September 30 – She was almost in tears. She was being tormented. It started from around the time of the start of the financial year. Government agencies started calling her up … and calling her up. They were intimidating. They demanded she go through further medical checks to prove that she really was too ill to work. Her illness was bad enough. Now she was being punished for it. Rude bureaucrats would call at strange hours – to check that she was really at home … and presumably not playing sports like a fit person? It was “like the Gestapo” she said.

This woman’s story is surely just one of thousands – or rather one of hundreds of thousands. You see the last federal Budget brought down a new “definition” of incapacity to work – a definition which seeks to force people off Disability Support Payments and on to the Newstart Allowance. That would mean a cruel cut in payments for these people. For a single person with no children, the cut would be from $670 per fortnight to $474.90 per fortnight. Additionally those people under 35 years age who remain on Disability Support Payments will, if deemed to have some capacity to work, be forced to prove that they have looked for work. This ALP government now has the dubious “honour” of being the first Australian government to force disabled people to carry out “obligations” in order to receive payments.

What the Gillard government is doing to the disabled typifies the essence of a Budget that will make life even harder for those doing it the hardest. Unemployed 21 year olds will now be moved off Newstart Allowance and on to the Youth Allowance, which has lower payments. This means a cut in their weekly income by $43 per week. Perhaps most drastically, unemployed single parents with children between 12 and 16 years old will now be forced off the Parenting Payment Single and on to the more meager Newstart Allowance. This means a drastic cut in the incomes of these single parents of $56 per week.

In attacking the poor, the Labor government has once again proved that whichever government happens to administer this capitalist state, it is a capitalist government. That means a government that serves the wealthy owners of the mines, factories, infrastructure nodes and banks at the expense of the working class masses. And this is the case whether government is run by the Liberals, the ALP or in this case the ALP propped up and supported by the Greens. So yet again the Budget failed to bring solutions to the problems faced by the working class – a working class grinding under cost of living pressures and ever more bullying bosses. This year’s budget failed to house the homeless, employ the unemployed, provide free and quality education for all children and students. It failed the sick that have the choice of, either expensive private healthcare, or long waiting times and under-funded facilities in public hospitals. And while there are some minor measures that will allow people receiving welfare payments to lose less of their allowances if they get part-time work, the whole tone of ALP Treasurer, Wayne Swan’s Budget is that the poor are to blame for their own plight and thus need to be whipped into shape. As for the fact that two million people, or 10% of this country, is living below the poverty line, and over 100 000 have no home, this does not even get a mention from Swan. That is the mindset of politicians serving the capitalists. They don’t want to even think about these issues, because they have convinced themselves it is largely the fault of the poor for being sick, or old, or too inexperienced, or a single parent who, because they are a non-white migrant or a middle-aged mother, happens to be unemployable as far as sexist, racist and ageist bosses are concerned.

Now Gillard claims that her victimization of the poor is aimed at pushing the unemployed to find good jobs. But there are no good jobs being made available by the bosses! That is why even if you leave out the tens of thousands of disabled people who will now be hauled out of their sick beds and dragged into Centrelink interrogation rooms, over 5% of the workforce is officially unemployed and another 7% underemployed (i.e. having to work part-time when they want to work more hours). And this does not even include the hundreds of thousands of others who have been discouraged from looking for work or who were forced to go back to studies because they had no luck finding employment. In such a situation, when there is such a large pool of people looking for work, do you really think that greedy, prejudiced bosses – people who are solely motivated by the drive for profits – are going to hire many people incapacitated by injury or illness? And does the fact that 21 year-old job seekers are now going to have their welfare payments slashed mean that greedy business owners are going to be any more likely to bear the necessary initial costs to hire and train such young individuals?  And does cruelly cutting the payments to single parents mean that Bluescope Steel is going to stop slashing its workforce by 1,000 workers as it announced last month? And how are many single parents with dependant children expected to enter the workforce when childcare is so hard to find or prohibitively expensive?

The fact is that while the Labor government’s bashing of welfare recipients may be music to the ears of right-wing talkback radio shock jocks, it’s not going to actually relieve joblessness at all. Yet there is more than just plain contempt in the government’s attacks on the unemployed. There is also cold calculation. You see the capitalists, whom all the parliamentary parties serve, require an abundant pool of unemployed, job-hungry, poor people to hire their labour from, even though they don’t want to sacrifice any of their profits by actually employing all these potential workers. So why do they need this big pool of unemployed workers? Because they want the say to those already working and the few they may hire: you are going to have work for lower wages and worse conditions now, because if you don’t there are so many others out there looking for work who will. And this is what this Budget is mostly about. It is about helping the capitalists, the exploiters of fellow Humans, in their efforts to exacerbate the competition of person against person for scarce jobs in order to extract evermore profits out of the workers that they exploit.

The working class should not let the exploiting class get away with this.  It should be mobilise its industrial power to crush all the Budget measures that slash payments, or increase burdens, on the poor. The workers movement should unite with the unemployed in this fight against the greedy capitalists. Against the government’s bogus “welfare to work” measures that punish the unemployed, the working class should demand jobs at full wages for all at the expense of the profits of the capitalists.

We must say to the capitalists: we are going to force you to keep on extra workers even if it means your profits fall because of extra training costs and because you are going to have to lower prices that much to sell the extra products made. The working class at strongly unionized workplaces must compel the bosses to submit to these demands through industrial action. If our unions undertook such a struggle, hundreds of thousands of workers would be encouraged to join our unions. Alongside such struggles, working class people as a whole – including workers at smaller sites where they have less clout as well as unemployed workers – needs to organise in a mass movement for jobs for all. We need to demand laws that ban companies that are making profits or have been making an overall profit over the last say five years or who pay any of their executives more than a certain salary (say $200,000), from being able to slash the size of their workforce. We cannot allow the likes of Qantas bigwigs to, in August, announce a 1,000 job cuts and then a week later inform that their annual profits had doubled to a whopping $250 million.

A mass struggle for restrictions on the “freedom” of bosses to sack workers will be in the spirit of past worker campaigns that have won concessions from bosses’ government – such as legislated annual leave entitlements, restrictions on maximum working hours etc. Hand in hand with this struggle must be a fight to enable women the opportunity to fully participate in the workforce by ensuring that society takes up tasks of child rearing. Thus there must be a fight for fully available, free around the clock childcare.

Of course the corporate elite will howl in rage at all such struggles. They will say: We cannot afford the taxes to be paid for free public childcare. And that: We cannot afford to lose profits by keeping on a bigger workforce. To this the workers movement must reply: if you billionaire capitalists cannot run industry and services in a way that gives jobs to all, then the economy should not be in your hands. We the masses will take the means of production into our collective hands. And this is what needs to in the end happen if we are to have a society that provides job for all, a society that enables women to fully participate in economic and political affairs, a society where the disabled are able to use their talents to contribute to society without being punished for their ailments. To open the road to such a society based on public ownership of key sectors, we need to sweep away the state structure defending the exploiting class through socialist revolution.

Socialism Works

In those countries in the world where capitalist rule has indeed been overturned and societies dominated by nationalized production have been created, a taste of the tremendous potential of the socialist system has been seen. This despite the fact these workers states are undermined by bureaucratic deformation and are severely constricted by the continued rule of capitalism in most of the world. Thus in the Cuban workers state, despite being economically blockaded and burdened by its pre-1959 history of underdevelopment under U.S. neocolonial rule, its fully nationalised public housing system means that homelessness is unheard of. But look at Cuba’s capitalist neighbour, Haiti, it remains a terribly subjugated neocolony where much of the population lives in slums in terrible poverty. Even the U.S.A., despite being the strongest imperialist power whose rulers leach the wealth of poorer nations, capitalist rule means that it has rampant homelessness.
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In socialistic China, a large country still working to pull itself up from the terrible poverty and backwardness of its pre-1949 capitalist days, 3-4% of people live under the national poverty line compared to Australia’s 10% and USA’s 15%. In part this is because unlike the governments in capitalist countries like India, U.S, Australia and Greece, whose first priority is in practice always to boost corporate profits, provincial and local governments in Red China, for all their corruption and inadequacies, are often compelled to prioritise broader social goals, like ensuring that there are no zero-income families in their areas of governance. And recently China’s Communist Party, for all its dangerous concessions to capitalists, has proposed to eliminate poverty by 2020 stating that poverty creates unhappiness and social chaos. Now imagine how easy it would be for a mineral-rich country like Australia to abolish poverty, or perhaps imagine USA the world’s largest economy could truly fight poverty while giving up its predatory wars against other nations, if only these societies were brought under working class rule.

Capitalist Crisis, Capitalist Austerity

If the way that the Peoples Republic of China has continued to uplift its people from poverty during the Global Economic Crisis has shown the advantages of the socialist system even in deformed form, the continued economic crises in most of the rest of the world has shown the irrationality of capitalism. The 2008 Global Economic Crisis was a result of the inevitable lurch to crisis of the capitalist system, which was further inflamed by the greedy gambles of capitalist banking institutions in the U.S. like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Freddie and Fannie engaged in risky home loans that involved many trillions of dollars. They foisted home owners with unpayable loans in order to rip them off but after having done so collapsed on themselves and landed in massive debt. The result from the failed capitalist housing and banking system, caused a massive backfire on the American and international capitalist economies leaving 10% official unemployment in the USA (meaning that the real unemployment was over 20%), 20% in Spain and sending Australia’s official unemployment rate from 4% to 7% with a further 7 to 10% of the workforce underemployed.

In response to the 2008/2009 collapse of the banks and the overall economic dive in the U.S., the capitalist Obama government gave huge amounts of assistance to help the capitalists, while leaving the poor to suffer. In Australia, the Rudd/Gillard governments tossed out money known as the stimulus package in an effort to revitalise the capitalist economy. Yet what temporarily saved the Australian economy from going down the same road as the other richer capitalist countries is not this stimulus package but socialistic China’s economy. In particular, China’s socialistic state-owned enterprises continued to purchase huge amounts of Australian exports as they powered through the Global Recession.

However, today in the U.S., official unemployment is still stuck at 9 to 10%, and the U.S. and European capitalist economies are heading towards recession once again. Meanwhile in several European countries, most notably Greece but also Portugal, Spain, Ireland, Italy and beyond, capitalist decay and leaching by the banks of the richest European countries has sent government debt spiraling upwards, which under the logic of capitalism has led to these whole economies entering various stages of catastrophic economic meltdown.

In such a situation of global crisis, not even the continued resilience of socialistic China’s economy may save the capitalist Australian economy this time. The Australian capitalists know this and their only solution is the timeworn capitalist method of squeezing more out of the working class. One the one hand we see the O’Farrell NSW Liberal government’s drive to slash wages and jobs of public sector workers. And on the other hand, there is the Labor/Greens federal government’s Budget that serves to put downward pressure on wages.

Furthermore, due to a mixture of genuine fear of eventually ending up on the same bankrupt status as the Greek government as well as a right-wing obsession with cutting public spending, the ALP government, pressured by the Liberals, is trying to bring the Budget towards surplus. Of course they have no intention of doing that by grabbing a slice of the wealth of Australia’s 200 richest people – people whose total wealth was last recorded at a staggering $167.3 billion (BRW Rich 200, May 26-June 29, 2011). No way – not these capitalist governments! Instead they are getting it from slashing welfare payments to the poor. And also by scrimping on providing adequate funds to effectively rebuild homes, create jobs, or restore electricity to those affected by the Queensland funds that caused an estimated $30 billion in damages and cyclone ‘Yasi’ that tore through north-east Australia causing over $3 billion in damages.

The stated imperative to bring the Budget to surplus has however not stopped the Gillard government, pushed along by the ultra-nationalist conservatives and capitalist media from spending some one to two billion dollars a year on racist border policing and refugee detention. For capitalist governments eager to divert the masses from seeing who is the real cause of their problems, the racist hysteria whipped up against boat arrivals that the border policing measures cause is more than worth the billions it cuts from the Budget bottom line.

Resistance is Inevitable – Ensuring it Heads in a Direction That Brings Victory is the Challenge

The capitalist rulers drive to diminish real wages and slash welfare benefits will eventually produce big working class resistance here. This has certainly what has happened in Greece, Portugal, Spain and increasingly in Britain, Italy and France too. Meanwhile in the U.S., as we go to press, people unhappy at corporate greed and attacks on the poor are defying police repression to march on Wall Street. Here we see NSW public sector workers participating in huge stop work rallies. Working class resistance struggles are inevitable. The question is in what direction will these movements head. If they either openly, or backhandedly, get subordinated to the goal of replacing one capitalist government by another or trying to make the existing capitalist government more worker-friendly, then the movements will fail to achieve the masses aspirations. Unfortunately however this is what the strategy is of the current pro-ALP leaders of much of the union movement. Additionally, instead of seeking to mobilise industrial action to force bosses to keep on workers, their current response to job losses is to typically to blame imports made by overseas workers for the job cuts and to, often joining in with the bosses themselves, call for measures to protect the local corporations. Such an agenda is harmful to the workers struggle. It does not save jobs. All it succeeds in doing is dividing workers from their allies overseas while letting the local greedy exploiters off the hook.

What the workers movements needs is for the unions to be led by an agenda of class struggle action to oppose austerity attacks on workers and the poor and to force greedy bosses to retain staff at the expense of their profits. That means an agenda of fighting, not for a modified capitalist government, but of fighting to win concessions from capitalist governments of all stripes in the course of the struggle to eventually sweep away capitalist rule itself.

Smash the Budget’s attacks on unemployed youth, single parents and the disabled! Unite the struggle of the working class with that of all the poor and oppressed! Don’t let the capitalists make us pay for the failure of their system! No to blaming “cheap imports” by overseas workers – unite with these workers to defeat the exploiters everywhere! Don’t let greedy local bosses slash jobs to boost their profits! And when these bosses say they can’t survive without slashing jobs, then fight to take the industry and infrastructure out of their hands and into the hands of a worker state!