En Passant

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.

So let us defend Lenin and October 1917, but also let us face the realities of our current difficult situation, without bluff or triumphalism. As Cliff used to put it, “If you sit on Marx’s shoulders you see far, but if you sit on Marx’s shoulders and close your eyes, you don’t see very far at all.”

On the 60th anniversary of the death of Russian dictator Joseph Stalin, Ian Birchall in Socialist Worker UK looks at his life and how his politics damaged the idea of socialism for decades. Stalinism offers a bleak image of what socialism is not. But the early years of workers’ power in Russia, and the traditions of those who resisted Stalin’s rise, often at the cost of their lives, offer a vision that can inspire and teach us.

There was a question on reddit socialism about the political philosophies of the individuals on the site.

I think the Socialist Alternative website with its General Principles in their ‘What we stand for section’ is a pretty good starting point for a discussion of what socialism is.

I think in essence socialism is workers’ power.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels showed that socialism, a society of human liberation, would only be possible if workers took over all the means of making wealth – the factories, offices, hospitals, mines, schools, and banks. The power to allocate resources, to decide how to produce the things we need, has to be taken out of the hands of the tiny capitalist class and put under the control of the vast majority.

Imagine what we could do with the accumulated trillions of dollars in the hands of a tiny minority of capitalist parasites. We could feed, clothe and shelter the millions who live on less than $2 a day, just as a start. The state, with its armed might that is used to repress dissent and defend the interests of the tiny minority would no longer be necessary. There could be genuine democracy. With the end of capitalist competition for profits there would be no war, so the massive resources that go into killing machines could be put to use restoring the environment, for education, health, community care of the sick, the young and the elderly. And much more.

Democratic workers’ councils are an expression of the working class on the cusp of history; democratising society and organising production to satisfy human need. Only under such democratic arrangements – socialism – can we truly be free.

Those on the left who argue for a return to the good ole days of Stalinism or imagine a state capitalist nirvana in the East or the West are stuck in the vice of history as farce.

John has published a piece on the revolutionary party on Left Focus.  His basic argument is that the building of a revolutionary party with its roots in the working class and as part of the class is an historic necessity.  The democratic socialist revolution can only be successful with such a party. This is not about […]

The beaut ute email extravaganza has got me thinking about the Paris Commune. How to govern?  That is just one of the questions each great working class revolution poses. The answer has been remarkably similar. The short lived Commune of the working men and women of Paris had some really strange rules.  Democracy was one of […]

Workers’ democracy means representatives based in the workplace, paid the average wage, and with the right to recall them instantly.