En Passant

Australia’s GDP went backwards 0.5% in the last quarter. Prepare for an onslaught of propaganda and action about cutting back spending on poor people, workers etc etc. The problem, as I tried to argue in this article in Independent Australia, is not policies per se, but capitalism itself. As Marx argued, there is a systemic […]

The declining Australian economy means that whoever is in government in Australia will adopt and ratchet up attacks on wages, jobs, conditions, and social spending. To try to hide this reality the attacks on the manufactured ‘enemy within’ will intensify and broaden to more welfare recipients and perhaps on to the left. The terrorist threat will dominate our news when the biggest terrorists sit in Canberra and Washington.

The mainstream media will cheer on the multitude of attacks on the working class. Nowhere among the reams and reams of ’analysis’ of the economic issues facing ‘the nation’ will there be published alternative voices that identify capitalism as the problem and production organised democratically to satisfy human need rather than make a profit as the solution. This article will never see the light of day in the mainstream media.

The attacks on the poor, the low paid, the disabled, the unemployed, pensioners, students, Aborigines and others are a class issue which requires a class response. That is why I say the best way to stop the bosses’ budget is to stop work. Bust the budget rallies are being held across Australia this coming Sunday, 6 July. Make them the first step in stopping Abbott attacking us and to send a warning to Labor to abandon its attacks on us when it is in government.

As profit rates have fallen and are up to half what they were in the boom years of the 50s and 60s, across the developed world the state has responded by cutting taxes on capital.

Marx never went to a Boxing Day Sale. He didn’t have the money. In recent years Boxing Day sales have become more popular as a way for retailers to recoup some money after flat or less than expected pre-Christmas revenue.

From Canberra comrade Peter Jones a very interesting paper: Abstract: This paper develops a method for quantifying the influence of four factors on the average rate of profit (ROP): the organic composition of capital (OCC), prices of constant capital, the rate of surplus value, and the average turnover time of variable capital. This is applied […]

Under capitalism, terrible slumps will reoccur and inequality will remain. The end of poverty and prosperity for the majority can only come through replacing private production for profit with democratically-planned production for social need.

We workers create the wealth of society and the bosses expropriate it. Maybe instead of cutting wages or holding them down as Crean and Ferguson did and now want, we should cut profits and increase wages. How? We can only win decent wage increases through strike action.

Here is a link to a draft I wrote on tax reform in Australia: a view from the left. Hit the download button to read it all. (Warning, 40,000 words.) http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2076934

The task today in all the countries and regions of resistance, in the Arab countries, in Europe, in the US, even in quiet Australia, is to further the movement for democracy and the opposition to austerity and to build a mass working class party of revolution.