Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group

This article first appeared in The Anvil Vol 7 No 3, published on 19 Nov 2018.

One hundred years ago this month, the guns of World War I fell silent. Ever since then, 11 November has been used to mark the end of that war and an intense political struggle has been waged over its meaning. The war was a devastating event of unprecedented savagery. Millions died and people naturally want to know why. The capitalist media won’t tell you why it started and they won’t tell you how it ended.

World War I began because two great rival imperial alliances had formed, contesting over who was going to be master of Europe. It was a war for conquest of territory, colonies and markets. It had almost started two years earlier, in 1912, but diplomacy headed it off. If diplomacy had prevented the assassination of an Austrian Archduke from starting the war in 1914, it would have happened later on, triggered by something else. The showdown was inevitable.

By chance, the war started when the state of military technology favoured defenders over attackers. With the aid of trenches, sandbags and machine guns, a platoon could hold off a battalion. Given that the two rival alliances were of roughly equal strength, the scene was set for a military stalemate. Governments and generals, as contemptuous of the human life of the lower orders as ruling classes always have been, and as stupid as can be expected in systems built on inherited privilege, proceeded to waste millions of lives of soldiers and others in a vain attempt to break the stalemate.

To cut a long story short, the pointless slaughter generated increasing opposition throughout all belligerent countries. The chain broke at its weakest link, with revolution breaking out in Russia in 1917. The February Revolution overthrew the Czar and the October Revolution brought the Bolsheviks to power, on a promise of peace. They negotiated the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which got Russia out of the war in March 1918, while discontent continued to build in the rest of Europe and in the Ottoman Empire.

Developments in military technology (most importantly the tank) and the entry of the United States into the war had broken the stalemate. Germany and the other Central Powers were under increasing pressure and had reached breaking point. In a last ditch effort, on 24 October the German Admiralty ordered the Navy to sea in order to take on the Royal Navy and break the blockade. The German sailors rightly considered this a suicide mission and mutinied, first at Wilhelmshaven on 29 October, followed by a larger mutiny at Kiel on 3 November. The attack was cancelled, but it was too late. The sailors’ revolt had sparked a revolution. Revolts spread throughout Germany in the early days of November and workers in city after city formed workers’ councils. By 9 November, the Kaiser had been forced out and a republic proclaimed. The new government, centred on the Social Democratic Party, signed the Armistice on 11 November.

Germany’s allies had also collapsed. Bulgaria had capitulated on 29 September, while the Ottomans signed an armistice on 30 October. Instability within their borders had combined with military reverses to force this. The Hapsburg Empire of Austria-Hungary signed an armistice on 3 November, but it was already falling apart by then, with independence proclamations issued in several cities. The Armistice on the Western Front, therefore, marked the end of the entire war. Discontent in the armies of the British Empire, slower to develop, peaked after the Armistice and focused on demands for demobilisation.

World War I was ended by social revolution. The population of the Central Powers, under the pressure of intense privations brought on by the war, and with the example of Russia to their East, withdrew support from the belligerent regimes. The fall of the Kaiser, the dissolution of the Hapsburg Empire and the dismemberment of the Ottoman one were the result of workers, peasants and soldiers who had had enough. If the Central Powers’ morale had held, the war would have continued for some time.

REVOLUTIONS STOP WARS

This article first appeared in The Anvil Vol 7 No 3, published on 19 Nov 2018.

The Victorian State election scheduled for 24 November offers workers no advance towards socialism. The incumbent Labor Government, led by Daniel Andrews, appears to have leapt straight from the pages of the latest edition of a neo-liberal textbook written in the bowels of the International Monetary Fund. A few mildly progressive initiatives and some inadequate action on climate change are firmly subordinated to capitalist market relations. Meanwhile, Labor’s pretences at being socially progressive haven’t stopped it joining in the Right wing media’s racist campaign against “African crime gangs”.

The alternative government, the Liberal Party, is an altogether less complicated beast. As the official mouthpiece of capital, its economic policies are stuck in 1990s IMF zealotry. There aren’t enough capitalists to win elections, so the Libs also need social reactionaries to vote for them. Therefore, the Libs are against taking any action on climate change and they’ve been working closely with Right wing media in fomenting a general “law and order” campaign, centred around a panic about alleged African crime gangs.

So, who else is running? Let’s pass by the assortment of Right wing nut jobs (who bicker amongst themselves just as badly as the Left does) and single issue parties, whose very existence is a statement that “Everything about this society is pretty well OK, except for this one particular issue”. The biggest challenge comes from the Greens. They are certainly committed to better environmental and social policies than either major party. They are fundamentally handicapped, though, by their delusion that a just and sustainable capitalism is possible. Grassroots activists have described them as “neo-liberals on bikes” and it’s difficult to disagree.

This time, we also have the Victorian Socialists, who are running in a number of upper and lower house seats. They are seriously trying to win an upper house seat in the Northern Metropolitan province. And because this is not just a flag-flying exercise, they have to pass a strict test. We oppose running for elections because, although it’s possible to enter a capitalist Parliament on a principled basis, we think it’s a waste of time and effort to do so. The energy required for the election campaign can be far more usefully directed towards building grassroots struggles. Nevertheless, the question arises of how to respond if a State Socialist group decides to waste its resources that way.

Firstly, the party has to be standing clearly for Socialism and against capitalism. The Vic Socialists are doing this. If the election campaign is just a flag-flying occasion, that’s basically enough, provided the party hasn’t disgraced itself in front of the whole working class like the British SWP has with its rape apologism (put “Comrade Delta” into your favourite search engine). Second, the party has to advance strong progressive positions on the issues of the day. The Vic Socialists do this, too. There’s room for argument about their adequacy in this or that area, but it’s not litmus test material for a State upper house. Third, the party has to promise to take the side of workers and oppressed groups in struggle. They tick that box, as well.

Unfortunately, the Victorian Socialists fall at the last hurdle. In the absence of argument to the contrary, the act of a Socialist running for Parliament serves to raise illusions that a parliamentary road to socialism exists. Potential voters will see their vote as the vehicle for attaining Socialism, through the election of sufficient Socialists to Parliament. It is therefore the duty of principled Socialists to explain that, while Parliament may be able to deliver some worthwhile reforms, Socialism can only be achieved by the revolutionary action of the workers themselves. The Victorian Socialists are conspicuously silent on this point.

To vote for a Socialist who has no hope of winning is simply to say “I’m against capitalism and for Socialism”. In lower house seats and in seven of the eight upper house provinces, this is the meaning of a vote for the Victorian Socialists. And there’s no harm in that. If the Socialist has a chance of being elected, though, we need to look at the situation more deeply. A Victorian Socialist in the Legislative Council of Victoria might make stirring speeches in support of grassroots struggles and might fight hard to get reforms out of this neo-liberal Labor Government, but if they don’t explain to the working class that this isn’t how we’ll win Socialism, they’ll be leading workers in the wrong direction.

On this basis, the Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group says that it is not possible to lodge a principled vote in the Victorian election on 24 November in Northern Metropolitan, the one constituency where they have a slight chance of winning. None of the candidates offer a road to Socialism.

BUILD MOVEMENTS NOT ELECTIONS

This article was published in The Anvil Vol 7 No 2, Sep-Oct 2018

The Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group believe that workers’ revolution is the only way to achieve a society of peace, freedom and equality for all. This is not a fashionable view.

It is understandable that our view isn’t fashionable for two reasons. First, the capitalist media and capitalist educational institutions work hard to build faith in other roads to a good society, or to discredit the very idea. Second, the failure of States that claim to uphold workers’ revolution to achieve a free and equal society has done much to discredit both the objective and the strategy. So people who still believe in workers’ revolution have some explaining to do. The MACG believes it can make a good case.

Before the rise of industrial capitalism, dreams of abolishing social class and establishing economic equality were confined to rare intellectuals or occasional outbursts of struggle during revolutionary periods. The intellectuals usually conjured up authoritarian communist utopias which could only be created by a ruler – but which no ruler would want to create. The outbursts of struggle fell away when faced with the problem of dealing with material shortage, and new ruling classes emerged or old ones reconsolidated.

The Industrial Revolution began in England in the late 18th Century and, over the following hundred years, spread across Europe, the United States, Britain’s settler colonies & elsewhere. The working class separated from the middle class, since most workers now had no realistic expectation of advancing to self-employment. It was this new working class that made possible a mass movement towards a free and equal society, because this was a force with the necessary motive and potential power. This movement prefigured a society based on these values because of the organic link between the practices of the movement and the structures of the new society.

Today, the working class is the largest class in the world, outnumbering the peasants and even the 3rd World urban poor, who are largely self-employed in the informal sector. We are vastly more powerful than when we made the Russian Revolution a century ago. The social productivity of labour is so great that many agree the world is rich enough to abolish poverty if only there were the political will to do so. Poverty, once an unavoidable tragedy, is now a crime against humanity.

Since emerging in the late 1860s, class struggle Anarchists have said that it is the working class that will abolish capitalism. We have argued for revolution because we agree with the saying attributed to Lucy Parsons, “Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth.” We believe the working class is central because of our numbers, but more importantly because workers create society’s wealth and make society function on a day-to-day basis. We can seize the workplace, the source of the capitalists’ power, and build our own power. The struggle for better wages & conditions is the school in which groups of workers learn their strength and come to believe in a society based on the solidarity they have built.

Critics of the class struggle strategy point to reactionary ideas amongst the working class. It is true that many workers have racist, sexist and homophobic attitudes and engage in various forms of oppressive behaviour. The leaders and propagators of reactionary ideas in society, though, are actually powerful capitalists. Years of racist dog-whistling by John Howard, Tony Abbott and Peter Dutton have been essential, for example, to the rise of Fascist thugs in Australia like the True Blue Crew and the Soldiers of Odin. The fish rots from the head.

There is also a more powerful argument against dismissing the working class. Workers who hold reactionary ideas are shooting themselves in the foot. Their racism, their sexism, their homophobia, etc, are instruments of their own defeat. As well as barring the way to a just society, reaction defeats workers in the daily struggle for decent wages and conditions. Black workers lose massively from racism, but white workers also lose. Women workers lose massively from sexism, but male workers also lose. And so on. Only the capitalists win from reactionary ideologies and the oppressions they justify.

We cannot put off the struggle against sexism, racism, homophobia, religious bigotry, anti-trans hatred or any other oppression until “after the Revolution”. Doing so would ensure the Revolution never comes. Instead, we have to return to the foundation principle that built the union movement – Touch One, Touch All. All forms of oppression, inside the workplace or outside, are an attack on our solidarity and thus on the working class as a whole.

It is in the crucible of struggle that workers learn these lessons most quickly. The most famous example of this was the great Miners’ Strike of 1984-85 in Britain. The coalfields, long-time bastions of sexism, changed when women stepped forward into the struggle. Few women were directly employed in the mines, but women saw the very existence of their communities was at stake. Fundraising activity by immigrant and LGBT groups made more bonds of solidarity that transformed miners’ consciousness. In twelve months miners learned new attitudes that took decades for the rest of the working class in Britain.

The struggle of the working class is linked to the revolution in three ways. First, the struggle is located where capital gets its power – in the workplace. Second, the struggle over wages and conditions shows that economic crises are inevitable within capitalism and the looming threat of an irresolvable crisis is ever growing. And third, it is only through struggle that the working class will learn the iron solidarity necessary for the revolution. As it casts aside all reactionary prejudices (what Marx called “the muck of ages”), the working class will remake itself as a body of free and equal people fit for a libertarian communist society.

TOUCH ONE
TOUCH ALL

This article was published in The Anvil Vol 7 No 2, Sep-Oct 2018.

The Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group have joined PUSH! Organising and Educating to Build a United Front Against Fascism. As its name implies, PUSH! aims to build a united front of working class organisations against Fascism. Our forces are modest, composed of a handful of groups and individual activists who have left CARF, but we are clear about our basic direction.

As capitalism evolves ever more deadly contradictions, Right wing forces gather strength. Fascism, an ideology most people thought was defeated seventy years ago, has re-emerged. Like other reactionary forces, Fascists seek to blame society’s problems on suitable scapegoats, but the distinguishing feature of Fascism is its use of violence as a strategy. By whipping up the middle classes into a frenzy of reaction, they create street gangs to attack vilified groups and “the enemy within” – progressive political forces. Ultimately, Fascists seek an open dictatorship to crush the unions and all other working class organisations. A Fascist group is a conspiracy to murder. Breaking it up is an act of self-defence and, if done using reasonable force, entirely justified.

Fascism can only be defeated by a united front, where workers from different tendencies unite all the Fascists’ targets through solidarity in action. In Australia today, this means that the unions must take the lead and rally the rest of the working class behind their banners. A mass demonstration of thousands, or even tens of thousands, of unionists and others would be unbeatable. The police could not disperse them and the Fascists would recoil in terror, to fall apart in bitter recriminations afterwards.

It is to pursue this vision that the MACG have left CARF and helped establish PUSH! While CARF has done essential work since 2015 in mobilising against Fascist rallies, it has put the only winning strategy in the too-hard basket. Increasingly, it abandoned building a united front that drew on broader forces and turned into a campaign group that merely attracted radicalised individuals. Worst of all, it turned away from the labour movement, writing off the unions as hopelessly conservative. CARF’s mobilisations have been a necessary stop-gap until we win the argument inside the unions, but they cannot win lasting victories when the constituency for Fascism keeps growing. There were some undemocratic practices within CARF, but we won’t dwell on them because frankly we’ve seen much worse and they only arose because of the political issues in contention.

The MACG will pursue our vision for an anti-Fascist united front within PUSH! We know that many groups in the labour movement don’t share our strategy, so they will have to be either won over or sidelined. And we know that the union bureaucracy is craven and conservative, but we place our faith in the rank and file workers who are Fascism’s targets. The struggle against Fascism is inseparable from the struggle against the union bureaucracy – but didn’t we know that already?

PUSH! can be contacted at antifascist.push@gmail.com or found on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/Antifascist.Push/.

NO PASARAN!

The Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group is pleased to announce that we have participated in the launch of a new anti-Fascist organisation. The initial callout is reproduced below.

PUSH! Organising and Educating
to Build an Anti-Fascist United Front

A callout to unite forces against fascists and the far right

In Australia and around the world, we face a fascist threat. Nazis are returning to the streets of towns and cities, winning seats in parliaments across Europe and — closer to home — marching openly under police protection through the streets of Melbourne. Wherever they appear, fascists spell danger, with local groups such as Blair Cottrell’s Lads Society training for combat and Neil Erickson’s Cooks Convicts raiding local councils and intimidating immigrants and refugees.

While these developments do not mean we are in a fascist state, they are warnings. Fascists rely on enablers and collaborators in the political mainstream to give them a platform. The current wave of fascism is no different. From Israel’s Netanyahu and the Philippines’ Duterte to the USA’s Trump, far right governments light the way for these emerging fascists. So do fear-mongering mainstream “democrats,” from Malcolm Turnbull and Peter Dutton to Matthew Guy and Daniel Andrews.

Racism lays the foundation for fascism

Australia is a state founded on the theft of Aboriginal land, the denial of the sovereignty of the people who have been living here for tens of thousands of years, and genocide to wipe out their communal culture. The capitalists need to propagate racism and reactionary nationalism to validate their position and pit workers against each other. Official state racism provides the environment where fascists are encouraged to organise.

Through rallies, elections, social media and think-tanks, fascists seek platforms to recruit from and normalise their world view, more broadly co-opting conservative or moderate forces toward their agenda. Following the examples of Hitler and Mussolini, they aim to build a movement capable of lifting them, and their ideological program, into state power. This is fascism — a mass movement, whose social base is mainly small business operators and entrepreneurs (the middle class) but also workers devoid of class solidarity, desperately looking for a solution to their impoverishment and uncertain futures.

Without capitalism, there would be no fascism

Fascist ideologues feed on their fears and prejudices, harkening to a mythical bygone era of greatness steeped in reactionary nationalism, white pride and patriarchal family values. Exploiting deep-seated and systemic racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia, they offer up scapegoats to blame — Muslims and Jews, immigrants and refugees, people of colour, First Nations, women, disabled people and the LGBTIQ community. However their prime marks are trade unions and the Left, because these are the movements capable of uniting and mobilising their targets against them.

Scapegoating deflects attention from the source of ever-widening desperation: the profit system. When economic crisis becomes so critical that workers and the oppressed resist and parliamentary democracy can no longer keep the class “peace,” the billionaire class will turn to the fascists. This happened 80 years ago. This economic élite will resort to fascism again to stave off revolt and save itself. The aim is to crush the working class so that capitalism can survive.

We can stop this

Hitler himself said that organised resistance could have eliminated the Nazis when they were still small and weak. But the fragmented labour and Left movements failed to coalesce into a united front. Fascism beat the working class into submission — assassinating its leaders, sending millions into concentration campsand forced labour, enforcing “kinder, küche, kirsche” (children, kitchen, church) on women of the “master race,” and smashing trade unions.

Unity in action is our collective, mutual defence. All of fascists’ targets coming together as organisations and individuals is our weapon against aspiring führers while they’re still small, split and weak. And while we still have rights to organise.

The united front is our collective defence

Our vision is of a united front in which politically divergent groups and individuals cohere around points of agreement and work together respectfully, collaboratively and uncompromisingly in the interest of workers and all the oppressed. A united front is about marching with our own banners and slogans, and striking together.

Democracy and accountability are key to this united strength. Without them, a united front can’t build or last.

Crucial to the united front is the involvement of the union movement, because this is where workers organise and build collective self-discipline to act in defence of our class. Union officials are belatedly beginning to recognise the threat. But it is the members and delegates — the ones facing fascist targeting in their everyday lives — who are most compelled to push our unions to join.

Open letter from Victorian Trades Hall Council, August 2018. Below is an extract:

“The mighty Victorian union movement is comprised of workers from all walks of life, united across race and religion. We’re a movement built on respect, care and unbreakable solidarity. We welcome everyone.

Except Nazis.”

PUSH! Organising and Educating to Build an Anti-Fascist United Front

PUSH! is a newly formed group committed to working with all other anti-fascists fighting to defeat this threat. Our member organisations — Freedom Socialist Party, Indigenous Social Justice Association – Melbourne, Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group and Radical Women — have long histories of anti-fascist organising, from running National Action out of Brunswick and later Fawkner and ridding Victoria of the misogynist, homophobic Blackshirts, to fighting off the current fascist scourge as founding members of Campaign Against Racism and Fascism.

This is a callout to all organisations and individuals who want to join in democratically shaping the agreed principles of unity and direction for a collective, united push to remove the fascist threat and make our communities and movements truly safe.

If you agree or want to talk,
please contact PUSH: email antifascist.push@gmail.com
or contact us on Facebook at Antifascist.Push

This statement was distributed at noon on May Day at the 8 Hour Monument in Melbourne

International Workers Day

May Day is International Workers Day. It is a day for workers to come together in struggle worldwide and to celebrate our solidarity. It started as a campaign to free the Haymarket Martyrs, Anarchist union organisers who had been falsely convicted of murder in 1886 after an unidentified person threw a bomb at a workers’ demonstration in Chicago in the United States. As the campaign spread around the world, the workers’ movement developed a sense that its movement was international as its pioneering thinkers had predicted. Four were executed and one committed suicide, but the survivors were ultimately pardoned. August Spies’ last words before his execution came true: “The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.”

The Workers’ Movement

Over succeeding years, the workers’ movement has waxed and waned. It has spread to new countries as capitalism created new battalions of the working class. It has been weakened by war, repression or betrayal. It has been strengthened by fresh waves of struggle. And all along, greater or lesser numbers have maintained the vision of an international movement with a global vision of a better society. We have had great victories – the revolutions which ended World War I, the great strike wave of the late 1960s and early 70s and the strikes that have driven up wages in China, Indonesia and Bangladesh in recent years. We have had bitter defeats, too – counter-revolution in Russia, Fascist dictatorship in the 1930s and the ongoing imposition of neo-liberalism in the last twenty years.

Today

The working class is now the biggest class in the world, larger than either the peasantry or the urban poor. We are still exploited. We still build unions. And we still strike. It is only from a narrow national view that it can be said that the working class has been rendered powerless or irrelevant. Globalisation has changed the game plan for workers. To put an end to the defeats we have suffered at the hands of neo-liberalism, workers must take an international perspective.

The Task Before Us

The contradiction between the global nature of production under capitalism and the nation state framework in which it is rooted is intensifying. A national perspective, whether it is “Aussie jobs for Aussie workers” or expecting a Labor Government to rescue us from the pressures of the global market, is a recipe for defeat. The only winning strategy is for workers to link across borders and use the power of the capitalists’ global production chains against them. Our movement can unite the human race. Through taking power in the workplace, we can defeat capitalists and governments in all countries. We can create a world of peace, freedom and equality for all. We can make a revolution and create libertarian communism.

WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE!

Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group

PO Box 5108 Brunswick North 3056
1 May 2018
macg1984 at yahoo dot com dot au