En Passant

Briggs identified the real problem when she said that profit cannot come before safety on building sites any more. However proft does come first, and will continue to come before safety. That is what the ABCC is about. It is what smashing union industrial campaigns for safety on site are about.

Can we cull the business sharks who kill building workers? The best way to ensure there is safety on building sites is to give the workers power to cut off the flow of profits to the bosses, without loss of pay, when sites are unsafe, or for workers to take that power.

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.

Even in death the bourgeoisie honours its own and those who serve them directly or indirectly. They die for capitalism. The system dishonours those who die because of capitalism. It consigns them to the coffin of history. Lest we forget.

One task for the Australian left is to link the fight for lives and against the bosses’ killing machine on building sites to the fight in Australia against the Australian ruling class’s killing machine in Afghanistan. That ruling class killing machine is in Afghanistan repressing Afghans to protect the system that produces Grocon’s safety practices and profits.

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.

Research by the Melbourne Energy Institute has shown that a 200km by 200km square of solar panels – 0.05 percent of total land in Australia – would produce enough energy to power the whole of the country. Include the use of wind and hydroelectric power and the potential is enormous.

This is the sort of infrastructure that should be built, yet it is the mining companies and coal plant owners that have everything to lose from it. Let’s start with taxing Gina Rinehart’s $10b, and BHP’s record $22.5b profit and fund renewables that way. If the system is geared towards upholding the profits of these corporations to the detriment of the planet, then the system needs to go.

So here we have the most profitable banks in the world, the big 4 Australian banks with $31 billion in profits, not prepared to pass on a 0.25% overnight cash rate reduction to their customers on their home and business loans.

Soak the bastards, Treasurer. Hit them with a super profits tax, or threaten to do that.

And when they claim that that would impact on their costs of lending and would need to be recouped, threaten them with interest rate controls and mention you might set up a people’s bank. Oh, I forgot, we used to have one of them until the previous Labor Government flogged it off.

Maybe we should nationalise the banks under workers’ control instead.

Capitalism’s manic drive for profit and its frenzied competition deny the possibility of addressing climate change in any real and concerted way. Only the democratic organisation of society and production to satisfy human need – socialism – can do that.

Something interesting happened over the weekend. Former Howard Government Minister and industrial relations thug Peter Reith got rolled in his campaign for the presidency of the Liberal Party. Current leader Tony Abbot urged him to stand and then betrayed him. Abbott showed his vote to Alan Stockdale, former Victorian Treasurer and Reith rival for the top job. In […]

The latest figures on industry income and profits from the Australian Bureau of Statistics confirm Marx’s argument that it is workers who create society’s wealth through their labour and the bosses who steal it through their ownership of the means of production. Of course we have to be careful using the bourgeoisie’s figures because they don’t use Marxist methodology […]