the collectivised economic sector develops, be able to find jobs with much better pay and conditions in the socialist sector. This last factor will force the small-scale capitalists to either improve their workers’ own conditions or, as is inevitable in the long-run, be themselves swept up in the tide towards the socialist economy.
Although the above carrot and stick measures would entice many petit bourgeois people to happily move into the socialist economic sector, some would be mildly or deeply resentful at being economically compelled to move away from self-ownership of their businesses. Similarly, some amongst the petit bourgeoisie, while being grateful to the revolution for freeing them from the tyranny of capitalist banks, monopolies and big landlords would be unhappy at moves to curb any profiteering/hoarding/speculative practices on their part. Therefore, all these tasks related to guiding the petit bourgeoisie with a firm but sympathetic hand cannot simply be carried out by the self-activity of the entire population as the petit bourgeoisie, themselves, compose a significant proportion of that population. The job of guiding the petit bourgeoisie will, thus, need to be carried out by a state dominated by the active working class. To be sure, a workers’ state would gradually draw in more and more of the petit bourgeois masses into the administration of the state. However, the petit bourgeois class would not have the same representation in the soviet councils as the working class, not until the petit bourgeois individuals, as they are gradually integrated into the collectivised socialist economy, themselves become active constituents of the proletarian ruling class.
Proletarian Democracy
Meeting in Petrograd of the Third All Russia Congress of the Soviets in January 1918 – two and a half months after the Russian Revolution. The Soviet Congress was the highest body of the workers state. It consisted of delegates of workers – and also peasants and soldiers – elected by local grassroots soviets in which the active masses exercised direct political power. The early years after the Russian Revolution saw the workers state administered through this system based on proletarian democracy. Although the system of soviet democracy was strangled by the subsequent bureaucratic degeneration of the USSR, the USSR remained a workers state until it was destroyed by capitalist counterrevolution in 1991-92.
The proletarian state will be a million times more progressive than the previous capitalist state where only the exploiting few were really represented and the vast majority were simply ruled over. For the first time there will be a state serving the interests of the majority – working class people – not the interests of a tiny few exploiters. Since it will be a state serving the majority of people, a workers’ state will be far less alienated from society as a whole than a capitalist state is.
The revolutionary workers will be directly administering their state via workers’ soviets – which in Australia, Aboriginal workers and Aboriginal activists are destined to play a prominent role in from the get go. These soviets will from the time of their formation prior to the revolution, include not only workers but the most downtrodden layers of the non-worker masses – including the unemployed and low-income single mothers. Over time, the soviets will draw in wider layers of the masses (such as students, pensioners and certain layers of the petty bourgeoisie who have been won over to communist ideals). These workers’ councils or soviets – bodies of organised workers elected democratically – will be the primary voices determining the tasks of the workers’ state. In a workers’ state, with the key productive centres of capitalism having been taken over by the working masses, the industries and lands that were once run at the behest and for the profit of the rich bourgeoisie will now be under the control of the proletariat and will serve the interests of all of the formerly oppressed sections of society. This is, in essence, the nature of proletarian democracy. For communists, our democracy is about engaging the masses in direct participation of political administration starting from the workplaces. This is not so much a “grassroots” approach as an entire branch,trunk and roots engagement of the working people in the running of their society. This is in complete contradiction to the way capitalist “democracy” works in a capitalist state where every few years a handful of officials, predictably drawn from the same bourgeois political class, are elected to administer the state and regulate the capitalist economy and whose number one job it is to grease the wheels of capital – a truth that is at best ignored and at worst deceitfully covered up by the social democrats.
Combating Capitalist Ideology
Oneofthebiggestproblemsfacinga newly formed socialist society and its goal of successfully operating a system based on proletarian democracy is that we begin our long, happy march towards communism handicapped by a certain cultural deficit. For centuries the masses have been subjected to capitalist modes of thinking: a middle class type of profiteering, hoarding, speculating and exploiting mentality. In addition, backward, reactionary and divisive religious and nationalist ideologies flourish in competitive man-vs-man capitalist societies. These backward ideologies are also consciously promoted by the exploiters to divide and divert the masses from proletarian consciousness. After hundreds of years of feudalist and capitalist thinking pervading our culture, philosophy and even our language itself, one of the major tasks of the new socialist society will be to culturally uplift society. The vanguard of the victorious working class will need to gradually nurture and promote a collectivist spirit and internationalist perspective. For, although the consciousness of the masses would have necessarily surged forward during the revolution (or else there would have been no revolution to speak of!) there will, indeed, still be many people stuck in a very backward mindset.
August 2008, Beijing: Plainclothes Chinese police drag away the leader of the American-based Christian Defence Coalition, Reverend Patrick Mahoney, as he leads a rally of American bigots opposed to abortion rights in China. After arresting the hardline right-wing activists, the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) police let them go. Good job, PRC workers state police – but maybe next time let these scum rot in jail for a while! The Christian Defence Coalition is an ultra-right wing Christian fundamentalist group specialising in extreme anti-abortion activities, homophobia and opposition to contraception. Mahoney had previously been a co-founder of the militant, anti-abortion group, Operation Rescue, whose members were involved in several terrorist attacks on women seeking abortion in the U.S. and doctors providing the service.Groups like Operation Rescue and the Christian Democratic Coalition either openly celebrated the murder of abortion-providing doctor, George Tiller, or otherwise disgustingly conducted activities to brand Dr Tiller as a mass murderer on his own funeral day. The brave doctor was shot dead in May 2009 in Kansas, U.S.A by a Christian terrorist linked to Operation Rescue. Already facing the intense military, economic and political pressure of the capitalist powers, the socialistic PRC does not need to have to put up with intrusion from the ultra-right wing of imperialism represented by the likes of the Christian Democratic Coalition and Operation Rescue.
Through the fundamental process of the socialisation of the land and industries in the new society and with more and more people engaged in truly productive and rewarding collective labour, a new communist culture will, of course, naturally begin to form in its embryonic state amongst the masses. In this way, an economic system based on collective ownership and production for the common good becomes the very springboard for creating a new communist society.
However, we quickly come to a chicken or egg type of conundrum as the successful operation of collectivised industries itself requires the existence of a collectivised spirit amongst the workers. If we had a small team operating in a collectivised enterprise and individualistic ways persisted in the workplace then this would greatly undermine operational productivity, efficiency and workplace cohesion. Therefore, the new society will need to consciously promote and propagate a collectivist spirit in the masses.
With significant layers still infected with the old capitalist ways of thinking, the population as a whole (and not even the entire non- capitalist population) will not be able to automatically carry out this important job of instilling in themselves and in society in general an effective, genuine and steadfast communist spirit. It will take a state under the control of the conscious layers of the working masses – that is, the revolutionary workers and especially the millions who actively participated in the revolution – to bring all the masses up to communist consciousness. By conducting education within the workplace and schools and through guiding the production of a progressive media and cultural space, the workers’ state will be able to encourage the masses to turn away from the ages old and cynical, individualistic dog eat dog mentality toward a friendly, sisterly and brotherly collectivist spirit that is truly fit for a communist future.
Role of the Party
Bringing the masses to communist consciousness cannot be done without a revolutionaryworkers’party.For,althoughthe workers state will be directly administered by workers’ councils of millions upon millions of revolutionary workers, all these workers will necessarily have differing levels of consciousness. We need a party that is based upon the most politically energetic and forward thinking layers of the working class. This party will be the source and inspiration for the pursuit of truth and knowledge without which the working class masses who are administering their state will be truly rudderless. Such a party – composed of the revolutionary vanguard of the proletariat – will have the job of guiding the workers and bringing the masses to the most correct theoretical understanding.
After the revolution, the task of the party is to partake in revolutionary cultural education of the masses, unify the working class in industries to further economic building and organise the masses to both defend the revolution at home and carry on the fight for socialism internationally. The party must also build a communist consensus and carry out education and discussion around the new socialist society, all the while overcoming individualistic mentality in production.
The Problem of Production During the Transition Period
As well as defending the revolution and fighting to spread it internationally, guiding the petit bourgeoisie and combating capitalist ideology, a key challenge for the new society will be the need to increase production.
February 2015: NSW Police raid homeless residents camping under a viaduct in Sydney’s Wentworth Park. Police cruelly confiscated most of the homeless people’s posessions – including tents. In capitalist Australia, the police and other state organs target the most impoverished and exploited layers of the population as well as discriminated against ethnic groups. Aboriginal people in capitalist Australia are incarcerated at a rate that’s 13 times that of non-Aboriginal people, while Vietnamese and Afghan-origin people also suffer high rates of imprisonment. In contrast, the Chinese workers state’s institutions are toughest on the very rich. Chinese rich lists published by the Hurun magazine are often referred to in China as “fat pig killing lists” for those who appear on the list become targets of outrage from a population and media that hate the greedy tycoons – often prompting the Chinese authorities to investigate these capitalist exploiters. Attempting to downplay the frequent jailing of capitalists soon after they feature in its magazine, Hurun has claimed that “only” 35 of the 3,000 people who have appeared on its rich lists over the last 17 years have been jailed or executed. Yet even this figure represents a rate that is nearly ten times that of the rest of the population. An independent academic study actually found that 17% of the “entrpreneurs” who appeared on China’s rich lists between 1999 and 2007 have been either jailed, investigated or executed, even though China’s overall rate of imprisonment rate is 40% lower than Australia’s and nearly six times lower than the U.S.
Higher production assists in reducing scarcity and petty human-vs-human squabbles. As long as such squabbles exist, the unity required for a communist society cannot be built. Higher economic development also increases the wellbeing, luxury, and convenience of the masses. Crucially, it also helps in securing our revolution. If still existing capitalist countries outperform the socialist state this may lead them to being able to militarily or economically undermine the revolution.
Will the masses rise to the productive tasks required to improve the lives of the community in the new revolutionary society? Under capitalism it is typically only the technical and middle class layers who are motivated to be innovative in production as they hope this will help them climb up the capitalist ladder. For working class people under capitalism the main driving force that makes people productive in their jobs is the fear of sackings by the greedy capitalists which will leave them without a means of survival. How will the masses be motivated to be productive in a socialist society where they are guaranteed jobs and a decent livelihood?
Some people will be motivated to produce purely out of a sense of responsibility to serve the community. These will be people with a socialist ideological and working class consciousness. However, others without this same level of consciousness will require some level of material incentives to spur production. Practical examples of such incentives include extra wages for individuals who work longer hours and higher wages for people to join particular skilled professions where there may be staffing shortages due to work being, for example, more dangerous or because there are currently too few trained professionals in that particular field.
So, in this transition period between workers’ revolution and communism, there will be some inequality between different workers. Of course, this inequality is nothing like under capitalism where the main inequality is not between different workers but between all the workers and the capitalist exploiters of workers. Nevertheless, some people in the new, revolutionary society will object to even a limited degree of inequality for, after all, the revolution was made partly in the name of equality. Therefore, it will take a state – a workers’ state run by the revolutionary workers – to administer and control this unfortunate albeit socially necessary and transitory inequality.
May 2015: Billionaire real estate mogul, Wáng Ming-húa, is arrested by Chinese police for killing giant panda for their fur. In a massive raid, over three hundred members of the Peoples Armed Police raided the property mogul’s home looking for evidence.
We should, however, not be naïve. Even transitory inequality can be dangerous to a revolutionary society. For one, it could give the better paid workers a taste of privilege and thereby encourage in them capitalist restorationist tendencies. It is also potentially corrupting for the workers’ state to be defending inequality at all. Therefore, the party must play a key role in explaining to the masses the complex tasks of production in the post-revolutionary society and the vigilance required to be on guard against capitalist restoration. The workers’ party must also make extra efforts to unify the masses to ensure that the inevitable degree of division that economic inequality between workers brings is minimised as much as is possible. Furthermore, the more inequality there is in this transitory period, the more the workers’ state must be vigilant to crush signs of any capitalist restorationist tendencies.
November 2015: Xu Xiang, a billionaire owner of an investment firm, dubbed by the Western media as “China’s Warren Buffet” is arrested by Red China’s police for economic crimes. Chinese police blocked a 35 kilometre bridge for half an hour to facilitate the operation against the greedy hedge fund/private equity operator.
As the socialist system enables more and more of the masses to upgrade their skills, and with workers now knowing that their labour and innovative ideas will be used for their own good as well as their comrades’ (rather than under capitalism where all their efforts only serve to help their capitalist exploiters get even richer) work itself will become more rewarding and pleasurable. Soon a more advanced communist society will start to remove individualistic tendencies and replace them with a communist motivated spirit where workers are proud that their labour is used to serve the community.
This then helps pave the way for the workers’ state itself to wither away as society marches towards communism.
Withering Away of the Workers State
Humanity will awaken to a new future after the socialist revolution.
The backwardness of society that has existed for over a thousand years will start to be radically challenged. But the progress to communism is not an instant task. Communism and the stateless society will need to be facilitated by the workers’ state and workers’ democratic authority.
What will be the conditions that facilitate the workers’ state to actually wither away (because there ceases to be a need for one) and a fully communist society – where there is no state – to emerge?
Firstly, not only must the resistance of the overthrown capitalists be totally defeated to the extent that they no longer attempt to undermine the revolutionary society but there must also be no threat from capitalist restorationist forces from abroad. This, in turn, presupposes that capitalist rule has been overthrown in all the richest and most powerful countries of the world.
Secondly, class differences will need to be eradicated and full equality based on abundance for all will need to be achieved to the extent that we can have the realisation of the ideal: “From each according to her ability, to each according to her need”. Achieving this ideal implies that there is growing collective wealth and that resources are so well allocated that the full productive and creative potential of individuals can be harnessed. When class differences and scarcity are eradicated then the state can wither away because there is no longer a class that needs to be suppressed.
To fully reach the stage of communism, the inequality that exists between workers in the manual work and the technical realm must also be overcome. In capitalist society, the manual workers often get lower pay and have less opportunities but with socialist rule and development, this inequality and isolation will be gradually removed through massively expanding training and education opportunities for the masses. Everyone will then, in communism, become a highly skilled technical or artistic worker while each and every worker will also do an equal share of the more monotonous and tiring tasks (the number of which will continue to be drastically reduced due to advancing technological and scientific innovations which, under communism, will benefit all workers).
Another essential requirement for reaching communism will be that the old bourgeois traditions be fully eliminated. This will allow Communism to be realised where individuals that compose the masses manage their own community affairs with a self-determined community motivated spirit and culture without the need for a guiding workers’ state.
Social democrats and other ignorant apologists for the capitalists don’t realise that the capitalist state is an oppressive and freedom-killing institution. The workers’ state is the opposite. It does, in fact, calls for its own dissolution but only at that point in time when it has succeeded in helping rid society of backward capitalist traditions and in engaging all the masses in the administration of society to such an extent there is no one left to administer. The role of the councils and the community bodies will then pass over from the administration of people to the administration of things.
This will be the ultimate stage of communist society. It is a future worth fighting for. Workersoftheworldunite!
November 2011, Workers at the Baida poultry plant in Laverton, Victoria on the picket line during a two-week long strike for job security and against bullying bosses.Baida workers at a picnic to celebrate their victorious struggle. Even today, when workers are in collective struggle, petty rivalries and jealousies and the racial and sexual divisions and oppressions created by capitalist society are to a degree mitigated. This points to how a future communist society will allow all people to live in very warm and happy friendship with each other in a society without oppression or exploitation – and, hence, no need for a state.
Footnotes:
28.
Lenin writes in The State:
But there was a time when there was no state, when general ties, the community itself, discipline and the ordering of work were maintained by force of custom and tradition, by the authority or the respect enjoyed by the elders of the clan or by women—who in those times not only frequently enjoyed a status equal to that of men, but not infrequently enjoyed an even higher status—and when there was no special category of persons who were specialists in ruling. History shows that the state as a special apparatus for coercing people arose wherever and whenever there appeared a division of society into classes, that is, a division into groups of people some of which were permanently in a position to appropriate the labour of others, where some people exploited others.
“Andthisdivision of society into classes must always be clearly borne in mind as a fundamental fact of history. The development of all human societies for thousands of years, in all countries without exception, reveals a general conformity to law, a regularity and consistency; so that at first we had a society without classes—the original patriarchal, primitive society, in which there were no aristocrats; then we had a society based on slavery—a slaveowning society. The whole of modern, civilised Europe has passed through this stage—slavery ruled supreme two thousand years ago. The vast majority of peoples of the other parts of the world also passed through this stage. Traces of slavery survive to this day among the less developed peoples; you will find the institution of slavery in Africa, for example, at the present time. The division into slaveowners and slaves was the first important class division. The former group not only owned all the means of production—the land and the implements, however poor and primitive they may have been in those times—but also owned people. This group was known as slave-owners, while those who laboured and supplied labour for others were known as slaves.
This form was followed in history by another—feudalism. In the great majority of countries slavery in the course of its development evolved into serfdom. The fundamental division of society was now into feudal lords and peasant serfs. The form of relations between people changed. The slave- owners had regarded the slaves as their property; the law had confirmed this view and regarded the slave as a chattel completely owned by the slave-owner. As far as the peasant serf was concerned, class oppression and dependence remained, but it was not considered that the feudal lord owned the peasants as chattels, but that he was only entitled to their labour, to the obligatory performance of certain services. In practice, as you know, serfdom, especially in Russia where it survived longest of all and assumed the crudest forms, in no way differed from slavery.
Further,withthedevelopmentof trade, the appearance of the world market and the development of moneycirculation, anewclassarosewithin feudal society—the capitalist class. Fromthe commodity, the exchange of commodities and the rise of the power of money, there derived the power of capital. During the eighteenth century, or rather, from the end of the eighteenth century and during the nineteenth century, revolutions took place all over the world. Feudalism was abolished in all the countries of Western Europe. Russia was the last country in which this took place. In 1861 a radical change took place in Russia as well; as a consequence of this one form of society was replaced by another—feudalism was replaced by capitalism, under which division into classes remained, as well as various traces and remnants of serfdom, but fundamentally the division into classes assumed a different form.
The owners of capital, the owners of the land and the owners of the factories in all capitalist countries constituted and still constitute an insignificant minority of the population who have completecommandof the labour of the whole people, and, consequently, command, oppress and exploit the whole mass of labourers, the majority of whom are proletarians, wage-workers, who procure their livelihood in the process of production only by the sale of their own worker’s hands, their labour-power. With the transition to capitalism, the peasants, who had been disunited and downtrodden in feudal times, were converted partly (the majority) into proletarians, and partly (the minority) into wealthy peasants who themselves hired labourers and who constituted a rural bourgeoisie.
This fundamental fact—the transition of society from primitive forms of slavery to serfdom and finally to capitalism—you must always bear in mind, for only by remembering this fundamental fact, only by examining all political doctrines placed in this fundamental scheme, will you be able properly to appraise these doctrines and understand what they refer to; for each of these great periods in the history of mankind, slave-owning, feudal and capitalist, embraces scores and hundreds of centuries and presents such a mass of political forms, such a variety of political doctrines, opinions and revolutions, that this extreme diversity and immense variety (especially in connection with the political, philosophical and other doctrines of bourgeois scholars and politicians) can be understood only by firmly holding, as to a guiding thread, to this division of society into classes, this change in the forms of class rule, and from this standpoint examining all social questions— economic, political, spiritual, religious, etc.
From The State: A Lecture Delivered at the Sverdlov University. Lecture written by V.I Lenin & delivered on 11 July 1919. First published: Pravda No. 15, 18 January 1929. Source: Lenin’s Collected Works, 4th English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972 Volume 29, pages 470-488. Translated: George Hanna. Copyleft: V. I. Lenin Internet Archive (www.marx.org) 2002. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/jul/11.htm
29.
The proletariat originally arose from many Some were freed serfs. Others were journeymen and apprentices – an oppressed class of artisans oppressed by the guild masters – who went into the new manufacturing and industrial enterprises in search of better pay and often simply employment as the new industries were then undercutting the guilds. Later the guild masters – who were a small-scale exploiting class – found that they too had to join the proletariat as their operations were ruined by competition from the more efficient large industries. Of course, there were classic petit bourgeois who became proletarians – tradesmen, shopkeepers, peasants. Some who joined were also former members of the landowning nobility. With the breakdown of feudalism and the bourgeois revolution these nobles no longer had serfs and peasants to provide for them and ended up having to work as exploited workers to make a living.
There are many national variations to this. In the South of the U.S.A, for example, a good part of the proletariat were/ are liberated former black slaves. In Australia, the proletariat has a particularly diverse background. Ironically, until they were granted equal pay as white workers, Aboriginal workers – that is, members of an egalitarian so-called “hunter-gatherer” society who were brutally denied access to the land that they had for millennia occupied (not “owned” as the concept of ownership was foreign to their society) – were the backbone of the rural proletariat working as stockmen, shearers, pickers, cotton chippers etc. This rural proletariat was supplemented by “Kanaks,” people from places like Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, PNG and New Caledonia who were kidnapped (“blackbirded”) by Australian slave hunters and brought to work as indentured plantation workers in Australia – especially in the sugar plantations of Queensland. Later these workers became “free” labour. Then there were the ex-convicts who became workers – that is, we can say ex-members of the lumpenproletariat. There were, of course, petit bourgeoise who were driven into the proletariat class – for example, gold prospectors once the gold rush was over. Australia’s working class – especially the industrial proletariat – is disproportionately made up of migrants and their descendants – that is, of European and later Middle Eastern migrants arriving after WWII and then coloured migrants after the formal relaxation of the White Australia Party. All these migrants came from different backgrounds. Some were workers in their original countries, others were farmers and shopkeepers. Some were former members of the exploiting class. These included people fleeing countries where the former ruling bourgeois faction has been deposed by a rival bourgeois faction – such as in Iran and Iraq. It also includes former members of the landlord and capitalist class running away from anti-capitalist revolutions in places like China, Laos and Vietnam. Former members of the deposed exploiting class in Vietnam and their henchmen are heavily concentrated as workers in the manufacturing and warehouse sectors of Sydney and Melbourne. Then there are the many henchmen of the capitalists who after WWII fled – from the Baltic states, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, Russia and Croatia – the victorious Red Army or the Yugoslav Revolution. The highest ranked of these anti-communists got well-paid positions assisting ASIO but most ended up becoming ordinary workers. So there we have the Australian working class’ diverse class background: former members of an egalitarian hunter-gatherer society, former “blackbirded” slaves, petit bourgeois farmers and gold prospectors, lumpen proletarian ex-convicts, overthrown capitalist exploiters and their die-hard anti-communist henchmen fleeing socialistic revolutions.
The latter includes, in the case of some of the East European and Baltic migrant workers, former members of outright fascist armies and police forces. All this underscores that there is nothing per se morally more worthy about an individual proletarian over an individual petit-bourgeois person. That is hardly the point. The point is that by its relationship to the relations of production the proletariat as a whole uniquely has the power, interest and potential consciousness to lead the struggle against capitalism and for socialism. Furthermore, the proletariat’s position in the relations of production and its means of deriving an income give it the opportunity to break free from attachment to private property and to develop a consciousness of solidarity with fellow toilers regardless of which class the proletarian or her/his ancestors may have derived from. Ironically, to see this question from a standpoint that puts the overall struggle for the liberation of humanity at the forefront rather than an individual judgemental type analysis itself requires a proletarian outlook as opposed to the individualistic bourgeois/petty bourgeois analysis that our whole upbringing in capitalist society conditions us to examine political questions with (in a similar way that our conditioning in capitalist society drives us to, when we analyse political events, excessively focus on the personalities and policies of individual political leaders/activists rather than the conflicts between classes and the struggles/contradictions between sections of classes).
30.
In checking the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) figures there are grey areas in how the figures are presented and also some grey areas about where to classify certain people. Nevertheless, it is apparent that the petit bourgeois make up from 15% to 23% of the Australian workforce. (The small-scale capitalist exploiters make up 3% to 4% of the workforce.) Comrades may find how these figures can be calculated interesting: Firstly, looking at the petit bourgeois, from http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/ProductsbyTopic/A8CAED8E5F9FB2E1CA257F1F00044E8C?OpenDocument (accessed 21 March 2016), it is apparent that there are 307,100 + 951,800 self-employed people, i.e. 1,258,900 self-employed people.
Additionally. some of the people who are employees are still part of the petit-bourgeois. Unfortunately and rather strangely, the ABS when breaking down occupations lumps in employees and owner-managers of incorporated enterprises into one group rather than listing them separately. But looking at the ABS spreadsheet for the breakdown of occupations in incorporated enterprises, we find that there are 584,000 people working as business, human resource and marketing professionals. Due to the closeness of many of these employees to the bosses and the nature of their work which, rather than the production of goods and services, often involves strategizing on helping the bosses maximise profits, many should be classed as petit-bourgeois rather than proletarian. Of course, not all these employees would fit such a description – lower level employees collating market research data should be counted as part of the proletariat. So we can at a very rough guess count 60% of these employees as petit bourgeois. But given that there are, additionally, professionals in other occupation types that we are not counting as petit bourgeois who should be, then if we take all these 584,000 as petit bourgeois then that would make up for all these others. These would include highly skilled professionals working in the public sector who, because society compels the government to provide certain basic services, the government is compelled to pay high salaries in order to ensure that the services are provided. Therefore, these people are not denied the fruits of their labour – but neither are they bourgeois exploiters. In this category would include town planners, senior civil engineers working for state and local government, staff specialist doctors at hospitals etc.
So, in total, taking 584,000 of those among the employees and owner-managers of incorporated enterprises as petit bourgeois we now have to deal with the issue of double counting since some of these may have already been included in the 307,100 people working as self-employed owners of incorporated enterprises. Therefore, we should scale this number by the ratio of the people in the employees and incorporated enterprises category who are not self employed divided by the total number of people in the employees and incorporated enterprises category. This ratio is 97%, i.e. (9,585,100 + 499,900)/(9,585,100 + 806,600). That means our estimate for the number of employees that should be added to the petit bourgeois category is 97% x 584,100 = 566,577.
Another group of people given in the ABS breakdown of occupations for people listed as being either employees or owner-managers of incorporated enterprises that should be classed as petit bourgeois is a proportion of the 1,257,800 people listed as managers. Most of the managers should be classed in the category of henchmen/enforcers of the capitalists. However, some of the people classed as managers are really leading hands without the power to fire or to deny workers leave and others are managers of things rather than people. We can estimate that say 25% of people listed as managers fall in this category. So, therefore, the number of managers who can be counted as petit bourgeois is 25% x 1,257,800 = 314,450. Now, some of these people may already have been counted in the self-employed category and we would expect the proportion of managers to be higher than the 3% (i.e, 100% – 3%) average for people in the employees or owner-managers of incorporated enterprises category. So we assume that 20% are double counted, i.e, 80% of the 314,450 managers (i.e. 251,560) considered petit bourgeois rather than bourgeois henchmen should be added to the petit bourgeois category.
There is one other group that should, perhaps, be added to the petit bourgeois category. This comes about due to a certain grey area among a small percentage of the people who are small scale employers. Most of the people employing one to four people are in fact small scale capitalist exploiters who derive their income from a combination of business conducted that’s based on their own labour as well as that of their workers. These include restaurant/ café owners hiring chefs/service staff, plumbers and electricians with their own business hiring a couple of (always terribly paid) apprentices, auto repair shop owners with a couple of hired workers etc. In all these cases, the hired workers contribute much to directly producing the goods or services that are being sold. The bosses deny the workers the full fruit of their labour (and when this is not the case it is not because the boss does not intend to but because there is not enough business for the boss to get full use out of the workers). Additionally, these bosses often treat their workers arrogantly and rudely. However, there is also a category of small-scale employers where the hired workers are not directly engaged in producing the goods/services being sold. These would include architects, dentists, doctors, accountants and solicitors with their own private practice and hiring an office manager/receptionist or two. Unlike, say, with the café owner hiring a service worker, in this case making the receptionist work longer hours for the same pay will not necessarily increase the owner’s profits. The profits and often high income of the business owner depends largely on the architect/doctor etc being able to get away with charging the client/patient high fees. So, in this sense, these type of business owners are petit-bourgeois rather than small-scale capitalists. On the other hand the work that the receptionist/office manager performs is crucial to the successful operation of the business and the often massive disparity in income between the business-owning professional and the receptionist/office manager shows that there is some degree of the worker being denied the fruits of their labour and thus not being adequately paid. So these business-owning professionals are really in a grey area between being petit bourgeois and being small-scale capitalist exploiters. However, many of them are probably closer to being petit bourgeois than small scale capitalists so for classification purposes could probably be classed as petit bourgeois.
So now for our numbers, we need to estimate what percentage of all the small-scale employers are business owning professionals hiring only one or two office staff (who are the only people working in the business in addition to themselves and possibly other professionals in a partnership). A guess would be 25%. We then need to know the total number of people owning businesses with only a very small number of hired workers. This page from the ABS – http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/8165.0 (accessed 21 March 2016) – indicates that 27% of all businesses have one to four employees (note: ignore the total number of businesses from this page as many business owners own more than one business). So, knowing that there are 806,900 + 1,191,200 = 1,998,100 business owners and assuming that this 27% ratio applies roughly to business owners in addition to applying to the total number of businesses, the number of business owners hiring from one to four employees is 27% x 1,998,100 = 539,487. Then, taking our estimate of 25% as the percentage of these business owners who are in a grey area where they probably should be categorised more as petit-bourgeois than small-scale capitalists, the number of these petit-bourgeois business owners = 25% x 539,487 = 134,872.
Therefore the total number of petit bourgeois = 1,258,900 + 566,577 + 251,560 + 134,872 = 2,211,909. This represents a 2,211,909/11,583,900 ratio, i.e. 19% of the workforce.
As for the small-scale capitalist exploiters, they would make up the remaining 75% of the bosses hiring between one to four workers who cannot be classed as petit bourgeois, i.e. they number 75% x 539, 487 = 404,615. That is, they make up 404,651/11,583,900 ratio, i.e. 3.5% of the workforce.
Now the medium and large scale capitalist business owners would be the total number of business owners minus those that have no employees less those that employ from one to four workers. That would be 1,998,100 – 1,258,900 – 539,487 = 199,713. This is 199,713/11,583,900 ratio, i.e. 1.7% of the workforce. Many managers are also substantial shareholders of businesses where they are not necessarily the main owners. However, it is hard to estimate this. It is easier to simply lump in the big and medium bourgeois and their henchmen as one.
So the managers who could be counted as bourgeois henchmen or straight bourgeois are those who cannot be counted as simply petit bourgeois, i.e. we have estimated that 25% can be counted as petit bourgeois so 75% of the managers can be estimated to be bourgeois or bourgeois henchmen. Thus, 75% x 1,257,800 = 943,350. As many of these managers, however, already have been counted as owner managers – at an estimate 30% – so 70% of the mangers not considered petit bourgeois should be added to the bourgeois class and its henchmen, i.e. 70% x 943,500 = 660,450.
Now an additional group of henchmen are cops, prison guards, secret police, volunteer army soldiers, private security, prosecutors, judges and magistrates. Judges, magistrates and prosecutors together make up a very small number. So a good estimate of the total for this category of henchmen is given under the listing in the ABS spreadsheet for “Protective Service Workers,” of which there are 140,300.
Therefore, the total for the big and medium size capitalists and their armed and unarmed henchmen/enforcers is 199,713 + 660,450 + 140,300 = 1,000,463. This is a ratio of 1,000,463/11,583,900 = approx. 8.5% of the workforce.
So, in summary the estimates are: big and medium size capitalist exploiters and their henchmen form 8.5% of the workforce, small-size capitalist exploiters 3.5%, petit bourgeois 19%; proletariat and semi-proletariat (including the better paid highly skilled/educated workers) make up the rest, which is 69% of the workforce.
To put it in easy to remember terms: in Australia roughly seven in ten people in the workforce are the proletariat/ semi-proletariat, one in five are the petit-bourgeois and one in eight are the capitalist exploiters and their henchmen/ enforcers.
