En Passant

Three recent events reveal the racism and historical ignorance that infects our society, writes Independent Australia Canberra correspondent John Passant.

In Independent Australia, John Passant reflects on a week of insanity in Australian – and world – politics, saying Labor and the Greens must do better.

With 180 million workers on strike in India it is the biggest mass strike in history. Let the ruling classes tremble. To read about it, because our media won’t cover it – it might send the ‘wrong’ message to workers in Australia and the rest of the West – click here.

If there are two lessons I draw from the surrender of SYRIZA they are, first, not to pursue a grand reformist project, especially an electoralist one aimed at winning power to manage capitalism, and second to consider how to unite those small and disparate forces now on the ground in Australia that understand that the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class.

The Australian economy’s dream looks to be over as the mining boom runs out of steam and living standards are squeezed. Peter Jones in Solidarity takes a closer look.

The slow genocide in Palestine, like that in Australia and the US, aims to push back the original inhabitants and steal their land over a long period of time.

The genocidal success to date of Zionism is remarkable, and the invasion of the concentration camp that is Gaza these last few days is but the latest step in the 66 year program of genocide against the Palestinians.

Of course the conviction of Peter Greste is a travesty of justice. So too are Aboriginal deaths in custody, imprisoning innocent asylum seekers and their children in concentration camps, criminalising dissent, fining or jailing workers for ‘illegal’ strikes and imprisoning Aboriginal peoples on their own lands.

The fight for justice in Australia is the fight against the same sort of forces imprisoning Peter Greste in Egypt. Our fight against injustice here is the fight against injustice everywhere. Peter Greste’s struggle is our struggle. The best way for Australians to support Greste is to fight for justice and freedom here in Australia.

Let’s build the campaigns against the many rotten aspects of capitalism today. Let’s understand they are all linked and that ultimately it is only in the struggle against the system that its systemic repressions can be challenged and ultimately overcome. Workers have that power. The struggles today if they are strong and militant enough can roll back racism.

However since racism is integral to the rule of capital in Australia we cannot defeat it unless ultimately we defeat capitalism. In the struggle today lies the future.

Changing Labor leaders would be like changing deck chairs on Clive Palmer’s new Titanic. Labor’s embrace of neoliberalism from 1983 has left it high and dry, with no wind in the sails and no steam in the engines. Its iceberg approacheth.

The major parties are pretty much the same on every issue, from refugee-bashing to industrial relations policy, so the battleground is necessarily about trivia and not about substance.