En Passant

Today, the potential for economic, environmental and humanitarian change lies with workers just as it did after World War One, I write in Independent Australia.  

With growing inequality and austerity has come growing anger, inchoate in Australia but finding a left wing political expression in places like the UK and US in the form of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders. Workers in struggle are the short term solution to the problems of capitalism. Workers in struggle are the long term solution to the problem that is capitalism.

In the latest edition of socialist magazine Solidarity, Geraldine Fela discusses the new film Suffragette, and how the fight for the vote polarised between wealthy and working class women.

Wednesday is the public sector general strike and the parliamentary vote on the Third Memorandum in Greece. There is a global call for solidarity with Greek workers striking against austerity. 5.30 pm Wednesday in every central square worldwide. Get cracking. Organise.

The Abbott government has been joined by Labor and the Greens in a rotten unity ticket on fuel excise indexation to attack workers and the poor.
This should not surprise us because what unites them – capitalism – is greater than any of their differences over aspects of how to manage it. Lie all parties of capital they make workers and the poor pay for the crises of capitalism and the fuel tax is just one small example, a portent of things to come.

In an article in Socialist Worker US, Candace Cohn contributes to the ongoing discussion about privilege politics.

Tom Orsag in Solidarity explains how the sacrifices demanded during the First World War produced mass resistance and opposition among the British working class.

Writing in Socialist Worker UK, Martin Empson reviews Naomi Klein’s new book, This Changes Everything, and argues that the only way to stop climate change is to get rid of capitalism There’s no denying it—capitalism is damaging the planet. The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report proves that humans are fundamentally changing the […]

This is not about saying join this or that socialist group although I do think groups like Socialist Alternative are worth having a look at. It is about asking Labor members and supporters who want to understand the degeneration of their party to do so in the context of its managerial role in Australian capitalism and to see that degeneration as part and parcel of that role.

Ludlum’s speech doesn’t specifically mention class let alone using it as the basis for fighting Abbott. All we have to do is wait 2 1/2 years to vote Abbott out. This is the talk of defeat, the strategy of failure, not fighting back.