Category Archives: Unions

Support the Drivers
Standing Up to
the Bosses of
Couriers Please!

Above photo, 24 October 2023: Couriers Please drivers and supporters rally outside the company’s Western Sydney depot on the eve of the workers submitting a petition to the bosses demanding their rights. The workers are threatening industrial action if their demands are not met.

Brave Gig Workers Take a Stand

Support the Drivers Standing Up
to the Bosses of Couriers Please!

27 October 2023: Sydney drivers working for Couriers Please are taking a brave stand against their exploitation. Two days ago, nearly fifty drivers sent their bosses a petition demanding improved working conditions. Fed up that the company has been arrogantly dismissing their grievances, workers are now threatening industrial action. These drivers are amongst the increasing number of workers in Australia who are employed in gig-type arrangements in sectors like food delivery, taxi/ride-sharing, courier and cleaning. Although workers in these sectors toil away for bosses, they are often not classed as employees. Instead their bosses engage them as “contractors” or “franchisees”. This allows the corporate owners to avoid paying workers annual leave and sick pay while ensuring that those that work for them do not have even the modest protections available to employees. With no job security, business owners very often rip-off gig workers at an even more extreme rate than they exploit other workers.

Bosses play up to these “contractors” the – in truth very remote – possibility that they too could eventually build up enough financial resources to themselves hire and exploit other workers. This is in order to instill an individualistic outlook amongst workers. This helps the bosses separate workers from each other – a goal that is also facilitated by the bosses paying each “contractor” differently depending on output. The bosses’ goal is further advanced by the fact that in such “contractor” arrangements, workers are not even technically employees of the same firm. By dividing workers from each other, the capitalist bosses make it harder for workers to unite together to stand up for their rights. Thus it takes particular resolve for gig worker “contractors” or “franchisees” like the drivers at Couriers Please to indeed take a stand. They deserve and need the backing of all class conscious workers and all supporters of workers rights.

Intense Exploitation

Before even starting work, Couriers Please drivers have to “buy” a “franchise” from the company – that is the “right” to service an area for the company! Currently the company is advertising the sale of such “franchises” for $15,000 to $25,000. Yet while engaging their drivers as “franchisees”, the corporation imposes on them all the usual obligations of employees. Drivers have to wear the company’s uniform and brandish the company’s logo on their vehicles. Most tellingly, drivers are obliged to conduct deliveries for the company five days a week. If they do not, they are often effectively fined because they have to pay any amount that the replacement driver hired by the company delivers below a set amount. Yet while having all the obligations of employees, Couriers Please drivers have none of the protections available to employees and all the obligations of a franchisee. Thus drivers have to provide and service their own vehicle, pay for fuel use and pay for all the different insurances that they need. All this combined with the poor amount that Couriers Please pays drivers means that, after expenses, most of the drivers receive very low net hourly incomes. Meanwhile, the company imposes financial penalties on drivers if they fail to meet “On Time Performance” (OTP) delivery targets that are so unreasonable that two-thirds of drivers constantly struggle to meet them. A survey found that half the drivers were working more than 50 hours per week and beginning their shifts around 3 or 4am.

The pressure to meet delivery targets, low net pay, long hours and unnatural daily start times combine to cause high stress and a poor lifestyle for many drivers. Three years ago, a Courier’s Please driver died due to the extreme fatigue of his job. Since then life has become even harder for drivers. Fuel prices have surged, as has general inflation, thus greatly increasing drivers’ operating costs. In contrast, the company has increased its margins by lifting the price that it charges customers for delivery of non-standard-sized items – but the drivers’ payment has not been lifted.

Company Set to Slash Legally-Mandated “Safety Net”

There are some modest legal rights available to courier drivers formally employed as “contractors”. A NSW Industrial Relations Commission determination mandates a minimum “safety net” payment that a “contract” courier must receive over each two month period. It consists of the “safety net” hourly rate multiplied by the number of hours worked by the driver. If the driver receives less gross income than this “safety net” over a two month period, their boss must top up the drivers payment until the “safety net” is met. However, this “safety net” is so low that, even with it, one-third of Couriers Please drivers, after paying vehicle expenses, were receiving less net income than Australia’s minimum wage! When the “safety net” was finally raised in 2022 for the first time in 15 years (!), it gave just a 40% rise from the 2007 level to be phased in over three years. This is despite 2025 prices predicted to be nearly 60% higher than 2007 levels. In other words, the state has significantly cut the “safety net” in real terms since 2007.

Yet, the amount that Couriers Please pays drivers for deliveries is so low that more than half the drivers surveyed relied on the “safety net” to top up their incomes. Now, Couriers Please is suspending paying the “safety net” for the November-to-December period. They dishonestly claim that drivers don’t need it, because they will make in excess of it in a peak period. If this were actually true they would have no need to axe it! It is the company’s announced axing of the “safety net” that is the biggest cause of drivers’ moves to fight for their rights. Aside from demanding the restoration of the “safety net”, the drivers’ other key demand is for an increase in the payments that drivers receive for deliveries – accounting for the increased prices that Couriers Please are charging their customers for some deliveries. The drivers also demand an end to the punitive OTP system of financial penalties and demand an increase in their oil subsidy. They point out that Couriers Please has actually reduced this oil subsidy even as fuel prices have surged.

Above: Couriers Please notify drivers that they are suspending the top up payments (which they call a “subsidy program”) that they are required to make in order to comply with the legally-mandated safety net that they must pay drivers. They dishonestly claim that because “we will have a significant increase in volume” drivers don’t need it. If this were actually true they would have no need to suspend the payments!

Australian Chinese Workers Association Steps Up
to Help Courier Drivers Organise Their Resistance

The existence of a “safety net” for “contract” couriers is the result of the efforts of the Transport Workers Union (TWU). However, the TWU leadership has thus far failed to mobilise the union’s immense industrial muscle to win courier drivers truly decent conditions or to compel companies to employ drivers in secure, wage-paying jobs (as opposed to as “contractors” or “franchisees”). Moreover, at Couriers Please in Sydney in particular, TWU officials have thus far done little to stand by the drivers in recent years. As a result, several of the drivers taking a stand had earlier quit the union after having previously been members. Many of the other rebel drivers never joined the TWU upon hearing from their co-workers of its failure to stand up to the bosses. Recently, when the drivers standing up to the company – now unfortunately mostly non-union members – shared their intention to resist with the TWU delegate at Couriers Please, the latter sought to discourage any struggle by claiming that it would be futile and result in the rebels copping heavy financial penalties. Dismayed, the drivers turned to a community group, the Australian Chinese Workers Association (ACWA) for support. Although the company’s drivers are of various ethnicity, thus far the overwhelming majority of the drivers standing up to the company are immigrants from China. The ACWA is an organisation that links ethnic Chinese workers with the broader Australian workers movement. It also helps Chinese workers defend their legal and social rights against discrimination, while supporting broader progressive causes. Thus the ACWA is an ally of Australian unions and not a competitor. However, on this occasion, it was compelled to step into the void created by the TWU’s indifference to the Couriers Please drivers’ plight and carry out the work that the TWU ought to have been doing.

After receiving an appeal from the drivers, the ACWA carried out surveys of drivers to accurately determine their actual working conditions. They organised drivers to elect an Industrial Action Guidance Group to direct their struggle. The ACWA then helped drivers to assemble a petition of their demands to submit to Couriers Please management.

Protest Stands with the Drivers Fighting for Their Rights

After being contacted by the drivers, the ACWA in turn appealed to ourselves in Trotskyist Platform to organise support for the drivers to coincide with their petition submission and their threat of strike action. So, in the afternoon before the petition was submitted on Wednesday morning, a spirited demonstration was held at very short notice outside Couriers Please’s Western Sydney depot in solidarity with the drivers’ demands. Drivers’ representatives were joined by supporters of Trotskyist Platform, the ACWA and other supporters of workers rights. Chanting, “Support the Drivers, Fighting for Their Rights” and “The Workers United Will Never Be Defeated”, demonstrators carried banners and signs like, “Couriers Please Profits and Oil Prices Are Soaring. Raise Payments and Fuel Subsidies for Drivers!” Tuesday’s action met with overwhelming sympathy from drivers going in and out of the depot. Many either tooted their horns in approval of the rally or waved and gave a thumbs up to the protestors.

This drivers struggle has great significance. Since this is a rare case of gig workers being able to organise resistance to their own exploitation, a victory could inspire resistance from other workers hired on bogus “contractor” arrangements. Trotskyist Platform fights to not only improve the rights of gig workers but stands for the conversion of all gig jobs into secure jobs where workers will be engaged as employees rather than “contractors”. As signs carried by drivers at Tuesday’s rally indicated, it is the aspiration of many Couriers Please drivers themselves to have their jobs converted into secure, wage paying jobs. This is essential to reducing the level of exploitation of those currently engaged in the gig economy and to protecting these workers from the great insecurity of gig work. It is also crucial for another reason. By separating workers and promoting the self-centred, small business-person outlook, the hiring of workers as “contractors” undermines workers unity. It therefore undercuts the struggle to build working-class resistance to capitalist exploitation. The fight to convert gig “contract” jobs into secure, employee jobs is thus an essential part of today’s struggle to build a militant workers movement. The workers movement must demand laws forcing companies who hire any particular individual “contractor” for more than, say, fifteen gigs in a month, or more than fifty jobs in a year, to offer these “contractors” secure, wage-paying jobs as employees of the company.

Representatives of Couriers Please drivers are joined by supporters of Trotskyist Platform, the Australian Chinese Workers Association and other supporters of workers rights in a rally in support of drivers’ demands.

Turn Our Unions Into Organisations of
Militant Working-Class Resistance!

Tuesday’s rally boosted the morale of the rebelling workers, flung at the bosses a sample of the wider support that the workers struggle will inspire and popularised the struggle amongst other Couriers Please drivers. Another key purpose of Tuesday’s protest was to try and shame the leadership of the TWU into doing what they ought to be doing: standing resolutely with courier drivers against the attacks of the greedy corporate owners.

Although we understand why the drivers standing up to Couriers Please are not part of the TWU, we are nevertheless strongly encouraging them to join the union immediately. Being in the union gives them an opportunity to appeal for support from the union’s ranks – that is from other transport and courier sector workers. This will be especially crucial if the drivers go ahead with strike action. Union truck drivers and other workers are much more likely to respect a picket line of striking courier drivers if they know that the picketers have shown – by paying to join the union – that they are not only willing to stand up for their own rights but to stand in solidarity with other workers in the industry.

However, joining the TWU does not mean that the drivers should submit to the agenda of its pro-ALP, leadership. Drivers should maintain their elected Industrial Action Guidance Group and ensure that this body retains ultimate control over the struggle. Should they join the TWU, the rebel drivers should be ready to regularly send large delegations into the union office in order to pressure TWU officials to mobilise the union’s industrial muscle behind their struggle. To help with such efforts and to win solidarity action in support of their fight, the drivers will need to appeal to the ranks of the TWU (and other unions) that are employed in other companies – especially those working in the highly profitable FHM group of companies (including efm Logistics, BagTrans, Niche Logistics, GKR Transport and Spectrum Transport) that is owned by the same Singapore Post corporation that owns Couriers Please. Given that Couriers Please and FHM form the most lucrative part of Singapore Post’s operations, joint action by workers employed by these companies can put immense pressure on their bosses to accede to workers demands.

However, the pro-ALP union bureaucrats are highly adept at corralling union ranks away from militant struggle strategies. If the militant Couriers Please drivers join the TWU, as we hope, then in the face of the arguments that TWU officials would inevitably throw out to discourage intransigent industrial action, it will be a challenge for the militants to maintain the allegiance of the more wavering drivers who signed the petition, let alone win over broader union ranks. To prevail, the leaders of the struggle will need to be armed with both a very clear understanding of what is wrong with the program of our current union leaders and what is the alternative program that the union movement needs.

The main reason that our current union officials discourage militant industrial action is because they think that while particular practices and bosses need to be resisted, in the “big picture”, workers interests are best served by accepting the overall domination of society by rich capitalists and the regime that serves them. They either argue that this is actually desirable – in the case of more right-wing bureaucrats – or claim that the capitalists are too powerful to challenge. Thus the current union heads seek to limit union struggle to that which is compliant with the restrictive anti-strike laws and industrial courts of the capitalist state. Their main strategy is to elect Labor and then encourage these ALP governments to make as much pro-worker reform as possible without decisively upsetting the powerful capitalists – which isn’t much! Thus, when Labor is in office, like right now in both NSW and federally, union officials are especially reluctant to unleash industrial action. This entire “strategy” of collaboration with the capitalists has been a disastrous failure! Following it, the pro-ALP union tops have allowed business bosses, over the last four decades, to both greatly increase their exploitation of workers and drive a big chunk of the workforce into insecure gig jobs. Still, these officials delude themselves that their strategy is in their ranks’ best interests. This is in good part because by subordinating the workers to the capitalist order, the pro-ALP union tops gain a respected social position within elite circles as loyal-to-the-system “rebels”. Moreover, many union heads are careful to ensure that their actions remain within limits tolerable to the ruling class because they want to leave the door open to future lucrative careers as corporate executives or mainstream politicians (as in the case of long-time TWU secretary and now Labor federal senator Tony Sheldon). 

To ensure that the maximum force is mobilised behind their struggle, the leaders of the Couriers Please drivers struggle and their supporters will need to convince other drivers and sections of the broader working-class that everything significant that the working-class has ever won has been through resolute industrial action and other mass actions. That all bureaucratic organs in capitalist societies – from the police to the courts to the industrial relations commissions – are subordinate to the interests of the capitalist class. This is the case whether the regime is administered by conservative governments or social-democratic Labor Party-type ones. Therefore, contrary to the strategy of pro-ALP union tops, the working-class cannot expect to win significant gains through the benevolence of the capitalist state or its courts no matter which party is in office – the more so in this era of frequent capitalist economic crises. To those who say that workers must limit demands in order to ensure that companies remain highly profitable so that they will not layoff workers, we must say that we must instead fight to improve workers rights across industry so that companies with the worst working conditions cannot undercut other operations. We must explain that the way to fight for jobs is by forcing companies to maintain a greater number of workers than is most profitable for them. And to those who say that such an agenda, in the “big picture”, would cause economic collapse, we must reply that if the ultra-rich corporate bigwigs cannot run their companies in a way that ensures both decent working conditions and jobs for all without collapsing, this only proves the need to eventually rip the economy out of their hands. In short, the fight to mobilise the maximum force behind the Couriers Please drivers struggle must be accompanied by a struggle to promote a new agenda for our workers movement: one that insists that the working-class must not restrict its struggle to what is tolerable by the capitalists but must fight unyieldingly for what it actually needs, on the way to an ultimate “big picture” goal of the collective ownership of the economy by all the people under workers rule.

Immigrants from Mainland China
Energise Australia’s Workers Movement

The Couriers Please drivers struggle is not the first time that immigrants from mainland Peoples Republic of China (PRC) have been at the forefront of workers struggle. In February 2021, largely Chinese immigrant drivers working for British-owned food delivery company Hungry Panda unleashed Australia’s first ever strike by gig workers. Organised in the TWU, their weeks of stopworks and protests won them modest but important gains. In November 2012, 180 bus drivers who were “guest” workers from China waged Singapore’s first strike in 27 years! So why do migrant workers from China, even when on precarious employment arrangements, have a great propensity to struggle? The reason is that in 1949 China had a massive revolution that brought workers to power. To be sure, the complete victory of the working class over the capitalists is still far from complete in China, or even certain, and there remains capitalists of some influence there. Nevertheless, people growing up in the Chinese workers state are immersed with the sense that workers ought to be treated with respect. This is reinforced by the fact that, very opposite to capitalist Australia, PRC courts – and sometimes even police – are known to usually favour workers in disputes with private business owners. So when Chinese workers migrate abroad they bring that workers don’t have to put up with crap spirit with them.

A particular reason that Chinese immigrant gig workers are unwilling to cop extreme exploitation is that they may be aware of the measures that the PRC has taken to defend gig workers’ rights back in China. In July 2021, the PRC decreed new rules compelling food delivery companies to ensure that delivery workers receive at least the local minimum wage, provide their workers social insurance and considerably relax the times that workers have to make a delivery (the latter being equivalent to forcing Couriers Please to greatly weaken its hated OTP system). The measures had such an impact that they caused the rich owners of China’s biggest food delivery platform, Meituan to immediately lose $A56 billion in share value! However, unlike here, where opposition from wealthy corporate owners is able to weaken or postpone any mooted pro-worker measures that would harm their interests, the PRC state went ahead with the new measures and is extending them to other sectors. Therefore, the workers movement must force Australia’s regime to retreat from its role in the Western capitalists’ drive to destroy the PRC workers state and must instead compel it to implement PRC-style anti-poverty measures here – like decreeing guaranteed minimum wages and social insurance for all gig workers.

Above: One of the protests held in Sydney in early 2021 by delivery riders working for British-owned food delivery platform Hungry Panda. The mainly Chinese migrant workers conducted the first strike by gig workers in Australian history. After weeks of industrial action and protests, the delivery workers won some modest but important gains. They achieved the first ever victory by gig economy workers in Australia. Below: Chinese bus drivers outside their dormitories in Singapore during their November 2012 strike. These Chinese guest workers defied Singapore’s extremely harsh anti-strike laws to wage the country’s first ever strike against a locally-owned boss since the country’s 1965 independence! Five strike leaders ended up being jailed by the Singapore capitalist regime and 29 other strikers were sacked and deported back to China. The struggle did, however, force the bosses to make a few improvements to the housing conditions of the bus drivers. In a country with an extremely repressive capitalist regime, the daring strike by the Chinese workers had the political effect of an earthquake.
Imbued with the healthy sense of entitlement that comes from having been raised in a workers state, Chinese migrant workers in Australia and abroad are energising workers movements.

Some courier drivers are non-citizens. They would be able to struggle even more resolutely if they were not shackled by the restriction of rights that non-citizens face. Moreover, anti-Chinese and other racism intimidates migrant workers and can make them reluctant to stick their heads up. Just four days ago, a Sydney University Chinese student was bashed by an unknown white man screaming racist insults. To unleash the full fighting energy of migrant workers, our workers movement must take action to oppose racist attacks and to demand the rights of citizenship for all migrants.

An Important Struggle to Win

There are literally millions of workers in this country who are hired on a gig basis, on sham “contracts” or on other forms of casual and insecure employment. These intensely exploited workers could be inspired to fight for their rights if they see the Couriers Please drivers struggle succeeding. Therefore, if these courier drivers end up going ahead with industrial action, it is crucial that those who joined Tuesday’s rally – and the many more who could not attend the snap rally but gave it moral support – go into overdrive to build support for the action. Let us build mass picket lines outside the company’s depots to help enforce any strike! Most crucially, we must fight to build secondary solidarity strikes amongst the less vulnerable sections of the working class. This is possible to do. For since the especially severe exploitation of gig workers is used to drive down the wages and conditions of all workers, it is in the interests of the entire working-class to actively support the struggle to improve the rights of gig workers. Let’s make the Couriers Please drivers’ struggle a springboard to launch a broad struggle to convert all gig jobs into secure, wage-paying jobs!

HIS MAJESTY’S LABOR GOVERNMENT MARCHES THE SAME PATH AS HER MAJESTY’S LIBERAL GOVERNMENT …
ONLY WITH LESS ODIOUS REGALIA

Above Left: Australia’s Labor prime minister Anthony Albanese meets with Australia’s unelected feudal, head of state for life, King Charles III a few days before the British monarch’s coronation on 6 May 2023. Above Right: Albanese arrives with his partner for King Charles III and Queen Camilla’s coronation ceremony. Albanese pledged allegiance to the new monarch.
Photo credit: AP

LIKE THE DEPOSED, MUCH HATED,
RIGHT WING MORRISON GOVERNMENT,
ALBANESE HEADS AN ADMINISTRATION

SERVING THE CAPITALIST EXPLOITERS!

HIS MAJESTY’S LABOR GOVERNMENT
MARCHES THE SAME PATH AS
HER MAJESTY’S LIBERAL GOVERNMENT
… ONLY WITH LESS ODIOUS REGALIA

27 January 2023: After nearly nine years of conservative administration, Australia’s working class masses, progressive youth, Aboriginal people and much of this country’s Asian, African, Islander and Middle Eastern-based migrant communities had been hoping that the defeat of the hated Morrison government in last May’s elections would finally bring at least a modest degree of relief from years of reactionary attacks on their rights and living standards. However, eight months later, it is clear that little of substance has changed. Moreover, the new Labor administration headed by supposed ALP “Left” Anthony Albanese has no agenda to substantially alter the course that the former right-wing government was on. As a result, the masses’ living standards continue to plunge. Workers’ wages only rise slowly, while food, gas and electricity prices are surging and petrol prices remain obscenely high. Millions of gig economy and casual workers continue to endure jobs with no security and harsh employment conditions that can be made still tougher at any time at the whim of the boss. Just look at how the 15,000 riders delivering food for Deliveroo were thrown out of work with no notice, zero entitlements and zero payout after the delivery platform wound up in Australia two months ago. Especially hard hit are the large number of low-income households that rent. Last year rents soared by more than 10%. Moreover, with so little affordable rental accommodation available, low-income households are not even able to move into cheaper dwellings to get by. As a result, not only are many unemployed workers being forced into living rough on the streets but more and more casual, part-time and other low-paid workers are being reduced to sleeping in their cars or their friends’ lounge rooms to get by. Many more are trying to make ends meet by skipping meals, foregoing essential dental visits or enduring cold winters without using the heater at all.

There are a couple of areas where the new government has moved to end especially extreme anti-working class measures imposed by the previous right-wing government. It has wound back the powers of the union-busting Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC). Yet, at the same time, the ALP government has committed itself to maintaining all the laws restricting workers’ strike action and union access to workplaces. The government did follow through on their promise to end the compulsory use of the cashless debit card that had been imposed on welfare recipients in some communities to control how they could spend their money. However, the Albanese government insists on continuing to subject unemployed workers to grinding poverty by refusing to make any real increases to the paltry Jobseeker payments [update – At the May 2023 budget the government did announce that JobSeeker, Youth Allowance and Austudy payments would increase from September onwards … but only by an insulting $2.60 a day!]. Albanese and his treasurer Jim Chalmers are simply not prepared to spend any of the public budget to lift these most vulnerable people out of poverty. Nor are they prepared to use public revenue to maintain funding levels for public hospitals – let alone boost them. Last October’s budget saw the federal government incredibly announce that it will cut the funding that it gives to the states to run public hospitals by $2.4 billion over four years. This is at a time when the public hospital system is so overwhelmed that patients are waiting years for surgeries deemed “elective”, ambulances are queuing in ramps outside hospital emergency departments for sometimes hours before they can get their patients admitted and nurses are being battered with ever more unsustainably high work loads due to short staffing. Yet if required to expand the wealth of the rich, ALP leaders are quite happy to drain down the public budget. Thus, Albanese and Chalmers dismissed opposition from Labor ranks and went ahead with their promised tax cuts for the wealthy.

The main difference between the current ALP government and its right-wing predecessors is merely in style and rhetoric. Morrison and Co. would oversee skyrocketing rents, falling real wages, and rising profits and then arrogantly tell us that this is all fair and we ought to work harder if we don’t like it … or buy a house if we are tenants who think that rents are too high! On the other hand, the ALP as a party with a mass working class base is careful to acknowledge “that many working people in Australia are hurting” and that “real wages need to rise.” Yet, the more sympathetic demeanour does not help workers to pay for their surging food and electricity costs and their ever-increasing rents that result from a government that continues to put the interests of the capitalist bosses ahead of the needs of the working class masses… just like their predecessors!

The divergence between the style and substance of the Albanese government is especially apparent on the issue of workers’ wages. When the Fair Work Commission (FWC) was about to make its annual setting of minimum wages last June, the Albanese government made a submission to the FWC calling for a minimum wage increase in line with the then inflation rate. This is what the FWC basically did, granting an increase in the minimum wage of 5.2% and a below inflation increase of 4.6% for other award workers. The Labor government boasted about its role in the decision and contrasted its stance to that taken by the previous Liberal-National government. The currently pro-ALP, ACTU leadership of our unions also stated that they were “really happy” with the outcome. However, the Albanese government and the ACTU tops knew all too well at the time that the inflation rate was expected to sharply rise and that by the Labor government only calling for a minimum wage increase that matched the then inflation rate, they were in effect calling for a pay cut. Seven months down the track this is all too clear. Prices have soared in this period. Annual official inflation is now 7.8% – the highest in over three decades. Most notably, food prices surged by 9.2% over the last year. As a result, the rate of price increase of non-discretionary items like food and fuel, which is what low-paid workers spend most of their money on, has surged even faster than the overall inflation rate – rising by 8.4%. Therefore, the June Fair Work Commission wage decision, so cheered on by Albanese, has in effect turned out to be a 3.2% pay cut for minimum wage workers and an even larger cut for other award workers. For many gig economy workers – like food delivery workers, Uber drivers and taxi drivers – the loss of income is even greater. Not only are they not even granted award wage increases, they have to pay out of their own pockets for the super-high fuel costs.

The reason that workers’ living standards are plummeting can be seen by comparing changes in wages with that of business profits. The latest figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) show that while wages only increased by 3.1% on average over the last year – that is a 4.7% cut in real wages – company profits increased by 8.5%. The profits of unincorporated businesses – overwhelmingly small businesses – increased even more sharply, surging by nearly 16%. In other words, workers are getting poorer because capitalist business owners – both big and small – are seizing as profits an ever greater share of the fruits of workers’ labour.

Australia’s capitalist bosses have been increasing the rate at which they exploit their workers not only over the last year but over the last nearly four decades. This is revealed in an index published by the ABS called the Unit Labour Cost, which shows the relative amount that bosses pay workers in wages, super and other benefits for every dollar of output value added by their workers. That Unit Labour Cost has plunged by over 21% over the last 36 years, representing the staggering increase in the rate at which capitalist business owners are exploiting their workers. This has been presided over by Liberal, Labor and Labor-Greens governments alike. Whether under the Coalition, Labor or indeed Labor-Greens defacto coalitions, the rich capitalist exploiters have gotten richer while the working class masses got poorer.

With no program to close the ever expanding income gap between the rich capitalists and working class people, the Albanese government inevitably seeks to divert the masses’ frustrations onto racial minorities by upholding the xenophobic and reactionary nationalist policies of the previous government. Thus, although the Labor government made a sop to its progressive supporters by finally ending the unpopular persecution of the Murugappan Biloela-based Tamil family, it continues to cruelly incarcerate over two hundred Asian, Middle Eastern and African refugees in off-shore detention in Nauru and PNG. To show how deeply it shares the racist refugee policy adhered to by the Coalition, immediately upon taking office, the Albanese government deported the asylum seekers who had arrived by boat on election-day from Sri Lanka. In fact, even as it slashed funding for public hospitals in its recent budget, the Albanese government increased annual spending on enforcing its offshore detention policy by a further $150 million. Meanwhile, the government has refused to offer permanent residency to those brought here for medical treatment from off-shore detention in Nauru and PNG (the “Medevac refugees”). As for their promise to grant permanency to the thousands of refugees living here on temporary visas, eight months into office this has not been implemented. This has left thousands of refugees in limbo. On top of the stress of having to reapply for these temporary visas every three or five years and not knowing if they will end up being deported at the end of a visa period, these temporary visas deny refugees the right to bring their spouses or children living abroad, the right to travel abroad, the right to have full access to social security payments, the right to university education and in the case of SHEV visa holders the right to live and work in urban areas.

22 September 2022: Some of the Trotskyist Platform signs carried at the anti-monarchy protest in Sydney after Labor prime minister, Anthony Albanese, declared the day a public holiday in honour of the late queen Elizabeth II.

Meanwhile, like its predecessors, the Labor government defends a system that continues to cruelly oppress Aboriginal people. This was signified in the ostentatious way that the government mourned over the death of Queen Elizabeth, the monarch under whom Aboriginal people were brutally subjugated and under whom generations of Aboriginal children were heinously stolen from their parents in order to be cut off from their culture and heritage. Albanese and Co. deeply offended Aboriginal people and all those opposed to colonialism by hailing uncritically the dead, war-criminal queen and by embracing the coronation of her unpopular son as king. They went event further. Seemingly trying to outdo right-wing conservatives and monarchists in adulation for the queen, the supposedly “republican” prime minister, Albanese, even decided to grant a special public holiday to mourn the passing of Australia’s unelected head of state for life. While upholding the social order that oppresses Aboriginal people, the ALP proposes to insert a token “recognition” of Aboriginal people into the constitution and to set up a powerless Aboriginal advisory body (“Voice”) to the parliament. This scheme is aimed at giving the regime the appearance that it is listening to Aboriginal people’s voices. Although the hard right-wing section of the Australian ruling class cannot stomach any recognition that Aboriginal people lived on this land for tens of thousands of years before colonial invasion, much of the ruling class see the proposed scheme as being useful because they hope that it will dampen the Aboriginal rights movement that has become more vigorous in recent years. They also think that the planned changes will persuade the broader population into having greater faith in the supposed “fairness” of the present Australian social order and, therefore, be more willing to support the ruling class’ more aggressive military and political interventions into the Asia-Pacific; as Australia’s capitalist rulers seek to, on the one hand, maintain their neo-colonial plunder and paternalistic control of the South Pacific and, on the other, play a frontline role in the Western imperialists’ Cold War drive against socialistic China. Those sections of the White Australia capitalist ruling class pushing the new scheme also want to ostentatiously display “constitutional recognition” and a nominal Aboriginal “Voice” for international consumption. They want to deflect widespread global revulsion at the Australian regime’s brutal oppression of Aboriginal people, which they know undercuts their ability to unleash (usually bogus) attacks on their enemies over “human rights.” However, most staunch Aboriginal activists have seen through the proposed measures. They have been enraged by the window-dressing nature of the “embrace” of an Aboriginal “Voice” and have skewered the tokenism of the proposed constitutional changes. At yesterday’s January 26 Invasion Day rally in Sydney, every single Aboriginal activist that addressed the issue of the “Voice” and “Constitutional Recognition” – including leading activists Gwenda Stanley, Lizzy Jarrett and Lynda-June Coe – condemned and opposed the sham plans. Nearly all the speakers at the Melbourne and Brisbane protests took the same stance. As Gumbainggir man and veteran Aboriginal militant, Uncle Gary Foley, powerfully told the Melbourne rally, the Voice would “only be cosmetic”. “Like lipstick on a pig. It will not address the deep underlying issues that still pervade Australian society and that primary issue is white Australian racism,” Foley pointed out.

Sydney, 26 January 2023: Aboriginal people and supporters of Aboriginal rights of all colours march together to protest against the racist oppression of Aboriginal people. The main banner of the thousands-strong demonstration and all the Aboriginal speakers who addressed the issue condemned the government’s “Voice” to parliament proposal as a powerless sham. Several key speakers including rally MC, Dunghutti, Gumbaynggirr, Bundjalung woman, Auntie Lizzie Jarrett also stressed that the new Labor government is just as much their enemy as the previous government.
Photo credit: Robert Wallace/ AFP

The stance taken by staunch Aboriginal activists is especially valid when the government that is pushing the proposed constitutional changes not only hails the blood-soaked, white supremacist monarchy but does nothing to stop regime personnel from killing Aboriginal people in custody and continuing to remove Aboriginal children from their families; while doing little to ensure decent housing and services for Aboriginal communities and absolutely nothing to genuinely return stolen land to Aboriginal people. Since the ALP took office, young Aboriginal people continue to die in state custody at a horrific rate and police and prison guards responsible for killing Aboriginal people continue to get away with these crimes. This has only encouraged violent white supremacists on the streets. The sickening beating to death by white racists of 15 year-old Aboriginal boy, Cassius Turvey, while he was walking home with his friends from a school in suburban Perth is a product of the White Australia capitalist “order” upheld by the Liberals, One Nation, the ALP and the Greens alike.

CLASS STRUGGLE IS THE ONLY ROAD
TO DEFEND WORKING CLASS PEOPLES’ LIVING STANDARDS

With the ALP’s working class base increasingly angry at their falling living standards, ALP leaders have been at pains to look like they are trying to lift wages. They pushed through new laws ostentatiously called the “Secure Jobs, Better Pay Bill.” As well as claiming that it will lift wages and improve job security for casual workers, Labor says that the bill will help reduce the gender pay gap. However, any benefits to workers from this bill will at best be modest and on balance it may do as much harm for workers as good. One positive aspect of the legislation is that it somewhat increases the scope for workers employed by different businesses in the same industry to collectively bargain for their rights. This partially winds back the measures introduced by the Keating Labor government in the early 1990s that restricted workers to bargaining with their bosses at a single enterprise. That system of enterprise bargaining, by curtailing the number of workers who could be united together to fight for a particular deal, reduced workers’ power and has been part of the reason why the capitalists have been able to increase their rate of exploitation of workers over the last few decades. To the extent that particular aspects of the new law undo the enforced limitation of workers bargaining to the enterprise level – that is, undo the damage done by a former Labor government – these aspects should be defended. However, we need to fight for the extension of the right to multi-employer bargaining that is far, far more wide-ranging than those very modest measures prescribed in the current law. For example, not only does the new law give small business bosses the power to refuse to be part of multi-employer deals with workers, it also gives this same power to capitalists who already have an enterprise agreement with their staff. Moreover, the legislation excludes multi-employer deals done with unions that have been involved in “repeated breaches of industrial law” – effectively preventing construction workers, mine workers, wharfies, seamen, offshore energy workers, ferry drivers and others represented by the more militant unions like the CFMMEU from engaging in multi-employer bargaining. Furthermore, in typical social democratic fashion, the ALP caved in to ruling class opposition to the pro-worker aspects of the bill from bosses’ organisations and the yuppy cross-benchers, thereby weakening them further. Thus, the extension of industry-wide bargaining prescribed in the original legislation kept on getting narrower and narrower. In the last few days before the bill was passed, the ALP government bowed to cross-bench senator David Pocock and excluded businesses with fewer than 20 employees from being compelled by the majority of their workers to engage in multi-employer bargaining, rather than the previous threshold of 15 employees. Additionally, the Albanese government agreed to changes that will make it much easier for bosses of businesses with up to 50 employees to escape multi-employer bargaining by workers.

Moreover, there are aspects of the so-called, “Secure Jobs, Better Pay Bill” that will actually help capitalist bosses to intensify their cuts to workers’ employment rights and real wages. For one, the new law includes new impediments on workers’ already very restricted right to take strike action. Workers must now go through a momentum-slowing, compulsory period of formal conciliation with the bosses before taking any industrial action. If they take action involving multi-employer bargaining they must give the bosses a full five days notice. And in a measure aimed at quashing long-running union industrial action, workers must now go through the complex process that they already need to engage in before taking industrial action – involving a time-consuming, momentum-sapping secret ballot of employees – every three months. Moreover, a measure in the bill to give the “Fair Work Commission” (FWC) the power to resolve disputes between bosses and workers through arbitration where there is no reasonable prospect of agreement being reached, will in the long run do far more harm to workers than any good. Yes, in places where workers’ unions are weaker and in the context of the workers movement having been on the back foot over so many years, it is perhaps possible that compulsory arbitration could allow some workers in the short term to receive a tiny few more crumbs from their bosses than they otherwise would. However, when the workers movement rises in a class struggle fightback – as it must – then increased arbitration powers for the FWC, which are after all the courts of a capitalist bosses-serving state, will be used to quell workers’ struggles and prevent workers from winning substantial victories through action. Furthermore, in a concession to lobbying by business groups, the ALP has introduced a measure in the legislation that will weaken the requirement that deals between workers and their bosses leave the workers nominally better-off than previous arrangements. Instead of this Better Off Overall Test (BOOT) being applied for specific changes, bosses can claim that they have met the BOOT because they have made improvements to workers’ conditions in some areas that supposedly offset cuts to workers’ rights in others. The new measure is set to open the way for business owners to drastically undercut workers’ conditions at those workplaces where workers have less bargaining power – for example, where workers’ union organisations are weaker. Indeed, secretary of the Retail and Fast Food Workers Union, Josh Cullinan, described the new law (when it was still at a bill stage before its better aspects were weakened further) as one containing “calamitous attacks on working people.” The union secretary further insisted that the (then proposed) law “does nothing to improve the job security of casual workers. In truth, it only attacks them.”

With the last eight months having proven, once again, that the ALP in government is not willing or able to stand up to the rich and powerful capitalist bigwigs that the conservative parties openly represent, it is clearer than ever that the only way for the working class masses and all the oppressed to defend their living standards and rights is through determined class struggle. Let’s build up our unions and make them infinitely more militant. We need hard-fought strikes and other struggles to win massive pay rises for workers. We must not only make up for rampant inflation but for the years of falling real wages. To clear the legal obstacles to such struggles we must simultaneously fight for the repeal of all anti-strike laws. For the unrestricted right of unions to engage in industry-wide and nationwide bargaining with the bosses! Reverse Labor, the Liberals and the capitalists’ gutting of the Better Off Overall Test in workplace agreements! We also need to ensure that all those currently working as casuals and gig workers have their positions converted into secure jobs with all the rights of permanency. As part of fighting for this and in order to ensure secure jobs for all unemployed workers, we must force companies to increase hiring of permanent workers at the expense of their fat profits. To stop landlords being able to jack up rents ever higher because they know that renters have nowhere else to go, we must take action to demand a massive increase in low-rent housing. To facilitate women’s full participation in economic life and complete economic independence, we must struggle for free 24-hour childcare. We must also fight for Medicare to fully cover all specialist fees, essential medicine, dental, “elective” surgeries and all aged care. The public budget will only be able to afford such free childcare, healthcare and aged care if we bring these sectors completely into public ownership so that a large part of the public budget for these social services does not end up, as it does today, in the pockets of the wealthy capitalists that own profit-driven childcare, aged care, pathology, X-ray, medical centre, pharmacy and other health service firms. We need funds to employ more public sector nurses, paramedics, doctors and aged care workers and not high profits for health sector profiteers. To help provide the urgently needed resources for public health, aged care, public housing and education and to drive down surging living costs we must fight for the confiscation of the oil, gas, coal and power companies and their transfer into public ownership.

To wage such struggles against the powerful capitalist class that runs this country, working class people need tight unity across racial and ethnic lines. Such unity can only be built if the workers movement consciously combats the efforts of the exploiting class to divide the masses with reactionary nationalism and if it actively mobilises against racist oppression. The workers movement must unleash its power to oppose racist state killings of Aboriginal people in custody and to oppose the disproportionate imprisonment of black people in Australian jails. We have to resist the rampant white supremacist violence in this country – whether it comes from rabid rednecks on the streets, as in the beating to death of Cassius Turvey, or from the regime forces, as in the crushing to death of 26 year-old Aboriginal man, David Dungay, by racist prison guards. There also needs to be united mass action of our unions, Aboriginal people, Asians and other people of colour to sweep violent far-right racist outfits off the streets. If we can strike blows against such organised white supremacist forces, we can send a message to the more numerous garden variety rednecks out there – of the type that in Kalgoorlie deliberately ran over and killed 14 year-old Aboriginal boy Elijah Doughty, who murdered Indian-origin, Brisbane transport worker Manmeet Alisher by throwing a firebomb into the bus that he was driving and who have brutally bashed numerous Chinese and other East Asian people over the last few years – that they had better pull their head in. We can not allow racist terror to intimidate and, thus, marginalise from broader society and social struggle Aboriginal people and other people of colour. We also need to ensure that migrant workers are not bullied out of participation in class struggle resistance by the threat of deportation. That means that we must fight for the rights of citizenship for everyone who is here. We must demand that all refugees on temporary visas, all guest workers and all international students are given permanency and the rights of citizenship. Let us also demand that all the asylum seekers incarcerated in PNG and Nauru are brought here with the full rights of citizens.

Workers at the General Mills food processing factory in Sydney’s west do a shift on the picket line during their weeks-long June 2021 strike for improved wages and better job security. The workers’ resolve and courage won them some important gains. If unshackled from the dead-end Laborite program of seeking common ground with the capitalist bosses on the basis of a mythical “common national interest”, the workers movement will be able to wage powerful class struggle that can push back against the nearly four decades of increased capitalist exploitation of workers in Australia.
Photo credit: United Workers Union Twitter page

THE ALP DID NOT EVEN PROMISE TO STAND UP
TO THE WEALTHY BUSINESS-OWNING CLASS

That the ALP government is kowtowing to the big end of town is hardly a surprise. Even during the lead up to the elections they made clear that they were not going to challenge the capitalists. Fearful that the billionaire oligarchs would utilise both their ownership of the media and their power to decide which political forces that they direct their massive financial resources to in order to campaign against Labor, Albanese’s team went out of their way to assure the wealthy ruling class that the ALP would look after their interests as diligently as Morrison’s conservatives. To their working class base, on the other hand, Albanese and Co. promised that they would reverse the plunge in real wages, fix the crisis in aged care and address the lack of affordable housing. Yet they promised to do all this by merely managing the existing capitalist system more rationally than the Liberals and by doing away with the most extreme reactionary of the latter’s policies. Rather than measures to curb the power of the corporate bigwigs, the ALP tops advocated “win-win” policies that brought together workers and their unions on the one hand and worker-hiring business owners on the other. However, such talk of “win-win” between workers and the capitalists is a cruel hoax. Workers are getting poorer precisely because capitalist bosses are increasing the proportion of the fruits of workers’ labour that they seize as profits. The interests of workers and those of the business owners that extract profit from their toil are counterposed. To refuse to stand with workers’ interests against those of their capitalist bosses means to accept the status quo of ever-increasing capitalist exploitation of workers.

Yet, despite all the ALP leaders’ efforts to please the capitalist ruling class, the latter do not come easily to accepting a Labor government. The ALP is, after all, a party whose rank-and-file are workers and is a party organically tied to the union movement. The exploiting class worries that this base could push an ALP government into enacting measures to defend workers’ interests. Therefore, in “normal” times, the oligarchs prefer their own parties, like the Liberals and the Nationals, to administer government, especially at the federal level. However, when the working class start to get restive or when the ruling class wants to herd the masses into supporting measures that could be unpopular – like a major war – the ruling class turn to the ALP. They hope that with the ALP’s greater authority amongst the working class and with its ties to the union leadership, the Labor Party is better able to pacify the working class masses and more effective at lining up the masses behind major campaigns of the capitalist elite than the openly, pro-business owner conservatives. In this way, the ruling class will look to ALP social democracy to come to their rescue when they are in a difficult position, even while having misgivings that an ALP government could irritate them by throwing some sops to its working class base. This was the case in the lead up to the 2007 elections when the working class masses were angry after more than eleven years of right-wing Coalition government and when workers had in the previous two years participated in mass nationwide stopwork actions against the Howard government’s anti-worker Workchoices legislation. At the time, even the main national, NSW and Queensland newspapers of hard-right billionaire Rupert Murdoch called for a vote to Kevin Rudd’s ALP. Murdoch even personally praised Rudd. Then, in the lead-up to last May’s elections, after nearly nine years of corrupt Coalition rule has discredited Australia’s present social order in the eyes of the masses and with working class people grumbling over plunging living standards, decisive sections of the ruling class started to seriously consider whether it would be better to get the ALP into government. This is especially the case because the capitalist rulers are worried that the disgruntled working class masses could refuse to get behind their Cold War drive against socialistic China.

However, before they were willing to accept the possibility of a Labor government, in the months and years leading up to the federal elections, the various factions of the capitalist class subjected Albanese’s Labor to a number of tests to see whether this nominally workers’ party could be trusted to run the federal government. The big end of town utilised their control of the media and think tanks and their numerous personal connections with politicians to demand reassurances from the ALP on key issues.

For one, they wanted to be sure that the ALP would not loosen anti-strike laws and would not encourage class struggle by pushing any policies that would openly redistribute wealth from the rich to the masses. The capitalist bigwigs were quite satisfied with Labor’s response. Not only did the ALP pledge to uphold anti-strike laws, some of which they had themselves instituted on previous occasions that they were in office, the ALP also pointedly refused to make even the most modest promises to redistribute income away from the super-rich. Indeed, ALP head offices openly instructed branch members not to make any negative references to the “big end of town” that the Labor Party had sometimes used in the lead up to the previous elections in 2019. The big end of town also demanded that the Labor Party abandon any plans to enact even minimal measures that would curb the returns of the rich from buying up multiple properties for speculation or for renting out as landlords. Here too Albanese’s Labor duly obliged. Thus, long before the elections, the ALP ditched the agenda that it took to the previous two elections of limiting the scope of negative gearing tax exemptions and reducing the amount of discount on capital gains tax payments. The supposed ALP “Left” Albanese has ostentatiously positioned himself even further to the right than his ALP Right faction predecessor, Bill Shorten. Even when promising resources for lower-rent “social housing”, the proposals of Albanese’s ALP are so modest that they would not be enough to pull down rents across the market – music to the ears of multiple-property owning, rich landlords shaking down ever greater rents from their tenants. Moreover, even the ALP’s modest plan for more “social housing” that it took to the election will not increase badly needed public housing but rather promises funds for just a modest increase in “community housing”, notorious for its private operators who skimp on repairs and shun the most hard-up, would-be tenants. Thus, even in making a sop to the needs of low-income renters, the ALP was careful to show that there would be a lot in the plans for the capitalists – in the form of expanded opportunities to profiteer from running partly government-funded “community housing.”

A two bedroom apartment in this building in working class Granville in Western Sydney was rented out before the real estate agency even put the unit up for its first open inspection. This all-too frequent occurrence took place despite the modest apartment being rented out for $620 a week (with a four week bond of $2480) – more than three quarters of the before-tax, full-time minimum wage. Not only are rents skyrocketing but the number of available properties for rent is very small relative to the need for them, giving low-income people little chance of securing suitable accommodation.

THE BIG END OF TOWN’S KEY RED LINE: ANY GOVERNMENT MUST
FULLY PARTICIPATE IN THE COLD WAR TO STRANGLE SOCIALISTIC CHINA

Perhaps the most important assurance that the ruling class demanded of Labor in the lead-up to the elections is a guarantee that it continue to support the U.S.-led Cold War drive to “contain” and squeeze socialistic China. They want Labor to follow through on the conservatives’ agenda for an increase in the U.S. military presence in Australia, for an aggressive Australian military build-up in support of this anti-China war drive and for a continuation of political support for those forces seeking to undermine socialistic rule in China from within – whether they be pro-capitalist, pseudo-“pro-democracy” activists or the dwindling number of anti-communist and fanatically anti-women’s-equality, religious fundamentalist forces based on the, more European-looking, Uyghur minority in north-western China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. The capitalist class also want Labor to do a more skillful job in aggressively interfering in Australia’s South Pacific “neighbourhood” in order to sabotage socialistic China’s south-south cooperation with the region. To be sure, the capitalists also want Labor to somehow conduct this Cold War in a way that simultaneously maintains workable diplomatic relations between Canberra and Beijing so that the tens of billions of profit that they get from Australian exports to China is not disrupted too much.

This begs the question: why are Australia’s capitalist bigwigs risking harm to their immensely lucrative trade with China by antagonising the latter? The answer to this question is entirely related to the fact that China is a workers state as opposed to being a country under capitalist rule. China’s toiling classes grabbed state power in a giant anti-capitalist revolution in 1949. To this day, China has an economy centred on a property system that favours working class people: that is, socialist, public ownership of key economic sectors. Even though the current Beijing leadership does not seek to challenge Western imperialism’s domination over the world, the mere existence of China as a socialistic power is slowly undermining the grip of imperialism over the ex-colonial countries. China’s mutually beneficial cooperation with the Global South is allowing countries in the Pacific, Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America to access capital, modern technology, training and a large market in China without having to subordinate their country to the imperial powers or their agencies like the IMF. This is what is driving Australia’s capitalist rulers mad as countries in the South Pacific like the Solomon Islands and Fiji slowly exert greater independence from their Australian imperialist overlords.

Furthermore, the capitalist powers are terrified that even though Beijing does nothing to explicitly promote socialist revolution, the mere example presented by the most populous country in the world continuing to adhere to a socialistic course, while successfully lifting her people out of poverty and providing rapidly rising real wages, wide access to low-rent public housing and ever improving infrastructure, public transport and cultural opportunities for her masses, will encourage working class people in the capitalist world to themselves start agitating for socialism. That is why the Western ruling classes see the rise of socialistic China as an “existential threat.”

Top: The latest Global Wages Report from the International Labor Organisation shows that workers in China have enjoyed by far the fastest growing wages of any country in the world, whether “advanced” or emerging. Above: Although average real wages in Australia rose by roughly 10% from 2008 to 2019 they have plummeted since. By June 2022, workers’ real wages in Australia were lower than they were in March 2012 (data reprinted in ABC News and obtained from The Australia Institute). In the last few months, they have plunged further and Australian real wages are now lower than they were 15 years ago! In contrast, real wages have continued to increase in China over these last three years. Below: Although China’s workers have enjoyed by far the fastest growing real wages of any country, China’s stock market, represented by the Shanghai Composite Index, is actually lower than it was 15 years ago (see red dotted line). By contrast, in the same period the Australian stock market index, the S&P/ASX 200, has soared by 30% (blue solid line). This is an indicator that while workers’ real wages have been falling here, Australia’s capitalists have been gaining ever greater return on their capital. In contrast, in China, while workers’ real wages have been steeply rising, the capitalists are not gaining any greater return on their capital (indeed China’s richest have lost wealth in the last period).
Source for stock market data: Investing.com

For the very same reason that capitalist exploiting classes fear and loathe the socialistic PRC, the working class must hail and defend its existence. For the very existence of working class rule in China, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba and North Korea – in however a fragile and incomplete form – gives confidence to the toiling classes in Australia and other capitalist countries that they do not have to accept capitalist rule and all that it brings – bullying bosses, plunging real wages, skyrocketing rents, growing racism and all-round economic insecurity and chaos. That is why the workers movement and Left must unconditionally stand with socialistic China and the other workers states against every form of attack that they face – whether that be military, economic or propagandistic.

Yet, diametrically against the interests of its working class membership, the ALP is right behind the capitalists’ drive to strangle socialistic China. Thus, while in Opposition, the ALP supported every one of the former Liberal government’s Cold War moves against the PRC – from the discriminatory banning of Chinese tech giant, Huawei, from participating in the building of Australia’s 5G wireless network, to the introduction of McCarthyist, so-called “foreign interference” laws aimed at intimidating Australians of Chinese descent that are sympathetic to Red China, to the enacting of the AUKUS anti-China deal for Australia to acquire nuclear submarines from the U.S. and Britain. Indeed, in the lead up to the elections, Albanese’s ALP even sought to position itself as more extreme in its opposition to the PRC than the right-wing Coalition. Thus, the ALP joined the hysterical, anti-China denunciations of the deal leasing part of the civilian port of Darwin to a Chinese company. Moreover, ALP leaders criticised the Morrison government for not bullying enough the Solomon Islands into renouncing their security cooperation with China. At the same time, the ALP tops canvassed to the capitalist class that they could do a better job than their rivals of dragging South Pacific countries back into the Australian ruling class’ tight hold. They argued that they would restore the Australian regime’s damaged credentials in the region through taking a more rational verbal position on issues – like climate change – knowing full well that Pacific island countries vulnerable to rising sea-levels are only too aware that Australia’s carbon emissions per person are among the highest in the world and nearly two and a half times larger than China’s. Australia’s capitalist rulers have been more than convinced. As far as they are concerned, the ALP passed with high distinction their test requiring that any prospective government commit to zealously pursuing the anti-communist Cold War against China. Moreover, Labor’s assurances that they could do all this while simultaneously restoring full trade relations with China through dialling down the ferocity of Canberra’s anti-China rhetoric also impressed the corporate elite.

THE STANCE THAT MARXISTS SHOULD HAVE TAKEN TOWARDS THE
ELECTIONS IN ORDER TO ADVANCE ANTI-CAPITALIST RESISTANCE

Before finalising their decision not to throw their massive economic might against the election of an ALP government, there was one final important requirement that Australia’s capitalists vetted the ALP over. They wanted to be sure that Labor would be all the way with Canberra’s Western allies in waging the West’s defacto war against Russia via their Ukrainian proxies. To be sure, initially the war was mainly a squalid battle for territory between the respective capitalist classes of Ukraine and Russia. In such an inter-capitalist war, the working people of both countries had no side except opposition to their own respective rulers. However, even from the very start of the war, an important additional aspect of the conflict was Russia’s just struggle to keep the nuclear-armed NATO warmongers from its Western border, on the one hand, and, on the other, Kiev’s kowtowing to the interests of Western imperialism. Before long, this second aspect of the conflict became the dominant one. The U.S. and its British, EU, Australian and Canadian allies poured into Ukraine such huge amounts of weapons, military advisers, intelligence assistance and propaganda backing, that in a matter of weeks this conflict ceased to be primarily a Ukraine-Russia war and effectively became a conflict between the Western imperialists and Russia with Ukraine acting as the proxy for the former. The U.S. imperialists want to subordinate Russia and reduce her to the humiliated status that she had in the first decade and a half after the early 1990s capitalist counterrevolution devastated her and the other lands of the former USSR. They want to ensure that Russia does not obstruct their predatory designs on the resource rich Caucuses and Central Asian regions. Moreover, the U.S.-led imperialists cannot tolerate Russia or anyone else being an independent, nuclear-armed power, especially if that power has failed to sign up to their Cold War drive against Red China. To be sure, the Australian ruling class’ reasons for opposing Russia are very different to their opposition to socialistic China. Most notably, unlike the PRC, Russia is a fellow capitalist country. Moreover, Russia has few interests in the South Pacific and Southeast Asian region. She is not obstructing Australian multinational corporations from plundering this region. Nor do the Australian capitalists have any significant interests or ambitions within either Russia or its neighbouring regions that would enable them to gain some direct economic benefit from any subordination of Russia. That is why, in previous years, Australian regime officials had privately complained to Washington that it is expending too much energy countering Russia when it should be devoting all its efforts to suppressing Red China. However, once the U.S. and its other allies entered the recent war in a decisive manner, the Australian ruling class fell in behind its allies. It wants the power and prestige of the U.S. and the overall West to come out strengthened rather than damaged from the war. This is a matter of self interest for Australia’s capitalist rulers. It is Australia’s alliance with U.S. – and to a lesser extent British – military and economic might that enables Australia’s capitalists to subjugate the peoples of the South Pacific. If the powerful allies of Australia’s exploiting class are weakened, then its own tyranny in this region becomes endangered.

Here too on the question of the war in Ukraine, the ALP proved its credentials to the capitalist class. It enthusiastically backed the Morrison government’s imposition of sanctions on Russia and its sending of hundreds of millions of dollars of military equipment to the authoritarian regime in Ukraine. With the ALP thus on board on all the issues of greatest strategic concern to the capitalist class and with the latter having serious concerns about the corrupt Morrison government’s ability to hold back mass struggle in the context of plunging real wages, much of the ruling class chose to either back Albanese’s ALP in the elections or to be indifferent as to whether the ALP or the Coalition won. This is shown by the fact that just like the openly pro-boss Liberals, far-right parties, “Teal independents” and Greens, the various branches of the Labor Party received tens of millions of dollars in donations from both ultra-wealthy individuals and from corporations in the months and years leading up to last year’s federal elections. Moreover, significant sections of the capitalist-owned media sided with the ALP in the elections. Take, for instance, Nine Entertainment Holdings which owns Channel Nine TV, the 2GB radio station and the vast suite of newspapers that formerly belonged to the, now defunct, Fairfax Group. Nine Entertainment is owned by right-wing billionaire, Bruce Gordon, and the chairman of the corporation is none other than former federal treasurer and Liberal Party stalwart, Peter Costello. The flagship newspapers of the corporation, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, both editorialised for a vote to Albanese’s Labor at the elections. Also calling for a vote to the ALP was the “progressive” liberal, Guardian Australia online newspaper, a publications that has relied on massive financial contributions from wealthy capitalists to operate – including a huge initial investment from filthy rich, Australian tech tycoon Graeme Wood (at the nudging of Liberal Party then future prime minister Malcolm Turnbull) and large contributions to the British owners of the publication from foundations controlled by some of the most powerful American capitalists in history, including Bill Gates, the Ford family that control the Ford car company, the Hilton family owning the Hilton hotel chain and the Rockefeller family known for their vast oil, banking and property empire and their one-time advocacy of despicable fascistic “theories” like Social Darwinism and Eugenics. To be sure, the hard-right Murdoch family’s main newspapers like The Australian and the Daily Telegraph supported the Liberals at the elections. Yet, Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch were unperturbed enough about the prospect of a Labor government to recoil away from enforcing a uniform, anti-ALP election line on their outlets, unlike the uniform positions that they often enforce for questions that are important to them – like support for particular Western military interventions abroad. Thus, the Murdoch newspaper in the Northern Territory, the NT News actually editorialised for a vote to Labor.

With major sections of the capitalist class either backing, or being unconcerned by, an ALP election win, to call for a vote for the ALP at the elections would have been a call for upholding the overall interests of the capitalist class. To do so would have been harmful to the interests of the working class and oppressed just as would obviously have been any support for the reactionary, openly anti-union Coalition. As we put it in a Trotskyist Platform leaflet issued in the weeks leading up to the election:

“… the Labor Party (ALP) “alternative” is hell bent on proving to the big business owners, the people who really hold the power here, that an ALP administration will enforce capitalist interests as reliably as the Coalition does. Albanese’s ALP even proclaimed that a Labor government will not increase the paltry JobSeeker payments. So, at the upcoming elections, no vote should be given to either the Coalition or the ALP and Greens “alternatives” and obviously not to the racist One Nation or the other nationalist far-right outfits like the United Australia Party. Instead, we need hard-fought strikes and other mass actions by the workers movement and its allies to turn back the capitalists’ exploitation of workers, to resist their oppression of Aboriginal people, women and coloured ethnic communities and to oppose “their” regime’s military buildup. The more that the working class understands that their position will not be advanced through supporting any of the current parliamentary parties, the more determined they will be to build the mass struggles needed.”

Trotskyist Platform, For Militant Class Struggle Against Australia’s Capitalists!, 25 April 2022

Most of the other far-left groups rejected such a stance. They called either openly, or more often backhandedly through preferences, for a vote to the ALP. However, events since the Albanese government’s election have confirmed the correctness of our opposition to supporting either the Coalition or the ALP or indeed any of other current parliamentary parties. Since coming to office, the Labor government has upheld all its commitments to the big end of town, while delivering few of the meagre promises that it made to its working class base. Thus, the Albanese government has given tax cuts to the rich, maintained tax exemptions for wealthy property speculators, cut public hospital spending and maintained – and even strengthened – anti-strike laws. Its measures to lift wages are so limp and state Labor and Liberal governments so draconian in their determination to keep state public sector pay rises well below inflation, that not only are real wages falling even faster than they were during Morrison’s reign but even treasurer Jim Chalmers quietly concedes that real wages are expected to continue to fall until … at least, 2024!

Meanwhile, as promised to the capitalist bigwigs, the ALP has continued the Australian regime’s obsessive participation in the imperialist campaign to strangle socialistic rule in China. Indeed, it was literally just hours after Albanese and his cabinet had been sworn into government by “Her Majesty’s” representative (the Governor General) that Albanese and foreign minister Penny Wong flew off to a Quad meeting in Tokyo to advance the Cold War measures of the U.S.- Australia-Japan-India, anti-China alliance. That Albanese briefly met Chinese president Xi during the G20 summit is hardly a sign of an easing off of the Australian regime’s determination to participate in the anti-PRC Cold War. The government and the capitalist class that it serves wants to have a relationship with the PRC somewhat like the Japanese, German, New Zealand and French regimes, who are all fellow, zealous Cold War opponents of socialistic rule in China but maintain diplomatic relations with Beijing at the level just above that which causes trade to be seriously affected. Albanese and Penny Wong thus seek improvement in diplomatic exchanges with Beijing from Morrison’s time. This is especially because the inflation-plagued Australian economy is faltering. Yet, while seeking to reduce the temperature of diplomatic disputes with Beijing, Canberra is following through on its commitment to the capitalist class to continue to pile on the pressure on socialistic China. Since, the Albanese government took office, Australian warships and military aircraft have continued to provocatively traverse waters and skies claimed by Beijing in the South China Sea, thousands upon thousands of kilometres from Australia. Moreover, not only is the ALP government following through on the deposed conservative government’s plan to acquire long-range naval missiles and nuclear submarines, late last year it was revealed that the Albanese government was planning a still more threatening move against China – allowing the U.S. to deploy nuclear-capable B52 bombers at a base south of Darwin. Then, three weeks ago, it was revealed that the Albanese government would be buying the expensive, long-range HIMARS missile system from the United States. All this is part of an aggressive military build-up aimed at contributing to Cold War military pressure against the PRC. Meanwhile, in the South Pacific, the new government has followed through on its promise to intervene more aggressively in the region in order to shore up the interests of Australia’s capitalist class through sabotaging the efforts of regional countries to cooperate with the PRC. Indeed, Albanese and Penny Wong have intruded so coercively into the Solomon Islands that the Solomon Islands government responded to one such act of meddling last September with a defiant statement slamming Canberra’s move as “an assault on our parliamentary democracy” and “direct interference by a foreign government into our domestic affairs” (a brave act by the Solomon Islands government given that Western powers had stoked riots against them a year earlier and given the degree to which not only the upper levels of the country’s bureaucracy have been infiltrated by Australian officials and “advisers” but broader sections of the island nation’s civil institutions and media have been ensnared in the Australian ruling class’ influence operations).

Moreover, the new ALP government has taken over the baton from the previous government when it comes to participating in Western imperialism’s joint propaganda war against Red China. Three weeks ago, the government joined a very small number of other countries – including the U.S. and Britain – in imposing a requirement that travellers from China and only from China get a pre-departure COVID test. They forced through the new rule in spite of Australia’s chief medical officer and most other experts advising against the move! Clearly, the Australian government’s measure has little to do with protecting the Australian population from COVID and everything to do with trying to build negative perceptions of China by denigrating her COVID response, despite the fact that the PRC has so successfully protected her people from the pandemic that her COVID death rate per resident is currently 15 times lower than Australia’s. After having supported last November’s small anti-COVID-response protests in China – that were the Chinese version of the Far Right-instigated COVID “Freedom” protests in Australia and other Western countries – that opposed China’s mask mandates and PCR testing of COVID-affected regions, the Albanese government and its Western counterparts have now done a 180 degree flip and want to portray China’s recent relaxation of COVID controls as reckless. This is despite the PRC being in a much better position to protect her people from COVID deaths after reopening than Australia was when it opened up a year ago because the anti-viral medications that are now widely available in China – both from Western pharmaceutical firms and from Chinese ones – were not available at the time Australia opened up; and because China’s community-based COVID response (which involves doctors and nurses seeing patients in makeshift clinics within neighbourhoods and neighbourhood committees and local volunteers regularly checking up on the health condition of elderly and other COVID-vulnerable neighbours, while delivering medical kits and pandemic information) is very effective in ensuring that vulnerable COVID-infected people get prompt enough access to anti-viral medication and are speedily triaged to top-level hospitals.

Meanwhile, just like its right-wing predecessors, the Labor government has continued to claim that China is persecuting her Muslim Uyghur minority that live in the country’s northwest – a claim that not only have countries representing around 85% of the world’s population refused to sign on to during UN debates and motions (including every single Muslim majority country in the world other than for tiny U.S.-dependent Bosnia) but which the organisation of Islamic Cooperation, most Muslim-majority countries individually and much of Africa, the Middle East and Asia have denounced as a lie and instead emphatically praised China’s treatment of Muslim Uyghurs after sending fact-finding inspections to the country’s northwest.

The Albanese government has also more than delivered on its promise to the imperialist ruling class to continue the Morrison government’s support for the Washington-led proxy war against Russia. In July, Albanese exceeded the former prime minister’s level of support for the war by personally visiting Ukraine and meeting with its authoritarian president. Albanese announced during his trip that his government would provide Ukraine with an additional 34 armoured vehicles valued at $100 million. As Albanese has boasted many times, the Australian regime is now the largest non-NATO provider of military aid to Ukraine… or rather to the proxies of Western imperialism. This backing reached a new level last week when 70 Australian soldiers departed for Britain to participate in a British-led training program of Ukrainian troops.

THE LABOR PARTY HAS ALWAYS BETRAYED ITS WORKING CLASS BASE

Although none of the Labor Party’s working class supporters thought that the Albanese government was going to seriously redistribute income and power from the big end of town to the masses, even their most modest hopes of progressive change are gradually being dashed. Yet this is hardly a new experience for Labor supporters. The ALP has always betrayed its base. This is not merely a matter of a lack of resolute, selfless leaders or a matter of the leadership not living up to the “principles” of the Labor Party. Mostly, it is because the social democratic strategy that the Labor Party commits itself to is incapable of delivering major, lasting benefits for its mass base. Social democracy seeks to improve the lives of the masses without fundamentally challenging the tremendous economic and political power of the capitalist class … or by “postponing” constructing that challenge to the distant never reached “right moment”. This becomes a recipe for resigning oneself to the domination of society by the big end of town and capitulating to their demands on the most decisive issues. By thereby accepting the supremacy of the capitalists, while negotiating with the latter on terms of their dominance in society on the nominal behalf of the working class masses, social democratic politicians, union leaders and NGO heads gain a highly respectable position in society as well as privileged incomes compared to their support base. They also acquire personal links with the big end of town that facilitate future lucrative careers in the corporate world. All this entices them to bow down even more subserviently to the capitalist bigwigs whenever the latter get angry that social democratic leaders are demanding “too much” on behalf of their support base.

Any working class based political party in a capitalist country faces not only the direct pressure of the capitalists but also the pressure of the state institutions. Despite the state being a body that nominally “treats everyone equally”, in practice, in capitalist societies the government departments, the bureaucracies, the courts, police, army and secret police all act as upholders of the interests of the racist, capitalist exploiting class. Just look at what has been revealed during the course of the Royal Commission into the former Morrison government’s despised “Robodebt” scheme, in which the regime’s computers, supposedly checking for “over-claiming” by welfare recipients, automatically sent messages to nearly half a million of this country’s most economically vulnerable people unlawfully demanding payments of non-existing debts, in some cases of up to tens of thousands of dollars. What testimony during the investigation showed is that it was not just Morrison and his ministers who were driving the Robodebt scheme. So were many highly-paid, senior government bureaucrats who shared the anti-working class Liberal government’s determination to suck every cent that they could out of low-income welfare recipients. Indeed it was bureaucrats from the Department of Human Services rather than Coalition ministers that first proposed Robodebt. Later, after the harm caused by Robodebt became widely known, calls by lower down staff for the scheme to be seriously overhauled were met with hostility by upper bureaucrats.

Meanwhile, two months ago, there were revelations of just how intense racism and hostility to leftists is within Queensland Police ranks. In recordings taken at the Brisbane city police watch house, a large number of cops engaged in discussions expressing their extreme hatred of black Africans, Muslim people, Aboriginal people and leftist protesters and also their contempt and concocted “fear” of being overwhelmed by Africans, Chinese, Indian and Muslim people and migrants more generally. Chillingly, some officers even discussed the possibility of beating to death and burying black Africans and expressed their wish to violently attack anti-racist, climate change and refugee rights protesters.

Given the racist, anti-leftist and anti-working class character of bureaucratic organs in Australia and other capitalist countries, any party that comes into government promising progressive, pro-working class measures would face sabotage of their agenda from the state agencies nominally under their “control”. Understanding this, we communists understand that in order to implement thoroughgoing, progressive social change, the working class, united with all the oppressed, must first grab state power by replacing the existing capitalist state with its own organs built to defend the interests of the working class masses and all the downtrodden. On the road to such a workers revolution, the exploited and oppressed can win immediate gains and concessions from the ruling capitalists through class struggle and other mass actions provided that they maintain complete political independence from all institutions of the capitalist state. In contrast, the approach of social democrats – whether of its most right-wing practitioners like the ALP or it’s most avowedly pro-socialist, left-wing elements – is to seek to wield the existing capitalist state in the service of the masses. Yet given that this state has been built up and maintained to enforce the interests of the capitalist ruling class, social democrat-administered governments, aware of the resistance that they would face from their own state agencies, almost always recoil from implementing the more progressive aspects of their agendas, even in those cases where pressure from their working class base pushes them to promise a more radical program.

In very rare cases when a social democratic party in government still insists on following through on a more explicitly pro-working class agenda, their government ends up being overthrown by the state institutions that they nominally head. Most infamously in September 1973 in Chile, the elected Socialist Party-led government of then Chilean president Salvador Allende, which had nationalised some industries and sought to improve workers’ living standards, was overthrown in a coup by the Chilean military backed by the country’s police. That the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) helped the American CIA to conduct a destabilisation campaign against Allende in order to foment the right-wing coup underscores the intensely pro-capitalist political character of Australia’s state organs. A few months before the coup, the then newly elected ALP government led by Gough Whitlam found out about the ASIS operation in Chile. Whitlam did order the ASIS operation to be disbanded. But this was only because he feared that it would be politically damaging if the plot was exposed. Indeed the ASIS chief at the time made clear to fellow spies that “personally he [Whitlam] would have wished to approve” the operation. Moreover, while ordering the end of ASIS’s role in the destabilisation plot, Whitlam facilitated the ongoing CIA operation against the elected Allende government by choosing not to expose it. This did not stop the CIA from carrying out a covert destabilisation campaign against Whitlam’s own administration! That culminated in the November 1975 overthrow of the Labor government in a right-wing coup executed by the British monarchy’s representative and long-time participant in CIA front organisations, then Governor General John Kerr. Although Whitlam was far more conservative and far less principled than the avowed Marxist, Allende, the American regime felt that he was still not a reliable enough backer of the critical Pine Gap U.S./Australia spy base in the Northern Territory. That the most progressive Labor government in Australian history was overthrown in such a coup shows the impossibility of realising even the rather modest aims of the Laborite project. That Whitlam had earlier stabbed his fellow social democrat Allende in the back by keeping him in the dark about the CIA destabilisation operation and by refusing to publicly expose the American interference plot only shows how the social democratic perspective of seeking to govern with the tolerance of the capitalist bigwigs and their state agencies inevitably means betraying the interests of the working class.

WHEN IT IS USEFUL TO GIVE CRITICAL ELECTORAL SUPPORT TO A
SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY AND WHEN TO DO SO WOULD BE A BETRAYAL

Despite the political bankruptcy of social democracy, there are certain times when mass working class based social democratic parties, like the ALP, could be pushed by their base to stand on a more explicitly pro-working class platform. This would be at a time of left-wing radicalisation of the working class and during a period of greater class struggle. Leaders of social democratic parties may then use the strengthened activity of their base to try and pressure the capitalists into granting some concessions to their base in order to dampen their mobilisation. At the same time, social democratic parties may put forward more overtly pro-working class demands and push to the fore more left-wing elements of their parties in order to maintain the authority of their base, so that they will be able to contain the radicalising working class and prevent them from heading in a revolutionary direction. In such circumstances, especially if the social democratic party has been out of government for a lengthy period, the working class masses could have serious expectations that should the party win office they would institute major pro-working class reforms. Although, in the event of a working class radicalisation, the worried capitalist class will be looking to social democracy to save their system from a resurgent working class, the demands that a social democratic party may be pushed to put forward could be too much for the capitalists to accept. In such scenarios, the capitalists as a whole may choose to actively campaign against the election of the social democratic party to government. If that were to happen, it may be worthwhile for communists to give electoral support to the mass social democratic party in order to deliver a political defeat to the capitalists and, thereby, embolden the anti-capitalist sentiments of the working class mases. Moreover, given that major pro-working class measures can only be implemented against the resistance of the capitalists through the powerful push of class struggle mobilisation, having a social democratic party in government when it actually stands on an anti-capitalist agenda can help intensify class struggle. However, any electoral support given by communists to a social democratic party like the Labor Party would be given with unyielding criticism of that party. We would point out that the social democratic party is incapable of realising its more worthy promises because it always ultimately seeks an accommodation with the capitalist exploiting class and because it is loyal to the capitalist state that enforces the interests of the exploiting class. Communists would warn the working class masses that the social democrats in government would inevitably betray them. We would insist that only class struggle action that is based on maintaining complete political independence from all the arms of the capitalist state can ensure major advances for the working class in the present; and that such gains can only be secured and reach decisive levels if the working class is able to lead all the oppressed in the seizure of state power. Thus, even in situations where it would be appropriate to give electoral support to a social democratic party, communists would be, in the words of Russian Revolution leader V.I. Lenin, seeking to support the social democratic party “in the same way as the rope supports a hanged man.”

When Lenin wrote the above words in April-May 1920 he was outlining why he believed that communists in Britain at the time should call for a vote for the British Labour Party while explaining to the masses that a Labor government would inevitably betray its working class supporters. Since then, nominally Marxist, left social democratic groups have seized on Lenin’s words to advocate giving electoral support to mass social democratic parties in every election, irrespective of the platform that those parties may claim to stand on. However, when Lenin advocated giving critical electoral support to the British Labour Party, the latter was claiming to stand on a program very different to Albanese’s Australian Labour Party today. With the most politically advanced layers of the British working class inspired by the socialist revolution in Russia two and a half years earlier and demanding a struggle for socialism in Britain, the leaders of the British Labour Party at the time knew that they would need to show some socialist credentials if they were to retain the loyalty of the British working class. In February 1918, notably just three months after Russia’s socialist revolution, the British Labour Party wrote into its constitution a commitment to socialist public ownership of the economy. They adopted Clause IV into their constitution, which stated that: “To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.” In contrast, not only does the ALP today not even pretend to stand for nationalisation of the economy and socialism, it is known by the politically engaged masses for having supported privatisation. Indeed, it was the 1983-1996 Hawke/Keating ALP governments that unleashed the privatisation wave that has swept Australia over the last four decades. That Labor government sold off the Commonwealth Bank and Qantas. Then, in 2002, the Carr NSW Labor government and the Bracks Victorian Labor government joined with the then Howard federal Liberal-National government to privatise the bulk of Australia’s rail freight operations. Meanwhile, state Labor governments have sold off public housing and state-owned electricity generation and retail with almost as much vigour as their right-wing opponents.

Another major difference between the British Labour Party of 1920 and today’s ALP was in their respective attitudes to the capitalist war drive against the then biggest workers states of their times. To be sure, in 1920 the leaders of the British Labour Party were as hostile to Soviet Russia (the only workers state then) as the ALP leaders are today towards socialistic China. However, Britain’s Labour Party heads also knew that there was considerable sympathy for the Soviet workers state amongst the most politically active ranks of the British working class. This sympathy combined with war weariness (following World War I) and pacifist sentiments led to a number of protest actions against the British government’s military intervention in Russia that was supporting anti-communist forces that were waging a civil war to overthrow the young Soviet workers state and restore capitalist-landlord rule. There were even a series of daring mutinies by British forces in Russia who demanded to be sent home. Meanwhile, within Britain itself, troops staged mutinies against plans to send them to Russia. Then during the very weeks in April-May 1920 when Lenin was writing the book, “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder, where he made that call for British communists at the time to give critical electoral support to the Labour Party “in the same way as the rope supports a hanged man”, there were two very powerful actions by British workers in opposition to the government’s shipment of arms and munitions to the capitalist Polish regime that was waging a war against Soviet Russia. In one, seamen sabotaged barges carrying munitions to the Polish troops causing the barges to sink. Then dock and coal workers refused to load and supply the ship Jolly George that had been scheduled to send munitions to Poland. In these various actions and munities, rank- and-file Labour members participated. Aware of this, when the British government weeks later announced that it would be sending troops to Poland to help fight against Soviet Russia, the Labour Party leaders and pro-Labour trade union heads called for protest actions to oppose the intervention. They built Councils of Action across the country to oppose the expedition to Poland, organised a series of massive protests and even threatened a general strike should the intervention go ahead. As a result, the British government had to abandon its plans to openly support the Polish regime’s war on the Soviet workers state. How different was the stance of the British Labour Party in 1920 towards the war drive against the Soviet workers state from the policies of today’s ALP towards the war drive against socialistic China! Today, even before the elections, Albanese’s ALP vowed to prosecute the rapid anti-China expansion of the Australian military, expand the presence of U.S. forces in Australia aimed against Red China and continue the Australian navy’s participation in provocative Western military incursions into China-claimed waters off her coast.

None of the above changes the fact that Britain’s Labour Party in 1920 was just as much an enemy of the fight for workers revolution then as the Australian Labor Party is today. The British Labour Party was fresh from having criminally led workers into supporting their “own” capitalist exploiters in the horrific inter-imperialist slaughter that was World War I. Labour Party leaders even took up cabinet posts in a wartime coalition government led by the Liberal Party. It was for good reason that Lenin had labelled social democratic parties like the Labour Party a “stinking corpse”. The British Labour Party leadership’s pro-socialist posturing was largely about maintaining its hold over a radicalising working class. In 1919, British workers had unleashed a massive strike wave that continued into 1920. Labour parliamentary and union leaders while nominally supporting the strikes worked overtime to ensure that they did not reach the level that would threaten the stability of the capitalist order. This is despite the unions representing the miners, railways workers and dockers and other transport workers having earlier formed themselves into a Triple Alliance promising to stand as one to fight for their demands. However, when each section of workers was facing major disputes with their bosses in 1919 and 1920, the pro-Labour Party union leaders refused to call out their members to strike as one as the Triple Alliance promised. Labour leaders held the same attitude to the promises of Clause IV as they did to the Triple Alliance. Clause IV existed to express a sentiment that would maintain the allegiance of pro-socialist workers to Labour but provided no program of action as to how an economic system in Britain based on “common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange” was going to be actually achieved. This was because the social democratic Labour leaders were unwilling to mobilise the revolutionary struggle needed to win such a system.

However, for most British workers it meant a lot that the leaders of the party that they saw as their party was promising to nationalise the mines and railways, greatly increase the provision of public housing and significantly redistribute income from the capitalists to the workers should they win the next election. To be sure, Lenin pointed out that the most politically advanced section of the British working class already distrusted Labour Party leaders and their commitment to deliver on their stated agenda. They had been convinced of this through communist propaganda and theory. However, the majority of workers could not be educated in this way. They needed to be shown through their own experience that social democracy is incapable of bringing a fundamental redistribution of power and wealth in society towards the working class – let alone open the road to socialism. Thus Lenin argued that it was necessary to get Labour elected to government and be put to the test. At the same time, communists must explain to the mass of British workers that communists are helping them to get the Labour Party elected in order to prove to them that the Labour Party will surely betray working class people. Communists would say to the British workers: we will prove to you that only our communist program can bring you lasting improvements in living standards, public ownership and socialism.

Yet such a tactic only made sense because British workers at the time could have genuine illusions that the Labour Party would nationalise key industries, seriously redistribute income towards the workers and make steps toward socialism. No politically engaged worker in Australia could have had illusions before last May’s elections that Albanese’s ALP was going to do any of these things. For not only did the ALP never promise any nationalisations, it was careful to not even speak about redistributing wealth from the capitalists to the masses in even the mildest way. Indeed, while the ALP did promise to stop the decline in real wages, it also promised to follow through on implementing the Coalition’s planned tax cuts for the rich – a promise that they dutifully kept!

Lenin’s advocacy of the tactic of critical support was also shaped by the attitude of the British capitalist class towards the Labour Party. Openly declaring his fear of a Labour victory, then prime minister from the capitalist Liberal Party, Lloyd George, compared the Labour Party to the Bolsheviks! He was of course completely wrong! However, such statements from capitalist leaders could only reinforce illusions amongst politically conscious British workers that the Labour Party would advance the country towards socialism. Moreover, the anti-Labour rants of Lloyd George and his then secretary of state for war, Winston Churchill, showed the then gulf between the agenda that the Labour Party had been pushed by their base to promise and the level of pro-working class reforms that the capitalist class were prepared to accept. In such a situation, an electoral victory for the Labour Party against the openly capitalist parties would be seen as a victory for the working class over the capitalists that would raise the fighting morale of anti-capitalist workers. This situation definitely did not occur in Australia around the May 2022 elections. A gauge of what the big end of town thought about the triumph of Albanese’s ALP in the last federal elections can be seen by comparing Australia’s stock market index immediately before and after the May 21 election. Not only was there no dramatic fall but the index actually rose slightly. This proved that much of the capitalist class were either mildly sympathetic or ambivalent towards the Labor victory over the conservatives. There was certainly no fear amongst wealthy investors that a Labor election would lead to a major reduction in the rate of capitalist profits.

The most important reason why Lenin and the other Bolshevik leaders, like Trotsky, thought that British communists should give critical electoral support to Britain’s Labour Party is because, at the time, that party had never previously led a national government. That meant that the majority of Labour’s working class base still had many illusions that should the party take over the government, this would lead to a substantial improvement in their living standards and major advances towards socialism. Many workers held the social democratic illusion that since workers make up the majority of the population, they could take over society through “democratic elections”. These hopes were reinforced by the then still expanding suffrage in Britain that was expanding the right to vote to workers who had been previously disenfranchised by laws restricting the right to vote to those who owned more than a specified amount of property. It was only in 1918 that all property requirements for male voters were scrapped granting the right to vote to the 40% of males hitherto denied suffrage because they lacked sufficient property; and that the right to vote was at long last extended to a large number of women (provided that they were over 30 and had some property – it took until 1928 for British women to be granted the same voting rights as men). British working class people expected that this expanded suffrage for working class people, the prospect of a future expansion of suffrage to low-income women lacking property and to younger women and the hoped-for scrapping of laws allowing business owners and other, mostly wealthy, individuals to vote twice, would open the way for workers to finally bring their numbers in society to bear in the political field. Lenin and the other leaders of the Communist International understood that it would take the experience of Labour in government to dash the hopes of the mass of politically engaged British workers that there could be an electoral road to socialism.

More than a century later, when workers in both Britain and Australia have been subjected to many Labour/Labor governments over the decades, such illusions amongst workers have been disappointed many times over. Indeed, over the last four decades, the Australian Labor Party has headed the federal government for a full half of this period. Therefore, right now, working class people in Australia do not have unrealistic expectations that a Labor government would fundamentally restructure society in their interests. That means that for communists to today consider applying the tactic of critical support towards the Labor Party, the ALP would need to stand on a far more emphatic pro-working class agenda than would have been required for communists to apply critical support in the period before the ALP first headed a majority government or in the period when it had been out of office for several decades (as was the case when the Whitlam Labor government was elected in 1972). The leaders of the anti-revolutionary ALP would only proclaim such an agenda if they were pushed to do so by a huge surge in militancy and left-wing radicalism of their working class base. Yet when the socialist consciousness of working class people reaches the next level – when the majority of the politically active section of the toiling masses is not only intent on resisting capitalist exploitation but desire the sweeping away of the entire capitalist order – then the time for electoral tactics becomes superseded; and communists will need to immediately organise a direct struggle for the working class seizure of state power. Therefore, while it still exists, the window, in terms of working class consciousness, in which the tactic of critical support to mass social democratic parties is applicable is narrower than it was a century ago.

What is called for before determining whether the tactic of critical support should be applied towards a particular social democratic party is a careful examination of what the party is claiming to stand for, what attitude the capitalist class is taking towards that party, what the sentiments of the working class are and what the general state of the class struggle is. What is definitely not needed is to mindlessly campaign for the victory of mass social democratic parties at every election based on what Lenin advocated towards the British Labour Party more than a century ago ‒ a position that was based on the particular circumstances at the time where that party had never previously led a government and, pushed by the striking growth in pro-socialist sentiments amongst their base following the October 1917 Russian Revolution, was proclaiming its intent to nationalise key industries and oppose its own rulers’ war moves against Soviet Russia. Those far-left groups that advocated a vote for the ALP at last year’s federal elections when the ALP was not even pretending to stand on an anti-capitalist program achieved the very opposite of Lenin’s tactic of supporting a mass social democratic party “in the way that a rope supports a hanged man.” Instead of helping to break the working class masses from allegiance to the ALP in the direction of support for communism, their call for support to the ALP pushed the masses, disgruntled at the Labor Party’s subservience to the capitalist bigwigs, back towards the Labor Party. No matter what else they said, by calling to support Albanese’s ALP, these pseudo-Leninist groups sent a message to those that they have influence over that no matter how much the ALP upholds the domination of the big end of town at home and the international agenda of that class abroad, workers have “no choice” but to support the ALP as “a lesser evil”. This can only breed despair and demoralisation amongst the working class. It harms the building of class struggle resistance to the capitalist exploiters.

WHAT ABOUT THE GREENS?

Given how small are the differences between Labor’s agenda and that of the Liberals, the Greens have gained a growing following amongst progressive-minded youth and the small-l liberal, middle class. They are attracted to the Greens by some progressive policies that the Greens advocate. This includes the Greens platform calling for dental to be covered by Medicare. Unlike the ALP, whose plan to grow “social” housing only involves a small increase in privately owned, “community housing” rather than any increase in public housing, the Greens stand for actually increasing public housing, albeit at a modest pace. However, to implement such reforms, let alone really substantial anti-poverty measures, requires standing up to inevitable resistance from the majority of the capitalist class. The Greens cannot do this because they reject a class struggle outlook. This is because the Greens actually embrace wealthy capitalists in their own party and a dominant role in their party is played by upper-middle class elements who gain part of their income from capitalist share investments. For example, one capitalist investor, Duncan Turpie, has personally donated over a million dollars to the Greens over the last few years. Therefore, lacking both the will and ability to challenge capitalist power, any Greens in government will inevitably bend to the demands of the powerful capitalists.

That is why in the early 2010s, when the Greens had two ministries in the then Tasmanian government, they were part of a joint government with Labor that cut nursing jobs and public housing maintenance. Federally, as part of a defacto coalition with Labor from 2010 to 2013, the Greens helped oversee the final privatisation of Telstra begun under John Howard. Today, they back the rest of the capitalist class’ drive to strangle socialistic rule in China. Indeed, while opposing the AUKUS nuclear submarine plans, the Greens are even more rabid than either Labor or the Coalition when it comes to spewing the lying “human rights” tirades against China that “rationalises” such military escalation. In this the Australian Greens are similar to their German counterparts who today form a key part of Germany’s coalition government alongside the Social Democratic Party and the avidly neoliberal, Free Democratic Party. The leader of Germany Greens, Annalena Baerbock, is that country’s foreign minister. While preferring to wrap their meddling imperialist agenda in more “human rights” packaging than their right-wing counterparts, Germany’s Greens are so extreme in supporting both Western imperialism’s proxy war against Russia and its Cold War drive against socialistic China that they would make neoconservatives blush! A future Greens role in the Australian government, either as a coalition with Labor or alone, would similarly see them act as imperialist warriors with a “progressive” face. Although the Greens call for lowering defence spending to 1.5% of GDP that would still be much higher than the likes of Canada and Japan and, on a per person level, nearly five times higher than China’s. The Greens international agenda is to support essentially the same imperialist interests of Australia’s capitalist class that Labor and the Coalition uphold, while pushing to supplement military might with greater use of “human rights” propaganda, increased support for pro-Western opposition movements in countries targeted by Western imperialism and deeper utilisation of Australian government aid as a means of political manipulation.

The Greens unwillingness and inability, as a party, to resolutely stand up to the rest of the capitalist establishment has sometimes even been evident when their own members have been targeted by other sections of the ruling class. Greens politicians are frequently pilloried by Far-Right parties, right-wing Coalition MPs, the Murdoch media, conservative think tanks and other organs of the hard right-wing of the capitalist class. Copping such, often vicious
and personal, attacks is indeed part of what gives the Greens credibility with progressive-minded people. A favourite target of the rabid right-wing is the federal Greens First Nations portfolio head – DjabWurrung Gunnai Gunditjmara Aboriginal woman and senator from Victoria, Lidia Thorpe. Before becoming a Greens senator, Thorpe had been well known as a staunch activist for Aboriginal rights. Thus, her entry into the Greens gave the party increased authority amongst many Aboriginal people and leftists. In May 2017, at the Uluru Aboriginal convention where supporters of constitutional recognition created their petition calling for the establishment of a First Nations “Voice” enshrined in the Australian Constitution, Lidia Thorpe was one of the staunch activists who walked out of the convention in protest at the direction it was heading in. She stated at the time, “We as sovereign First Nations people reject constitutional recognition. We do not recognise occupying power or their sovereignty, because it serves to disempower, and takes away our voice,” insisting that, “We need to protect and preserve our sovereignty.” When the new Albanese government announced its intention to push for the implementation of the advisory “Voice”, Thorpe made clear that she was not going to simply roll over and accept the scheme that was being championed by small-l liberals, social democrats, “progressive”-liberals and many mainstream conservatives. Lidia Thorpe insisted that a Treaty between the government and Aboriginal people, a Truth Commission to lay bare all the genocidal crimes that have been perpetrated against Aboriginal people, the stopping of Aboriginal deaths in custody and providing proper compensation for Aboriginal people who were stolen from their families when children, all took precedence over the “Voice”. As a result of this stance, the centrist and “progressive” sections of the ruling class establishment joined their right-wing counterparts in setting their political gunsights on Thorpe. It was, indeed, the supposedly centrist-“progressive” ABC News that led the renewed witch hunt against Lidia Thorpe. They sensationalised an “exposé’” about how Thorpe had once briefly dated a former Victorian leader of an “outlaw” bikie gang. Quickly, the rest of the racist establishment joined the beat up claiming that Thorpe had a potential conflict of interest because she sat on a parliamentary “law enforcement committee”, even though the person she dated had years before left the motorcycle group and had no criminal convictions and despite the committee having not even inquired into outlaw motorcycle groups during Thorpe’s time as a member. Indeed, the man Thorpe briefly dated, who is a strong supporter of Aboriginal rights, seems to be a saint relative to the greedy, often corrupt and frequently racist capitalist exploiters that most parliamentarians associate with. Yet, less than an hour after the ABC unleashed this revamped witch-hunt against Lidia Thorpe, Greens leader Adam Bandt cowardly forced his First Nations portfolio head to resign as the Greens deputy leader in the Senate. Bandt also publicly condemned Thorpe for showing a “significant lack of judgement”, while saying nothing against the obvious beat up against her. A party that cannot even defend one of its own leaders against a ruling class witch hunt, moreover one laden with large amounts of racism and misogyny, is incapable of standing up to the rest of the capitalist ruling class more generally. The Greens should be given no political support – including at election time!

After this article was written, on 6 February 2022, DjabWurrung Gunnai Gunditjmara woman and prominent voice for Aboriginal rights, Lidia Thorpe, quit the Greens. The federal senator, who had been the Greens First Nations spokesperson, will now sit as an independent. Announcing her resignation from the Greens, Lidia Thorpe stated that: “This country has a strong grassroots blak sovereign movement, full of staunch and committed warriors, and I want to represent that movement fully”, “It has become clear to me that I can’t do that within the Greens.” Earlier, targeted for her strong advocacy of Aboriginal rights and her refusal to simply roll over and accept the powerless “Voice” to parliament scheme that was being championed by small-l liberals, social democrats and “progressive”-liberals and many mainstream conservatives, Lidia Thorpe had been subjected to a despicable witch-hunt over having once dated a former member of a motorcycle gang (big deal!). Greens leader, Adam Bandt, failed to defend Thorpe from the witch-hunt and indeed cowardly forced his First Nations portfolio head to resign as the Greens deputy leader in the Senate. Although our Marxist-Leninist politics are different to Lidia Thorpe’s politics, we salute her determined advocacy of Aboriginal people’s liberation right now and say: Down with the racist, right-wing and small-l liberal witch-hunt of Lidia Thorpe! Bravo Lidia Thorpe for having the courage of her convictions to resign from the Greens in order to unshackle her struggle for Aboriginal people’s rights! Hopefully Lidia Thorpe’s resignation will encourage any progressive-minded workers or youth that have illusions in the Greens to also break from the party. And hopefully it will put pressure on those Far Left groups that tail after the Greens and give it electoral support to dump their unprincipled support to this party of the “progressive”-liberal wing of the inherently anti-Aboriginal, capitalist establishment. We say: No unity with any wing of Australia’s racist, capitalist ruling class – including the “progressive”-liberal wing represented by the Greens!
Photo credit: Matt Roberts/ABC News

Several socialist groups that stood to the left of the Greens also ran in the May 2022 federal elections. Unlike the Greens, these parties proudly proclaim themselves anti-capitalist organisations. Among these groups is Socialist Alliance. Whereas the Greens advocate maintaining the U.S.-Australia alliance – only calling for it to be “renegotiated” – Socialist Alliance rightly demand an end to the alliance. Moreover, while the Greens leadership refused to defend their own First Nations portfolio head, Lidia Thorpe, from the reactionary witch hunt unleashed against her five months after the elections, Socialist Alliance had the decency to condemn the attack upon her. However, Socialist Alliance tied their 2022 electoral campaign to the Greens. They called not only for directing preferences to the Greens but for a vote to the Greens in seats where their own party was not standing. This is despite Socialist Alliance and other pro-Greens socialists sometimes acknowledging the capitalist essence of the Greens. By advocating a vote for the Greens, Socialist Alliance and other pro-Greens socialists are undermining class struggle by, in effect, promoting the false notion that a wing of the capitalist class – represented by the Greens – can improve workers’ lives. This is as harmful to the building of militant unions as the false notion at the workplace level that workers can improve their lot by helping “nicer” managers to become their top bosses.

The tailing of the Greens by the likes of Socialist Alliance not only reflects their failure to insist on the independence of the working class movement from all wings of the capitalist class – including the “progressive”-liberal wing represented by the Greens – but also the fact that these reformist socialist groups share not only the Greens’ progressive positions but also share its reactionary loyalty to the key global strategic agendas of the Australian capitalist class. Thus, Socialist Alliance, like the Greens, are avid supporters of the U.S.-NATO-Australian regimes’ proxy war against Russia. An 18 September 2022 Socialist Alliance resolution even supported the supply of arms to Ukraine by these Western regimes. Still more harmfully, Socialist Alliance apes the Greens in lining up behind the principle strategic goal of the U.S. and Australian imperialist ruling classes: to destroy the Chinese workers state. Socialist Alliance excuses this position by ridiculously claiming that China is just another “capitalist” country and, what’s more, one dominated by “authoritarian nationalist politics.” With these rationales, Socialist Alliance, while rightly opposing the U.S.-Australia military build up against China, fervently support the Western imperialists’ anti-communist propaganda assaults on Red China over “human rights”. They also support all the forces attacking socialistic rule in China from within – from the pro-colonial, upper-middle class, anti-communist opposition forces in Hong Kong to the Taiwanese capitalist ruling class seeking to guarantee its rule of exploitation through securing independence from socialistic China to last November’s Chinese version of the Far Right-instigated, anti-COVID response “Freedom” protests. Unless Socialist Alliance both dumps their support for the imperialist-driven campaign to undermine the Chinese workers state and breaks free from the orbit of the “progressive”-capitalist Greens, they should not be given even critical electoral support – including at the upcoming NSW state election.

WHAT THE MAY 2022 ELECTION RESULTS SIGNIFIED

The Greens gained significantly during last May’s federal elections. With an increasing share of the vote, they boosted their numbers in the Lower House from one seat to four seats and their Senate numbers went up by to twelve seats from the nine held previously. Although the Coalition were badly defeated, the ALP’s first preference vote actually fell slightly. The loss in Coalition vote in affluent areas was in good part siphoned off to so-called Teal “independents” that advocated greater action against climate change, gender equality and more small-l liberal social policies. Their success represented a rebuff by the liberal sections of the upper class and upper middle-class to the Liberal-National’s increasingly extreme, rightward course on social policies, resistance to action on climate change and male chauvinist internal culture. These “independents” grabbed six formerly safe Liberal seats in urban and suburban areas in addition to those that they held prior to the elections. However, these Teal independents are as committed to anti-working class, neoliberal economic policies as the conservatives. Their campaigns relied on lavish funding from corporate bigwigs and other wealthy individuals. Some of this went directly to TEAL candidates and the rest was funnelled through campaign groups like Climate 200, which alone provided nearly $6 million dollars to TEAL candidates. Among those making donations well in excess of $1 million to the TEALs and Climate 200 were Australia’s fourth and fifth richest capitalist exploiters – Atlassian cofounders Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar – and the CEO of trading outfit VivCourt, Rob Keldoulis. Also providing big bucks for the TEALs is Climate 200 convenor, Simon Holmes à Court, a capitalist investor and one of the heirs to the wealth of his father, Australia’s first billionaire, ruthless corporate raider Robert Holmes à Court. On the opposite political flank of the Coalition, the Liberals and Nationals lost votes to the Far-Right parties. The parties to the right of the Coalition increased their vote by nearly 60% relative to the previous elections. That means that last May’s elections saw one in eight people vote in the Lower House for a range of extreme right-wing parties including the racist Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and Liberal Democratic parties and billionaire Clive Palmer’s ultra-nationalist, United Australia Party. This reflected the dangerously growing right-wing extremism of a chunk of Australia’s disgruntled middle class and self-employed layers – a result of their economic insecurities in the context of the decaying capitalist order and the present failure of the workers movement to provide a powerful anti- capitalist alternative that could channel the legitimate component of middle-class grievances. The splintering away, in either direction, from the main parties of the capitalist class, the Liberals and the Nationals, ultimately reflects the crisis of confidence that the capitalist class feels internally as it agonises over the economic and social crises of its own system, on the one hand, and on the other, panics over the implications posed by the successes of socialistic rule in the world’s most populous country.

Given that there was no mass workers party running on an anti-capitalist platform in last May’s elections, the most crucial aspect of the election results to examine was the proportion of people who did not cast valid votes. It turns out that the number of people who risked a fine by neither showing up to vote nor filling out a postal ballot increased by 25% from the previous elections – reflecting fading hopes in the supposedly “democratic” political system. Over one in ten voters did this. More interesting still is to analyse the number of people who turned up to the ballot boxes to get their names ticked off to avoid a fine and then did not cast a valid vote. Some of these people even wrote messages criticising the political parties instead of numbering the boxes. More than eight hundred thousand people in this way “voted” Informal at last May’s federal elections. Although a very small proportion of these people may have simply filled out the forms in error, for the most part, their Informal “vote” represented distrust of all the political parties running in the elections.

Such anti-establishment suspicion could come from a number of different standpoints. In the worst case it could reflect people’s adherence to any number of crazy, inherently right-wing, conspiracy theories or to the fact that each extreme right-wing party was not on the ballot in every seat where there were people who wanted to vote for them. However, the greatest share of the Informal vote came from working class voters – often from people of colour backgrounds – who would never dream of voting for the Liberals or Far-Right parties but are understandably disillusioned with the ALP for not standing up for their interests. This is proven by the big disparity in the Informal “vote” between the wealthy electorates and the strongly, pro-ALP working class electorates. Thus in the rich Sydney electorate of Wentworth, which includes plush suburbs like Bellevue Hill, Point Piper, Rose Bay and Vaucluse, just 2.5% of people “voted” Informal. Wealthy residents trust the political system and their casting of valid votes reflects their understanding that they have a voice in how the system operates. In contrast, the opposite sentiment is significant in working class areas. Thus, in the Sydney electorate of Blaxland, which largely consists of heavily Asian, Middle Eastern, African and Islander working class suburbs like Auburn, Bankstown, Chester Hill and Villawood, the Informal “vote” was well over four times higher than it was in wealthy Wentworth. Nearly one in nine voters showed up to the ballots in Blaxland only to cast an Informal “vote”. Indeed, in particular voting booths in Sydney’s multiracial southwest, the Informal vote was even higher. In the Blaxland polling booth in Auburn West, nearly one in five voters cast an Informal “vote”. In the Villawood North polling booth in the seat of Fowler and the Fairfield Heights booth in the McMahon electorate, the Informal “vote” was also more than 18%. By contrast, a ten times lower proportion of voters cast an Informal “vote” at the polling booths in the wealthy Double Bay and Bellevue Hill South areas. Some mainstream political commentators, eager to cover up the distrust in the “democratic” system amongst the working class masses, patronisingly claim that the much higher Informal “vote” in migrant, working class areas is due to poor education and lack of English ability causing people not to know how to vote properly. However, while such problems caused by socio-economic disadvantage is a minor factor, it is not the main one. This is proven by the reality that the Informal “vote” in the Senate, where people have greater choice in the parties that they can vote for, is more than a third lower than it is in the Lower House vote. The fact that the Informal “vote” mostly represents a conscious choice to reject all the parties running in the elections is further proven by the fact that the Informal vote fluctuates widely from election to election. After all, if unintentional errors in filling out ballot papers were the cause of the Informal vote it should not swing so wildly from election to election.

Indeed, the narrow defeat of high-profile Labor candidate Kristina Keneally to a local independent in the multiracial, working class, southwestern Sydney electorate of Fowler can be, in good part, put down to the fact that well over one in ten voters – no doubt mostly potential Labor voters – turned up to the ballots to get their names ticked off and then cast an informal “vote”. Indeed, when a Trotskyist Platform supporter in this electorate explained to Labor election day canvassers why he would be “voting” Informal, the reaction of the Labor activists was along the lines off: Oh no, not you as well, please don’t waste your vote like so many other people! This indicated that many others in the electorate were “voting” Informal as a conscious rejection of all the parliamentary parties and in particular as a rebuff of the party that they see as the party which should represent them but which they rightly understand has betrayed them – the ALP.

WORKERS DO NEED A PARTY – BUT ONE BUILT TO ORGANISE
INTRANSIGENT RESISTANCE TO THE CAPITALIST CLASS

That proportion of working class people who would never support the conservative or Far-Right parties but are disillusioned with Labor can be a key force for organising class struggle action to fight for the rights of working class people and all the oppressed. However, that is only if their disappointment with Labor and the whole system does not lead to them becoming skeptical of the possibility of achieving change and cause them to become depoliticised. Especially when plunging living standards and economic insecurity constantly impel people into political activity, political demoralisation can sometimes be people’s first step to turning towards the Far Right whose stock in trade is, after all, to turn despair at the possibility of resisting the big end of town into scapegoating of the most downtrodden layers of society.

That is why it is crucial that there be built a working class party that will provide a genuine alternative to the many disillusioned former Labor supporters. However, such a party must be completely different to the ALP. We do not need another party vying for administrative leadership of the capitalist system in order to try to tweak the system to serve the masses’ interests, which is the mission impossible that the ALP seeks to fulfil (at least in the most generous evaluation of the party’s ethos). What we need instead is a workers party that is committed to organising intransigent mass resistance to the capitalist exploiting class and their system. Right now, the potential to mobilise such class struggle resistance is especially evident in Europe where the masses living standards are plunging particularly rapidly. Angered by surging inflation and crumbling public services, hundreds of thousands of French transport workers, teachers, oil refinery workers and others went on strike last Friday against French president Macron’s moves to raise the age at which people can get the aged pension. Meanwhile, workers in Britain have unleased the biggest wave of industrial action there in decades. In the last two months, rail workers, bus drivers, teachers, nurses, paramedics, postal workers and others have waged a series of strikes against falling real wages. To mobilise such struggle here and, most importantly, to ensure that the struggles are both raised to the level of intensity and guided to the direction that can ensure victory (which is a challenge also acutely faced by the rebelling workers movements of France and Britain given their social democratic misleadership), it is necessary to not only positively motivate the need for such actions but to knock down the serious political obstacles impeding militant class struggle resistance.

One such obstacle is the widely held illusion that a Labor government is, in some way, a workers government. A more left-wing version of this myth is the idea that even though an ALP government is far from ideal, the ALP in office can be made to serve the interests of the masses through political pressure and campaigning. Unfortunately, such illusions are being reinforced by many Far Left groups – due to their social democratic skew away from authentic Marxism. This includes the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). Thus, an open letter sent last June by the CPA’s National President to prime minister Albanese praises his government’s stance on a number of issues while politely urging him to take a more progressive stance on others. The letter begins by expressing warm solidarity with the new government:

“Dear Prime Minister Albanese, The Communist Party of Australia wishes to congratulate you on the election of a Labor government and the more diverse Cabinet of MPs and Senators. We recognise you will face many challenges from the nine years of the corrupt, dysfunctional Coalition government with its anti-worker, union-bashing record.”

The Guardian, Issue #2012, 27 June 2022,
https://cpa.org.au/guardian/issue-2012/open-letter-to-the-prime-minister-of-australia/

The CPA letter then covers up the Albanese government’s failure to seriously push for real wage rises and its backing of a minimum wage increase that it knew would not be sufficient to match the widely predicted increase in inflation in the following months by cheering that “We warmly welcome your government’s swift action to support a cost-of living increase in the minimum wage. The outcome is a start to arresting the decline in real wages experienced by low and middle-income workers over recent decades.” Well it wasn’t even a start! Real wages have plummeted at an even greater rate in the seven months since! The CPA letter even praised the Albanese government’s stance on the Palestinian issue by stating that: “We congratulate your government on its stand at the United Nations in not supporting the US-led opposition to an inquiry into human rights abuses by Israel in the occupied territories of Palestine.” Yet, even then it was clear that the new government had no intention of reversing the Australian regime’s long-standing support for Israel’s brutal oppression of the Palestinian people. Indeed, over the last few months, the ALP government has been amongst just a small number of other governments around the world to oppose UN motions aimed against the Israeli regime’s tyranny over the Palestinian people and other Arab peoples in its neighbourhood.

The most harmful aspect of the CPA leadership’s warm open letter to the head of Australia’s capitalist regime is the false notions that it promotes amongst the party’s supporters that the Albanese government deserves some level of support and can be pressured to take a basically progressive course. Such ideas are completely wrong. The Labor Party is, to be sure, a party with a working class base. However, its leadership and program support the capitalist order. Moreover, the Albanese government heads a state machine that has been built up to enforce the interests of the exploiting class. As the last eight months of plunging real wages, skyrocketing rents and continued military build-up against socialistic China proves, the Albanese government is an enemy of the working class and oppressed. Although the CPA and other reformist Far Left groups say that “grassroots campaigning and direct action” is necessary to “push Labor to the left and force progressive policy on key issues”, their semi-favourable portrayal of the ALP government and their sugar-coating of its actions acts to deter the building of truly intransigent class struggle. For it reinforces the false notion that militant anti-capitalist struggle – whether aimed against reactionary policies of the Labor government or against particular capitalist bosses – should currently be avoided, lest it undermine a Labor government that should be given some level of support. Today, the wide acceptance of this idea by politically active workers and progressive youth is the main reason why, despite working class people’s plummeting living standards here, the Australian workers movement and Left has yet to unleash, even, the level of class and other progressive social struggle seen in the likes of France and Britain.

Britain, 18 January 2023: Nurses picket outside London’s University College Hospital as part of a mass nurses’ strike. Over the last two months, Britain has had its biggest strike wave in decades as workers desperately demand decent pay rises to keep up with soaring living costs. However, the full potential of such powerful strike action is held back from being brought to bear by the social democratic (pro-Labour Party), present leadership of Britain’s workers movement. The same problem faces the Australian working class. Moreover, even though Australian workers are seeing similar cuts to their real wages as their British counterparts, since a Labor government is in office here (unlike in Britain), the pro-Labor social democratic bent of Australia’s current union leadership and beliefs amongst workers themselves that a Labor government should be supported as a “lesser evil” has meant that workers here are yet to unleash the level of resistance seen in Britain – let alone the massive, hard-fought struggle needed to truly smash the attacks on workers’ living standards.
Photo credit: Reuters/Toby Melville

Another widely held misconception holding back class struggle right now is the idea that the new Albanese government has won a “mandate” through its election and should not be opposed in the first half of its term, at least when it is carrying out policies that it took to the elections. However, under capitalism, such “mandates” are not truly “democratically” chosen by the people. For in capitalist societies, any elections and the political discourse leading up to them do not express the interests of the majority of people – the working class masses. For starters, this is because it is capitalists who thoroughly dominate ownership of the media and, thus, ensure that it is only the policies that serve their class that are being promoted by the news media. Moreover, through their incredible wealth, it is the capitalists who are, in great disproportion to their numbers, able to dominate funding of political parties, buying of political advertising, hiring of lobbyists and establishing of those supposedly “independent” think tanks and “movements” (like the right-wing Advance Australia) that have such a great impact on public opinion. Disclosures about political donations in Australia are not yet available for the 2021-22 financial year when the federal elections were held and, thus, when the biggest donations would have been made. But records do show that in the previous financial year, a whopping $177 million dollars flowed into Australia’s political parties – most of it through undisclosed donations and receipts. From the records of the small portion of donations that are disclosed, we do know that in the last two financial years for which records are available, 2019-2020 and 2020-2021, Australia’s fifth richest person with a total wealth of $24.3 billion, Anthony Pratt and family (owners of packaging and paper giant Visy Industries) donated nearly $2.9 million to the Coalition. Meanwhile, in the same period, Australia’s seventh richest person, Clive Palmer, donated nearly $6 million to his United Australia Party, which helped it win a Senate seat in Victoria at the recent federal election. And if you are wondering why the Coalition and Labor keep on allowing the bank bosses to ruthlessly plunder from their customers despite these corporate bigwigs admitting to rip-off practices like charging customers account management fees for no service, here is some part of your answer: from 2019 to 2021 the four big banks donated a combined $580,000 to each of Labor and the Coalition. With such huge money flowing into the “democratic process” from the corporate elite, what chance do the working class masses struggling to pay bills have to significantly shape the “mandates” of the dominant parliamentary parties? The fact is that these “mandates” primarily represent the will of the super-rich capitalist exploiting class. We should not be bowing down before any such “mandates”!

Since this article was written, the Australian Electoral Commission has finally released the list of major political donations for the financial year from 1 July 2021 to 30 June 2022. Above are some of the ultra-rich capitalists whose large political donations thoroughly shaped last May’s federal elections and the political discourse that surrounded it. From Left to Right: Anthony Pratt, Australia’s fifth richest person and owner of the Visy packaging giant; filthy rich tycoon, Dick Honan, who along with his children own agribusiness behemoth, Manildra Group; mining billionaire, Clive Palmer; Australia’s fourth richest capitalist, Scott Farquhar; high-rolling investor, Duncan Turpie; Pierre Langenhoven who alongside his wife, Luciana, are big-time pastoralists in the NT and the son-in-law and daughter respectively of one of South Africa’s richest men. In the 2021-2022 financial year, Anthony Pratt made political donations of almost $4 million evenly distributed to the ALP and the Coalition. This is unlike in the previous two years, where Pratt donated a total of over $2.8 million to the Coalition as against just 0.35% of that amount to the ALP. The big turnaround reflects the fact that the capitalists were increasingly worried that the corrupt and unpopular Morrison government would not be able to hold back workers’ anger over falling real wages. Hence, the capitalist exploiters thought that Labor, with its organic ties to the union leadership, would be more effective at restraining workers’ resistance than the conservatives. As a result, many capitalists chose to support, or at minimum be indifferent to, an ALP victory in the 2022 elections. Dick Honan’s Manildra Group also gave big amounts to both sides: donating $154,200 to the Coalition and a slightly lesser $105,718 to Labor. Clive Palmer made by far the biggest political donations. He incredibly gave almost $117 million to his United Australia Party (UAP) and another $250,000 to fellow Far Right outfit, the Liberal Democratic Party. As a result, despite the UAP’s increasingly extremist right-wing politics, mixed with a good deal of crackpot conspiracy, the UAP was able to win a Senate seat and increase its vote in the lower house by 20%. Meanwhile Scott Farquhar donated $1.5 million to the Climate 200 campaign group that was in good part responsible for getting the TEAL “independents” elected and which also backed the Centre Alliance that won a lower house seat in the only seat that it contested. By donating more than three quarters of a million dollars to his campaign, Climate 200 were also largely responsible for getting elected ACT “independent” senator David Pocock (who later became known for weakening the only significant pro-worker aspect of the government’s “Secure Jobs, Better Pay” law). Farquhar also donated $8,000 to the Greens. However, the biggest single donor to the Greens in the 2021-2022 financial year was capitalist investor, Duncan Turpie, who gave the party a whopping $545,555. Also sizable donors to the Greens are the pastoral companies owned by the Langenhoven family. These filthy rich, rural capitalists donated a combined $29,000 to the Greens last financial year.

In all the imperialist countries, at all times, among the biggest obstacles to working class resistance is the notion that the capitalist class on the one hand and working class people and other downtrodden sectors on the other have substantial common interests. This false notion is continuously drummed into the working class masses by the currently social democratic, ACTU leadership of our unions. The capitalist ruling class also actively promotes this lie. In large part they do this through whipping up nationalism and the false notion that accompanies it: that all people of the nation regardless of their class position have a common “national interest”. In actual fact, it is the very opposite that is true: that the rights of the working class and all the downtrodden can only be advanced at the expense of the immediate economic interests of the capitalists … and vice versa! This was true even a century ago when Britain’s Labour Party promised substantial reforms benefiting working class people without challenging the capitalist order. However, it is even more so today. For capitalism has reached a still more senile and diseased state than it was in a century earlier. Even by a century ago, the capitalist system had outlived the period when it could still provide some progressive benefits to humanity. The appalling slaughter of World War I where the rival capitalist powers sent the masses of their own countries and their colonies to kill each other for the sake of their competing claims over spheres of exploitation showed this all too clearly. By 1921, Britain and the rest of the capitalist world was in the midst of a sharp post-war recession. Yet, in a longer-term sense, capitalism today is afflicted by a still more severe malaise. The economic collapse in the capitalist world during the late noughties Great Recession was the clearest indicator of this. Most major capitalist economies had never fully recovered from this plunge when they were buffeted by new crises associated with first, COVID and now, out of control inflation. The latest available figures (for 2021) show that since the eve of the late noughties Great Recession, average incomes (adjusted for inflation) have plummeted by 8% in Britain, 9% in Italy, 15% in Brazil and 37% in Greece. The real incomes of the working class section of the population in these countries have fallen still more steeply. If Australia did not suffer to the same degree from the Great Recession and its aftermath, it is solely because China’s booming socialistic state-owned enterprises bought up an ever greater amount of exports from Australia. Indeed, much of the capitalist world has only been saved from still greater disintegration by the rapid growth of the market provided by a socialistic country, in China, combined with the inflation-lowering impact of imports from Red China. To be sure, the wonderful capacity of us humans to innovate occasionally injects some vitality into the shrivelled up veins of late-stage capitalism. However, the system is unable to deliver the benefits of such innovation to the masses. Instead, the capitalist bosses’ only “effective” means to prop up their system is to ever more steeply increase the rate at which they exploit their workers. In by far the biggest capitalist economy, the U.S., real wages are today what they were 50 years ago. In Australia, real wages are lower than they were 12 years earlier. With their system mired in economic and social stagnation and decay, the capitalist bigwigs are even more loathe to grant concessions to the masses than they were a century ago. It will take very intense class struggle to win any substantial gains for the exploited and oppressed masses.

If it is to be able to build large-scale resistance against the ruling class, the workers party that we need will have to oppose nationalism and consciously dispel the myths about the possibility of “win-win” collaboration between the capitalist exploiters and the exploited workers. It will have to convince the masses that every setback for the capitalist rulers strengthens the struggle to advance the rights of working class people and all the downtrodden. That means that such a party would resolutely oppose the extreme exploitation of PNG, East Timor, Fiji, the Solomon Islands and other South Pacific nations by Australian-owned corporations; while opposing the neo-colonial meddling in the region that the Australian regime engages in to facilitate such plunder. Understanding that any setbacks for the U.S./NATO/Australian proxy war against Russia in Ukraine can only make the Western ruling classes more vulnerable to resistance from their masses, a class struggle workers party would stand for the defence of Russia in this conflict – despite the reactionary, capitalist nature of Russia’s ruling class. It would demand an end to all weapons supplies to Ukraine and the immediate dropping of all economic sanctions against Russia.

Whereas the ALP and its allies in the ACTU leadership limit their demands to what it thinks the capitalists will reluctantly tolerate, the new workers party that must be built will fight for what the working class and all oppressed actually need. Given that the crisis-ridden capitalist system cannot satisfy the masses’ aspirations, the ultimate task of such a party is to lead the working class masses to depose the capitalist exploiters from power and take state power into their own hands. This is not an easy task. The capitalists have enormous wealth, control of the economy and the physical power of all the current state institutions. Therefore, to be able to organise the eventual defeat of such an immense force, the members of the revolutionary workers party that we need must be made to adhere to much more rigorous obligations than that of the Labor Party. In the ALP, many join due to a combination of, on the one hand, wanting to advance the interests of working people and, on the other, wanting to build lucrative and socially respectable careers in politics. For the ranks of the party it is more the former that motivates them. However, for the personally ambitious and pushily, careerist-minded people who shove themselves into Labor leadership positions, it is the latter that is often more important. Furthermore, the longer the careers of such leading ALP members progress and, correspondingly, the more evident it is to them that the party’s strategy is incapable of delivering the gains for the masses that may have once primarily motivated them, the more cynical that they become and the more shamelessly that they subordinate their principles for the sake of personal advancement. In contrast, for a party seeking to accomplish so difficult a task as the defeat of the powerful capitalist rulers, the political activity of all members will need to be solely motivated by the goals of liberating the exploited and oppressed and advancing the well-being of humanity. Thus, in working hard to contribute to the building of such a party, we in Trotskyist Platform insist that our members must not seek any personal financial advantage whatsoever out of their involvement in the party’s activities, other than the benefits that they would share with the rest of the masses due to participation in victorious struggles – for example through party members at a workplace being part of industrial action that wins higher wages for all workers at the site. Similarly, members of a revolutionary workers party must not seek even non-material forms of particular personal benefit from their political activities, whether that be fame, ego, sex appeal, social networks or even excitement, although a number of these things, to some degree, may arise as a by-product of their involvement in the struggle. Most crucially, members of a revolutionary party will need to make enormous personal sacrifices for the sake of the struggle and show great personal and political courage.

Despite the enormous power of the capitalists, the working class and other oppressed have one huge advantage over these filthy rich exploiters – there is a lot more of us than them! Moreover, it is the manual and mental labour of the workers that creates capitalist profits. In other words, the working class is potentially a lot more powerful than the capitalists. Indeed, for between a century and a century and a half, the working class in much of the world has had the objective power to overturn capitalist rule. What has been lacking is the consciousness of the need to accomplish this task amongst the mass of workers and a workers’ leadership that is prepared to fight tenaciously for socialist revolution. Even as its own system decays, the capitalists have become increasingly expert at messing up the political consciousness of the working class masses and at poisoning it with nationalism, racism and illusions in the “fairness” of parliamentary “democracy”. Moreover, they are very adept at intervening into the contest within the Left and workers movements between reformists that uphold the capitalist order and revolutionaries opposed to the capitalist system in order to boost the former. The ruling class do so in various ways. First they give enormous financial and other backing to the social democratic reformists. It is not only the bank bosses doing this. The bosses of retail conglomerate, Wesfarmers, and banking and asset management giant, Macquarie Group, each gave around $220,000 to the ALP during the two financial years from 2019 to 2021 – the same amount that they each gave to the Coalition. Meanwhile, in this same period, the bosses of Bluescope Steel which gave Labor $108,000, accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers which gave $254,316, oil and gas giant Santos that gave Labor $88,000 and mining giant Fortescue – owned by Australia’s second richest person Andrew Forrest – that gave nearly $70,000, all gave more to the ALP in this period than they did to the openly capitalist Liberal/Nationals. The corporate bigwigs also skew the political battle between Laborite social democrats and revolutionaries, within the Left and workers’ movements, in other ways. The media that they own and the think tanks that they fund promote the most capitalism-loyal elements within the workers movement, while denigrating and witch-hunting revolutionary elements and more militant union leaders. Meanwhile, their courts, DPPs and police target for persecution the more revolutionary elements of the Left and the more radical officials and delegates within the trade union movement. Within workplaces, capitalist bosses victimise militant union delegates and unionists. The bosses seek to break the spirit of such left-wing workers by giving them the worst, most undesirable workplace tasks. More sinisterly, they prosecute disciplinary actions against these workers by concocting claims that these workers have “violated” workplace rules in order to intimidate these workers with the threat of being sacked. In contrast, capitalist bosses look after those union delegates that are seen as compliant, or open to being co-opted, by giving them special treatment at the workplace. Yet, despite how slanted is the competition for the hearts and minds of the working class masses between the Laborites and other social democrats, on the one hand, and the revolutionaries, on the other, the latter have one massive advantage that tilts the contest back the other way: it is we whose program actually represents the historic interests of the working class and all the oppressed. And as capitalist Australia enters a period where falling economic growth and rising job insecurity melds with the high cost of living, plummeting real wages and dangerously rising imperialist militarism that we have already been copping, it will be easier for revolutionaries to motivate a program that is opposed to the entire capitalist order.

Indeed, even the capitalist rulers themselves know that their system is in crisis. In a January 18 interview, none other than the head of the French capitalist regime, Emmanuel Macron, openly expressed his fears for the stability of capitalist rule and for the precarious state of Western capitalist “democracies”:

“First, there’s a crisis within the global open financial capitalist system. This system is experiencing a deep crisis, because, by acquiring capital, it has caused inequalities to skyrocket…. Therefore, our democratic system is in crisis, because it no longer spontaneously generates progress for all – once again, it creates inequalities between social classes.”

As surely as the sun shines, capitalism will create the conditions that will impel the masses into large-scale struggles. The strike wave that we are seeing today in Britain, France and other parts of Europe is testament to this. The only question is: will the Left be up to the task of intervening in and guiding these struggle towards an eventual assault on the crisis-ridden, inequality-skyrocketing, capitalist order? If we fail in this task, the crisis of capitalism will be exploited by the fascist wing of the capitalist class as it was in the 1930s. The terrifying rise of the Far Right in Europe, the 60% growth in the combined Far Right vote at last May’s Australian elections and the expansion of violent fascist, extra-parliamentary forces in Australia, illustrates this all too clearly.

All this is why now is the time to work extra hard and make still greater sacrifices to advance the struggle against the capitalist system. The final assault on the capitalist order can only be prepared and the masses schooled for this task by training the working class masses in all sorts of partial struggles right now to defend their living standards, oppose racist attacks and make immediate improvements in their rights and conditions. So let us unleash the power of our workers’ unions and build militant class struggle and other progressive struggle actions to win higher wages, the rights of permanency for all gig and casual workers, a massive increase in public housing and the confiscation of the oil, gas, coal and power sectors and their transfer into public ownership. Let us fight for the full rights of citizenship for all visa workers, refugees and international students and build mass actions uniting our unions, Aboriginal people, other people of colour and leftists to drive violent racist outfits off the streets. We must also mobilise these forces to oppose the racist state murder of Aboriginal people in custody, stop the continuing removal of Aboriginal children from their families, win full and genuine land rights for Aboriginal people and ensure decent housing and services in Aboriginal communities funded for by confiscating the wealth of the mining and pastoral bosses. Let us also demand: Down with the racist, right-wing and small-l liberal witch-hunt of Lidia Thorpe! Crucially, to advance the struggle against capitalist rule in this country, we must defend the anti-capitalist conquests that have already been made abroad. Most importantly, that means that we must defend the working class rule – as imperfect and insecure as it may currently be – in China that was born out of her earth-shattering, 1949 anti-capitalist revolution. To unleash all these struggles and ensure that they have the greatest chance of victory, we need to work relentlessly to knock down the political obstacles that impede and limit these struggles. Let us destroy the myth that workers and their capitalist exploiters have a common “national interest.” Let us convince the masses that Albanese’s ALP in power is a capitalist government ‒ just like its right-wing predecessors. And let us point out that “democracy” under capitalism is only truly a democracy for the rich and that the “mandate” that the ALP government has to maintain anti-strike laws, institute tax cuts for the rich, keep unemployment benefits at their present paltry level, avoid increasing actual public housing, shun measures to crack down on housing speculation, continue the military build up and propaganda war against socialistic China and support the Western imperialists’ proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, is not a “mandate” that the masses should, in the slightest, respect. To most effectively bring such understanding to the working class masses, let us build a new workers party that is linked to the new class struggle leadership of our unions that we need. A party composed of those people who understand that workers and their capitalist exploiters have no common “national interest” and are willing to make great sacrifices for the cause of socialist revolution.

REVERSE THE PLUNGE IN WORKING CLASS PEOPLE’S LIVING STANDARDS!

Above photo: Lebanese cucumbers selling for all most $12 a kilogram at a Woolworths supermarket in an Inner West Sydney suburb on 22 July 2022. Food prices in Australia and other capitalist countries have been surging, while wage increases have been small.
Photo credit: Trotskyist Platform

REVERSE THE PLUNGE IN WORKING CLASS
PEOPLE’S LIVING STANDARDS!

FIGHT FOR HUGE WAGE RISES, THE RIGHTS OF PERMANENCY FOR GIG WORKERS, A BIG INCREASE IN THE DOLE AND
A MASSIVE INCREASE IN LOW-RENT PUBLIC HOUSING!

IMMEDIATELY PUT THE GREEDY OIL, GAS
AND POWER FIRMS UNDER PUBLIC CONTROL!

15 July 2022: Food prices are surging. The price of lettuce has more than doubled over the last year. Beef is 12% dearer. And then there are the skyrocketing electricity and fuel costs. Yet while everything is getting more expensive, wages have barely risen. That means that even while the rich business owners extract ever more exorbitant profits from their workers’ labour, workers’ living standards are plummeting. It is of zero comfort to Australia’s working class masses that bankers, corporate bosses, politicians and media “experts” celebrate that the economy is undergoing a “strong expansion” when their own lives are getting ever harder.

Prime minister Albanese stated that it was “absolutely welcome” that the “Fair Work Commission” (FWC) recently set the annual increase in the minimum wage at 5.2%, basically matching the official inflation rate. It is true that unlike the former government, which refused to back a pay rise, the ALP government did call for a minimum wage rise that matched official inflation. Yet not only does the 5.2% increase not make up for the fact that this minimum wage had not kept pace with inflation in the preceding period, it will not match price increases in the coming period, which even the Reserve Bank has conceded will reach 7%. Moreover, as FWC president Iain Ross admitted, the prices of non-discretionary items like food are rising much faster than official inflation, especially hurting those on low incomes. Most low-paid workers are renters and Australia’s rents soared by 9.5% over the last year. Therefore, the actual cost increases endured by low-income workers are closer to 10% and rising fast. In other words, last month’s FWC ruling cheered by Albanese actually means a sizable cut to the real income of minimum wage workers. And other workers will suffer an even bigger cut. The FWC only gave award workers a 4.6% increase – less than even official inflation. Meanwhile, public sector workers are being hit still harder. The right wing NSW government has restricted public sector wage rises to just 3%. Gig workers are suffering the biggest cut in real income. Especially for food delivery workers and taxi and Uber drivers, surging petrol costs are ripping away their net incomes.

WHAT IS CAUSING WORKERS’ LIVING STANDARDS TO PLUNGE
AND HOW CAN THIS BE REVERSED?

Australia is not alone in having soaring living costs. This is happening throughout the capitalist world. A poll found that one in six Germans are now skipping meals to get by! In the U.S. the annual inflation rate is 9.1%. Moreover, the crisis extends to the poorer countries. In India, inflation is over 7%, in Brazil it is nearly 12%. In Turkey, the inflation rate is nearly 80%!

So what is causing this crisis? When capitalist countries plunged into the late noughties’ Great Recession, governments found that they could only make their economies recover through flooding them with cheap credit and debt-financed spending. Even after that crisis waned, capitalist economies were so fragile that governments were never able to take their economies fully off of these life-supports. Then after COVID hit, capitalist governments dialled up the intensity of such pump priming “solutions”. The problem is that in the capitalist system, where the economy is in the hands of profit-driven bosses, excess money supply leads the corporate bigwigs to drive up prices. To ensure that the resulting increased revenue flows into their own pockets and not that of their workers, business owners avoid increasing wages knowing full well that soaring prices means that they are effectively slashing their workers’ pay. As a result, workers’ real wages in Australia are now 8% lower than they were six years ago!

This increasing exploitation has been going on under Liberal, Labor and Labor/Greens governments alike. Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data show that bosses are now exploiting their workers 22% more than they were 36 years ago. As a result, ABS figures show that for every $100,000 of value added by workers – that is after all material, property and interest costs have been paid – at a capitalist business (one using hired labour) about $50,000 is gouged by the business owners as profit and only $50,000 is given back in wages! And given that the ABS classifies the fat salaries of CEOs and managers as “wages and salaries”, the reality is that, on average, workers in Australia are now receiving back as wages far less than half of the fruits of their own labour.

Therefore, the measures needed to defend workers’ living standards must be based on drastically increasing the share of the fruits of workers’ labour going back to workers at the expense of the amount that is leached away by the capitalists as profits. For starters that means that the workers movement must fight for huge wage increases. We must also specially defend the most precariously employed workers by demanding guaranteed wages, holiday pay and all the other rights of permanency for all those currently employed on a casual or gig basis. To make it easier to unleash the trade union industrial action needed to win such gains, we must demand the abolishing of all anti-strike laws and all laws restricting union access to workplaces.

Whenever workers demand improvements in their wages, the capitalists scream that this will cause job losses. But such job cuts will only occur if we let these exploiters carry out retrenchments and if we let them retain as few workers as is necessary to maximise their profits. Instead of doing that, we must force the capitalist bosses to hire more workers than they want to at the expense of their profits. We must demand a ban on job cuts by all profitable firms and must demand that all companies making a profit be required to increase their number of full-time, permanent employees by at least twenty-five workers for every one million dollars of quarterly profit.

The already most poverty stricken people are being hardest hit today. Due to entrenched gender inequality, sectors where women workers predominate have especially low wages. It is crucial that the workers movement as a whole demands equal pay for equal work for women workers. Meanwhile, unemployed workers are having to make do with cruelly low social security payments. This is not only driving unemployed workers into extreme poverty but has made the prospect of losing one’s job so scary that it is helping bosses to intimidate some employed workers into avoiding joining workers’ rights struggles. That is why it is especially important to fight for a doubling of the Jobseeker payment. Surging prices also mean that, even though old-age pensioners receive higher payments than unemployed workers, many working class pensioners are facing homelessness. The current system where a meagre pension is combined with individual superannuation carries into old age the inequality that workers faced when at working age. CEOs receive huge superannuation while low-paid workers receive little and gig workers and the unemployed nothing at all. Our unions must demand that the current superannuation system be replaced with one where bosses pay super into a common fund that will be used to help equally pay all a pension equal to the minimum wage.

MASSIVELY INCREASE LOW-RENT PUBLIC HOUSING!

What is making plunging living standards especially unbearable for many working class people is the lack of affordable rental accommodation. Even in the lower income, Western Sydney suburb of Auburn, the median weekly rent for two bedroom units available for lease is right now $435. That’s well over half the minimum wage! And given that so many are working in casual jobs where they receive far less than the minimum full-time wage, it is clear why so many people are only able to pay rent by skipping meals and avoiding using the heater right now at the height of winter. Moreover, there are very few affordable properties available to lease. So people struggling with rising costs are not even able to move into rougher but cheaper dwellings to get by.

The capitalist “free market” is failing to make available enough affordable accommodation – providing such housing is simply not profitable enough for wealthy investors and real estate speculators. What is therefore needed is much more low-rent public housing. Instead, Liberal, Labor and Labor/Greens federal and state governments have overseen a big public housing sell-off over the last few decades. Some of that involves governments handing over public housing to private operators and passing off the resulting “community housing” as also being part of “social housing.” However, the private operators of such “community housing” are notorious for skimping on repairs and skewing their allocations towards higher-rent paying tenants at the expense of the most hard-up. Thus, the proportion of tenants paying more than a quarter of their income in rent is almost eight times as high in “community housing” as it is in public housing.

Even over the last five years, governments have eroded public housing to the extent that the proportion of Australian dwellings that are public housing has been slashed by a further 10%. Today, just one out of every 34 dwellings in Australia belongs to public housing of some form. Yet governments are still continuing on the same course. Let’s stop all sell-offs – let’s fight for a massive increase in public housing instead! And for all public housing properties to be properly repaired! Let’s stop governments from driving tenants out of public housing by allowing properties to become so neglected that they become unfit for habitation!

FOR A NEW, CLASS STRUGGLE AGENDA TO LEAD THE WORKERS MOVEMENT

Many working class people hoped that with the despised Morrison government finally gone, their needs would be addressed. However, the new ALP government also has no commitment to the measures needed to reverse the decline in working class people’s living standards. This was clear even before the elections. To reassure the big end of town that it would not be taking decisive moves to redistribute income from the rich to the poor, the ALP announced that it would ape the conservatives in refusing to lift dole payments. They also made clear that they would not abolish anti-strike laws. That is little surprise. Nearly all these laws had been accepted by previous ALP governments and a few of the rules – such as the Keating government’s 1993 measure restricting strike action to limited bargaining periods – were actually first brought in by Labor. Meanwhile, the ALP’s housing affordability plan will not increase public housing but rather promises funds for just a modest increase in privately-operated “community housing”.

To be sure, ALP leaders would like to improve the lives of their working class base. However, the ALP social democrats are unwilling to seriously challenge the power of the capitalist bigwigs who use their enormous wealth and ownership of the media and economy to thoroughly dominate political life and state institutions. Given their acquiescence to these oligarchs and given that the interests of these capitalists and those of its working class base are counterposed, the Labor Party always ends up betraying its base. Meanwhile, although more progressive on social questions, the Greens too accept the domination of the capitalists. For unlike even the ALP, whose ranks are largely workers, the Greens include significant numbers of actual capitalist exploiters in their ranks and is politically dominated by upper-middle class elements loyal to capitalism.

This means that plunging workers’ living standards are not going to be reversed by the agenda of either the new government or by any of the parties currently in parliament. The way that working class people can advance their interests is through mass action, especially through strikes and other class struggle action by our trade unions. It is through such struggle that working class people have won whatever rights they still have today. In recent months, there have been strikes by NSW train and bus drivers, nurses and teachers that give a small taste of the kind of struggle needed. However, the current pro-ALP union leaders see such actions as supplementary to their main strategy of herding workers into supporting the election and maintaining of Labor governments that they hope will uphold workers’ interests. As we have outlined, this is a losing strategy.

Therefore, we need a new agenda to guide our workers movement. One that rather than seeking collaboration with the capitalist class by limiting demands to what is tolerable to them, will mobilise the working class in an all out struggle against the capitalist exploiters to fight for what the masses actually need. That means not only unleashing struggles for secure jobs for all and big pay rises but also demanding free provision of the social services most needed by the masses. Despite ruling class politicians constantly congratulating themselves about the existence of Medicare, truly free healthcare does not exist in Australia. Currently, the out-of-pocket expenses that a sick person has to cover for specialist fees above what Medicare reimburses can be debilitating. And as governments increasingly underfund the health system, these out-of-pocket expenses are growing. Meanwhile, the lack of Medicare coverage of dental expenses means that large chunks of the working class simply avoid going to the dentist until their teeth deteriorate to the point of an emergency. Similarly, many are foregoing needed specialist visits. This is all the more damaging because COVID in 2022 has been killing people in Australia at the highest rate during this pandemic and hundreds of thousands are suffering Long Covid. Moreover, the inequality of healthcare is so large that those who cannot afford private insurance must wait long periods to receive treatment for debilitating conditions. For example, the current median wait time for a public patient who needs knee replacement surgery to enable them to walk properly again is around eight months!

That is why we must demand truly free health care – that means that Medicare should fully cover all specialist visits, all surgeries, all essential medicine and all dental care and that there should be no long waiting times. Similarly, we need to fight for free education, which means no fees and no HECS debt for TAFE and university. We must also demand free, 24-hour childcare. This is not only a crucial cost of living measure but would help enable women’s full participation in economic life. That in turn is vital for advancing women’s economic independence, without which many women being battered by violent, or otherwise abusive, partners could be coerced by financial necessities into remaining with such abusers.

Striking nurses march in Sydney. NSW nurses, rail workers, bus drivers and teachers have held a series of stop works and strikes over the last several months to demand increased hiring to cope with excessive workloads and to defend their wages and conditions. These actions give a small taste of the kind of militant class struggle needed to reverse the plunge in working class people’s living standards.
Photo credit: Tim Swanston/ABC News

SANCTIONS ON RUSSIA DRIVE UP FUEL PRICES –
WESTERN POWERS’ ANTI-RUSSIA PROXY WAR

HARMS THE MASSES’ LIVING STANDARDS

A major reason for the cost of living crisis are the surging fuel prices. These prices are being driven up by the sanctions imposed on Russia by Washington, Canberra and other U.S. allies that back Ukraine in its war with Russia. We must oppose these sanctions! This is necessary not only to protect our living standards. For the Ukraine war has become a proxy war of the Western imperial powers to unjustly drive their would-be Russian rival down to the subordinate condition that she had been in during the first fifteen years after her devastating 1991-92 capitalist counterrevolution. Australian governments have sent Ukraine’s authoritarian regime hundreds of millions of dollars of military equipment, including howitzers (long-range artillery) and dozens of armoured vehicles, to add to the billions of dollars of increasingly heavy and sophisticated weapons sent to Kiev by Washington and its European allies, including anti-aircraft batteries, advanced long-range anti-ship missiles, drones, tanks and advanced HIMARS multiple-launch guided rocket systems. Although Russia is also ruled by an ambitious capitalist class, her lack of economic strength means that it is the U.S, British, Australian, German, Japanese and other Western ruling classes and not, for the most part, the Russian one that are superexploiting and often simply steamrolling through brutal military power (as they did in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Somalia) the peoples of Asia, the Pacific, Africa and Latin America. That is why if the Western proxy war on Russia is defeated it would be great for the peoples subjugated by imperialism. Such a serious setback to the authority of Australia’s capitalist rulers can only strengthen the ability to resist them. So we must demand: No military aid to Ukraine! Lift the sanctions on Russia!

However, the sanctions on Russia are not the only cause of soaring fuel and energy prices. Although the majority of Australia’s petroleum is imported, Australian corporate oil producers contribute to the high pump prices by selling fuel at the obscenely high world price. This is quadruply so with gas, which Australia is a major exporter of. Greedy Australian energy giants are selling gas at such a high price that it is not only sending residential heating costs through the roof but is driving up manufacturing and electricity prices that are flowing through the rest of the economy as well as pushing up home electricity bills. Meanwhile, power cuts have been threatened because profit-driven generator companies are trying to avoid selling electricity at the capped price when their fuel costs are so high. That is why all oil, gas and electricity corporations must be immediately placed under strict public control. Fuel and power costs must be driven down at the expense of the profits of energy corporations!

BRING THE ECONOMY INTO PUBLIC OWNERSHIP UNDER WORKERS RULE

The bulk of Australia’s energy sector is owned by super-rich, Australian shareholders. Among them is Mike Cannon-Brookes who owns the largest stake in electricity and gas giant AGL. Australia’s third richest tycoon with a $28 billion fortune, Cannon-Brookes is known for his obscenely extravagant lifestyle. Four years ago, he paid the highest amount ever for a house when he bought a Sydney estate for $100 million! The fact that we need to take control of energy industries away from the hands of such people inevitably poses the question: why should these filthy rich capitalists be owning such key sectors at all? We should fight to confiscate the oil, gas and power sectors from their big shareholders and place them into public ownership. Similarly, we need to bring all the key social service sectors into public ownership. Part of why we are being hit with such high out of pocket health costs is that so much of the Medicare budget goes into the pockets of the rich tycoons owning private hospitals, pathology and radiology services and pharmacies – like Sonic Healthcare big shareholder, Michael Boyd, and billionaire Chemist Warehouse owners, Jack Gance and Mario Verrocchi. As a result, the service outcomes produced by each dollar of public money that’s spent is severely truncated. The same applies to childcare, where government subsidies end up feeding the profits of the companies that operate the sector. In public housing too, a good part of the budget ends up in the bank accounts of the owners of construction firms and maintenance contractors – including corporate giants like Downer and Ventia. So let us struggle to ensure that all parts of the operation of healthcare, education, public housing, childcare and aged care are brought into public ownership.

To ensure that all these social services are provided for free, more public funds do need to be allocated to them. But where will the money come from ask neoliberal apologists. It will come from confiscating the most profitable sectors of the economy from the capitalists, starting with the mining industry. Mining profits are so huge that the wealth of just the five richest of Australia’s mining billionaires increased by a staggering $19 billion in just the last year – more than three and a half times what all governments spent on public housing! However, to bring the mining, energy and social service sectors into public ownership requires taking on the tyranny of the oligarchs that own these sectors – oligarchs like Cannon-Brookes, Gina Rinehart and Andrew Forrest – who leverage their enormous wealth to keep state institutions under their control and who disproportionately fund political advertising, political parties, think tanks and lobbyists. Therefore, to bring substantial sectors into the collective hands of the people requires the working class to sweep away the whole capitalist-dominated bureaucratic and political machinery and to construct a new workers state. Based on democratically elected working class people’s councils, such a state would bring all significant parts of the economy into the people’s common, that is socialist, ownership and thereby enable the building of a society that would guarantee secure jobs, improving living standards and free quality social services for all. In doing so it would lay the economic basis for dissipating the inequality faced by women and minorities.

We have living proof that such a socialist system indeed works. For in the world’s most populous country, the Peoples Republic of China (PRC), socialistic rule has ensured that she is the one large country whose masses have not been hit by rising food prices. Although China’s transition to socialism is incomplete and deformed and threatened by intense hostile capitalist pressure, the fact that all her major oil and gas, power, food processing and warehousing, shipping, banking and stevedoring firms are under public ownership has enabled her to not only have an inflation rate of just 2.5% but to have actually falling food prices. And even while ensuring that her people have a COVID death rate per person that is 112 times less than Australia’s, the PRC’s socialistic system has ensured that, unlike here, her workers’ real wages have continued to rise during the pandemic. Indeed, for the last 15 years, the PRC has been enjoying the world’s fastest growing real wages. She has ensured that the proportion of her population suffering homelessness is much lower than in Australia through giving her people eight times greater access to public housing than we who live here in Australia. By curbing capitalist pre-school and tuition firms and replacing them with public and non-for profit childcare and children’s leisure activity services, the PRC has reduced her masses’ financial costs of raising children.

Yet, these achievements of socialistic rule and the fact that China continues to gradually lift herself up from the terrible poverty of her pre-1949 capitalist times is what terrifies the world’s capitalist powers. For not only are they enraged that the PRC’s cooperation with developing countries is impeding their economic rape of these countries, the capitalist powers fear that the PRC’s course will eventually incite their own working classes to demand that their economies also be brought under social ownership. Yet that is precisely why the working class in Australia and the other capitalist countries must stand with socialistic China. Let’s advance the struggle for working class ownership of the economy here by defending the existence of such a system in the world’s most populous country! Let’s oppose the U.S./Australia military build up against socialistic China! No to the lying “human rights” propaganda attacks on the PRC over Uyghurs, Tibet and Hong Kong!

If we can protect the PRC’s advance on the socialist course set by her 1949 toiling people’s revolution and if we can popularise knowledge of the benefits provided by her socialistic system, even in the partial form that it exists in, we can promote the need for a system based on public ownership in this country. The plunging living standards, unaffordable housing and lack of economic security of the capitalist system is pushing the masses to seek anti-capitalist solutions. However, in response, capitalist ruling classes are spreading racism to divide and divert the masses that they exploit. That is why racist far right forces have been growing in the U.S., Germany, India and here. To build the inter-racial unity necessary to fight the powerful capitalists, we must consciously oppose racist influence by mobilising the working class in defence of targeted ethnic groups. For union action to support Aboriginal people’s struggle against racist state terror and all-sided oppression! For workers’ struggle to demand the rights of citizenship for all guest workers, international students and asylum seekers! Bring the long-suffering Nauru refugees here! For united mass action of our workers movement and people of colour communities to crush violent white supremacist forces! Let’s also reject those who say that we can protect living standards by favouring Australian businesses over their overseas rivals. Such agendas only set local workers against their worker sisters and brothers overseas while obscuring workers from the truth that they can only defend their conditions by struggling against the local bosses that exploit them. Let’s understand that the main call of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, “Workers of All Countries Unite”, remains as crucial today as it was when the Manifesto was first issued.

Another famous line of our Manifesto – that “the spectre of communism” is haunting the capitalist world – also rings loud today. The escalating economic crisis in the capitalist world, the social decay of capitalist societies, the capitalist powers’ horror at the successes of socialistic rule in China and the terrifying extent to which the imperialist regimes are willing to risk World War III by waging a proxy war on fellow capitalist Russia in good part because they want to weaken her ability to obstruct their war plans against Russia’s socialistic Chinese, friendly neighbour proves this. The Communist Manifesto’s main agenda is to replace the rule of the capitalist class with the rule of the working class. We have made good progress in this task in countries that make up one in five of the world’s people. But we have much work to do! We need to speed up the completion of the Manifesto’s tasks because it is increasingly clear that decaying capitalism not only threatens the masses’ living standards but humanity’s very existence.

The Communist Manifesto made clear that the seizure of political power by the working class is preceded by a period of “more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society” where the working class “now and then” are victorious in defending their living standards against the capitalists but the “the real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers”. To build the unity, strength, self-confidence, organisation and political awareness that’s needed so we can advance towards the working class rule that we so badly need, we must, right now, mobilise militant class struggle to fight for huge wage rises, the rights of permanency for gig workers, a massive increase in low-rent public housing and the nationalisation of the oil and gas, power and social service sectors. Let’s build a party to spearhead the fight for this Communist Manifesto agenda! As Marx and Engels pronounced at the end of their famous tract: Let the ruling classes tremble at a communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

None of the Parliamentary Parties Defend Workers’ Interests – FOR MILITANT WORKING-CLASS RESISTANCE!

Photo above: Sydney bus drivers picket during their December 2021 strike action against poor wages and conditions following privatisation.
Photo credit: AAP

None of the Current Parliamentary Parties
Defend Workers’ Interests

FOR MILITANT CLASS STRUGGLE
AGAINST AUSTRALIA’S CAPITALISTS!

Capitalist Rulers’ Hostility to China is Due to Their Hatred
of Her Public Ownership-Based System

STAND WITH SOCIALISTIC CHINA TO
STAND FOR WORKING CLASS INTERESTS!

25 April 2022: Working class people are sick of the Morrison government. They are angry that while their rich bosses are looting ever greater profits, their own wages are barely rising, even while prices skyrocket. Many young people, women and migrant workers in particular are frustrated that they are stuck in casual positions with no job security. Meanwhile, Aboriginal people and Asian, African and Middle Eastern communities can’t help but notice that nine years of right- wing government has seen Australian society become even more racist and hostile towards them.

Yet the Labor Party (ALP) “alternative” is hell bent on proving to the big business owners, the people who really hold the power here, that an ALP administration will enforce capitalist interests as reliably as the Coalition does. Albanese’s ALP even proclaimed that a Labor government will not increase the paltry JobSeeker payments. So, at the upcoming elections, no vote should be given to either the Coalition or the ALP and Greens “alternatives” and obviously not to the racist One Nation or the other nationalist far-right outfits like the United Australia Party. Instead, we need hard-fought strikes and other mass actions by the workers movement and its allies to turn back the capitalists’ exploitation of workers, to resist their oppression of Aboriginal people, women and coloured ethnic communities and to oppose “their” regime’s military buildup. The more that the working class understands that their position will not be advanced through supporting any of the current parliamentary parties, the more determined they will be to build the mass struggles needed.

THE DEAD END OF SOCIAL DEMOCRACY’S APPROACH TO
“SUPPORTING” WORKERS RIGHTS

The ALP does raise issues of concern to the masses. The problem is that because ALP leaders are so in awe of the economic power and capacity to swing public opinion of the tycoons (the likes of the Murdochs, the Lowys, Kerry Stokes, Andrew Forrest, Gina Rinehart, Anthony Pratt and Bruce Gordon), the ALP does not dare anger these oligarchs by even merely promising the measures actually needed. Thus, the ALP’s rental affordability plan will not increase badly needed public housing but rather promises funds for just a modest increase in “community housing”, notorious for its private operators who skimp on repairs and shun the most hard-up would-be tenants. Similarly, even as the ALP promises higher wages and secure jobs they commit to maintaining nearly all the anti-strike laws that restrict workers ability to fight for these needs.

With no program to secure jobs through struggle against the bosses, the ALP resorts to policies favouring procurement (ie buying) from businesses owned by local capitalists. Such measures will inevitably provoke countermeasures by trade partners overseas to favour their own firms over Australian exporters. In the end, rival protectionist schemes end up with workers in no country better off. What they do “achieve” is to make workers mistakenly side with the interests of the very local bosses that exploit them. This harms the building of union resistance against the bosses. Moreover, such protectionist agendas set local workers against their counterparts abroad. This is totally against what the 1st of May international workers day is based on: the truth that only by fighting as one worldwide class can the interests of workers everywhere be advanced.

The ALP kowtows to the capitalists most cravenly on external issues. Thus, the ALP backs Morrison’s anti-China military buildup. ALP leaders even criticise him from the right for not bullying enough the Solomon Islands into renouncing their security cooperation with China. In backing the Western imperialists’ Cold War against socialistic China, the ALP is acting completely against the interests of its working class base. Mutually beneficial cooperation between China’s state-owned firms and countries like PNG, Fiji, Solomon Islands and East Timor has allowed Pacific peoples to gain more independence from the Australian capitalists that have long looted their resources. This has enraged the corporate bigwigs here because it has made them lose some of the super profits that they were looting in the Pacific. Yet this is good news for the working class as it weakens the bosses of Australian multinationals and makes them less able to face down union action here. Similarly, while Western capitalists are terrified that the successes of China’s socialistic system will inspire workers in their own countries to fight against capitalism, any true partisan of the toilers should want precisely such “Chinese influence” here in Australia.

PROMOTING THE GREENS MEANS OBSTRUCTING
THE CONSTRUCTION OF WORKING CLASS RESISTANCE

Given how similar Labor’s agenda is to the Liberals, some support the Greens. They do promise some progressive policies like increasing public housing. However, to implement such reforms, let alone any decisive anti-poverty measures, requires defying the capitalists. The Greens cannot do this because they reject a class struggle outlook. In fact, the Greens actually embrace capitalists in their party. Thereby lacking both the will and ability to confront capitalist power, any Greens MPs in government will inevitably bend to the demands of the powerful capitalists. In the early 2010s, when The Greens ran Tasmania alongside Labor, they cut nursing positions and public housing repairs. Today, they are part of the capitalist class’ drive to strangle socialistic China. Indeed, while opposing the nuclear submarine plans, The Greens are even more rabid than the Liberals in spewing the lying “human rights” attacks on China that “rationalises” such military escalation.

Despite this, The Greens are backed by parts of the Left – such as the Socialist Alliance. After all, such reformist socialists share not only The Greens’ better positions but many of its worst ones; such as their support for anti-communists attacking the Chinese workers state – like the pro-colonial, rich kid rioters in Hong Kong. Pro-Greens socialists do acknowledge The Greens’ capitalist essence. However, they say we need to “support the lesser evil.” Yet, backing The Greens actually means supporting another form of the same evil – the tyranny of the capitalists. Moreover, those advocating a vote for The Greens are undermining class struggle by promoting the false notion that a wing of the capitalists – represented by The Greens – can aid the workers’ cause. This is as harmful to the building of militant unions as the idea sometimes heard in workplaces that workers should focus on helping supposed “nicer” managers rise to become the head henchmen of their firm’s exploiters.

LET’S BUILD A PARTY TO ORGANISE MILITANT CLASS STRUGGLE
RESISTANCE AGAINST THE CAPITALIST EXPLOITERS

The current mass workers party, the ALP, is selling out its base. But we still need a workers party! But completely unlike the ALP, it should be built to organise class struggle against the capitalist ruling class. Recent nurses and transport strikes show the potential for such resistance. However, the current pro-ALP union leaders see such actions as supplementary to the parliamentary game. The new workers party must have the inverse perspective: class struggle is its main game. Such a party would not limit its program to what the capitalists can accept but will doggedly fight for what the masses actually need: big wage rises, a huge increase in the dole, the conversion of all casual jobs into ones with all the rights of permanency and the abolition of anti-strike laws. It would struggle for a massive increase in public housing and completely free medical and dental care. It would champion the cause of oppressed women workers through demanding equal pay and free childcare.

To be able to win in struggle against the powerful capitalists, the workers movement must draw alongside it all the oppressed by standing with the Aboriginal people’s struggle against racist state terror, by championing women’s rights and LGBTQI+ rights and by defending persecuted ethnic minorities. Our side also needs maximum unity to win. That means anything that undermines workers unity like protectionism and the scapegoating of migrants must be rejected. The working class and our unions must demand all the rights of citizenship for all refugees, guest workers and international students.

Whenever we demand decent wages and job security, the bosses threaten that this will cause job losses. We must respond by demanding the banning of all job cuts by any firm making a profit and laws to force them to increase their hiring at the expense of their profits. When they scream that this will cause economic collapse, the new workers party would respond: if your system cannot provide secure jobs for all then the economy needs to be immediately ripped from your hands and brought into socialist, state ownership under a state run by the workers. The workers party that we need must be a revolutionary party.

Advancing towards the overturn of capitalism requires defending already achieved anti-capitalist conquests. That means defending the Chinese workers state – despite its bureaucratic deformations – that was created by the Chinese toilers through their 1949 anti-capitalist revolution. So down with the lying propaganda war against socialistic China! Australia’s imperialist rulers: Hands off the Pacific! Down with the anti-China AUKUS alliance! Not one submarine, not one missile, not one soldier for the Australian military – a force that only serves the interests of Gina Rinehart, Clive Palmer, Andrew Forrest and their ilk.

Western rulers’ hostility to Russia is of a very different character to their enmity to Red China because Russia is a capitalist country just like them. But their anti-Russia campaign is aimed at suppressing an emerging competitor so that they can continue to exclusively dominate and exploit most of the world’s peoples. If their campaign succeeds it will embolden them to further attack the rights of workers and other oppressed at home and bully still more arrogantly the people of the Pacific. So down with U.S., Australian and other Western arms shipments to Ukraine! Lift all sanctions on Russia!

The way that the U.S. and its allies provoked the Ukraine War and then pour oil onto an already burning conflict that pits their ally against their rival nuclear power shows just how dangerous the Western capitalist rulers really are. These rulers could not protect “their” vulnerable populations from the terrible COVID carnage. What chance do they have then of making an effective response to the threat posed by climate change?! More immediately, rampant inflation in their countries is threatening a new global capitalist crisis that will impoverish billions – just like the late noughties Great Recession did.

With every passing day, the urgency of opposing the capitalist “order” becomes ever clearer. However, the masses are held back by the mainstream consensus that privatisation, submission to the tycoons and suppression of wage rises are what is needed. However, events in the world’s most populous country are proving that things don’t have to be this way. In China, the state has been rapidly increasing wages, massively boosting public housing, forcing companies to guarantee gig workers at least the minimum wage and suppressing greedy billionaires. Far from privatising, the Chinese state has maintained public ownership of banking, ports, major construction and all other key sectors. And despite an incomplete transition to socialism, their system works. Let us be inspired by this to resist the class war that the capitalists have been waging against us. They have been winning because the Laborite heads of our movement have accommodated them rather than been at the forefront of a militant resistance against the exploiters. We need to change this! Let us wage class war back against the capitalist class! Let us slash away the illusions in salvation through parliament that are restraining a truly powerful working class fightback!

Welcome China’s AntiCapitalist Crackdown! Let’s Use it to Inspire Resistance Against Privatisation and Exploitation in Australia

Above Photo: Workers at the General Mills food processing factory in Sydney’s west do a shift on the picket line during their weeks-long June 2021 strike for improved wages and better job security. The workers resolve and courage won them some important gains. If unshackled from the dead-end Laborite program of seeking common ground with the capitalist bosses on the basis of a mythical “common national interest”, the workers movement will be able to wage powerful class struggle that can push back against the nearly four decades of increased capitalist exploitation of workers in Australia.
Photo credit: United Workers Union Twitter page

Welcome China’s Anti-Capitalist Crackdown! Let’s Use it to Inspire Resistance Against
Privatisation and Exploitation in Australia

7 February 2022: There has been carnage in Australia. In just the first 38 days of 2022, over two thousand people have died here of COVID. Like previous pandemics, this COVID one is a natural disaster. But the catastrophic number of deaths in Australia two years into this pandemic is an entirely man-made calamity. The right-wing federal government and nearly all Liberal and ALP state governments alike chose to let COVID rip. Then they and profit-driven pathology companies and retailers intensified the virus spread by failing to ensure adequate PCR testing and affordable RAT test kits. However, decades before they let COVID rip, Australia’s rulers let another pandemic rip, the pandemic of poverty amongst low-paid workers and the unemployed. Australia’s billionaire-owned media have hidden the true extent of the suffering from this poverty pandemic. Low-income working class people were expected to “learn to live” with poverty and the terrible suffering which that brought. Today the attitude of the mainstream media is little different. Although, in 2022, people have been dying from COVID at nearly twenty times the rate that they have been dying from road deaths, the media have conspicuously avoided showing the pain of family and loved ones after COVID deaths that they often show following fatal traffic accidents. The capitalist media are trying to deceive us into “learning to live” with this COVID carnage.

The underlying force driving Australia’s governments, top bureaucrats and media to cause widespread poverty on the one hand and enable the COVID catastrophe on the other is one and the same: their intent to put the profits of wealthy business owners ahead of the well-being of the masses. In the case of the poverty pandemic, it is specifically the result of the ruling elite’s determination to help the capitalists that they serve increase their rate of exploitation of workers. Now the COVID pandemic has inflamed a new wave in this poverty pandemic. Latest ABS (Australian Bureau of Statistics) figures show that even as average prices rose by 3.5% last year, hourly wages increased just 0.1%. Moreover, it is the most exploited who have had their pay fall behind the most. Thus, over the last year, the hourly wages of women workers has actually fallen. Meanwhile, the weekly wage of a worker in the lowest bracket of earners (mainly part-time workers) fell by $29 per week. When one combines that with the reality that average rents rose by $30 per week in the same period (and don’t even mention fuel costs!), it is obvious why more and more people – including many who have some type of job – are being plunged into homelessness. Nearly three hundred thousand residents of Australia were homeless at some point last year!

Above: The latest Australian Bureau of Statistics figures available show that in the previous twelve months hourly wages rose just 0.1% (while actually falling for women workers) whereas prices surged by 3.5% (Below) and increased by an annualised rate of 5.2% (1.3% in a quarter) over the last quarter. That means workers real wages are being reduced even after the federal government granted billions in Jobkeeper grants to bosses who were extracting increasing profits.
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The rate at which workers are being exploited has actually been increasing for decades. This is reflected in an index published by the ABS called the Unit Labour Cost, which tracks changes in the proportion of the fruits of workers labour that workers actually receive payment for. Well over the last 35 years this Unit Labour Cost has plummeted by 20%. In other words, Australian capitalists are now exploiting workers an average of 20% more than they were in 1986. This increase in exploitation took place firstly under the Hawke/Keating Labor government, further deepened during the Howard and Rudd/Gillard years and has intensified still further under the current right-wing government. Therefore, even as technological advances have made Australian workers more productive than ever, the living standard of large numbers of lower-paid workers has not risen for decades! This is the case not only in Australia but in much of the capitalist world. In the U.S. for example, real minimum wages have actually crashed 30% over the last 50 years! 

The increased exploitation of workers has caused the share of income in Australian employee-hiring businesses going to wages and salaries – as opposed to capitalist profits – to plummet from 64% twenty years ago to just 52% today. Given that obscenely high CEO and director incomes are also classified as “wages and salaries”, this means that the share of business income going to actual workers is now likely less than 50% – that is less than half! In other words, in an average labour-using Australian private sector enterprise – small or corporate – for every $100,000 of value added by workers, less than $50,000 goes to pay those who actually do the work, while over $50,000 is diverted as profits to the plundering rich owners/shareholders. To add insult to injury, the capitalists then leach tens of billions of more dollars from us through the interest payments and fees of the banks that they own. They and upper-middle class layers also rip off the increasing number of us who do not own our homes by making us pay ever higher rents.

The Methods that Capitalists Use to Increase Their Exploitation of Workers

Being increasingly exploited not only brings financial hardship to workers. Many of us are also finding that our work lives have become ever more stressful. For capitalists and their manager henchmen are implementing schemes to not only bully workers into toiling longer for the same pay but to set worker against worker so that we are less united and able to resist our exploitation. Meanwhile, the governments and media that serve the capitalists use racist scapegoating to divert anger over the economic insecurities caused by increased capitalist exploitation onto minorities and First Peoples. The result of all this propaganda is reflected in a survey conducted last year: 42% of Australians were found to have “very negative” or “somewhat negative” feelings towards Iraqi Australians, 43% held such attitudes towards Chinese-Australians and 46% held these views towards people of Sudanese descent. In other words, about one out of every two Australians is now consciously prejudiced against one or several ethnic communities. Or put another way, a full half of this country is now openly racist! What this means on the ground is that people from vilified minorities are more and more often attacked on the streets, public transport, bars and schools. In particular, thousands of East Asian-origin people have been assaulted and verbally abused by extreme racists over the last two years. Such attacks have been incited by ruling class politicians and media disgustingly blaming China for the pandemic. Yet the pandemic has also destroyed many a racist myth. For one, it has demolished the claim that immigration is responsible for housing unaffordability. For during the pandemic, immigration into Australia has stopped and international student numbers have plummeted, yet house prices have risen at their fastest rate ever, soaring by 22% in the last year alone.

Spreading racism is one of the most powerful means that those who oversee capitalism use to suffocate resistance to exploitation. Yet it is hardly their only method. Over the last few decades, Labor and Liberal governments alike have ever more tightly restricted the right to strike. Meanwhile, capitalists have also forced huge numbers into insecure forms of employment. This facilitates increased exploitation, because without job security workers are more reluctant to stand up to greedy bosses. Now, the capitalists are driving large numbers, especially youth and international students, into a form of casual employment that gives workers even less security: gig work. Laboring in areas like food delivery, gig workers are often so exploited that they can toil long hours without making even the minimum wage.

To facilitate the capitalist drive to keep down wages, governments of all stripes have been hacking at the social safety net. By making life miserable for those who end up without a job, the ruling class want to intimidate those workers with jobs into submitting to attacks on their wages and conditions. That is why governments have kept unemployment payments at cruelly low levels and subjected the unemployed to ever more humiliating “activity tests”. Meanwhile, they have chipped away at the coverage that Medicare gives and have sold off so much public housing that the proportion of people living in public housing is now only half of what it was two decades ago. The dearth of public housing has in turn caused private rents to soar to such levels that last year not one single rental in Australian cities was affordable for a single or pensioner couple, an unemployed person, or a single part-time working parent.

One of the tens of thousands of people forced to sleep the streets in Australia. As a result of the sell-off of public housing, the casualisation of the workforce and housing policies presided over by both Liberal and ALP governments that greatly favour landlords over tenants, homelessness is on the increase in Australia. Last year, nearly 300,000 people were homeless in Australia for some period of time (Photo Credit: National Indigenous Times).

Another key tool in the capitalist profit drive is privatisation. Over the last three decades, governments have sold off a large chunk of this country’s state-owned assets. To be sure, one should have no illusions that in countries presided over by a capitalist state, state-ownership genuinely means public ownership. In Australia, state-owned entities have failed to even provide basic services like post and electricity to many rural Aboriginal communities. Nevertheless, privatisation results in assets that could have been producing state revenue that would partly go into social services needed by the masses end up in the hands of private owners intent on using their newly acquired monopolistic control of strategic assets to extract super-profits. Most significantly, because private capitalists face even less scrutiny than governments, they are more easily able to slash workers jobs and rip off consumers. Therefore privatisation is always accompanied by attacks on workers rights and higher prices while delivering massive profits for the new owners. That is why governments run by all the different pro-capitalist parties have overseen privatisation. The Hawke/Keating ALP began the privatisation wave by selling off the Commonwealth Bank and Qantas. Then the Howard Coalition began privatising Telstra in 1997 – a sell-off completed by the Gillard Labor-Greens government in 2011. Most recently, Morrison’s conservatives have made clear that they intend to sell-off the NBN. The ALP “Opposition’s” tepid response has been only to object to an immediate sale, while leaving the door wide open to future NBN privatisation.

Fight for a New, Class-Struggle Agenda to Guide the Workers Movement

Ongoing strikes by NSW rail workers, rolling action by southwest Sydney bus drivers and the partially victorious, strike last June by food processors – many of whom were women and men from various Asian backgrounds – at western Sydney’s General Mills factory all give a glimpse of what is needed to smash the bosses’ incessant campaign to drive down wages. So does the inspirational February 2021 struggle by workers toiling for British-owned food delivery company, Hungry Panda. That partially victorious struggle, which was spearheaded by riders from the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) who had come here as visa workers or students, was the first strike in Australia’s history by gig workers. Yet such resistance is hampered by the social-democratic perspective of the current ALP leaders of the workers movement. According to this outlook, while more extreme attacks on workers should be resisted, the capitalist order as a whole is tolerable or, if not, then it is nevertheless too powerful to oppose. Therefore all factions of the ALP claim that while class struggle methods like strikes can sometimes be used, the main means to defend workers rights is to elect an ALP government to administer the current, capitalist, order in a fairer way for workers while ensuring that the system itself is strengthened. However, knowing how able the corporate bigwigs are to use their fabulous wealth to swing public opinion, the ALP leaders ensure that any opposition that they take to particular attacks on workers will not be strong enough to make the capitalists so outraged that they will campaign against the ALP. Yet it is simply impossible to both truly defend working class people’s rights and avoid getting into a head-on clash with the capitalist class. This is because, as founder of the communist movement, Karl Marx insisted, the capitalist system cannot survive without the capitalists seeking an ever greater rate of exploitation. Marx explained that the total profits that the capitalists as a whole extract depends on the proportion of the fruits of workers labour that they can seize for themselves. However, as these capitalists spend more and more on building up capital (which today includes buildings, equipment and IT infrastructure), they can only maintain the same percentage return on their now bigger capital outlays if they can increase the amount of profit that they extract – in other words if they grab a greater share of the value added by workers mental and manual labour. Thus accepting the needs of the capitalist system means accepting the increasing exploitation of workers. That is why ALP governments over the last nearly four decades have carried out much the same agenda as the openly capitalist Liberals/Nationals – privatisation, casualisation, public housing sells off, attacks on the unemployed – albeit with a “nicer” tone. Today, Albanese’s ALP is following this same path more than ever. At the upcoming elections, the working class should not put their trust in the ALP anymore than they should support any of the non-working class-based capitalist parties: the Liberals, the Nationals, the Greens, One Nation or the United Australia Party.

Although the strategy of the pro-ALP union leadership and their Labor parliamentary mates has on occasion retarded attacks on the working class, overall this program has allowed the capitalists to increase their exploitation of the masses. Over the last nearly four decades, our unions have been weakened, working conditions have been eroded, jobs have become more insecure, housing has become more unaffordable and to facilitate all this the ruling class has made society more racist and ugly. In short, the Laborite program has been a disaster for the working class masses. Unable to effectively defend workers against the class war of the capitalists, the ALP and other pro-capitalist parties that sometimes claim to stand by workers, like the Greens, are left with advocating schemes to restrict imports in order to favour local producers at the expense of producers abroad. However, such protectionist schemes only result in governments abroad taking reciprocal measures to favour their own producers against Australian-made exports. The end result is that no workers benefit while Australian workers are left divided from their overseas worker sisters and brothers leaving both sets of workers less able to mount resistance against their own exploiters.

In opposition to Laborism, we need a new agenda to guide our workers movement. Instead of our demands being curtailed to avoid angering the capitalists, the working class must fight for it actually needs. That means demanding huge wage rises to make up not only for rising costs but for the ever lower share of income going to workers over the last three decades. We also need to put a halt to all privatisation. Rip up the underhanded plans to sell off Australia Post! No to privatisation of the NBN! Instead of privatisation, we need to bring the extreme profits in sectors like mining and banking into the public budget by ripping these sectors out of the hands of billionaires like Andrew Forest, Gina Rinehart and Clive Palmer. That is the way towards acquiring the public finances needed to provide more nurses and hospital beds for our badly strained public hospitals, the extra teachers that we desperately need for our public schools and better funding for TAFE and universities. Most urgently, we need to fight for the confiscation of private aged-care homes from profit-making companies and their placing into public hands. These capitalists have already caused thousands of our elderly to die from this pandemic by, in their quest to maintain exorbitant profits, neglecting to provide adequate PPE for staff, refusing to hire adequate staff numbers and failing to follow basic pandemic safety protocols. We need to put a stop to this profit-driven carnage immediately!

An anti-privatisation agenda is urgent because the fact that large chunks of the “public” health system are actually in private hands is exacerbating the COVID crisis. Profit-driven pathology operations have not only negligently given hundreds of people the wrong COVID test results but have closed down dozens upon dozens of PCR testing sites … just when they were needed most! That is why pathology services must be nationalised right now. In China, whenever there is tiny outbreak in a city, their public-ownership dominated system is enabling them to PCR test the entire population of cities with over ten million people every two days (!) – usually with people only having to queue for less than 15 minutes. We need the same here! As well as fighting for a truly public health system, we need to demand the placing of all banks under state control. This is essential to directing credit for urgent pandemic response measures.

Our sole means to effectively fight for these demands are industrial action and other mass action by the working class and its allies. Therefore anything that harms such struggle must be flung out of the way. Anti-union laws must be opposed. Protectionist demands, which divide workers across national lines while undermining workers opposition to their bosses by encouraging the false notion that Australian workers have a common “national interest” with their local bosses, must be rejected. The poison of racism that the ruling class pours into society must be cleansed away. This can only be done by mobilising the workers movement to oppose racist atrocities from both governments and rednecks. The workers movement must support Aboriginal people’s struggle against the murder of black people by racist cops and prison guards. It must demand freedom for the refugees and the bringing here of all asylum seekers in Nauru and PNG with the full rights of citizens. Meanwhile, open provocations by violent racist groups must be shut down by mass mobilisations of trade unionists united with people of colour and all anti-racists. And in cases where the location and intended victims of potential redneck attacks are known – such as when an ethnic Chinese family has their home daubed with threatening graffiti – workers-led defence guards must patrol to prevent further attacks.

To strengthen their class struggle, the workers movement must draw into the struggle unemployed workers and the millions more enduring temporary employment or just a few hours of work a week. We must address the needs of these most vulnerable layers of the working class, including low-income single mothers, by demanding: Double the payments to the unemployed! Abolish all punitive “activity tests” on unemployed workers! For a guaranteed minimum wage for food delivery and other gig workers. For permanency, guaranteed minimum hours, leave and all the rights of permanency for all gig and other casual workers. Stop the sell-off of public housing – massively increase low-rent public housing instead! For free, nutritious lunches for all school students! For free, 24-hour childcare!

Whenever our unions ask for higher wages, the capitalists respond that this will lead to job losses. However, that is only true, if we allow them to employ as few workers as they want to. The bosses only employ as many workers as that which allows them to maximise profits. They keep their workforce ultra-lean. That is why when some workers are now off sick with COVID there are such shortages of food and other essentials. Moreover, even as they complain about a labour shortage, the capitalist bosses don’t want to hire any inexperienced workers because these greedy exploiters don’t want to pay a full wage to workers who will initially be not as productive as experienced staff. That is why we need to force the capitalists to increase hiring at the expense of their fat profits. Let’s force all companies making a profit to increase their number of full-time, permanent employees by at least twenty-five workers for every one million dollars of quarterly profit! The capitalist rulers will no doubt scream that this is “impractical.” We say that if it is “impractical” for the capitalists to utilise every labour resource available and provide those who labour with both job security and decent working conditions, then the means of production and distribution need to be ripped from their hands and brought into public ownership under workers control.

The Peoples Republic of China Heads in the Opposite Direction

The capitalist class and their economic “experts” would have you believe that there is no alternative to the agenda of privatisation, pro-landlord housing policies and “economic freedom” of capitalists to do whatever it takes to maximise profits. We are told Australia is merely headed down the path of “like-minded countries”. But there is a country that is actually headed in the opposite direction. And that country happens to be the world’s most populous country, the PRC. Last July, the PRC ordered food delivery companies to ensure that their delivery riders are always paid above the minimum wage and are additionally provided social insurance to cover these gig workers in case of loss of income from illness or unemployment. The companies were also ordered to provide workers with rider rest stations. The pro-worker measure had such an impact that it immediately wiped more than $A56 billion off the share market value of China’s leading food delivery platform. Indeed, the PRC is not shy of hurting rich capitalists to defend the interests of the masses. Last July, in order to protect parents from having to fork out ever larger amounts for their children’s after-school tutoring in an education rat race against other parents’ kids, the PRC dramatically banned all tutoring firms from making a profit. The new requirements caused the billionaire owner of one of China’s biggest tutoring firms, Gaotu to have $A21 billion almost instantly wiped off his wealth. However, Beijing’s measures to stop education being “hijacked by capital” are very popular with parents and students. Alongside the widespread rollout by Chinese schools of low-cost, school holiday daycare (which cost at most $A25 a week) involving extra-curricular programs in music, sport, dance, games and art, the measures suppressing capitalist tutoring firms are also aimed at giving kids a happier, less-stressful childhood.

Red China’s moves against profit-driven education firms are part of its broader moves – moves which it greatly accelerated from mid-2020 onwards – to clamp down on the “disorderly expansion of capital” and pursue “common prosperity.” The latter Beijing explains, involves curbing excessive incomes of the very rich and increasing the income of low-income groups. As a result, whereas in Australia it has been workers who have frequently been hit with fines and restrictions for standing up for their rights while tycoons like Gerry Harvey have been given huge payouts through Jobkeeper and other schemes, in China it has been the other way around. Last year, PRC authorities hit e-commerce giant Alibaba, one of the two main companies owned by China’s once richest man, Jack Ma, with a massive $A4 billion fine for monopoly behavior. They also forced the other of Ma’s main companies to restructure in a way that will greatly curb its profits. Companies owned by China’s other tech tycoons have also been hit with large fines and sanctions for suppression of consumer choice and unauthorised use of customer’s personal data, while being pressured to improve their workers’ rights. Meanwhile, the PRC has been vigorously pushing bosses to increase workers wages. As a result, the Global Wage Report 2020-21 produced by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) showed that Chinese workers enjoyed by far the fastest growing wages of any major economy. Although as a country catching up from the terrible poverty of her neo-colonial days, China’s per capita income and hence wages are still a fair bit lower than Australia’s, in the 2008-2019 period examined by the ILO, real wages in China not only more than doubled but were by 2019 approximately 2.3 times what they were in 2008 – a wage growth rate close to treble that in India and about twelve times that in Australia.

Another area in which the PRC is headed in the opposite direction to the capitalist countries is on the issue of privatisation. Over the last decade and a half, far from engaging in privatisation, the PRC has actually been carrying out some nationalisations. In the late noughties, China began re-nationalising privately owned mines in her coal sector by forcing greedy coal barons to sell their mines to the state for very low prices. The primary goal was to improve workplace safety. Private firms putting profits before workers’ lives had caused large numbers of workers to die in mining accidents. China’s nationalisations have indeed dramatically improved workplace safety. Last year, the number of deaths in China’s coal mining sector was 36 times lower than in 2002, despite production being two and a half times as high. More recently, the PRC has brought into public ownership several insurance companies, mid-size steel producers, property assets and one of China’s biggest mobile phone brands (Honor). Meanwhile, the PRC’s existing public sector firms continue to thrive through innovation in high-tech areas like high-speed rail and new energy. As a result, last year the revenue of China’s state-owned enterprises soared by more than two and half times the growth rate of her overall economy – indicating that the public sector has increased its weight in the Chinese economy.

A particular area where the PRC has been heading in the diametric opposite direction to privatisation is in the housing sector. In the decade from 2008 onwards, China provided an incredible 70 million new public housing dwellings to her low and lower-middle income people. This emphasis continues today. China’s 2021-2025 Five Year Plan has stipulated that a further 6.5 million new low-rent public housing units shall be built alongside millions of other types of public housing. Already, more than one in four of China’s households are living in public housing – a proportion eight times higher than in Australia. Meanwhile, the PRC has been administering her overall housing policy according to the motto: “Houses are for living in not for speculation.” Therefore, rather than giving huge negative gearing tax concessions to speculative landlords as occurs here, the PRC’s provincial governments have been curbing housing speculation through measures like bans on households buying more than two homes. This crackdown and the PRC’s emphasis on public housing are two of the reasons why, despite her per capita GDP still being some three to five times lower than Australia’s, China has a far lower rate of homeless than this country. Indeed, youth from the PRC who come to Australia for study are shocked at the level of homelessness that they see when they arrive here.

A public housing complex in China’s Shanghai. Over the last fourteen years, China has embarked on a massive program to provide her low and lower-middle income people with access to public housing. As a result, one in four of China’s housing dwellings are public housing dwellings and this proportion is rising every year (Photo Credit: Wei Li). The proportion of China’s housing stock that is public housing is now eight times higher than in Australia.

What China’s Reaction to the Woes of a Billionaire-Owned Developer
Says about the Path that She is Headed On

The direction that China is travelling in shows that the tyranny of the tycoons, privatisation and erosion of workers’ rights rampant in Australia is not the “natural order” of things. There is another alternative! And that alternative is being implemented quite successfully in Australia’s biggest trading partner. The working class and other low-income groups must fight to open up such an alternate path here! It is precisely this prospect of the toiling classes looking at China’s direction and demanding a similar path in their own countries that spooks the capitalist rulers of Australia and other “like-minded countries.” Aghast at the speed that China has been travelling on this roughly anti-capitalist road since mid-2020, a terrified major American news site complained in an article headlined, “Xi Jinping’s Capitalist Smackdown Sparks a $1 Trillion Reckoning”, that “true to their Communist roots, China’s leaders have no problem trampling on the interests of venture capital, private equity or stock investors when they conflict with its long-term development plan” (Bloomberg, 2 August 2020). Around the same time, a report from U.S. banking giant Goldman Sachs whinged that, “Chinese authorities are prioritizing social welfare and wealth redistribution over capital markets in areas that are deemed social necessities and public goods” (CNN website, 4 August 2021).

Desperate to stop the Chinese road inspiring working class people in their own countries, capitalist ruling classes have been doing everything possible to discredit the PRC’s latest measures. Thus when it became clear that a major Chinese property developer, Evergrande was in financial trouble, the capitalist media triumphantly declared that this was a sign that the Chinese economy was in deep crisis. Their barely disguised message was: if you crack down on the “free-market” in housing, this will lead to economic doom. To sell their narrative that an Evergrande collapse threatens a broader economic implosion in China, Western mainstream media deliberately hid the fact that China’s housing industry is in fair part driven by public housing construction and state-owned developers rather than being solely dependent on private housing built by tycoon-owned companies likes Evergrande. Yet they were not the only media engaged in such deception. So were the media of those nominally socialist groups that have enlisted in the propaganda campaign against Red China. Thus, an article last October in the Socialist Equality Party’s (SEP) World Socialist Website cheered that, “the feverish property development and build-up of debt [in China] have created the conditions for a major financial crisis”. Not to be outdone, the Australian left group “Solidarity” also sounded much like the Murdoch media when they headlined, “Evergrande crisis shows Chinese growth figures built on sand.” Lying that China’s high growth rates were the result of debt-fuelled speculation, Solidarity excitedly claimed that “the Evergrande crisis is a major thorn in the side of President Xi Jinping’s government” (Solidarity website, 15 October 2021). The only difference between Solidarity’s article and the capitalist media line is that the former claimed that Evergrande’s troubles are a product of “Chinese capitalism”, whereas the real capitalists, rather more accurately, identified Evergrande’s plunge as a result of the PRC’s crackdown on capitalism. Whereas the mainstream media seek to intensify enmity to Red China from pro-capitalist sections of the population, “Solidarity” mobilises such anti-PRC hostility from anti-capitalists. To do so, Solidarity claim that “Chinese capitalism” is going through typical capitalist boom-bust cycles, with the Evergrande demise the result. They could only sell this fiction by hiding the truth that even while the capitalist world was plunging into the troughs of its boom-bust cycles, the PRC has not had any cyclic economic busts – not even during the mid-late 1990s Asian Financial crisis or the late noughties Great Recession. This is because the capitalist mode is not dominant in China.

By the start of this year, all those predicting and wishing for China’s economic collapse had … egg on their face! The PRC’s economic growth rate for last year came in at a whopping 8.1%. So just like umpteen other “predictions” of China’s demise over the last 25 years, the hopes of Western capitalists – and the half-baked socialists that capitulate to the latter’s anti-communist drive – went unrealised! As a result, the anti-PRC media switched focus to selling the line that the plummeting share price of Evergrande is a serious problem in itself as is the (very slight) fall in Chinese house prices over recent months. These anti-communist propagandists deliberately avoided mentioning that the PRC’s authorities have actually been intentionally curbing house prices in order to make homes more affordable for the masses – unlike Morrison’s conservatives who wants to drive up house prices to please their wealthy mates and Albanese’s ALP which lacks the courage to defy them. As for fact that the PRC’s measures to stop housing speculation is causing Evergrande’s billionaire majority owner, Hui Ka Yan – and some other property tycoons – to lose the majority of their wealth, this is entirely aligned with the PRC’s drive to “stop the disorderly expansion of capital” and curb excessively high incomes in order to uplift the position of lower and middle income groups.

The manner in which the PRC has responded to Evergrande’s liquidity crisis is also consistent with her “common prosperity” agenda. The PRC state has effectively taken over the restructuring of the struggling corporation and they have used that control to make clear that all the company’s moves must firstly guarantee the wages and jobs of their workers and the promised homes of their customers, while the interests of rich investors must come last. Already, PRC authorities have pressured Hui Ka Yan to sell over $A1.5 billion of his personal assets – including two private jets, several mansions, expensive art works and shares – to help pay off some of the company’s debt. Meanwhile, the PRC looks to be driving Evergrande down a similar path that it took another privately-owned conglomerate that was mired in debt, HNA Group. In that case, the PRC state re-allocated the company assets to several state-owned companies and private corporations in a way that has kept workers in their jobs, while HNA’s [ex-]billionaire main owners lost nearly all their assets. Already, Evergrande and some smaller developers in distress have sold off a number of property assets to PRC state-owned enterprises, while the state has also confiscated parcels of land and other assets owned by Evergrande. Just like the real estate and airport operations of HNA, Evergrande is set to end up in good part becoming yet another chapter in China’s post-noughties nationalisation story. That will be bad news for Hui Ka Yan and other filthy rich investors but more great news for China’s working class and middle class masses.

Socialism Works!

The reason that the PRC is able to push back wealthy business owners in order to decisively improve the rights of gig works, raise wages and defend housing accessibility for low income groups is because capitalists do not rule in China. You see, China is not a “like-minded country” to the likes of Australia, India, Indonesia and the USA! In 1949, the toiling classes of China seized power in the most massive revolution in human history. Although the Chinese working class exercises its power in an indirect manner through a middle class bureaucracy that controls political administration and although that bureaucracy’s pro-market reforms have allowed capitalists to gain a sizable foothold in parts of the Chinese economy since the 1980s, it is the public ownership system favouring working class people that continues to be the backbone of Chinese society. Although capitalists are very prevalent in retail, internet and light manufacturing, all of China’s strategic sectors including banking, oil and gas, steel, mining, power, infrastructure, ports, auto, train and aircraft manufacturing, shipbuilding, space technology, telecommunications, airlines, food processing, computer chips and pharmaceuticals – as well as many consumer sectors like movies, whitegoods and flat screen TV manufacturing – are dominated by socialistic state-owned enterprises. It is this socialistic system that enabled China to complete lifting all its residents out of extreme poverty by the end of 2020. This is a stunning achievement because before China was steered onto the socialist path 72 years ago she had been so subjugated by neo-colonialism that her per capita income was barely more than half that of India’s. It is the PRC’s public sector that played the key role in achieving her anti-poverty triumph. Over-riding the imperative to maximise profits at all costs, the PRC’s giant state-owned enterprises established industries in poorer parts of China and often hired workforce numbers far in excess of what would be most profitable for their operations. This socialist sector was also key to ensuring the Chinese economy’s great resilience during the pandemic. Thus during the worst period of the pandemic in China, the first seven months of 2020, the PRC’s state-owned enterprises actually increased their investment in fixed assets by nearly 4%, even as private sector investment collapsed by close to 6%. Meanwhile, the PRC’s public sector boosted its hiring of new graduates by a whole one-third in order to make up for decreased job opportunities in the capitalistic private sector.

20 July 2021, Qingdao, China: The world’s first 600 km/hr (!!) Maglev train is unveiled by CRRC, China’s giant state-owned train manufacturer. This Maglev train will now undergo testing and validation. CRRC is the producer of China’s famous high-speed trains as well as her cargo trains, subway trains and trams. Like CRRC, other PRC state-owned enterprises have led China’s innovation in many key high-tech areas including renewable energy, space and satellite technology, supercomputers, speech recognition, artificial intelligence, bridge and tunnel building, computer chips and flat screen televisions. Putting social needs above profit goals, these socialistic enterprises were key to China’s historic victory over extreme poverty and her stunning success in protecting her population from COVID.

Among the public sector enterprises most crucial to Red China achieving her social goals have been her banks. In China, alongside her three 100% state-owned policy banks specifically charged with advancing social development agendas, all her big six commercial banks as well as nearly all her medium-sized banks are majority state-owned. Very different to the notorious greed of banks in capitalist countries, the PRC’s socialistic banks have often foregone lending that would bring them higher returns in order to prioritise credit for areas like uplifting of impoverished areas, public housing, renewable energy and environmental protection. They also played a vital role in China’s pandemic response, helping provide the funding that enabled manufacturers, pharma-biotech firms and developers to quickly switch over their operations to the delivery of PPE, COVID testing kits and makeshift hospitals.

The work of the PRC’s public sector in responding to the pandemic have produced stunning results. The PRC has the lowest death rate per person from COVID of any country in the world with a population of more than one million people. Twelve days ago, she achieved an incredible milestone: Mainland China went through a whole year without a single COVID related death! And this in a country with one in five of the world’s people! Of course, the capitalist media have denigrated this success by lying that China’s suppression of COVID is only the result of widespread continuing lockdowns. Yet today, not one large city in China is under a city-wide lockdown. Indeed, a large proportion of China’s residents have never had to endure a full lockdown during the entire pandemic. Even China’s best known megacities Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chongqing and Shenzhen have, at most, only ever had lockdowns in small proportions of their giant cities but never a citywide, Sydney or Melbourne-style lockdown. Moreover, in rare cases when an outbreak did cause a whole Chinese city to lockdown, like Xian, which eased out of lockdown a few weeks ago, the lockdowns have been much shorter than the three to four months that Sydney and Melbourne residents endured in the middle of last year. Thus, even the worst hit parts of Xian were released from lockdown within 32 days. Over the last few days, although the PRC has had to take measures to prevent Winter Olympic teams from highly infected countries like Australia and Britain bringing the virus into China in big numbers, well over 99.5% of mainland China’s people enjoyed their seven-day (!) public holiday for Chinese New Year with more social freedoms than people have here. People packed into tourist spots and literally millions of people travelled on China’s famous high-speed trains every day. Nearly all of China has no restrictions on dancing and singing at clubs as we have in most Australian cities. Although the Chinese workers state has sometimes taken strict measures – putting the masses lives before business profits – China’s success in responding to the pandemic is not mainly because of this. What has separated the PRC’s response from all the capitalist countries is the ability of her socialistic system – where not only is the public sector the backbone but where private companies are subordinated to the workers state – to provide massive testing of people in COVID-affected cities, to move every COVID-affected person into medical care and quarantine in an existing or makeshift hospital and to give all hospital workers, aged care workers and other exposed workers full coverage PPE.

Socialistic Rule in China: Terrible for Capitalist Exploiters Worldwide,
Great for the Working Classes of the World

It is not only China’s pandemic response and her common prosperity drive that Western capitalist ruling classes are seeking to denigrate. They, their media and the “independent” “human rights” NGOs that they fund are looking for every possible angle to attack the PRC. One of the main fronts in their propaganda offensive is over the situation of the Muslim Uyghur minority in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). The U.S., Australian and other Western imperialist regimes – the same ones who destroyed Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen through either direct invasion or proxy wars, who committed the most hideous war crimes in the countries that they invaded or bombed and who prop up Israel’s murderous oppression of Palestinian people – claim that China is committing “genocide” against Muslim Uyghurs. They make this ridiculous claim even while largely admitting that China is somehow committing this “genocide” without actually killing any Uyghurs??!! Instead they claim that China is supposedly imprisoning millions of Uyghurs in re-education camps. This is a truly whacko conspiracy theory on par with some of the nuttiest Q-Anon “theories”. To try and give some “credence” to this conspiracy theory, the capitalist powers have relied on the fabricated “accounts” of those under the influence of either, ultra-rich capitalist Uyghurs who want to overturn socialistic rule in the XUAR, or extreme religious fundamentalists who want to turn the XUAR into a version of ISIS’ Caliphate. However, Western regimes’ claims that Uyghurs are being subjugated by China have been strongly rejected by the overwhelming majority of Uyghurs living in Xinjiang who are instead proud of their anti-poverty advances – especially over the last twelve years – and who are freely enjoying the rich Uyghur language, music and dance. The section of the Uyghur community that most strongly opposes anti-PRC propaganda and the increasingly small number of right-wing Uyghur terrorists are Uyghur women. These women are terrified at the prospect of having their current secular lifestyle and freedoms inside the PRC being taken away and their status being thrown back to the much lower position endured by women in most of the neighbouring non-socialist countries to their west; which includes Afghanistan where both under the Western occupation and now under the Taliban, women are subjugated in a way that the religious fundamentalist component of anti-communist Uyghur forces would like to see.

Furthermore, the accusations against China over Uyghurs have been rejected by most of the world. The only countries to sign-up to these claims are the Western powers – the very same ones that have been subjecting their own Muslim communities to racist stigmatisation and heavy-handed policing – and a handful of ground down neocolonies, like Nauru, whose Australian imperialist overlords have turned into a concentration camp for refugees. In all, those regimes making the claims of Uyghur oppression rule over only one in eight of the world’s people. Notably, not one Muslim-majority country has consistently signed onto these anti-PRC claims. Indeed, with the exception of Japan, not a single country in all of Asia, the Middle East, Africa or South America has signed on. Instead, far, far more countries have signed statements that not only denounced “the groundless accusations against China based on disinformation” but which positively “commends the efforts of the People’s Republic of China in providing care to its Muslim citizens” in the XUAR. As a small number of Western mainstream media outlets have had to report, at UN meetings, around 70 countries have signed statements lauding China’s treatment of Uyghurs and in all around 90 countries have openly weighed in behind China on the issue. Notably, this includes the vast majority of the world’s Muslim-majority countries, including those as different from each other as Palestine, Pakistan, Nigeria, Somalia, Iran, Iraq, Algeria, Turkmenistan and Qatar. Indeed the claims about China subjugating Muslim Uyghurs are so ridiculous that even thoroughly U.S.-allied Muslim-majority countries like the UAE, Kuwait, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan have rejected the anti-China claims and instead praised China’s advancement of Uyghur human rights through development.

It is no surprise that capitalist ruling classes would do everything possible to vilify the PRC. After all, we know how viciously capitalists, their media and their governments attack trade unions that staunchly defend workers rights like the construction workers CFMEU – and especially its militant Victorian branch. Therefore we can expect that the capitalist class will be even more fanatical in attacking organisations – like the Chinese workers state – formed when the toiling classes not only assembled to fight for improved rights but actually united to takeover a country. After all, the existence of the PRC workers state is greatly impeding the ability of the powerful “multinational” capitalists of the richer countries to exploit a workforce of some 800 million people! Moreover, the existence of a workers state in the world’s most populous country provokes the greatest fear of the capitalist rulers of Australia and other “like-minded countries”: that the working class of their own countries will look at China and decide that they also want to grab state power. The fact that the PRC state has been more clearly showing its pro-working class character of late by cracking down on greedy capitalists and improving the rights of gig workers makes capitalist ruling classes the world over all the more nervous.

For the very same reason that capitalist exploiting classes fear and loathe the socialistic PRC, the working class must hail and defend its existence. For the very existence of working class rule in China, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba and North Korea – in however a fragile and incomplete form – gives confidence to the toiling classes in Australia and other capitalist countries that they do not have to accept capitalist rule and all that it brings – bullying bosses, economic insecurity, growing racism and a society that puts the profits of wealthy business owners above the lives of workers, our parents and our grandparents. That is why the workers movement and Left must unconditionally stand with socialistic China and the other workers states against every form of attack that they face – whether that be military, economic or propagandistic. Down with the U.S./Australia/Britain military build-up against the PRC and North Korea! No nuclear submarines for the Australian regime – No to AUKUS! U.S./NATO/Australia out of the South China Sea! Rebuff the lying “human rights” attacks on the PRC over Uyghurs, Tibet and Hong Kong! Oppose U.S. funding for capitalist counterrevolutionary groups in China!

China’s Socialist Advances Face Serious Threats –
All the More Reason to the Defend the Workers State

The pro-working class measures that are being implemented within China are meeting much resistance – even from certain elements within the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC). China’s capitalists hate the recent measures with a vengeance. But they dare not say so openly. So they get establishment bodies like their All China Federation of Industry and Commerce to lobby behind the scenes for “respect” for the “rights” of capitalist exploiters. Meanwhile, various experts, economists and academics that are close to these capitalists, like liberal Peking University economics professor Zhang Weiying, have been speaking out against the common prosperity drive. Given that the CPC is the only truly mass party in China, it is inevitable that the party would house those holding a range of viewpoints – including those that are protective of the capitalists. Indeed, even China’s number two, premier Li Keqiang seems to be quietly obstructing president Xi Jinping’s common prosperity push by favouring the private sector – as opposed to the socialistic public sector – in his tax policies and statements. In the face of this blowback, there was some retreat by the PRC leadership in their public stance about the crackdown on “disorderly expansion of capital.” PRC officials sought to reassure domestic capitalists and foreign investors that there were limits to how far the recent moves would go.

On the other hand, the Chinese masses have been egging on the PRC’s crackdown on big-time capitalists. Chinese workers and youth have, quite correctly, flooded social media with posts calling out Jack Ma as an “evil capitalist” and a “bloodsucker”. A commentator who cheered that “Ma will definitely be hung from the lamppost” received well over a hundred thousands likes for that post! Pushed by such mass sentiment, last August, some of the biggest Chinese state media outlets chose to run an article by popular leftist blogger Li Guangman that encouraged the crackdown on capitalists to deepen, calling them a forerunner of “profound revolutions” that would see a “return to the original intentions and quintessence” of socialism. Meanwhile, despite right-wing sections of the CPC having made headway in lobbying for legal guidelines stipulating that economic transgressions by “entrepreneurs” (by which they mean capitalists) will in future be dealt with as civil matters rather than jail-carrying crimes, major sections of the PRC state are not relenting on their moves to bring aggressive capitalists and those that protect them to heel. Last September, after HNA’s state administrators had wiped out their wealth, the now ex, billionaire former owners of HNA Group, its ex-chairman and ex-CEO, were arrested. Then, last week, the CPC expelled from the party and handed over to prosecutors the recent, former CPC chief of Hangzhou city, Zhou Jiangyong for not only taking bribes but for having “colluded with some capital elements and backed the runaway expansion of capital”. Sensationally, Hangzhou is the city where Jack Ma’s corporations are based. Speculation is mounting that among the “capital elements” that Zhou colluded with in backing “the runaway expansion of capital” is none other than Jack Ma himself. Many in China are excited that Zhou’s downfall will be the prelude to the final takedown of China’s most well-known capitalist exploiter, Jack Ma.

In summary, there is a fierce tug of war going on between on the one end, the Chinese working class and its allies both within and outside the CPC and on the other, the capitalist class and those upper middle class elements and groupings within the CPC aligning themselves with the private “entrepreneurs.” In some sense this is no different to the class conflict taking place in the capitalist world. However, the big difference between the contest running in China and that in the capitalist world, is that in China, the seizure of state power by the toiling masses in 1949 and the resulting emergence of a society centred on working-class, that is collectivised, property forms has given the working class the decisive advantage in the class war. However, they have far from achieved final victory. The excessive openings to capitalists made by the CPC from the mid-1980s to the mid-noughties greatly strengthened the pro-capitalist side. Most importantly, capitalist restorationist forces within China are boosted by the fact that all the most powerful countries in the world, other than for China itself, remain under capitalist rule. Their presence not only emboldens Chinese capitalists to demand ever more “rights” but helps rightist sections within the CPC to prosecute the case that with such strong external forces opposing socialist rule, Beijing has no choice but to “compromise” with and “adapt” to global capitalism. This is another reason why those particular socialists (in Australia this includes Solidarity, Socialist Alternative, the Australian Communist Party, Socialist Alliance and the SEP) who use the existence of a degree of capitalism within China as an excuse to support anti-communist forces attacking the PRC state – like Hong Kong’s pro-colonial, rich people’s opposition – are actually helping strengthen pro-capitalist forces within the PRC establishment. By increasing the hostile pressure on the workers state, they are helping empower Chinese “Gorbachevs” who should they gain the ascendancy would open the gates for outright capitalist counterrevolutionaries to storm through and take power.

In contrast to those leftists who capitulate to the anti-PRC Cold War, we in Trotskyist Platform work hard to mobilise active solidarity with the Chinese workers state. In October 2019, we joined together with the Australian Chinese Workers Association and others to build a united-front action that saw 70 people march through Sydney city calling to “Stand with Socialistic China.” When word got back to China about this action, those staunch Chinese communists who heard about it were thrilled. We need more of and more powerful such actions! For these actions not only inspire anti-capitalist workers within China to resist the capitalists and their advocates but emboldens them to push for the crackdown on “the disorderly expansion of capital” to intensify. And China’s anti-capitalist crackdown does need to go much further than president Xi wants. To fortify working class rule and ensure the PRC’s further progress towards “common prosperity”, the power of Jack Ma and his ilk needs to be smashed. The tech, real estate and light manufacturing sectors need to confiscated from these capitalists and brought into public ownership. The danger of the socialistic economy being white anted by a large number of smaller-scale capitalists needs to be averted by ending premier Li Keqiang’s concessions to small and medium sized private “entrepreneurs”. Rather than rescuing such private enterprises by giving them handouts, promising such enterprises should be nationalised when in trouble. Let’s help advance China’s socialistic public sector! Let’s do so by mobilising in solidarity with the PRC here in Australia!

Above and Below: The 7 October 2019 demonstration calling on “Working Class People in Australia & the World” to “Stand With Socialistic China.” This united-front action was built primarily by Trotskyist Platform and the Australian Chinese Workers Association. This rally and march through the centre of Sydney city also called to “Defeat Hong Kong’s Pro-Colonial, Anti-Communist [Opposition] Movement!” 

Let’s Seize on China’s Anti-Capitalist Measures to
Motivate the Struggle Against Australia’s Capitalist Exploiters

We should point to the existence of socialistic rule in China to not only popularise the need for a future socialist revolution here in Australia but to motivate a fightback right now against growing exploitation and privatisation. Every time that we demand any serious measures to restrict the “right” of capitalists to “freely” exploit it poses the questions: how far are such restrictions going to go and what should be done if such measures cause the capitalist engine to grind to a halt. The current pro-ALP leadership of the workers movement responds to these questions by telling the masses that while there should be restrictions on capitalist exploitation such measures should be mild so that they allow the current (that is capitalist) system to function properly. However, the fact that a socialistic system is operating in the world’s most populous country and running rather successfully – even though the workers state there is weakened and distorted by hostile pressure and capitalist intrusion -shows that the workers movement does not have to moderate our demands to ensure the success of capitalism. The dead end of Laborism can be rejected. The working class can and should fight for what it actually needs! For if making headway on those demands causes the capitalist order to start coming apart – as it inevitably will – then so be it; that is no issue because replacing capitalist rule with socialistic working class rule has been proven to work in China and is what we desperately need. Through our publications and discussions with the masses, through seeking to steer progressive struggles in a direction that enhances the working class’ trust in their own power and diminishes their illusions in any wing of the capitalist class and in any organ of the capitalist state and through ourselves initiating actions with the same purpose, Trotskyist Platform works hard to win broader and broader layers of the working class to the need for a future workers conquest of state power, while advancing the building of the revolutionary workers party that would spearhead the struggle for such a socialist revolution. We understand that the struggle for a socialist Australia will be advanced today by the working class fighting through class-struggle methods for what it needs. That is why we draw the Australian working class’ attention to the anti-capitalist measures being taken in China and seek to use that to inspire workers to mobilise right now in action to demand: A guaranteed minimum wage and all the rights of permanency for all gig workers! For big wage rises! For a massive increase in public housing! No to privatisation of the NBN – stop all privatisations! Nationalise the banks, aged care sector and pathology services!

DON’T BELIEVE THE FAR RIGHT’S DEADLY LIES

WHILE FILTHY CAPITALISTS PROMOTE ANTI-CHINA COVID CONSPIRACY THEORIES
WE STAND WITH ESSENTIAL WORKERS & OUR VULNERABLE COMMUNITIES

Don’t Believe
the Far Right’s Deadly Lies

22 Nov 2021: An independent analysis that we have performed on NSW deaths from the Delta strain has shown that vaccine recipients have died 69% less often from COVID than the unvaccinated population. Our analysis is enough to make two crucial conclusions. Firstly, it confirms that vaccination is an absolutely essential and crucial tool for defeating the pandemic. However, the results of the analysis also show that vaccination is not a magic bullet either. It does not provide 100% protection to all recipients. Therefore, more people will die from the disease and the hospital system could in the future become overwhelmed if other measures are not employed in addition to the extension of the vaccination program.

Our analysis was performed using data publicly released by the NSW Department of Health. The Delta outbreak, which began in Sydney’s wealthy Eastern suburbs, first hit NSW on June 16 and took its first life on July 11. Since then the NSW government has reported 555 COVID deaths up until November 13, the last day that total figures are available up to. Of these people who tragically died, 398 people were considered unvaccinated, 79 deaths were of fully vaccinated people and the remainder of the people who passed away were either partially vaccinated or, in a smaller number of cases, their vaccine status could not be determined. To determine vaccine efficacy, we need to first normalise the data for the rate of vaccination when the deaths occurred. That is to account for the reality that earlier in the outbreak when the number of fully vaccinated people was low relative to the number of completely unvaccinated people, one expected, regardless of the efficacy of the vaccines, that the number of deaths from fully vaccinated people to be low given that such a small proportion of the population were then vaccinated. However, in more recent weeks, as the number of fully vaccinated people outnumbers the unvaccinated population, the percentage of deaths from fully vaccinated people would be expected to grow by the sheer weight of their higher proportion in the community. Our analysis accounts for these biases by relating the deaths in any given week to the corresponding vaccination rates.

Note that when we analysed the deaths of fully vaccinated and unvaccinated people each reporting week of the NSW Department of Health, we needed to relate them to the published rates of two dose recipients and no dose recipients respectively 25 days and 32 days prior to the middle of the week that the deaths were reported. This is firstly because, in the classification system used by the NSW Department of Health, a person is considered effectively unvaccinated (“no doses”) unless they received a vaccine jab at least 21 days before becoming exposed to the virus and considered not fully vaccinated unless they receive their second dose at least 14 days before becoming exposed; and secondly, because during this latest outbreak the median period from exposure to death is 11 days. That means that a COVID infected person who passes away on, say, September 22 would have on average been exposed to the virus on September 11 and, thus, would be considered completely unvaccinated according to the NSW Department of Health unless they received their first dose 21 days before that exposure, that is by August 21 and would not be considered fully vaccinated unless they received their second dose by 28 August.

The truth is that the calculation that vaccine recipients in NSW have died 69% less often from the Delta strain than the unvaccinated is most probably an underestimate of true vaccine protection against death. This is because in the earlier period of this outbreak, before the rate of vaccinations reached high levels, a disproportionately high percentage of vaccine recipients were the elderly and those with pre-existing medical conditions. Yet this is precisely the section of the community most vulnerable to dying from COVID. Therefore, when comparing the number of deaths from those who were vaccinated against those who were unvaccinated, the deaths of the vaccinated were artificially skewed upwards due to the then age bias in the vaccinated community. However, as more of the adult population has been vaccinated that age bias has disappeared and we get a clearer sense of the true efficacy of the vaccines. Thus, over the last 8 weeks that we examined, we found that those who are vaccinated have on average died 88% less often from COVID than the unvaccinated. Going forward, this will be about the level of protection that vaccines give against COVID death – unless a new variant emerges that has greater resistance against the vaccines.

Spreadsheet showing our calculation of vaccine efficacy in the eight weeks up to 13 November 2021.
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Support the Vaccination Campaign!

The first conclusion that we should draw from our analysis is that COVID vaccination saves lives. It is especially effective in protecting the lives of younger and middle-aged people. Therefore, we strongly urge all our readers to get vaccinated. This is not only a responsibility to oneself but a collective duty. By reducing hospitalisations, vaccination reduces saturation of hospitals thereby enabling a higher proportion of the sickest COVID patients to be treated in hospital and fewer other ill people to be knocked back from admission due to hospitals being filled up with COVID patients. Those far-right groups and hard right politicians like Craig Kelly that are spreading anti-vax conspiracy theories – although not necessarily the many decent people believing these theories – are doing a great deal of harm. They are effectively causing people to die who would otherwise be alive.

A man fights for his life at the COVID ward in Sydney’s St Vincents Hospital. The virus has taken a terrible toll on the people. In just the four months and two days up to 13 November 2021, 555 people have been killed by the coronavirus in NSW – approaching twice the road toll for the state in all of 2020.
Photo credit: Kate Geraghty

Of course, among those who are genuinely suspicious of the vaccines and lockdowns – as opposed to the violent white supremacists and other right-wing extremists exploiting such sentiments – part of their attitude comes from very understandable distrust of government and the ruling elite. After all, why wouldn’t the masses be distrustful? Governments are notorious for trying every means possible to reduce payments to the poor while they splash tens of billions of dollars through Jobkeeper to super-rich business owners like Gerry Harvey. Meanwhile, over the last few months, the heavily working class, Asian, African and Middle Eastern communities in Sydney’s southwest have been subjected to discrimination and vilification by the NSW government, police and media over the Delta outbreak. Last month, Gladys Berejiklian became the third NSW leader in less than thirty years who has had to resign over a corruption cloud. And that is just the tip of the iceberg! In this capitalist society, mainstream politicians – whether from Liberal, Labor or the minor parties – are corrupt, even when measured against their own rules. They hand out public money to their rich mates, they enrich themselves by taking bribes from developers, they branch stack their own parties and they favour their own voting base in dispensing government grants – from sports rorts to carpark porks to discriminatory dispensation of regional infrastructure grants.

The most oppressed in society have additional reasons to distrust ruling elites. Unemployed workers most frequent experience with government institutions and their contactors is to be bullied about why they have supposedly “not looked hard enough” for non-existent jobs. They see these agencies as gangs for kicking people when they are down. State officials try to claw back every cent they can from welfare recipients and then program their Robodebt machines to do so even more rapaciously. Meanwhile, most Aboriginal people have great reasons to be suspicious of government initiatives. Black people face racist oppression from state organs every day. Aboriginal people remember too how their ancestors were deliberately infected with smallpox and how they were hideously used as guinea pigs in medical and chemical experiments – including being subjected to atomic bomb tests in South Australia’s Maralinga in the 1950s and 1960s. That is why anti-Vax groups have managed to engender much vaccine hesitancy amongst Aboriginal people. This is only being countered thanks to the dedication of Aboriginal community activists and black-led social organisations.

So some of the oppressed masses are saying to themselves: How can we trust the government and the ruling elites when they talk about vaccines? Why should we follow their rules? These healthy “anti-establishment” feelings get manipulated by sinister right-wing forces. Those who are socially isolated, either because they are middle aged single people and/or because they are unemployed or self-employed people who work alone, are especially vulnerable to anti-Vax/anti-lockdown conspiracies. For without being able to test their ideas in discussions with co-workers and friends, they can be swayed by dubious internet and social media postings, which in their isolation can be their main form of “contact” with other people.

To not be manipulated by sinister forces it is important to understand why governments, politicians and upper-level state officials lie. Sure, they are self-seekers, but the main reason for their dishonesty is because of the contradiction between their claim to “serve all the people” and the reality that in capitalist societies the state machine exists to serve the exclusive interests of the capitalist exploiting class over the interests of the working class masses. Ruling class politicians do look after themselves but they mainly exist to look after the interests of the big business owners. Indeed, there are some ruling class politicians that are personally honest but are still the most intransigent and destructive enforcers of the interests of the capitalist class. Thus, the ultimate oppressors and exploiters are not the politicians or the state officials but the actual capitalists. Capitalist governments and bureaucracies are also the enemy of the working class masses but they are only the enemy because they enforce the interests of the capitalist exploiters over the masses. We must always keep this basic truth in mind when we analyse any government measures that restrict social freedom. Ruling class politicians and bureaucrats mainly do not seek power for power’s sake but rather to be able to better protect the super-profits of the capitalist business owners from the rest of society. Of course, there is no shortage of mainstream politicians who get off on their own power and status. However, when any of their plans to increase their authority happen to clash with the interests of the big business bigwigs on important questions, events inevitably show that it is the latter who are the real masters and the former who are merely their barking dogs. In 2020 and 2021, this means that capitalist governments would never hurt the profits of their big business-owning masters through imposing lockdowns unless there was actually a real epidemic crisis involved. Moreover, the fact that we are now re-opening in NSW and will in the future fully re-open will blow to smithereens the far-right conspiracy theory that COVID was merely a hoax – or at least greatly exaggerated – and designed to enable governments (“led by Communist China” no less) to take away people’s freedoms.

If we understand that the overwhelming reason why capitalist governments and officials lie and seek greater powers is to enforce capitalist interests against those of the toiling classes, we will realise that on issues that affect all classes and therefore also affect the wealthy corporate elite that they are committed to serving, the capitalist politicians and bureaucrats can sometimes tell the truth to some degree. Today – when they say that COVID is a real threat and that vaccination is important – happens to be one of those times. Similarly, there are times when they make rules that do not have a class bias one way or the other but merely ensure the smooth running of their society. These include traffic light laws, restrictions on fire-use during bushfire season and pandemic social-distancing regulations. The laws and regulations that we Marxists are opposed to – and there are a lot of such rules – are those laws and regulations that are used to enforce the exploitation of the working class and the poor and which are used to facilitate the suppression of other oppressed groups including Aboriginal people, other people of colour, women and LGBTQI people. However, other laws we do accept despite our opposition to who is making them. We do not think, for example, that residents in a bloc of apartments have a “right” to disturb their neighbours by using noisy power tools at two o’clock in the morning even though the regime that instituted these noise regulations is a corrupt capitalist regime. Thinking workers instinctively understand all this. Such workers would not want a work colleague to drive a crane without a license, for example, because such behavior could get themselves or their co-workers killed. Moreover, even under capitalism, some rules have actually been won through struggle by the workers movement. These especially include health and safety practices at work. Class conscious workers would be furious with a co-worker who broke one of these rules – for example by working at height without a harness. This is not only because such a person would be putting themselves and their co-workers at risk but because they would be undermining workplace safety practices for all. Many a capitalist boss would love to see a worker violating a workplace safety rule – even though bosses sometimes pretend to be opposed to such behavior to cover themselves – because it sets a precedent to enable the rule to be undermined. In the minds of many bosses, workers who follow health and safety rules are “wasting time” and “harming productivity”. After all, for the capitalist exploiters, workers’ lives come a distant second to profits. Thus, a proud trade unionist would only have scorn for a worker who proclaims that “it is his/her right to choose to work at heights without a safety harness if he/she so chooses.”

The extreme individualism of the “It is my right to refuse vaccines, not wear a mask and disobey social distancing rules”-movement is completely counterposed to the collectivist spirit that the socialist and, indeed, the trade union movement is based on. Politically aware wage workers know that our class has only been able to win gains through collective action and through, when necessary, enforcing that collectivity. Imagine trying to win a strike if workers think that they have an individual “right” to cross a picket line and go to work if they “so choose.” Therefore, the main base for the most hardened anti-Vax/anti-lockdown/anti-masking activists is not amongst wage workers and certainly not amongst class conscious workers. Instead, the movement is mostly based upon smaller-scale capitalist exploiters and amongst some of the self-employed (as well as unfortunately also amongst unemployed workers) – that is, amongst some pub and restaurant owners, self employed tradies, owner truck drivers, farmers and so on. Their “it is my right to refuse vaccines, not wear a mask and disobey social distancing rules”-sentiments reflect the same attitude that some of these social layers have when they insist that they ought to have the freedom” to bully and underpay their apprentices and hired helpers or to start loudly hammering away at five thirty in the morning when doing a maintenance job inside an apartment block. Their rage at all laws obstructing their ability to maximise profits (whether it be minimum wage laws, workplace health and safety laws or environmental and noise regulations) – a rage that becomes all the more fanatical given both the cruel blows to their profitability landed by the current crisis and the necessarily precarious nature of small-scale enterprise at all times – becomes transferred onto the various rules and mandates arising from the pandemic. And for many particular small businessmen and self-employed tradies, the lockdown measures have actually been very directly harming their profitability.

In summary, as much as the microbusiness and self-employed sections of the masses do not come under the sway of the community-minded working class, they exude a selfish individualism that flows from both the hustler spirit of small enterprise owners and from their position in the economic structure – the position of (thinking) that they are their “own masters.” In the end, of course, small business owners and the self-employed are firmly under the thumb of the banks, the big commercial landlords, the corporate suppliers and the top-level contractors. These small-scale capitalist exploiters on the one hand and petit bourgeois layers on the other can only escape the domination of the big capitalist forces to the degree that the working class lands blows against the latter. To the extent that they do not align themselves with the working class, squeezed as they are by the big capitalist giants and battered by the decay of the capitalist order, the rage of the embittered self employed in times of crisis will end up being directed by the far-right into the service of the big end of town. And so it is with the anti-vaccine mandate/anti-lockdown movement. For make no mistake about it: the movement that the Far Right have whipped up – although they have drawn some decent people into it unlike their stock-in-trade race-hate mobilisations – is serving the big end of town. Their attack on the Melbourne offices of one of our unions – the CFMEU – can only serve the union-busting big capitalists. More generally, the Far Right, through inciting opposition to social-distancing measures and grotesquely downplaying the dangers posed by COVID, is proving itself to be the shock troops of the capitalist business owners who want to pressure society into a reckless form of re-opening that would enable them to have their profits flowing again at full throttle as soon as possible. That is why, although they were not necessarily enthusiastic about the anti-Vax aspect of the demonstrations, sections of the capitalist-serving federal government struggled to contain their glee at the anti-CFMEU and anti-lockdown actions. And you can bet that the new, even more right-wing, Donald Trump-supporting NSW premier, Dominic Perrottet – who has already shown his willingness to ride roughshod over medical advice warning him about the dangers of a recklessly performed reopening – was secretly pleased too!

September 2021: People at an anti-lockdown, anti-vaccine demonstration in Melbourne carry flags supporting extreme racist, hard-right former U.S. president, Donald Trump.
Photo credit: William West/AFP

At the same time, although Australia’s capitalist governments have been sanctimoniously deriding those who refuse to be vaccinated, we should understand that they are indirectly as responsible for residual vaccine hesitancy and anti-masking/anti-social distancing sentiment as the Far Right. For they have deceived the masses so often, over so many issues and over so many years that many people simply do not believe them in the rare cases that they are actually telling the truth. Over the vaccines, they are like the boy who cried wolf too often when the real wolf arrives!

Genuine pro-working class, “anti-establishment” sentiment would not be directed against vaccination or remaining social distancing measures but against the racist and anti-working class vilification of the people of colour communities in southwestern and western Sydney during the Delta outbreak. It would take aim at the Morrison government for throwing $27 billion of public money – in the form of JobKeeper payments – to the owners of businesses that maintained or increased their sales. As for vaccines, what we should be furious about is not vaccine mandates but the fact that the greedy capitalist drug corporations and the governments that serve them have failed to provide adequate vaccines to poorer and low income countries. This is not only grossly unfair and murderously cruel but it means that COVID will remain in the world for longer and new variants will emerge; both of which will lead to more deaths and further delay in humanity’s return to pre-COVID “normality.” Today, it is mainly only China and her drug companies, in particular her socialistic, state-owned pharmaceutical giant, Sinopharm, that has been providing large amounts of vaccine aid to poor and developing countries. Meanwhile, the Western drug companies like Pfizer and Moderna have seized on the desperation of the world’s people to charge a fortune for their COVID vaccines. The right-wing Liberal government has hidden the cost to the public budget that it is paying for each vaccine. But we know that Moderna is charging the European Union a whopping $A35 a dose. We should be outraged at how much these capitalist drug corporations have been ripping off the world’s people!

Fears about Astrazeneca

Our analysis of the effectiveness of vaccines in NSW did not compare the efficacy between the Astrazeneca and the Pfizer vaccines. We were not able to do this because the NSW government does not provide enough open source data to enable this. The Pfizer vaccine that has been the mainstay of the vaccination program here is safe. This approved vaccine, like all medicines, produces side effects in a small proportion of cases. However, the benefits far outweigh the risks. No one has ever died from a reaction to this vaccine in Australia and already thousands of lives have been saved. There is, however, understandable fear about the Astrazeneca vaccine which in rare cases causes deadly blood clots in recipients. So far, nine people in Australia have died from blood clots or low platelet count caused by Astrazeneca vaccinations (https://www.tga.gov.au/periodic/covid-19-vaccine-weekly-safety-report-07-10-2021). However, due to improved detection and treatment methods, the proportion of deaths caused by Astrazeneca in Australia is considerably lower than abroad where several countries have either suspended use of the vaccine or restricted its use to the elderly. Norway and Denmark have outright stopped using Astrazeneca and many states in Canada have also suspended use of this vaccine. More recently, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland suspended use of the Moderna vaccine for people under the age of 30 due to a rare cardio-vascular side-effect amongst a small proportion of young recipients.

Research has shown that deaths from Astrazeneca-caused blood clots are slightly higher among younger and middle-aged people than those over the age of 60. This, combined with the lower propensity to die from COVID for the under 60, prompted the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) to recommend that the federal government suspend use of Astrazeneca for the under 60s. For the over 60s, ATAGI explained that any risk of death from the vaccine is far outweighed by the lives it saves by preventing COVID fatalities. The government initially heeded the ATAGI recommendation and suspended use of Astrazeneca for the under 60s. However, later, prime minister Scott Morrison put blatant pressure on ATAGI to make a new “recommendation.” ATAGI buckled to this political pressure and then “recommended’ that Astrazeneca be allowed to be administered to the under 60s provided people have sought prior advice from their doctor.

Morrison wanted to have Astrazeneca more widely used to cover for his government’s earlier failure to provide adequate stocks of other vaccines. Secondly, because Astrazeneca is being produced by a local corporation, CSL (a corporation whose CEO, Paul Perrault, received a total remuneration package last year of a staggering $40 million!) and because the government here serves the Australian capitalist exploiters, the government wants more of the CSL-manufactured vaccine sold. Thirdly, the Australian, British and U.S. governments hope to send Astrazeneca to the developing world as part of vaccine diplomacy. As many of the ex-colonial countries in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific are moving closer to the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) because of the fairer way that the PRC treats these countries in comparison with the imperialist powers, the U.S., Australian and British imperialists are doing everything possible to undermine socialistic China’s vaccine support to these countries. Thus hoping that “Third World” countries will accept Astrazeneca rather than the popular Chinese-produced Sinopharm and Sinovac vaccines, the Morrison government does not want Astrazeneca’s reputation to be further damaged by being prohibited from general use in Australia.

However, for those here worried about getting Astrazeneca, there is now enough of the Pfizer to go around. So book your Pfizer doses if you are not already vaccinated!

Imperialist Anti-Vax Campaign Against Chinese Vaccines Exposed

The analysis of the effectiveness of the American and British-Australian produced vaccines used here shows that while these vaccines are extremely helpful they provide far from 100% protection from death – especially to the elderly and those with underlying conditions. This then makes a mockery of the efforts of the U.S. and Australian ruling classes and their media to slander the efficacy of Chinese-made vaccines on the grounds that they have failed to provide 100% protection. Take, for example, a story broadcast by the Australian regime-owned broadcaster, the ABC, on 5 July. The piece claimed that the Chinese-made vaccine, Sinovac, was giving inadequate protection against the Delta strain and suggested that Australia ship Astrazeneca vaccines to Indonesia instead. The “report” even deliberately implied, quite stupidly, that the supposed lack of efficacy of the Sinovac vaccine was responsible for Indonesia’s then surge in cases. However, at the time of the ABC piece, just a tiny 5.1% people of Indonesia’s people had received two doses of this vaccine!

The ABC then chose quite craftily not to do a follow-up story to examine if their projections made in July – actually their hopes – that the Chinese vaccine would prove ineffective came true. The ABC decided not to run such a follow-up story because they would have had to have reported that far from “Indonesia reassessing vaccine strategy over Sinovac concerns” that they had claimed, the Indonesian ministry of health released the results of a study that showed that the Sinovac vaccine reduced deaths by 95%. That compares favourably with the 88% reduction in deaths of the vaccines used here over the last eight weeks.

That the ABC did not run a follow-up story to their initial anti-Vax campaign against Chinese-made vaccines is indeed consistent with the favorite strategy of all Australian mainstream media when “reporting” issues connected with China. Run sensational stories predicting Communist China-created doom – whether it be conspiracy theories about Chinese vaccines, reports of fresh COVID outbreaks within China or, most hilariously, imminent PRC “economic collapse” – and then don’t run any follow-up stories that would prove how ridiculous their initial stories had been. Or put another way: throw mud, then stop throwing mud when it would be obvious to all that this is precisely what you have been doing but make sure you don’t do anything to wipe off the mud that you had earlier thrown so that most of it still sticks in the minds of an unsuspecting public.

Indeed, if the ABC did run a follow up story on the use of Chinese vaccines in Indonesia, they would have had to report that since Indonesia’s innoculation with the Sinovac vaccine soared from late July, COVID deaths per day have plummeted there. Today, Indonesia’s COVID deaths are more than sixty times less than when the ABC ran their July 5 story! Of course, one cannot be certain that the increased uptake of Chinese vaccines is the sole cause for the dramatic plunge in Indonesia’s Delta deaths. However, even more ridiculous was the ABC’s claim that the supposed ineffectiveness of the Sinovac vaccine was the cause of Indonesia’s then surge in COVID deaths. Indeed, if one wanted to make propaganda against Western vaccines using the same twisted “logic” used by the ABC, one would claim that the surge in Australia’s Delta deaths over the last few months is a result of the “ineffectiveness” of American and British-Australian manufactured vaccines! Fortunately, China’s state-owned media outlets have been far more responsible than their Australian counterparts and have refrained from going down that destructive path.

Since Indonesia accelerated her vaccination program in the middle of this year using Chinese-made Sinovac vaccines, her daily deaths from COVID have plummeted.

If the ABC really wanted to examine how effective Chinese vaccines are they would look at China itself. There, 75% of the country’s entire population (not just of those over 16) has been vaccinated. And to date the country has had not one single death from the Delta strain! The Australian government and big business owned media will not report that because the Australian capitalist ruling class – alongside their American and British counterparts – are in an intense Cold War against the PRC. The reason for the conflict is simple. Although socialistic rule in China is as yet incomplete and is deformed and fragile, China remains a workers state whose key sectors are dominated by the socialistic, collective property forms created by her 1949 anti-capitalist revolution. In the end what the Cold War is about is the hostility of capitalism towards socialism. It is the international reflection of the enmity between the capitalist bosses and the workers that they exploit. And just as the capitalist business owners here are not going to let a pandemic get in the way of their class war against working class people, so these same capitalists in the international arena are not about to let scientific fact or the need for international cooperation to defeat the pandemic impede their Cold War against the PRC workers state.

Indeed, so willing are the Australian imperialists to hack down COVID alleviation efforts if they get in the way of their anti-communist Cold War that, several months ago, they even obstructed efforts by the Papua New Guinea people to acquire Chinese-made vaccines. For this purpose, the Australian regime utilized Australian bureaucrats and “advisers” that are impregnated colonial-style within the highest levels of the PNG state apparatus. Moreover, the racist imperialist regime even threatened PNG officials that if they welcome Chinese made vaccines, Australia would cease investments in PNG road projects. The particular vaccine that the Australian regime sought to impede PNG from receiving was the vaccine made by China’s Sinopharm. Australian officials insisted that PNG use the Astrazeneca vaccines that Australia was “offering”. However, the WHO assessed the Astrazeneca product to have an efficacy against symptomatic COVID infection of 63% as against the 79% efficacy that it found for the Sinopharm vaccine (note that both these figures are for vaccine efficacy against symptomatic infection rather than against deaths – both these vaccines have a much higher efficacy in reducing deaths). Furthermore, a study conducted in South Africa found the Astrazeneca vaccine provided inadequate protection against COVID variants. As a result, South Africa cancelled use of that vaccine and instead moved their program to using China’s Sinovac, Pfizer and other vaccines. Moreover, because the PRC made the strategic decision to focus its initial COVID vaccine research on using the tried and tested inactivated vaccine method, rather than the more experimental technology used for the Astrazeneca vaccine, the Sinopharm vaccine has proven to be extremely safe. Not one single person has died as a result of side effects from the Sinopharm vaccine from the billions of doses administered. By contrast the Astrazeneca vaccine, which Canberra once suspended the use of for those under 60, is especially fraught for use in PNG given the latter’s young population. PNG’s average life expectancy is 64.5 years and so the overwhelming majority of her people are under the age of 60. Moreover, given the current backward state of PNG’s health system, a much higher proportion of those who develop blood clots and low platelet counts there after receiving the Astrazeneca vaccine would perish than have done so in Australia.

If the Australian rulers really wanted to help the people of PNG they would be giving the PNG people Pfizer doses rather than dumping on their neo-colonial subjects the vaccine that most Australian young and middle-aged people, when given a choice of vaccine product, have chosen to reject. They certainly would not be endangering thousands of lives in PNG by obstructing vaccination with safe, effective Chinese made vaccines. Then again we should not be surprised by such behavior. By their plan to get nuclear submarines from the U.S. and Britain and their project to buy expensive long-range missiles, Australia’s capitalist rulers are showing their willingness to help kill millions in distant wars in order to crush socialistic states – just like they did in Vietnam and during the earlier 1950-53 Korean War.

There is another atrocious aspect of the campaign to sabotage China’s vaccine cooperation with ex-colonial countries. That is, by spreading anti-Vax lies about Chinese-made vaccines, the Australian ruling class is inevitably feeding into the broader anti-Vax “narrative”. It is telling that the most rabid opponents of the PRC workers state in the Australian parliament – including the likes of Craig Kelly, Matt Canavan and George Christensen – are simultaneously the most sinister promoters of far-right, anti-Vax and anti-lockdown agendas. The slander against Chinese-made vaccines by the more “respectable” wing of the ruling class is but a more urbane and sophisticated version of the rants of the likes of Craig Kelly and other pro-Trump, far-right forces. These more “respectable” rulers thus have little authority to then attack the lies promoted by Craig Kelly and other far-right anti-vaccine figures.

The same goes for the Morrison government, the mainstream media and Joe Biden’s despicable resuscitation of the loony, Trump-era conspiracy theory that COVID leaked out of a Chinese lab. By promoting such a long-discredited conspiracy theory they are inevitably invoking in the minds of some the possibility that other COVID conspiracies could in fact be true – including the ridiculous one that COVID is either not real or greatly exaggerated. In summary, through their willingness to use blatant disinformation and anti-scientific conspiracy theories to attack socialistic China over COVID and over COVID vaccines, the capitalist media and all the pro-capitalist parties in the U.S. and Australia – from the U.S. Republicans and Democrats to Australia’s Liberals, Nationals, ALP and Greens – have much responsibility for indirectly giving credence to the more general COVID conspiracies – like the anti-Vax and anti-masking ones.

Vaccines are Vital – But Not Enough by Themselves

The most important practical conclusion of our analysis of vaccine effectiveness in NSW is that the vaccines are in themselves not enough to stop large numbers of COVID deaths. They are, of course, an indispensable tool that must be utilised to the full. However, especially the elderly and those with compromised immunities will not be safe until at least such time that they receive booster shots; and probably not fully safe until COVID is suppressed throughout the planet. What all this means is that as Australia fully opens up from social distancing restrictions, if other measures are not simultaneously taken to contain outbreaks, not only will some of the millions of people not vaccinated die but a percentage of the fully vaccinated will also die.

What is to be done then? After more than three and a half months of a very strict lockdown most people in Sydney understandably want the greater freedoms recently granted. Workers who were stood down or who lost their jobs during lockdown are desperate to work again. Yes, but there is a way we can fully open up without an explosion in COVID cases in subsequent weeks. We need to look to the measures that the PRC has used to successfully contain the Delta strain. Those measures have involved far more sparing use of city-wide, long-lasting lockdowns than has been the case in Australia. Yet, even during a recently suppressed mini outbreak, China, with its gigantic population, had been averaging just 60 cases per day. That is in per capita terms the equivalent of having just one case per day in a country the population of Australia’s! China’s method involves, alongside mass vaccination, huge universal testing of people in cities that have outbreaks, rigorous dispensation of PPE for health and aged care workers and provision of hospital care to all COVID cases. Yet the PRC has only been able to pull off these measures because of the ability to pool and direct resources provided by her socialistic system of public ownership of key banks, infrastructure construction firms and manufacturers. Every day that this pandemic passes, the need to have here such a system based on collective ownership and state planning becomes ever more urgent. On the way to winning such a socialist system, let us fight for the implementation of whatever state planning and control measures are needed right now to respond to the pandemic. Let us prevent thousands more of us from perishing! It is frontline workers who are at highest risk from dying of COVID. Don’t let the relentless drive for profits of capitalist business owners cause more tragedies for frontline workers and their families! And let us ensure that COVID does not grow so rampant that we end up being thrown back into yet another debilitating lockdown!

Shanghai, October 2: Large crowds enjoy themselves at tourist spots throughout China during her seven-day (!), public holiday for National Day. The Peoples Republic of China has been able to suppress several outbreaks of the Delta strain without having to use long-duration, Sydney or Melbourne-style, city-wide lockdowns. So successful have they been with suppressing the Delta strain that currently this country with one in five of the world’s people averages less than twenty locally transmitted cases per day and over the last ten months has had no COVID deaths whatsoever. We need to fight here for the implementation of the socialistic measures that China has used to contain COVID.

The Measures Needed to Stop a Surge in COVID Deaths and to Win Secure Jobs for All

Photo Above, 9 August 2021: Residents in the eastern Chinese city of Yangzhou undergo their fifth round of COVID testing after the Delta strain penetrated the city on July 28. In the previous 11 days, the entire city with a population nearly that of Melbourne’s had been tested four times for COVID! As a result the outbreak was quickly quashed with zero deaths and without the need for a lengthy, city-wide lockdown.Photo Credit: Li Bo/Xinhua

Learning from China’s Stunning Success
in Containing the Delta Strain:

The Measures Needed to
Stop a Surge in COVID Deaths
and to Win Secure Jobs for All

15 October 2021: People in Greater Sydney celebrated when the lockdown was partially eased for the fully vaccinated on Monday. For many it was their first chance in over three months to visit family members and to socialise with friends. For a large number of service industry and casual workers, the partial re-opening meant an opportunity to finally get some badly needed work. Given the inability of the authorities and their capitalist system to implement an effective COVID containment strategy that would have avoided the need for lengthy lockdowns, this lockdown was necessary. Without it, thousands more would have died. As it is, COVID has still killed 458 people in NSW since July 11. That means that in just over three months, more people have died from COVID in NSW than were killed in all road accidents, murders, drowning accidents and fires combined in all of last year.

The toughest lockdown conditions were imposed on Sydney’s working class areas in the city’s southwest and west. People in these areas are largely frontline workers and their families. Therefore, even after Delta first took hold in Sydney’s affluent Eastern suburbs, southwest and western Sydney were always going to suffer the most. This hit from COVID was made all the more severe by a second assault from the capitalist regime. As police helicopters hovered ominously over their heads, people in the heavily Asian, African and Middle Eastern working-class suburbs of Auburn, Campsie, Granville, Merrylands, Fairfield, Bankstown, Lakemba, Liverpool and Blacktown were slandered by the media and the NSW government and subjected to heavy-handed treatment from police and army personnel; all while the authorities were slow to provide adequate testing facilities. The working class, non-white masses of these areas will never forget the way that they were treated. This episode once again highlights what a class-divided society Australia is. At the top are a small class of rich capitalist business owners and below are wage workers, with working class people from people of colour background at the lowest levels and most of this country’s brutally subjugated Aboriginal first peoples at the very bottom.

The Serious Risk of a New Surge in COVID Deaths

The government has motivated easing lockdowns on the grounds that a high proportion of NSW is now vaccinated. Indeed, the vaccines have already saved hundreds of lives. However, a large number of people are still not vaccinated. Unlike the rest of the world, Australian governments report vaccination rates only for people over the age of 16. The current 78% rate of people in NSW over the age of 16 who have received both doses of a vaccine corresponds only to an overall vaccination rate of the entire NSW population of just 62%. What this means is that when cases surge with eased restrictions, a large number of people who have not been fully vaccinated will die.

There is a second problem. Although the vaccines significantly reduce the chance of death, they provide far from 100% protection. An independent analysis that we performed found that since the Delta outbreak hit NSW, vaccine recipients have died 56% less often from COVID than the unvaccinated population. Because of the current under-vaccination of younger, healthier people, this is an underestimate of true vaccine efficacy which we estimate to be between 60% and 80% in preventing deaths. Nevertheless, this means that many vaccinated people will still die if exposed to COVID. So far at least 62 fully vaccinated people in NSW have succumbed to Delta.

The NSW Liberal government knows all this. However, the Donald Trump-supporting NSW premier, Dominic Perrottet, is not bothered by the fact that, due to the neglect of the ruling elite, Aboriginal people have currently low rates of vaccinations and are hence especially threatened by a COVID resurgence. Instead, the new premier is trying to minimise people talking about COVID deaths. In his first press conference, it was conspicuous how the number of deaths was not even reported when daily COVID numbers were detailed. When Perrottet and Morrison talk about “learning to live with COVID” what they really mean is people “learning to live” with a certain number of their friends and family members dying from COVID. However, the Liberal Party is hardly alone in this. After earlier warning against opening up when case numbers are high, the Victorian Labor premier has now unapologetically embraced an identical strategy to his right-wing counterparts. The fact is that all of Australia’s governments put the interests of capitalist business owners ahead of those of the masses. And these greedy capitalists, knowing that it is not them but frontline workers who will be most exposed to COVID, have been demanding reopening at all costs.

Unless other measures are taken, we could end up like the U.S. which, although it is more highly vaccinated than Australia currently is, averages 1,400 COVID deaths every day. Given her larger population, that U.S. death rate is equivalent to 108 people dying in Australia every day. That would be the same death toll as having five no-survivor crashes of Boeing’s faulty, 737 Max airliner every week! That is a “living with COVID” that we don’t want! Moreover, health experts – and even the AMA doctor’s federation – have warned that the hospital system could end up being overwhelmed with COVID patients. Already public hospitals are straining and their doctors – and even more so nurses – are overstressed and experiencing burnout. A new deluge in COVID patients would obstruct care for other patients, cause emergency waiting times to skyrocket and delay non-urgent surgeries by long periods. In the worst case the system would collapse. Indeed, the situation could end up so desperate that restrictions would end up being reimposed. That is what happened in Singapore, three weeks ago, despite the small nation being one of the most vaccinated countries in the entire world. Yet, daily COVID deaths there have continued to soar.

July 2021: A COVID-19 positive patient in Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital. As of October 15 the Delta outbreak has killed 458 people in NSW, including at least 62 fully vaccinated people. If the government continues to refuse measures to keep COVID cases from skyrocketing following re-opening, thousands more people could end up in ICU or dying from the disease. Photo Credit: Kate Geraghty
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The Example of the Peoples Republic of China

So what alternative is there? Almost no one wants an extension of restrictions let alone new lockdowns. To see what needs to be done we need to turn to the example set by the world’s most populous country, the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). The PRC is the only large country in the world that has been able to defeat the Delta strain. Indeed, so successfully has the PRC responded, that despite the variant getting into China several times since July, she has never had more than 105 cases in a day despite having a population 60 times that of Australia’s. There has not been one single person who has died in China from the Delta strain. Crucially, the PRC is now able to suppress the virus threat without using Sydney or Melbourne-style lengthy, city-wide lockdowns. Really? Yes! But did not China in a way invent the lockdown method? Yes, she did. But that was in January 2020 when she was dealing with a previously unknown disease that no one in the world had a handle on and which had spread rapidly in Wuhan in a short period of time. Since then, the PRC has greatly refined her methods. So much so that during her recent outbreaks, only small areas of a city would be fully locked down and then for periods much, much shorter than Sydney or Melbourne. Meanwhile, the rest of the country operates as per normal. Today, only one town of 80,000 people in all of China is under a lockdown in a country of 1.45 billion people! The rest of the country is able to operate as if there is no pandemic at all other than for mask wearing at crowded locations, limitations against extreme overcrowding at tourist spots and frequent testing of frontline workers. Moreover, international travel is freer than it is in Australia. Whereas only Australian citizens and residents have been able to enter here for the last 19 months, China has been allowing foreigners to enter for work, study and cultural and scientific exchanges.

So close to pre-COVID is life in China that during their recent seven day (!) public holiday, people there made 515 million tourist trips. Despite that, China now has the lowest number of per capita COVID deaths in the world for all countries with a population of more than one million. So how has the PRC achieved this? There are three key methods that she has used. Firstly, whenever China has a COVID case, regardless of how severe their symptoms, the person is moved into hospital. This ensures that COVID-positive people will not transmit the virus onto family members or other house mates. Part of the reason for the rapid spread of the Delta outbreak in NSW and Victoria is that each COVID-infected person is inevitably passing on the virus to all others in their household. Moreover, hospitalisation of all COVID cases in China enables the infected people to receive proper medical care as well as guaranteed supplies of basic necessities. One of the tragedies of the Delta outbreak in NSW is how many people have died at home without getting proper treatment. Just 9% of COVID cases in NSW during the recent outbreak have had the benefit of hospital care. However, to have all COVID cases in hospitals risks the virus being transmitted from COVID patients to health workers and from there then onto non-COVID patients. Tragically, by late August, one in five of the Delta strain deaths in NSW have been from people who were admitted into hospital for another reason and then picked up COVID at hospital. This then highlights the need for the second feature of China’s COVID response which is that medical staff and hospital janitors are equipped with virus-impenetrable, head-to-toe PPE. Take a look at photographs of the gear that Chinese hospital workers are decked in and then compare them with photographs of the PPE that their Australian counterparts have to make do with. It will then become obvious why COVID transmission within Chinese hospitals is very rare whereas at least fourteen of the Delta deaths in NSW picked up the virus during multiple outbreaks in just one hospital – Liverpool Hospital. Thirdly, once there is an outbreak in a city, China engages in a massive testing program in which literally every single person in the city (other than infants) is tested from three to five times in the space of seven to fifteen days. In that way cases can be detected before they spread the disease widely and can be moved quickly into quarantine in hospitals.

What is to Be Done?

It is easier said than done to pull off the kind of COVID response that China has. For one, Sydney and Melbourne’s hospital system is already under great stress. How could they then admit every single COVID case into hospital care? What would be required is the building of new hospitals as well as the rapid conversion of gymnasiums, stadiums and other buildings into makeshift hospitals. That is precisely what the PRC has been doing. To do so she brings the dominance of social ownership in her economy to bear. With the biggest developers, equipment manufacturers, communication firms and power companies under public ownership, it has been these socialistic state-owned enterprises who have done the heavy lifting in building China’s hospitals at lightning speed when needed. In Wuhan, during the height of the pandemic there, these socialistic enterprises even built and equipped two massive, brand new, infectious disease hospitals in less than two weeks. In Australia, in that time, capitalist developers and other private contractors would still be busy scheming with their mates in government over how much money they could get away with being paid for such an urgent contract. Moreover, the developers would be reluctant to disrupt any existing contract that was more profitable.

Similarly, a mobilisation to supply PPE is very difficult in capitalist countries because the private enterprises that dominate the economy are totally driven by profit. They will only agree to such a hugely expensive switch in production if they can be sure that they can make big bucks out of it and if they are given guarantees that the demand for PPE will continue for the long term. By contrast, once COVID hit China, her state-owned industrial enterprises, whose ultimate goal is to serve the public rather than wealthy shareholders, quickly turned their operations into factories making PPE, disinfectants, non-contact thermometers, testing kits, masks and ventilators. Meanwhile, the existence of a workers regime in the PRC has compelled even the privately owned of China’s manufacturers of COVID testing kits to provide adequate supply of these kits at low prices.

Left: Medical workers at a makeshift hospital in China prepare to deliver medicines to COVID patients (Photo Credit: Zhu Xingxin – China Daily) Right: Medical workers at Sydney’s St Vincents Hospital’s ICU unit around a COVID patient. Australian medical workers are provided with far less comprehensive PPE than their Chinese counterparts. As a result during this recent Delta outbreak in Sydney, dozens of people have tragically died after catching COVID in hospitals after the virus has passed from COVID patient to medical worker and onto non-COVID patients. Such transmission is very rare within China.

It is apparent that it is not possible to pull off the measures needed to beat down COVID as effectively as socialistic China has done as long as Australia remains under capitalist rule. However, that does not mean we are helpless. Just as industrial action by 200 cleaners at Westmead Hospital in July won them the adequate PPE supplies needed to protect them from COVID, a powerful mobilisation by the broad working class can force the capitalist rulers, against their will, to impinge on their own “economic freedoms” and profits and implement some of the economic control and planning measures needed to suppress the COVID threat. What we urgently need to fight for is:

  • For selected compatible manufacturers and pharmaceutical-biotech firms to be ordered to immediately supply at a low price, variously, PPE, COVID testing kits and other pandemic relief items.
  • For developers and equipment suppliers to be ordered to undertake the low cost, high-speed conversion of designated buildings into make-shift hospitals to enable the hospitalisation of all COVID cases. If they refuse or delay, the enterprises should be immediately confiscated and brought into public ownership.
  • For the immediate placing of all banks under state control. This is essential to directing the capital needed for manufacturers, pharma-biotech firms and developers to be able to quickly switch over their operations to the delivery of PPE, COVID testing kits, makeshift hospitals etc. For the nationalised banks to be put under people’s supervision such that major bank operations are inspected by committees of unionised bank employees’ representatives alongside representatives of other unions and mass organisations.
  • For the confiscation of private aged-care homes from profit-making companies and their placing into public ownership and control. The greedy, profit-driven operators have all too often neglected to provide adequate PPE for staff, failed to follow pandemic safety protocols and have denied their staff the job and income security that would allow them to feel at ease taking sick leave while having symptoms. We need to put a stop to this immediately! Dozens have already died during the recent NSW outbreak from COVID acquired at these private nursing homes – including twelve people at the homes in Guildford and Summer Hill owned by the wealthy Hardi family dynasty, a further eight at the Revesby’s Allity Beechwood facility owned by private equity firm, Archer Capital, and many more at other aged care homes.
  • For frequent rapid antigen testing for COVID at all concentrations of frontline workers including transport depots, warehouses, supermarkets, factories and utilities. Such testing is what bus drivers at western Sydney’s Smithfield depot went on strike for last month and that is what we need!
  • For union safety committees at each workplace. These will struggle to ensure that each workplace has proper pandemic deterrence procedures and that workers are provided with adequate PPE. If any site is found to be dangerous, workers should walk off the job until the site is made safe.
  • All workers to get unlimited, employer-paid, pandemic leave for treatment and quarantine.

Fight for Secure, Permanent Jobs for All Workers!

Workers at the General Mills’ western Sydney food products factory on the picket line during their three weeks-long strike for decent pay and conditions. The multiracial workers stood firm and emerged largely victorious. Photo credit: United Workers Union

The coming period is not only one full of threats to workers’ lives but one where working class people’s livelihoods will remain precarious. The official unemployment rate numbers are a joke. They hide the true picture of massive job losses because so many people have dropped out of the labour force – more than 330,000 in the last three months. The majority of those forced out of the labour force have been women. And women and young workers also make up a majority of the millions of workers with far less weekly working hours than they want or who are forced to toil in positions with little job security. In contrast, many filthy rich capitalists have actually increased their profits during the pandemic after business owners not meeting the criteria – including port operator Qube Holdings and whitegoods retailer Harvey Norman (owned by its billionaire chairman Gerry Harvey) – were thrown huge amounts of Jobkeeper payments by the federal government. Many of these bosses also used the threat of pandemic unemployment to pressure workers into accepting cuts to their working conditions – especially to shift penalties. However, from the largely victorious, three-weeks strike in June by western Sydney workers at food products manufacturer, General Mills, to the strike by Sydney rail workers two weeks ago, workers are beginning to resist. Such struggles by workers for decent wages and conditions at individual work sites must be combined with actions uniting all employed and unemployed workers to protect our livelihoods and demand secure, permanent jobs for all workers. Let us fight for:

  • The immediate conversion of all casual workers into permanent employees with all the rights of permanency.
  • A doubling of unemployment payments while we fight for permanent jobs for all.
  • A massive increase in low-rent public housing. Stop low-paid workers and the unemployed from being driven into homelessness or to the extreme stress of always being on the brink of homelessness!
  • The defence of the socialistic PRC. Despite her bureaucratically deformed structures, the fact that she is a workers state dominated by public ownership of her key economic sectors means that any strengthening of the PRC can only enhance the struggle for workers rights and public ownership here. So let us oppose the U.S./Australia Cold War drive against the PRC that is not only against workers’ political interests but threatens the massive trade with China that so many workers’ livelihoods depend on.
  • The scrapping of the estimated $150 billion purchase of nuclear submarines. For the cancellation of the planned purchase of long-range missiles and the associated $270 billion increase in defence spending. Force the owners of profitable businesses to return the $27 billion in Jobkeeper wrongly given to them! For the saved money from all this to be used for public housing, increased welfare payments, urgently needed new public hospitals, increased wages for nurses, free public childcare and aged care and better-funded TAFE.
  • The granting of the rights of citizenship to all guest workers, international students and refugees. Stand with these often super-exploited workers! Don’t let their exploitation be used to drive down wages for all workers!
  • A ban on all job cuts by any firm making a profit, however small.
  • A ban on all job cuts by any company whose CEO has an annual package in excess of $1 million.
  • The forcing of any company still making a profit to increase its number of full-time paid employees by at least twenty-five workers for every one million dollars of quarterly profit.

Unfortunately, the current leaders of the workers movement, the ALP and the ACTU tops, do not fight for such a class-struggle program. They bow before the “right” of capitalists to hire and fire at will in accordance with the “need” to maximise profits. They accept the capitalist class’ insistence that a class-struggle program for jobs is “impractical.” To that we say, if it is “impractical” for the current system to do the obviously rational and humane thing by utilising every available labour resource and providing those who labour both job security and decent working conditions, then this system needs to be swept away. After all in this country and most other capitalist countries, the rule of capital has failed to adequately protect the masses from COVID. In contrast, the PRC, the biggest socialistic country – for all the incompleteness of her transition to socialism – has protected her people from both the pandemic and economic chaos more successfully than any other country in the world. And she has done so without vilifying and discriminating against those living in the working class suburbs of her big cities … unlike the capitalist regime here! Let’s fight for socialism!

Bust Morrison’s Myths about Australia’s Response to the Deadly Pandemic

Above Photo: July 2021, Southwest Sydney – Essential workers living in Sydney’s multiracial working class suburb of Fairfield queue for up to six hours just to get a COVID test.
Photo Credit: AAP

To Suppress the COVID Wave Sweeping through Sydney,
We Need to:

Bust Morrison’s Myths about Australia’s
Response to the Deadly Pandemic

2 August 2021: Yesterday, NSW announced that it had 239 new locally acquired COVID cases – the equal highest number of daily cases since the start of the pandemic. Worryingly, case numbers have soared since last week. There is a risk that the situation will spiral out of control. Even if the authorities are able to prevent a massive death toll as occurred in Melbourne last winter, it is likely that they will only be able to do this by maintaining the current lockdown for months. Some 2.3 million residents in Sydney’s working class western and southwestern suburbs are under especially strict lockdown restrictions that prevent all but essential workers from working outside their local government area. However, all the residents of Greater Sydney, the Blue Mountains, Central Coast and Wollongong have been locked down for the last more than five weeks and the lockdown is officially set to last another four more weeks. Many infectious disease experts are saying that it is unlikely that the lockdown can be lifted until well into spring. Indeed, the NSW Liberal government, having been disastrously slow to respond to the outbreak of the more infectious Delta variant, seems to have given up trying to squash the outbreak. Instead, it is merely trying to limit the speed of the spread through lockdowns while waiting for more and more people to get vaccinated and in this way for the outbreak to be eventually contained. The problem is that this strategy could take several months to bear fruit. Months in which many people will die. Months in which many others – including young people – will get long-term debilitating COVID side effects. And months in which hundreds of thousands of working class people will suffer terrible financial hardships; with those working in insecure, casual jobs once again set to be hardest hit.

So how can we dig ourselves out of the hole that federal and state governments and their system have led us into? To clarify the strategy needed, we must look at why Australia’s current response is failing and what methods have worked in certain overseas countries. However, to be able to do this we need to bust the boastful myths that prime minister, Scott Morrison, and health minister, Greg Hunt, have spread about Australia’s handling of the pandemic. And we need to dispel the myths that they have spread about the varied COVID responses in different overseas countries. Of course, it is hardly only “Scotty from Marketing” and his Liberal-National government that are at fault. Thus, although the ALP have now been calling out the Coalition government’s shambolic vaccine rollout, they have largely upheld the overall COVID response program of the right-wing government. Indeed the favourite expression in 2020 of ALP “opposition” leader, Anthony Albanese seemed to be: “we are at one with the government on this.” Meanwhile, although sections of the mainstream media have criticised Morrison’s vaccine rollout and sometimes critiqued particular measures taken by various levels of Australian government, they too have peddled the myth about Australia’s response to the pandemic being “the envy of the world”. And they have certainly joined Morrison, the ALP, the Greens and the far-right parties in looking for every opportunity to make lying attacks against the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) response to the pandemic. To better explain why the entire Australian ruling class and all the forces that uphold their rule are “at one with the government” on the fundamental questions over the pandemic response, it is necessary to pick apart each of the myths spread by the government headed by Morrison from marketing.

Myth Number 1: “Australia’s Response to COVID Leads the World”

With the Delta variant spreading dangerously through Sydney and with Greater Sydney and surrounding regions in the midst of what will be a months-long lockdown, this frequently made boast by the Morrison government is getting more infuriating every day. Moreover, it is also simply not true. It is, to be sure, true that relative to the U.S., Britain, Western European countries, Brazil, Russia and India, Australia’s response has been more successful. However, that is a very low bar to climb over! For the response to the pandemic in those countries has been catastrophically awful. Moreover, Australia is blessed with certain natural advantages that make it easier to control a pandemic. Firstly, Australia has a very low population density – 120 times lower than India’s – which obviously makes viruses transmit slower than in more densely populated countries. Moreover, Australia is an island. This makes quarantine measures easier to implement. Indeed, to the extent that Australia’s rulers have been more successful than their counterparts in some other countries in dealing with the virus threat, it is has been through implementing one of the most draconian travel restriction policies of any country in the world. Adopting a fortress strategy, the ruling class have basically banned all international travel except for allowing, at a slow pace, the return of citizens and permanent residents from abroad. However, as we are seeing with this current outbreak in Sydney and the one a year ago in Melbourne, once the virus gets through the walls of the fortress, the system here is truly tested. And it has been failing this test.

To see how much a lie it is that the Australian rulers’ response to COVID has been “number one in the world”, we only have to compare the COVID situation in Australia with that of the most populous country in the world, the PRC. Over the last five days, Australia has averaged nearly 225 local cases per day. By contrast, mainland China, a land with a population some 60 times larger than Australia, has averaged just 36 locally acquired cases per day.

It is not only in the recent period that Australia’s pandemic response compares unfavourably to China’s. Overall, the amount of people who have died from COVID per million residents is more than 11 times higher in Australia than in China. And China’s much greater success in responding to COVID can be proven even to those swayed by right-wing conspiracy theories claiming that she has under-reported her pandemic death toll. In fact, Australia’s own health data confirms how few people in China were infected with COVID. Australian data shows that of the more than 320,000 people who arrived into Australia from China (include both returning Australian citizens and residents as well as Chinese international students) in the first four months of last year – by far the worst period of the outbreak in China – only between 15 and 21 people were found to have been infected with the coronavirus. This means that in the very worst period of the pandemic in China, the average infection rate of arrivals from there – which is a good indicator of the infection rate within China itself – was many times lower than the peak infection rate of active cases within Australia.

The PRC is not the only socialistic country that has outperformed capitalist Australia in responding to the COVID threat. Laos, which has a population slightly more than Victoria’s has had just six COVID deaths throughout the entire pandemic. As well as the four socialistic countries in Asia, even dozens of capitalist countries have a lower death rate from COVID than Australia. Although largely not as successful as the Chinese, Laotian and North Korean workers states, amongst these capitalist states that have responded better than Australia include Nigeria, Niger, New Zealand, Singapore, Eritrea and Tajikistan.

So why has the response from Australia’s rulers been comparatively poor. The haphazard vaccination campaign is often mentioned. And that definitely is a factor. Less than 15% of Australia’s population is fully vaccinated (18% of people older than 16). Even among the most vulnerable section of the population, over 70s, three in five people are not yet fully vaccinated. However, the poor vaccination campaign is not the only reason for the current crisis in this country. COVID testing services are inadequate meaning that people have to wait in long queues to get tested in hotspot areas, which deters people who should be getting themselves tested from doing so. In the Fairfield area in southwest Sydney, residents have had to queue for up to six hours just to get a COVID test! Meanwhile, Australia’s rulers and their capitalist system have failed to ensure adequate protective clothing (PPE) for nurses and other healthcare workers, paramedics, hospital cleaners, aged care workers and other crucial frontline workers. As a result, throughout the pandemic, COVID has readily spread from infected patients to nurses and aged care workers or the other way around, leading then to rapid spreads among other healthcare workers, patients and aged care home residents. This is a primary cause of the carnage last winter in privately-owned aged care homes in Victoria. Moreover, in just the last month in Sydney, virus transmission between healthcare workers and patients has caused dangerous COVID clusters that have disrupted services in several major hospitals include Fairfield, Royal North Shore and Liverpool. Indeed, Australia’s latest COVID death is a man who contracted the disease while being a patient for another illness at Liverpool Hospital.

To fully appreciate all the reasons for the poor response to the COVID crisis in this country, we first need to bust a few more of the myths spread by the Morrison government, the “Opposition” and the tycoon and government-owned mainstream media.

Myth Number 2: “South Korea and Taiwan are Countries that are Also
at the Top of the League with Australia in Terms of COVID Response”

Actually, South Korea has had even more pandemic-related deaths per million residents than here in Australia; and as we have outlined above, dozens of other countries have a lower death rate than here. Moreover, South Korea is right now in the midst of a massive COVID spread. They have averaged over 1,500 new cases per day over the last week. So Australia’s ruling class speak less about South Korea these days. But why did Australia’s ruling class want to portray South Korea as a “top of the league” success story? Praising South Korea’s response was part of their desperate attempts to find a “like-minded country” that they could highlight as a pandemic response success. They needed this mythical “success story” from a “like-minded country” as a retort to the, for them, very ugly reality that the most successful countries in responding to COVID have been the very countries most targeted by the Western imperialists’ Cold War drive against workers states: the PRC and her socialistic neighbours.

When the ruling class say “like-minded countries”, they mean other countries ruled by capitalist regimes that are allied with the U.S. and Britain. Sometimes the rulers here also point to Singapore and New Zealand as “similar COVID successes like Australia.” However, they know that people are not stupid and that most people would know that both those countries are islands with very small populations and which, therefore, have a much easier challenge dealing with COVID than other countries. Indeed, some islands with small populations like the Solomon Islands and Macao have had no pandemic-related deaths whatsoever.

Australia’s ruling class chose South Korea as a populous, capitalist, Western-allied country to be held up as a pandemic “success story”. The fact that South Korea is a frontline Cold War state who the West needs to hold up as a model relative to socialistic North Korea (DPRK – Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea) makes it an even more useful choice. Another crucial frontline Cold War ally of the Western capitalist powers is Taiwan – who the American, Australian and other “like-minded” regimes see as an unsinkable aircraft carrier aimed against Red China. An island country, Taiwan used a draconian, Morrison-style fortress approach to have early success in warding off the pandemic. Apologists for capitalism and Western domination of the world loudly celebrated. They took every opportunity to hold up as a model of pandemic response success this capitalist state of ethnic Chinese people in order to obscure the big fact that was becoming increasingly obvious to objective observers: that socialistic China was doing a sterling job in suppressing COVID. However, once Taiwan’s fortress experienced a serious breach a few months ago, her systems were found to be poor in dealing with the resulting outbreak. Taiwan’s COVID death rate soared to almost the same level as Australia’s. Therefore, just as with South Korea, the Australian ruling class and their media have stopped talking about Taiwan’s COVID response.

It is becoming impossible to ignore the elephant in the room when it comes to pandemic response success – the PRC as well as her socialistic neighbours and allies the Lao People’s Democratic Republic and the DPRK (and to a slightly lesser extent the Socialist Republic of Vietnam). And if the capitalist media here were not so blinded by their own soft-core white supremacist prejudice and “First World” arrogance they would also recognise the current achievements of several African and Central Asian countries in dealing with the pandemic – many of whom it so happens have cooperated closely with Beijing in their COVID response.

What the capitalist rulers of Australia and other “like-minded countries” are terrified about is that the masses in their own countries will see the relative success of socialistic China in dealing with the pandemic and conclude that they need socialism in their own countries too; or, at the least, conclude that they should not acquiesce to the Cold War drive against socialistic rule in China. So with the facts about the pandemic response against them, the U.S., Australian and other Western imperialists have had to resort more and more to outright lies. It is in this context that we must understand Joe Biden and Morrison’s resurrection of the discredited, Trump-era, far-right conspiracy “theory” that COVID leaked out of a Wuhan lab.


Per capita COVID-caused deaths in some of the states in the Asia-Pacific region that have not had an absolutely disastrous response to the pandemic. “Australia has been the leader of the world” in responding to COVID??? “Taiwan and South Korea are also at the top of the pack”??? Give us a break Scott Morrison, Greg Hunt and the mainstream Australian media!

Data source: Worldometer, https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
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Myth Number 3: “China’s COVID Response is
Based on the Use of Authoritarian Methods”

Ever since it became apparent that their own countries were going to be far less effective in dealing with the coronavirus threat than the PRC, capitalist ruling classes began spreading the above myth. Scott Morrison found one or two unverified reports of people in China using draconian methods to enforce the initial Wuhan lockdown and insinuated that this was the norm in China. The mainstream media sang the same tune. Yet the truth is very different. Of course, in a hugely populous country with one in five of the world’s entire population, one can always find a few negative stories in China about just about any issue. The reality, however, is that the Wuhan lockdown succeeded because of the voluntary co-operation of the overwhelming majority of her residents. China’s collectivist economic system in which public ownership plays the backbone role has bred a collectivist culture amongst her people. The feeling that people should make personal sacrifices for the common good out of which everyone will then benefit has been rooted deep in the hearts of the people. Moreover, trust in government is high in the PRC. Therefore, Wuhan’s lockdown was not undermined by the phenomena we have here, where far-right forces are manipulating distrust in government and middle class anger at the economic cost of lockdowns to undermine pandemic response. Moreover, any enforcement of the lockdown that was needed in Wuhan was largely performed by neighbourhood committees, volunteers from local Communist Party of China branches and public health officials. The police role there was really subsidiary. Thus, when the tiny percentage of people who snuck out of lockdown were caught out, rather than being fined, they were typically just scolded and often then simply escorted (or in very rare cases dragged) back into their homes by grass-roots activists – who were sometimes their own neighbours. The people hit with heavy criminal penalties – and rightly so – were not mainly individuals breaking the lockdown but those business owners who took advantage of the crisis to jack up prices.

Although capitalist ruling classes were quick to denounce China for its “authoritarian” lockdown of Wuhan, before long they were compelled to implement similar measures – often for much longer periods in total than the two months that Wuhan was locked down for. It is important to note that Wuhan and the other cities in Hubei that had stringent lockdowns only amounted to 4% of China’s population. In a further 12% of China for varying periods of between one to four weeks at the height of her pandemic in February 2020 people were placed into a lockdown similar to the one that Greater Sydney and southeast Queensland residents are under right now. However, most of the residents of the rest of China have never had to be in any sort of lockdown. This includes all the residents of well-known cities like Shanghai, Xian, Chengdu and Chongqing as well as over 90% of the people living in Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Tianjin. At the height of the pandemic in China – and for short later periods when cases were detected in particular regions in subsequent small outbreaks – there were closures of schools, theatres and clubs, restrictions on the passenger density of buses and trains and sometimes, grassroots-organised, management of neighbourhoods involving frequent temperature testing of residents and where outsiders entering a residential area had to register their real names and have their temperature checked. However, three quarters of the people of China have never had to be in a Greater Sydney-style, actual lockdown for any time during this entire pandemic. Moreover, the longer that this pandemic has gone on, the more that China has been able to suppress sporadic outbreaks without needing to lockdown whole cities. Thus, when the megacity of Guangzhou had an outbreak three months ago, the PRC was able to suppress the spread while only ever needing to lockdown five streets in one district of the entire city. It is telling that while a week ago, nearly 60% of Australia’s population was locked down and right now Greater Sydney, Wollongong, the NSW Central Coast, the Blue Mountains, Greater Brisbane, the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast are all under lockdown, at most 120 thousand people in China, a country of 1.45 billion people, are under any sort of stay-at-home, lockdown measures right now. Although there are also some restrictions on outbound travel in a handful of Chinese cities dealing with small outbreaks of the Delta variant, most of the rest of the people in China are able to live their lives like there is no pandemic at all.

So how has the PRC been able to respond so effectively to the pandemic and increasingly without needing to lockdown large populations for lengthy periods? One reason is China’s high vaccination rate. In a massive feat of public health mobilisation, the PRC has administered 1.7 billion vaccine doses to her people in the space of just a few months. Given that she is using two-dose vaccines, this means that the PRC is already three-quarters of the way to fully vaccinating the 80% of her population required to achieve herd immunity. As a percentage of her population, the PRC has administered nearly two and a half times as many doses as Australia’s regime has. This is one of the reasons why, while fifteen people have already died in Sydney since this latest outbreak started in June, not a single one of China’s 1,450 million people have died from COVID for more than six months!

It is important to know why China’s vaccination campaign has been so successful. China’s first vaccine to get WHO approval – and the mainstay of her campaign – is produced by her biggest pharmaceutical company, Sinopharm. In keeping with the PRC’s socialistic system where public ownership plays the dominant role, Sinopharm is a state-owned enterprise. So while Canberra has had to haggle with capitalist corporations like Pfizer, Moderna, CSL and AstraZeneca in order to obtain vaccine supply – as the pharma-biotech giants play governments off against each other while they try to squeeze every last dollar of profit they can out of the misery and desperation of the COVID-hit world – in China the main vaccine supplier happens to be collectively owned by the very users of the vaccine: that is, by nearly 1.5 billion Chinese people. Therefore, China has had no problem in ensuring vaccine supply. Moreover, given that the vaccine manufacturer is collectively owned by all the Chinese people, the Chinese people are in effect “buying” the vaccines off themselves! This is very different to the reality here. For example, the Australian-owned, multinational giant that locally manufactures the AstraZeneca vaccine, CSL, which was privatised by the Keating Labor government in 1994 and is actually Australia’s largest company by market capitalisation, is a greedy profit-obsessed corporation. Its wealthy owners made a massive, after tax, net profit of $1.8 billion in just the six months to February (that is, even before profits from the AstraZeneca production came on board). Among the big shareholders raking in these profits are the chairman, Brian McNamee, and the CEO, Paul Perrault, both of whom own around $47 million of shares. In addition to the profits he extracts through his massive shareholding, CEO Perrault additionally received a total remuneration package last year of a staggering $40 million! And guess whose going to be paying this year to help sustain these mega-profits and obscene executive remuneration levels? As always that’s going to be the workers of CSL through their labour being exploited but also all of us working class and middle-class people via the flow of public money into paying CSL for the vaccine supply contract.

Now, in addition to the vaccine produced by China’s very un-CSL-like pharma giant, Sinopharm, there is a second China-developed vaccine approved by the WHO which is produced by privately-owned, Sinovac. As a result of the unfinished character of China’s transition to socialism and the fact that China’s compromise-seeking leadership has allowed too much of a capitalist private sector into the economy, capitalists do exist in China – like the ones who own Sinovac. However, as China’s best known capitalist, Jack Ma, has been finding out over the last couple of years, those capitalists that do exist in China do not have the “right” to exploit the masses with the same “freedom” as do the owners of Pfizer, Moderna, CSL, BHP and Amazon in the capitalist countries. Instead, they face much state pressure to give back to society – especially when China’s egalitarian-minded masses agitate for a crackdown on the capitalists’ greed. Failure of these exploiters to comply could see not only their wings clipped, as has happened to Ma, but risks them being completely – and we may add deservedly – squashed. Recently, the PRC banned all privately-owned tutoring firms from making a profit and last week ordered operators of food delivery companies to ensure that all delivery workers are guaranteed wages no less than the local minimum wage. Therefore, the owners of Sinovac will find it much harder to do to the Chinese people what Pfizer, CSL, Moderna and the like have been doing to the Australian people and, even more so, to the people of low-income countries.

Ensuring a supply of vaccines is a key part of any vaccination campaign but it is only one part. The vaccines then have to be transported, stored and delivered. Here too the backbone role played by public ownership in China comes into play. Not only is the PRC’s healthcare system and aged care sector overwhelmingly dominated by public and community healthcare providers but so are all the major airlines used to transport vaccines as well as plenty of buildings, gymnasiums and other infrastructure needed for the delivery of the vaccines. This contrasts with the situation here where governments at all levels have been on such a big privatisation binge that so much of the buildings, other assets and even land needed for a public health campaign have been sold off, making it that much harder to quickly pool resources together for an emergency mobilisation.

The PRC’s success in responding to the COVID threat is not merely due to her vaccination campaign. Even before she began rolling out her vaccines, the PRC had largely suppressed the COVID threat. One reason for this is that, after a painful lesson in the early days of the epidemic about how easily COVID could be passed onto healthcare workers, the PRC was able to ensure that all her nurses, hospital janitors, paramedics, doctors, aged care workers and other medical workers were equipped with head-to-toe space-suit style PPE. As a result, from about a month after COVID was first detected, the deadly transmission that we have seen in Australia between healthcare workers or aged care workers on the one hand and patients or aged care residents on the other – and also amongst healthcare and aged care workers themselves – has been largely prevented in China. To supply the PPE needed to protect her workers, China’s state-owned industrial enterprises, whose ultimate goal is to serve the public rather than wealthy shareholders, quickly turned their operations into factories making PPE, disinfectants, non-contact thermometers, testing kits, masks and ventilators. Even state-owned aircraft manufacturers, car factories, oil giants and even underwear manufacturers were marshalled for this purpose. Such a mobilisation is very difficult in capitalist countries because the private enterprises that dominate the economy are totally driven by profit. They will only agree to such a hugely expensive switch in production if they can be sure that they can make big bucks out of it and if they are given guarantees that the demand for PPE and other pandemic relief items will continue for the long term. That is why Australia’s hospital and aged care workers ended up with such a shortage of adequate PPE last year – and why this shortage still persists to a fair degree to this very day – with fatal consequences for hundreds of people.

Meanwhile, in the PRC, the existence of a workers regime has compelled even the privately owned of China’s manufacturers of COVID testing kits to provide adequate supply of these kits at low prices. As a result, in China, all workers at hospitals, aged care homes, ports, airports, borders, transportation hubs and prisons are given very frequent COVID tests. This enables the PRC to detect new outbreaks amongst her most pandemic-exposed population very quickly. Moreover, once there is a significant outbreak in an area, the PRC moves into a massive testing operation. The same public ownership and control over buildings, land, infrastructure and airlines that has allowed China to so quickly vaccinate her population is again brought into play. This enables the PRC to conduct mass COVID testing with lightning speed, while largely sparing her people the lengthy queuing that people in working-class southwest Sydney have had to go through over the last several weeks.

A case study of how the PRC’s COVID response works can be seen in the way that they have handled a recent Delta variant outbreak in the megacity of Nanjing. The outbreak was first detected on July 20 during routine COVID testing of airport workers. Although the size of this outbreak is much smaller than the current one in Sydney, the PRC quickly moved into a massive testing operation. Within twelve days of the Nanjing outbreak being detected, the PRC tested the entire city of 9.3 million residents (except for babies) for COVID three times! Today Nanjing started its fourth round of all-inclusive testing (by the way, the COVID test used in China does not require the uncomfortable swab pushed into the nose method used here). Those found to be infected have all been moved into hospitals. This practice not only ensures that COVID-symptomatic people get proper medical treatment and have no problems safely accessing food and other basic needs but guarantees that they do not pass on the virus to household members, both of which has been occurring in Sydney with this latest outbreak, often with tragic consequences. Through these means, the PRC has been able to prevent the Nanjing outbreak from getting out of control within days. Moreover, although theatres, gyms, tourist sites and face-to-face training have been closed in the city, the PRC is managing to slow the Nanjing outbreak without locking down the whole city. Indeed, just four particular areas of one sub-district – a sub-district whose entire population is only 80,000 people out of a city of 9.3 million – have been placed into lockdown. Meanwhile, the same mass testing-focused method used in Nanjing is also being used to contain subsequent, small secondary spreads in other cities, including Wuhan.

Of course, to be able to treat all infected people during an outbreak in hospitals, as China does, often requires the rapid conversion of gymnasiums, stadiums and other buildings into makeshift hospitals; or the creation of brand new hospitals. Here again the dominance of social ownership in the PRC’s economy is brought to bear. With the biggest developers, equipment manufacturers, communication firms and power companies under public ownership, it has been socialistic state-owned enterprises who have done the heavy lifting in building China’s make-shift hospitals at lightning speed when needed. In Wuhan, during the height of the pandemic there, these socialistic enterprises even built and equipped two massive, brand new, infectious disease hospitals – complete with negative pressure rooms to prevent COVID spreading from infected patients to staff and others – in less than two weeks. Here, in that time, capitalist developers and other private contractors would still be busy scheming with their mates in government over how much money they could get away with being paid for such an urgent contract. Moreover, the developers would be reluctant to disrupt any existing contract that was more profitable.

It is apparent that the marshalling of resources needed to pull off the measures that socialistic China has applied to beat down COVID goes against the very nature of Australia’s capitalist system. However, that does not mean it is impossible here to win the implementation of some of these measures. After all, giving pay rises is also against the nature of capitalist bosses but through determined collective action by workers we can sometimes force these bosses to grant pay rises. What working class people in Australia and our allies urgently need to fight for then is:

  • For selected compatible manufacturers and pharmaceutical-biotech firms to be ordered to immediately supply at a low price, variously, PPE, COVID testing kits and other pandemic relief items. If they refuse or delay, the enterprises should be immediately confiscated and brought into public ownership.
  • For developers and equipment suppliers to be ordered to undertake at low cost and high speed the conversion of designated buildings into make-shift hospitals to enable the hospitalisation of all COVID-infected people.
  • For the immediate placing of all banks under state control. This is essential to directing the capital needed for manufacturers, pharma-biotech firms and developers to be able to quickly switch over their operations to the delivery of PPE, COVID testing kits, makeshift hospitals etc. We also need credit being allocated into areas that will help reduce the level of job losses. We need this nationalisation of the banks right now and we need it all the time. For the nationalised banks to be put under people’s supervision such that all major bank operations can be inspected by committees consisting of unionised bank employees’ representatives alongside representatives of other unions and mass organisations.
  • For the state requisitioning of unused private buildings for use in COVID vaccination and testing.
  • For the confiscation of private aged-care homes from profit-making aged care companies and their placing into public ownership and control. These notoriously greedy, profit-driven operators have all too often neglected to provide adequate PPE for staff, failed to follow basic pandemic safety protocols and have denied their staff the job and income security that would allow them to feel at ease taking sick leave while having symptoms. We need to put a stop to this immediately! It is in these private aged care homes where nearly three quarters of all those who have died from COVID in Australia have perished! Right now a new outbreak at the privately-owned Hardi Wyoming nursing home in Sydney’s Inner West has already infected 19 elderly patients and two workers.

In theory, even some capitalists whose “property rights” are not directly affected by some of the measures listed above would benefit from them in the immediate term. For by quickly bringing COVID under control, these measures would protect the overall economy. However, all capitalists would resist these plainly rational measures as they would worry that any impinging on the “right” of private business owners to deploy their operations in the way that is most profitable to them could see momentum created for further inroads into capitalist “property rights,” not least because the working class masses would see the obvious benefit of bringing key sectors of the economy under public control. That is why any such measures needed to control the pandemic will need to be fought for by the collective action of the working class. In doing so, the working class would also be able to draw in behind them those middle class elements who could see the rationality of this program.

An example of the type of struggle needed was seen in the powerful action, two weeks ago, by 200 cleaners at Westmead Hospital. They were so alarmed by the state’s failure to provide them with adequate PPE, or to even allow them to shower in the hospital after their shifts, that they refused to work at the hospital’s COVID unit until they were fitted with adequate PPE. Their totally supportable action eventually won these workers improved PPE. The fight against COVID is very much intertwined with the struggle for workers rights because so much of the transmission, in especially this latest outbreak, is occurring within workplaces. Workers’ collective action needs to push back against capitalist bosses and high-paid state bureaucrats both of whom are willing to risk the health of workers to boost their profits and careers. We need to fight for:

  • Union safety committees at each workplace. These will struggle to ensure that each workplace has proper pandemic deterrence procedures and that workers are provided with adequate PPE. If any site is found to be dangerous, workers should walk off the job until the site is made safe. At non-unionised work sites, more class conscious workers should take the lead in organising workers together into safety committees to play the same role. This could be a catalyst for organising workers into unions at these sites. No management to be allowed to participate in safety committee meetings.
  • All workers to be granted unlimited fully paid pandemic leave for COVID-19 treatment and quarantining paid for by the bosses – not the reduced amount being granted by governments.

Myth Number 4: “Australia Took the Lead in
Pushing for an Inquiry into the Origins of COVID”

Actually most of the world, including China, wanted a scientific inquiry into the origins of COVID. What Scott Morrison’s government, backed by the ALP, pushed for was a political “inquiry” that operated based on the presumption of “guilt” on the part of China. The type of “inquiry” that the Liberal government pushed for was a witch-hunting one like the Royal Commission into Australian trade unions that it established in 2014. Australia’s foreign minister even compared the sort of COVID inquiry that Canberra wanted with “weapons inspectors,” thus provocatively linking the inquiry with the cover of “international inspection” that was used to justify the brutal U.S./British/Australian invasion of Iraq.

How sincere the Australian ruling class is about truly determining the origins of COVID can be seen by their reaction to a detailed four-week scientific study in Wuhan conducted by a team of WHO experts. When these experts published their findings earlier this year and it became clear that the science did not match the China-bashing agenda of the Australian, American and other imperialist regimes, Biden, Morrison and Co. simply trashed the experts’ report. This is despite the Australian expert on the team, Director of NSW Health Pathology at Westmead Hospital, Dominic Dwyer, defending the findings of the inquiry and praising Wuhan authorities for being “pretty open” with the team during their investigation.

In any case, the origins of the coronavirus is actually not the most important pandemic issue that requires an inquiry. The harsh reality is that outbreaks of deadly viruses have been with us since time immemorial. The last deadly world pandemic, which ravaged the world from 1918 to 1920 (it was inaccurately known as the Spanish flu but actually originated in Kansas in the USA) killed between four to twenty times as many people as the current pandemic has. Moreover, it did so at a time when the world’s population was less than a quarter of what it is now. With the population density of the world growing, it is inevitable that humans will become more prone to being infected with animal-borne viruses. Moreover, when a new virus strikes the human population, it is impossible to curb the spread at the very start. The virus will quietly spread between people before they notice symptoms and before doctors are aware that a new killer is on the loose. So the real practical question that must be looked at is, once a new virus with pandemic potential has an initial spread, how do we contain and suppress it? And there are already some clear answers if we take a cold hard look at the different responses to COVID. In China, the total death toll from the pandemic currently stands at 4,636 people. This is in a country with one in five of the world’s people. That means that if every country had responded as effectively to the COVID threat as the PRC has, the international death toll would at most be 25,000 rather than the nearly four and a half million official death toll that we have today.
In reality the death toll would have been much less than even this because most countries would have had the advance warning that the virus was coming that the PRC never had. Moreover, if every country had responded as effectively to the COVID threat as the PRC has, the virus would have been completely contained and suppressed months ago. Why this did not occur and why do we have the catastrophic disaster that we face today? That is the real, practical, life and death question that humanity must now ask itself.

As we explained when exposing the previous myths discussed above, the Australian and other capitalist ruling classes are fearful that their “own” masses will see the success of China’s COVID response and start demanding similar measures in their own countries; and most frighteningly (for the capitalist bigwigs) start advocating for the public control of the economy that would make such measures achievable. So the Western imperialist rulers are doing everything possible to divert people away from seeing the success of the PRC’s pandemic response and away from seeing what measures were taken to achieve that success. By this obfuscation, by resisting the kind of measures that could quickly suppress the outbreaks that are sweeping through Sydney and threatening to do the same to southeast Queensland, Australia’s capitalist ruling class are costing the lives of numerous people and causing huge numbers of others to lose their livelihoods.

So let’s work hard to dispel the China-bashing myths about the pandemic spread by the likes of Morrison, Biden, Albanese, Boris Johnson and the capitalist media. And while we are at it, let’s oppose the equally dishonest attacks on the PRC – as well on the other socialistic countries Cuba, DPRK, Vietnam and Laos – over supposed “human rights” violations. For just as it is in the interests of all working class and middle class people to fight for the implementation here of the kind of measures that the PRC has used to squash the pandemic over there, it is in the interests of the overwhelming majority of the world to defend the socialistic rule that has enabled China’s pandemic-response success story.

Myth Number 5: “The Government’s February 2020 Ban on Foreign Nationals
Arriving from China Saved Australia from a Disastrous COVID Outbreak”

Actually, by the date that the Morrison government banned foreign nationals and non-permanent residents arriving into Australia from China on 1 February 2020, the PRC had so successfully kept the coronavirus out of the huge part of China that is outside of Wuhan (and a few surrounding areas in Hubei Province) – whose residents could not enter Australia or any other country because Wuhan and the affected other parts of Hubei were all then under lockdown – that no one who could have then entered Australia from China would have been infected with the coronavirus. This is proven by the fact that, as reported by then Deputy Chief Medical Officer (now Chief Medical Officer) of Australia, Paul Kelly, in the four weeks after the ban was implemented, of the 40,000 people who did arrive into Australia from China (who were allowed to do so because they were Australian citizens or permanent residents), not one single one of them was found to be infected with the coronavirus, despite very careful screening of these people. The few people who did arrive from China with the coronavirus came in January 2020. However, because China had warned the world at the start of January of the threat posed by the new virus, those few cases were quickly identified by screening done in Australia and did not pass the virus onto others. It turns out that arrivals from China did not cause any of the community spread of the virus within Australia at all.

The government’s ban on arrivals from China, done with the full support of the ALP, had more to do with advancing their Cold War China-bashing than with protecting people from COVID. This was proven by the government’s conduct over the subsequent few weeks. In this time, medical data was coming in from Italy, Germany, other West European countries and the U.S. showing that large numbers of people were being infected with the coronavirus in those countries. However, even as this information was screaming at their face to act, the Liberal government waited weeks before introducing any quarantining of the large numbers of people who were arriving into Australia every day from these countries. In order to achieve their Cold War goal of portraying Red China negatively, the Australian regime had to maintain, for as long as possible, their specific travel ban on only China – or at most China and a couple of other countries – so as to keep as much focus of suspicion on China as they could. The result is that it was arrivals from Western Europe, cruise ships and the U.S. – through no fault of their own but with plenty of fault lying at the feet of the Australian government – that brought the pandemic to Australia. The bipartisan distortion of quarantine and travel restriction policies to meet Cold War agendas was, thus, in big part responsible for Australia’s first wave of the pandemic and the approximately one hundred lives that it took.

Myth Number 6: “We are All in the Same Boat in Dealing With COVID”

Tell that to the many workers who, through years of toil, have enabled their bosses to extract a fortune but at the first sign of a reduction in profits caused by the pandemic were thrown out of their jobs or stood down without pay by these very same “Aussie” capitalist bosses. Or tell that to the workers who, insecure about losing their jobs during this crisis, have been bullied by their bosses out of important working conditions like receipt of shift penalties.

As for Australian governments of various stripes, their real attitude is typified, not by their “all in the same boat” rhetoric, but by the starkly contrasting ways that the NSW state government has dealt with the latest outbreak as it moved from Sydney’s wealthy Eastern suburbs to the working class, heavily multiracial, southwest and west of Sydney. When the Delta variant was first spreading within Sydney’s Eastern suburbs in mid to late June, the Berejiklian government was very slow to take measures that, at the cost of inconveniencing the affluent residents of the affected region, could have obstructed the outbreak from spreading to other parts of Sydney. However, once the virus spread to Sydney’s working class and heavily Asian, Middle Eastern, African and Pacific Islander background southwest and west, the government did not hesitate to decree strict restrictions on people living in the new centres of the outbreak in order to stop the outbreak moving out of those areas. To be sure, in the absence of the government’s ability and willingness to implement the kind of measures that socialistic China has used to suppress outbreaks, the government had little choice by this stage. However, the contrast between their approach to the residents of the Fairfield, Liverpool, Canterbury-Bankstown, Cumberland and Blacktown local government areas and the soft touch given to the residents of wealthier suburbs – a soft touch that allowed this Bondi cluster to get out of control – is striking.

Where the contrast is most evident is the way in which the government, the high-up bureaucrats and the mainstream media portray the people living in the shifting virus hotspots. When the Bondi cluster was very much localised within the Eastern suburbs, the ruling class did not engage in blaming the residents of the affected area (nor should they have). However, once the centre of the outbreak spread to Sydney’s southwest, they launched a series of attacks on the residents of the region, with barely disguised anti-working class and racist undertones. None in the ruling class sought to explain that it was inevitable that the virus was more prone to spreading quickly in the working class southwest and west of Sydney given how many frontline and essential workers live in the region and are, thus, more at risk of getting infected. Then to add insult to injury, the police were deployed in big numbers to southwest Sydney in a very ostentatious show of force, nominally to enforce the lockdown. This brought a furious reaction from many residents of the region. They rightly pointed out the contrast between the way that residents in the Eastern suburbs were handled with the way that they were now being treated. What amplified the anger of local residents is that police, as well as being notorious for their racist brutality towards Aboriginal people, are known for their heavy-handed treatment of people of colour and those from low-income households; both of whom make up a high proportion of the residents of the areas where heavy policing was being unleashed. As many residents pointed out: they need more testing services and not police. Now the Australian regime has gone even further. They have actually deployed the army to the virus hotspot areas of southwestern and western Sydney. The capitalist rulers do not miss a chance to try and boost the authority of their military – with its reputation badly damaged by revelations of widespread, horrendous war crimes in Afghanistan – and to get people used to the idea of the military being deployed domestically. To the many residents in the suburbs where the Australian military is being deployed who originate from countries like Afghanistan and Iraq and where Australian and allied militaries have committed horrific torture and murder of civilians, seeing the ADF deployed in their neighbourhoods is terrifying.

So we are not buying the line spun by Morrison, Hunt, Albanese and the Murdoch, Kerry Stokes (billionaire owner of Channel 7), Bruce Gordon (filthy rich, right-wing owner of Channel 9, The Sydney Morning Herald, 2GB and other ex-Fairfax media) and regime-owned media outlets about us all being “in the same boat.” In reality people in this country are in about three different boats. A massive luxury cruise liner for the small number who make up the big end of town. A more modest but comfortable boat for the upper-middle class. And for the rest of us, a rickety overcrowded boat where those of lowest income are squeezed into the most uncomfortable parts; and on which we are regularly raided by the enforcers for the capitalist rulers – enforcers who come in their speedboats to hurl some of us into the water in order to scare the rest of us into steering the boat in a direction that those on the luxury cruise liner find most convenient.

Let’s demand: Australian military, get out of the streets of southwestern and western Sydney! Get back to your barracks! Stop the vilification of the multi-racial, working class people of southwest Sydney! For more testing services in southwestern and western Sydney, not heavy-handed police deployments!

Myth Number 7: “The Government’s Jobkeeper Program
Sought to Save the Jobs of Workers”

Jobkeeper was designed to mostly help capitalist business owners. And that is whom it mostly benefited. In just the first three months after the scheme was implemented, $4.6 billion of it went into the pockets of capitalist operations that actually increased their profits from pre-pandemic levels. Over 150,000 sets of business owners that made increased profits were paid out of the scheme in its first three months of operation. Among those in this category are port operator Qube Holdings (founded by notorious union buster Chris Corrigan) which received $13.5 million in subsidies from April to June last year. Meanwhile, furniture, electrical and whitegoods retailer Harvey Norman, which is owned by its billionaire chairman Gerry Harvey, received a total of $22 million in Jobkeeper payments despite its profits more than doubling during the pandemic. Another $8 billion of Jobkeeper grants went into the pockets of an additional 200,000 capitalist operators whose profits did not fall below the threshold levels that the scheme was meant to kick in under. And that was just in the first three months of Jobkeeper. The scheme did save some workers jobs and to that extent we did not campaign against the scheme. However, the most vulnerable workers including international students and most casual workers were not protected by the scheme. Moreover, the tens of billions in handouts to business owners will end up being paid for by working class and middle class people, both out of our taxes, and through the cuts in public services that will be needed to cover the budget hit caused by the scheme.

Although the ALP Opposition is finally now, in 2021, starting to criticise the flow of Jobkeeper dollars into the bank accounts of billionaires, they offer no other strategy for preventing job losses. In contrast, what we say is needed is a fight to win secure, permanent jobs for all through forcing the capitalist bosses to hire and retain more workers than they want to, at the expense of their own profits. This fight to defend and enhance the livelihoods of workers is at one and the same time a struggle to beat back the pandemic. For the lack of job security for most workers is part of the reason why COVID has been spreading so readily within workplaces and nursing homes. For example, because many aged care workers are denied permanency and stable, adequate work hours, they are compelled to work at many different sites, thus inadvertently spreading the virus from nursing home to nursing home. Meanwhile, workers who are insecure about their jobs, especially casual workers, are torn between the need to self-quarantine when showing COVID symptoms and the compulsion to still go to work when they have mild symptoms in order to protect their jobs and retain the flow of their meagre incomes. The capitalist ruling class then blames these workers if they go to work but at the same time the individual capitalist bosses will not hesitate to throw these same workers into the scrapheap if they find that they can’t extract enough profit out of them.

Therefore, both as a means to defend our livelihoods and as a weapon to combat the COVID threat, the working class and our allies should unite to demand:

  • A ban on all job cuts or unpaid stand downs by any firm making a profit, however small.
  • A ban on all job cuts or unpaid stand downs by any company whose highest paid executive has an annual payment package in excess of $1 million.
  • The forcing of any company still making a profit to increase its number of full-time paid employees by at least twenty-five workers for every one million dollars of quarterly profit.
  • The immediate conversion of all casual workers into permanent employees with all the rights of permanency.

To such a program, the capitalist exploiters and all the ruling class politicians, mainstream media commentators and official economists who serve them will scream that this is “totally impractical”, “will cause investment to collapse”, etc, etc. When they do, all socialists should use that opportunity to explain to the working class masses that this is precisely why we socialists insist that the means of production be stripped away from the rich capitalists and brought into public ownership under a workers government. It is that socialistic system, after all, that even in an unfinished and bureaucratically distorted form is enabling the world’s most populous country to not only beat back the COVID threat but to increasingly do so with only the very sparing use of the lockdown method. It is in good part to stop working class people in this country from seeing the necessity to fight for a socialist response to the pandemic – and to fight for a socialist system more generally – that Australia’s capitalist rulers have spread a whole lot of myths about both their own and about China’s very different response to the pandemic. Let’s dispel these myths! Let’s open the road to a rational, pro-working class program to both beat back the COVID threat and to mitigate the economic hardships to the masses resulting from the pandemic!

Oppose the Right-Wing Attack on Vermont Unions

From the U.S. to Australia, Let’s Fight for
Revolutionary, Internationalist Leadership of our Trade Unions

Oppose the Right-Wing, Bureaucratic Attack on
the Vermont AFL-CIO Union Federation

18 June 2021: In the latter part of 2019, a new slate was elected to the local leadership of the AFL-CIO (the biggest U.S. union federation – a U.S. equivalent of the ACTU) in the USA’s northeastern state of Vermont. Alongside vowing to make the union’s operations more transparent to its 10,000 rank and file members, the new leadership promised more independence from the Democrat Party, a focus on standing by migrant workers, more active support for the Black Lives Matter struggle and a greater willingness to use strikes to defend workers rights. The national leadership of the AFL-CIO, which is protectionist and conservative in its outlook and which subordinates the union movement to the capitalist Democrat Party (one of the two parties that alternately run American capitalism alongside the right-wing Republicans), met the election of the new slate in Vermont with suspicion and alarm. Before long, the national AFL-CIO leadership, headed by the federation’s president Richard Trumka, began bureaucratic manoeuvres against its Vermont branch.

Tensions between AFL-CIO national Executive Committee (henceforth referred to as National EC) and its Vermont branch (henceforth referred to as VT AFL CIO) have now reached breaking point. This follows an overwhelming vote on November 18 by delegates of the VT AFL-CIO to authorise the branch leadership to “call for a general strike of all working people in our state” should Donald Trump and his supporters seek to launch a coup for Trump to remain in the presidency despite his losing the election. After trying to stop the Vermont strike resolution at the time, four months later, Trumka went further and announced that the National EC would be investigating the “recent conduct” of the VT AFL-CIO, threatening “further action.” These are steps towards removing the elected Vermont leaders and putting the branch under the direct administration of the federation’s National EC. This bureaucratic campaign to suppress and punish class-struggle mobilisation must be defeated!

That the threat of a far-right coup in the U.S. was real was seen just a month and a half after the Vermont resolution when fascist white-supremacists and other rabid right-wingers stormed the U.S. Congress building on January 6 with the aim of restoring Trump to the presidency. The workers movement has a real interest in opposing such a far-right coup. However, opposing such a coup does not mean that one should give any support, however critical, to new president Joe Biden. Biden must be 100% opposed! The correct stance to have taken at last November’s presidential election was to oppose a vote to both Trump and Biden. Today Biden and his war-mongering secretary of state, Antony Blinken have taken off from where Trump and Mike Pompeo left off in ratcheting up the imperialist Cold War drive against socialistic China. Biden has even resuscitated a thoroughly discredited Trump-era conspiracy theory that COVID escaped from a Chinese lab, a despicable suggestion that is being used to not only whip up mass hostility to China but which is helping to incite yet more racist violence against people of Chinese and other East Asian backgrounds in the U.S., Canada and Australia. Meanwhile, under the reign of Biden and his new vice-president Kamala Harris, racist cops continue to murder black people and other people of colour throughout the USA. And Biden and Harris are overseeing the brutal incarceration of thousands of child refugees in over-crowded detention camps near the U.S.’s border with Mexico. However, should a coup to restore hard-right Trump to the presidency have succeeded, it would have necessarily been accompanied by further attacks on the democratic rights to organise of unions, black rights activists and other leftists and would have greatly emboldened violent far-right, that is fascist, forces. To prepare working class industrial action against the prospect of such a coup was a very supportable and necessary step. However, Trumka and Co. want workers to rely only on the capitalist Democratic Party to oppose the threat of far-right forces. This is a losing strategy! January 6 proved to the whole world the half-heartedness of U.S. repressive organs for opposing the threat of violent far-right groups. It also showed the downright collusion of some elements of these state organs with fascistic forces.

Neither the capitalist parties, like the Democrats, nor the organs of the capitalist state can be a force against far-right threats. This is because the mainstream capitalist parties and the U.S. state institutions both serve the same capitalist class as far-right forces. By seeking to suppress working class mobilisation against a right-wing coup, Trumka and Co. are tying the hands of the one social force with the power and consistent interest to lead resistance against far-right coups and attacks on remaining democratic rights. Therefore, Trotskyist Platform adds our voice to that of the many trade unionists and anti-fascists in the U.S. and around the world who are opposing the campaign of the national AFL-CIO Executive Committee bureaucrats against the Vermont AFL-CIO branch. We have signed on to an open protest letter to national AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, defending “the right of the VT AFL-CIO to have passed a motion authorising a General Strike if the 2020 election results had been overturned in a coup” and demanding that Trumka, “immediately drop the vindictive and retaliatory `misconduct’ investigation into the VT AFL-CIO.”

The Open Letter was initiated by the circle associated with the Australian far-left website, Class Conscious. We congratulate them on taking the initiative on this issue. Thus far, nine pro-working class organisations around the world have signed onto the Open Letter. So have dozens of individuals, many of whom are union activists. Alongside Trotskyist Platform, one other Australian group has signed onto the Open Letter, which is the leftist, anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian, Melbourne-based group, Jews Against Fascism. Trotskyist Platform calls on all trade union activists and officials who believe in class struggle and the centrality of the working class to the fight against right-wing repression, as well as all staunchly anti-fascist groups, to also sign the Open Letter to AFL-CIO national president Richard Trumka. To sign the letter use this link to go to the relevant page on the Class Conscious website: https://classconscious.org/2021/05/17/sign-open-letter-to-richard-trumka-againt-themisconduct-investigation-into-vermont-afl-cio-defend-labors-right-to-fight-against-fascism-and-dictatorship/ . Note that those who sign on through this link will only be endorsing the actual four-sentence Open Letter and not necessarily the preamble by Class Conscious (while this preamble makes many very good points there are aspects of its analysis that we do not fully endorse).

See this link for a list of signees of the above Open Letter as of 30 May 2021:
https://www.facebook.com/vtworkers/posts/2886823191539923

AFL-CIO Bureaucrats Sorry History of Supporting
Counterrevolutionary Forces and Right-Wing Coups

Although we were very happy to take a stand against the bureaucratic attack on the VT AFL-CIO branch by signing the Open Letter, there was a sentence in the letter that we felt uneasy about. It said that the VT AFL-CIO motion authorising a general strike if Trump’s election defeat had been overturned in a coup, “was in the proud tradition of labor fighting together against the threat of fascism and dictatorship.” Unfortunately, the tradition of the AFL-CIO includes, under the pre-text of fighting for “democracy” and “against dictatorship,” intervening abroad to support U.S. imperialist machinations against both socialistic workers states and independent-minded governments in the “Third World”.

It was in Latin America where top AFL-CIO bureaucrats conducted their most notorious work. Their methods included training local anti-communists to gain influence within Latin American trade unions to combat the influence of leftists within the unions. These local allies would then seek to split leftist-led unions in order to build business-loyal unions that would help U.S. multinationals operating within Latin America to maximize profits by keeping wages poor. Meanwhile, working closely with some of the USA’s biggest and most notoriously anti-union mining corporations, agricultural giants, oil companies and banks, the AFL-CIO’s “American Institute for Free Labor Development” (AIFLD) would help disburse CIA and U.S. State Department funds to help the political work of anti-communist union officials, to bribe union leaders into joining the “democratic camp” and to grant affordable housing to workers who switched over to membership of anti-communist-led unions. Then, if leftist governments gained the ascendancy in Latin America, even when democratically-elected within capitalist state structures, AIFLD-backed labour groups would foment unrest and use U.S. government funds to sustain strikers. This would then help pave the way for bloody, U.S.-backed right-wing coups, which AFL-CIO local allies would then work to suppress any labour resistance to. In this way, in the name of “democracy” and stopping “communist dictatorship”, the AFL-CIO tops worked hand in glove with the CIA to bring down elected, left-leaning, or otherwise anti-colonial-minded, governments in Guatamela in 1954, Guyana, Brazil and the Dominican Republic in the early-mid 1960s and Chile in 1973. In all these cases, except to a partial degree in Guyana, the AFL-CIO aided, CIA-orchestrated overthrow of elected governments was through bloody coups that resulted in right-wing dictatorships that committed murderous terror against leftists and workers rights activists on a massive scale. Meanwhile, in Indonesia, AFL-CIO bureaucrats helped the CIA and Australia’s ASIS overseas spy agency to orchestrate a coup in 1965 that led to one of the worst slaughters in human history. The CIA/ASIS/AFL-CIO backed coup forces led by General Suharto massacred between one and two million Indonesian communists, trade unionists, women’s rights activists and ethnic Chinese people in the process of consolidating their horrific right-wing dictatorship.

The AFL-CIO bureaucrats’ most important service to U.S. imperialism was in their support for the capitalist rulers’ drive to overthrow workers states. They collaborated closely with the CIA to stir up worker unrest in state-owned enterprises in Red China, in the former Soviet Union and in the other former deformed workers states in Eastern Europe. Their operations were most successful in Poland. There, with the open backing of the Vatican and rabidly anti-union U.S. and British heads Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and with support from the pro-ALP leadership of Australia’s ACTU, the AFL-CIO tops and CIA propped up a large anti-communist “union” called Solidarnosc. In 1989-90, Solidarnosc would lead a capitalist counterrevolution in Poland that would open the door to the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union and all the Eastern European socialistic states within the following two years.

Much of this despicable counterrevolutionary work was conducted by the AFL-CIO heads behind the backs of their membership. More recently, national AFL-CIO leaders in the post-Soviet period, including Trumka, have sought to distance themselves from the federation’s role during the anti-Soviet Cold War. In 1997, the AFL-CIO shutdown its discredited AIFLD. However, today the AFL-CIO’s National EC are back at it again! They replaced the AIFLD with a new organization called Solidarity Center that conducts much of the same work as the AIFLD. Solidarity Center is funded by USAID, the State Department and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the U.S. government’s main vehicle for open funding of counterrevolutionary and pro-imperialist movements that goes alongside their covert funding through the CIA. The NED is notorious around the world for spearheading pro-imperialist “color revolutions” and right-wing coups. In 2002, Solidarity Center-backed right-wing forces in Venezuela tried to carry out a coup to overthrow the elected, leftist Chavez government. Since then Solidarity Center has continued to nurture, train and encourage pro-imperialist opponents of the anti-colonial Venezuelan government.

Today, a main international focus of the National EC is to, under the guise of supporting “democracy,” back forces within China seeking to emulate Polish Solidarnosc – that is forces seeking to use legitimate worker grievances within China not to improve workers social position by crushing capitalist influence or by strengthening the socialist character of the workers state but to restore capitalist rule.  The main organised force seeking to build such a Chinese version of Solidarnosc is the China Labour Bulletin (CLB) led by Han Dongfang. And the AFL-CIO’s National EC is right behind the CLB, even presenting Han Dongfang with its highest “human rights award.” Last year, Trumka presented this same award to Hong Kong’s Civil Human Rights Front (CHRF), the principal force in the violent, pro-colonial, anti-Beijing movement in Hong Kong. The CHRF is funded by the NED and by right-wing, Hong Kong media billionaire, Jimmy Lai, who is aptly known as “Hong Kong’s Rupert Murdoch”. The CHRF represents rabidly anti-communist members of Hong Kong’s upper-middle class and large chunks of her capitalist upper class, both of whom are nervous about losing their privilege should Beijing start to bring socialism to Hong Kong. Among the affiliates of the CHRF is the mainly (but not exclusively) white-collar, Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions (HKCTU), the smaller of Hong Kong’s two main union federations. The HKCTU, whose leaders want it to become Hong Kong’s Solidarnosc, is not only backed by the NED and the AFL-CIO tops but by the Laborite bureaucrats heading Australia’s ACTU. Today, as Biden emulates Trump in escalating Washington’s new Cold War drive against socialistic China and Australian imperialism enthusiastically eggs him on, we can expect the AFL-CIO and ACTU heads to step up their support for capitalist counterrevolutionary labour groups within mainland China and Hong Kong unless revolutionary activists within these union federations are able to change the agenda leading our unions.

However, despite our concerns about the possible implications of that sentence in the Open Letter to AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka that lauds labor’s “tradition” of fighting against the threat of “dictatorship,” we note that this formulation did not specify or allude to any particular counterrevolutionary or pro-imperialist act by the AFL-CIO and indeed does not actually even specifically mention the AFL-CIO. Therefore, the chance that endorsement of this Open Letter would be understood as also giving support for the AFL-CIO’s continued backing of anti-communist and pro-colonial movements is small. Hence, given the importance of opposing the National EC’s right-wing bureaucratic attack on the VT AFL-CIO, we on balance decided to sign the Open Letter and are urging others within the Left and workers movement to do so as well.

In doing so we point out that, the national AFL-CIO leadership’s attempts to quash class struggle resistance to far-right attacks on democratic rights within the U.S. is the domestic equivalent of their support abroad for right-wing forces seeking to use the guise of “fighting for democracy” to undermine socialistic states and anti-colonial governments.

Right-Wing Coups and the Threat of Fascism

Should the fascist forces, that formed a key component of the January 6 rioters, been sufficiently large, united, disciplined and armed, then if they and their allies had been able to stage a successful overturn of the election result on January 6, this could have opened the road to the fascists making a bid to impose the fascist form of capitalist rule in the short term. Fascism is a form of capitalist rule created through the complete physical smashing of all leftist parties and independent workers organisations through right-wing terror. Such a catastrophe is possible in periods of acute capitalist economic and social crisis, when in the absence of a powerful working class struggle for socialist revolution, right-wing demagogues, backed by decisive sections of the capitalist class, are able to mobilise large chunks of the insecure and embittered middle class – alongside portions of the unemployed poor – into squads dedicated to unleashing reactionary violence.

History however proved that in early 2021, the fascists and the right-wing conservatives that then allied with them did not yet have the clout to even overturn the election result. This is because right now the bulk of the U.S. capitalist class feels that the benefits of ruling through “democratic” means, in terms of fooling the masses into believing that they have a decisive say, combined with the risk of resistance of the sort indicated by the Vermont general strike resolution should they try to impose fascist rule, outweigh the potential benefits of physically crushing the workers movement. To be sure, their deep concern about the decay of their own system, their terror over the bitter grievances of their own population, their fright about the emergence of a socialistic power in the Peoples Republic of China and their skepticism about their ability to maintain super-profits without exploiting their workforce at an even more intense level, mean that even now some sections of the American capitalist class are supporting fascist forces. Another larger section of the capitalist class, typified by Trump, have not yet definitely decided to go down the road of fascism but are ensuring that they have the option to go down that road in the future by today nurturing violent far-right forces.

Given the current balance of forces between rival sections of the American capitalist class, a more realistic possibility on January 6 than a full-blooded coup that opened the road to a short-term bid for power by fascists was the overturn of the election result in the form of some sort of compromise power-sharing arrangement between the rival bourgeois camps. Such a partial coup resulting from fascist and other far-right mobilisation would still have greatly emboldened the violent far-right forces and thus made resistance like the sort foreshadowed in the Vermont general strike motion absolutely crucial. A coup of this sort did occur in France in February 1934 when after a violent mobilisation by fascists and other reactionaries, the “progressive” liberal capitalist government headed by Daladier of the Radical Party was replaced by a right-wing, bonapartist government. That new government headed by Doumergue rested on the right leg with the fascists and on the left leg with the Radical Party. French workers responded to the coup with a general strike six days later. Although, the political and economic situation in France then was quite different to that in the U.S. today, it is worth leftists today reviewing Leon Trotsky’s brilliant analysis of the situation then in France. Trotsky pointed out that in the context of a deep economic crisis, France and its middle class were becoming deeply polarised. If the working class did not show that it can be a serious contender for power, the fascists and their seeming radicalism would win over the desperate middle class. Trotsky emphasised the need to build workers militias to defend the workers movement against fascist threats and to use the mobilisation of such militias to energise the advance towards workers revolution. Here are links to some of Trotsky’s key writings from that period:

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Today, in the U.S., some in the Far Right will be demoralized that their coup did not succeed. On the other hand, that fascists and hard-right conservatives were able to storm into the parliament building, occupy it for several hours, intimidate many congress members inside it and all the while gain assistance from some in the state organs would have given many of them great encouragement. Meanwhile, the fact that Trump had to, eventually, somewhat distance himself from the rioters will lead to some right-wing conservatives who supported the Capitol storming dispensing with their faith in parliamentary democracy and move fully in with the fascists. That the less conservative Biden has now become president will likely only accelerate this drift. More fundamentally, while plenty of temporary swings in political mood and economic conditions will occur, the long term trend of capitalism, if it is not first overthrown, is to descend into its fascist form because ultimately this is the capitalist class’ last hope of saving its own class rule in the face of the relentless decay of its own system and the rise of a socialistic giant in the form of the Peoples Republic of China. That is why we must mobilise now to oppose the fascist threat. The general strike planned by the VT AFL-CIO is certainly a powerful form of such resistance. However, most immediately we need to oppose physical attacks by fascists on their targets. Such attacks take place every single day – even when fascists are not making an immediate bid for power. Resisting such attacks is crucial to demoralising the fascists on the one hand and on the other, helping the working class to develop the organisation, discipline and activity needed to fight the new Biden administration and the U.S. capitalist class as a whole. As we emphasised in our statement following the January 6 events in Washington (see: https://www.trotskyistplatform.com/how-to-resist-the-growing-threat-of-the-violent-far-right-in-america/):

“… it is urgently necessary for politically aware workers, black liberation activists and leftists to organise workers at multiracial workplaces together with black communities, other non-white communities and anti-racist activists into disciplined action squads to physically resist the threat of violent attack from far-right forces.

“… Especially given that the fascists are often armed with guns, the working class-based, anti-fascist defence squads that must be built should take advantage of the right to bear arms that exists in America – as granted by the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution – to acquire arms.”

Indeed, any general strike mobilisation against far-right forces like the one prepared by the VT AFL-CIO would need to be defended against physical attacks by fascists through the deployment of workers defence guards and workers militias.

From the U.S. to Australia: Let’s Fight for a
Revolutionary, Internationalist Agenda to Lead Our Workers Movements

The fact that Trumka resumed his attack on the VT AFL-CIO over the general strike resolution some two months after Biden was inaugurated – and thus long after the strike resolution ceased to be potentially operational – shows that his attack is about more than the general strike resolution itself. Trumka and Co. want to bring to heel a union branch that is, in his eyes, too independent of the Democrat Party, too willing to wage strikes and too real about supporting anti-racist struggles.

However, the VT AFL-CIO leaders, while clearly more left-wing than the National EC, have a program that is still short of the revolutionary, internationalist program that the workers movement needs. Thus in their November general strike resolution, while they recognise “that democracy in the United States is hobbled by the archaic structure of the Electoral College and entrenchment of the two-party system”, they basically accept that the U.S. system is otherwise generally “democratic.” However, while any attacks on democratic rights from far-right forces, conservatives and liberals alike should be opposed, the “democracy” that exists in the U.S. is fundamentally not a democracy for all but in practice a democracy only for the capitalist exploiting class. This is because it is the capitalist class who has the means at their disposal to shape public opinion and sway elections. It is they who own the media and print houses. It is the rich capitalists who disproportionately have the money to finance political parties, pay for political advertising, set up NGOs and think tanks and hire lobbyists. In practice, “democratic elections” in the U.S. end up being a matter of different factions of the ruling class wrestling for administrative control, with the masses reduced to largely serving as voting fodder for the rival capitalist cliques. Meanwhile, no matter who wins elections, any party that wins office will be administering a state machine that has been built up and maintained for the very purpose of enforcing capitalist rule over the masses and which is controlled through thousands of strings by the capitalists. Therefore, the “democratic” form that exists in capitalist countries like the U.S, Australia, India, Brazil and South Korea masks a social order that is very much a dictatorship of the capitalist class over the working class masses.

Furthermore, while the Vermont union leaders are less willing to blindly support the Democrat Party than the National EC, they do not have a principled opposition to supporting candidates from this capitalist party. Thus the Vermont branch leadership called for support to Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential candidacy bid. But Sanders is a member of the capitalist Democrat Party, who while he wants greater social inequality accepts the sanctity of the capitalist state and thus would be incapable of achieving many of the progressive measures that he seeks. Moreover, through advocating strident trade protectionism, Sanders damages working class unity and thus undermines the class struggle resistance that could actually win gains for the working class masses. Meanwhile, like other progressive Democrats such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders fully enlists in the imperialist campaign of lies against China over Muslim Uyghurs in China’s northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and is a strident supporter of the anti-communist, anti-China opposition in Hong Kong.

However, it is significant that the VT AFL-CIO leaders have the determination to defend their more class-struggle, left-wing agenda against bureaucratic attacks from Trumka. Resisting this right-wing attack from the national AFL-CIO tops inevitably brings up a discussion about what else is wrong with the national AFL-CIO leadership’s program and opens the possibility of a more complete break with Trumka’s class-collaborationist, protectionist and pro-imperialist outlook. That is why revolutionaries should join the united front opposing Trumka’s attack on the AFL-CIO’s Vermont branch.

It is not just in the U.S. where there needs to be a new, revolutionary agenda to guide the working class movement. Here in Australia, the ACTU’s strategy of reliance on the Labor Party, divisive economic nationalism, subordination to anti-strike laws and support for Australian imperialism’s agenda has proved disastrous to the workers movement. Over the last three and a half decades the share of national income going to workers has dropped drastically in favour of ever greater profits for the capitalists. Meanwhile, more and more workers have been driven into insecure casual and gig jobs, social welfare has been slashed and rental accommodation and housing have become more unaffordable for working class people. The revolutionary, internationalist program that must guide the workers movement here includes:

  • Rely on strikes and picket lines, including in defiance of anti-strike laws and Arbitration courts, to defend workers rights rather than the dead end of relying on the ALP and the Greens.
  • Fight for permanency and all the rights of permanency for all currently casual and gig workers.
  • Refuse to accept the capitalist bosses right to sack workers. Fight to ban all profitable companies from slashing jobs and force them to increase hiring at the expense of their profits. When the capitalists inevitably scream back that such measures will lead to economic collapse, then explain to workers that, since capitalists say that their system cannot survive if the measures needed to bring jobs for all are taken, this proves that the economy needs to be ripped out of the capitalists hands and brought into public ownership under workers control.
  • Fight for the granting of the full rights of citizenship for all visa workers, refugees and international students.
  • Oppose all protectionist demands that set local workers against our working class sisters and brother abroad. For a fighting unity of workers against the capitalist exploiters everywhere!
  • Mobilise mass action of workers to defend Aboriginal rights and to oppose racist state terror against Aboriginal people.
  • The workers movement must champion the fight to enable women’s full participation in social, economic and political life: Demand free, 24-hour, public-provided childcare; free, nutritious school lunches for school students and free, after-school and holiday sporting, cultural and hobby activities for children with free public-provided shuttle services to them from school/home.
  • Build joint mobilisations of workers contingents, Aboriginal people, Asians, Muslims, Africans and all other people of colour together with all anti-racists to crush provocations by violent far-right forces.
  • Oppose any support for any pro-imperialist labour groups and anti-communist “democratic” and “human rights” forces seeking to undermine socialistic rule in China or Red China’s sovereignty over her Hong Kong territory. Stand with the Chinese, North Korean and other workers states against the U.S./Australian Cold War drive.

By standing by a leftist branch of the U.S. union movement that is resisting a bureaucratic attack from more conservative union officials we can advance the struggle to build a class struggle leadership of the American workers movement. This can only encourage the fight to build the revolutionary, internationalist leadership of the working class that we so badly need here too in Australia.

UPDATE, 30 June 2021, 10:20am (AEST): About two hours ago, the Vermont AFL-CIO and its leader David Deusen announced that the national AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka had sent its Vermont branch a formal letter stating that although its General Strike Authorization resolution was deemed “misconduct”, he would NOT be taking disciplinary action against the Vermont branch. So victory in this struggle!

Congratulations to Vermont trade unionists and all others who took a stand in this struggle. We should also note that yesterday another Australian-based pro-union group took a stand by sending a protest letter to Richard Trumka. That group is the Australian Chinese Workers Association. Below is the letter that they E-mailed to Trumka:

Letter E-mailed by the Australian Chinese Workers Association on 29 June 2021 to national AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka opposing the “misconduct” proceedings against the Vermont AFL-CIO branch.

FIGHT TO DETER AUSTRALIA’S RACIST REGIME FROM KILLING ABORIGINAL PEOPLE!

Above, 10 April 201, Sydney: Thousands of people of all colours march through the streets of Sydney in a passionate Aboriginal-led protest against the racist state killing of Aboriginal people in custody. Photo credit: Jessica Hromas/The Guardian

NEARLY 500 BLACK DEATHS IN CUSTODY IN 30 YEARS

FIGHT TO DETER AUSTRALIA’S RACIST REGIME
FROM KILLING ABORIGINAL PEOPLE!

5 June 2021: In mid-April, thousands marched against racist killings of Aboriginal people. The determined Aboriginal-led protests marked the fact that since a Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody thirty years ago, a further 474 indigenous people have died in custody according to official figures. The real figure is thought to be much higher. To put this in perspective, compared to the current Aboriginal population, one out of every 1,500 Aboriginal people have died in custody since 1991. Imagine what that would mean if the Aboriginal population were much larger, say the same as the whole population of China today. Then if Aboriginal people were being killed or driven to death at the rate at which this is going on right now in Australia, one million indigenous people would have died in state custody in the last 30 years! This underlines the sad truth that almost every Aboriginal family directly knows or is related to at least one and sometimes several of their compatriots who have died in state custody in Australia.

The mainstream media were too busy eulogising recently dead Prince Philip – an arrogant racist and male chauvinist – to bother highlighting Australia’s carnage of Aboriginal people. When the media did report, they distorted the truth! They portrayed the deaths as if they were due to natural causes or suicide when the truth is that many victims were either murdered by redneck police or prison guards or died due to the racist neglect of these officers. However, families of victims have powerfully exposed the real truths. Among those who addressed the Sydney protest were Leetona Dungay and Paul Silva, respectively the mother and nephew of Dunghutti man, David Dungay, who was asphyxiated to death by six prison guards. Also addressing the protest was Caroline Andersen, the mother of Wayne Fella Morrison, who died after being brutalised by several prison guards and then transported to hospital while forced to wear a spit hood.

FROM TOP TO BOTTOM AUSTRALIA’S CAPITALIST SYSTEM
IS RACIST AND ANTI-WORKING CLASS

Many Royal Commission recommendations were not implemented. If procedures to reduce Aboriginal incarceration and improve the monitoring of prisoners’ health had been acted on there would have been some improvement. But such changes would far from solve the problem. This is because many of the deaths were caused by cops and guards acting in violation of their own procedures. The state personnel who killed TJ Hickey, David Dungay, Kumanjayi Walker and so many other people were obviously not following stated procedures. Neither were those who caused the deaths of Julieka Dhu, Rebecca Maher and Nathan Reynolds through their refusal to render timely medical assistance. These deaths were simply a result of the racist bigotry of cops and guards and their contempt for people without money. No procedure can stop that! As an Aboriginal protest leader stated: Australia’s system needs to be burnt down to ashes!

Australia’s system, a capitalist system, was created when British colonialists threw Aboriginal people off their land and property owners started exploiting the labour of both Aboriginal people and convicts/ex-convicts. Alongside exploiting workers on stolen black land, Australia’s capitalists rob even more blatantly the peoples of PNG, East Timor, Fiji, Indonesia and beyond. This tyranny is backed by the might of Australia’s American ally. To bolster its U.S. godfather’s power, Australia’s rulers support every U.S. intervention – from its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to its backing of its Israeli ally’s brutal subjugation of Palestine. But it is little surprise that Australia’s rulers are among the most ardent defenders of Israeli terror. While Israel was built on the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, capitalist Australia was built through the genocidal dispossession of Aboriginal people. Down, Down Australia Down, Down Israel Down, Down USA!

The biggest threat to U.S. and Australian tyranny and exploitation, both at home and abroad, is the spread of socialism – that is of states created by the toiling people’s overthrow of capitalism and which are then dominated by public ownership. Therefore, the U.S.-Australia alliance is in large part about crushing socialistic states. Let’s never forget the horrific war crimes of these regimes in their anti-communist wars in Korea and Vietnam. Now they are preparing for war against a more powerful socialistic foe – the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). If their war drive is not stopped, they could destroy us all!

To protect their theft of Aboriginal land, their exploitation and the system that ensures all this, Australia’s rich capitalists have created a state apparatus. And all the components of this apparatus – the police, prisons, military, courts – and its personnel are immersed in the prejudices that come with their role as enforcers of a racist, exploitative “order”. That is why the only thing that is going to deter state officers from killing Aboriginal people, bullying other people of colour and harassing the homeless is if they are made to pay for their crimes. However, the biggest recommendation of the 1991 Royal Commission, or rather non-recommendation, was that it recommended no charges against any of the cops and guards responsible for the deaths. This was a green light for more state terror! That is why the rate of black deaths has been 60% higher since the Commission. As Leetona Dungay put it: “No more royal commissions, I want real justice!”

ENCOURAGE CHINA’S CALLING OUT OF THE
AUSTRALIAN REGIME’S “DEEP-ROOTED RACISM”. 
BUT CHINA MUST MORE AGGRESSIVELY
DENOUNCE AUSTRALIAN HUMAN RIGHTS ATROCITIES

How are murdering state officers going to be held accountable for their crimes when the police, courts, coroners and Royal Commissions “investigating” deaths are themselves thoroughly prejudiced? The racist Australian regime does have two Achilles heels. Firstly, to further its predatory aims abroad and its crusade against socialistic states, the regime accuses its adversaries of “human rights violations”. This makes it vulnerable to exposure of its own crimes. Concerted international exposure could thus push the Australian ruling You would not have the ability to think about what you must look for viagra sales australia in a device. One of the most icks.org cialis uk effective ways to lower blood sugar levels in the body which is a pull toy to the mind. Add to levitra without prescription that, he has forgotten to pay the premium on his homeowner’s policy and they drop him. Erectile dysfunction is amongst most common and embarrassing health conditions that let a male personality down in front of cialis generic canada his partner and in his own eyes as well. class to somewhat rein in its racist police and prison guard attack dogs. That is why it is important that in January and then again in mid-March – alongside calling out the Australian military’s horrific killing of Afghan civilians and demanding that Australia free the refugees – the PRC led attacks at the UN by several countries on Australia’s racist treatment of Aboriginal people. Anyone opposed to racist terror should be lauding China’s stand while calling on China to be much more assertive in calling out the Australian regime.

In part to distract from these exposures of its racist tyranny, Australia’s rulers and their lying media have attacked China over “human rights.” These attacks are based on lies. For example, most video clips showing supposed “brutal oppression” of China’s Uyghur minority have proven to be taken in other countries (!) and those that are actually real show docile conditions compared to what is faced by Aboriginal people and Palestinians. The small proportion of Uyghurs opposed to the PRC are whipped up by U.S.-backed, capitalist Uyghurs and religious extremists who both seek to use nationalism to throw off China’s secular, socialistic system. In order to prevent the Australian regime from blunting China’s attacks on Australia’s own racist atrocities here at home by falsely attacking China, we must resist the imperialist propaganda campaign against China.

DETER RACIST STATE TERROR THROUGH MASS ACTION
BY MILITANT WORKERS, ABORIGINAL PEOPLE AND ANTI-RACISTS!

There is a second Achilles heel that could more fundamentally threaten the regime’s ability to subjugate Aboriginal people. And that is the reality that while most non-Aboriginal workers enjoy a social position above most Aboriginal people, they still face exploitation and an uncertain future. For working class people, affordable accommodation is hard to find. Even before the pandemic hit, most young people did not have secure jobs – being either unemployed, in unstable casual or gig jobs or on short- term contracts. Meanwhile, the ever escalating military, police and spy agency budgets show that the ruling class threatens us with a nightmarish future of war and repression. Moreover, the cops who assault Aboriginal people are the same ones who attack strike pickets, protests in support of public housing and staunch unionists. That is why it is possible to mobilise working class defence of Aboriginal people. Let us deter racist terror through building resistance, uniting trade unionists, Aboriginal people, other people of colour and all anti-racists!

The problem is that chunks of the masses are influenced by the – often subtle – White supremacist propaganda of the capitalist rulers and their media. That is why we need revolutionary activists within our unions. They must show fellow workers that opposing racist oppression is essential to unifying the multi-racial workers movement into a force able to defeat our exploiters. This work will need to face down obstruction from the pro-ALP leaders of our unions who while proclaiming solidarity with Black Lives Matter (BLM) simultaneously spread Australian nationalism – nationalism that blinds people to racist tyranny in Australia and which binds workers to their rulers on the basis of an actually non-existent, common “national interest.”

A taste of the potential for working class defence of Aboriginal people was seen on June 6 last year when trade unionists were amongst the tens of thousands who marched against racist state killing of black people in Australia and the U.S. Some Aboriginal activists are furious that most of those who participated in those protests no longer join anti-racist actions. A similar phenomenon has occurred in the U.S. The cause for this in the U.S. was the illusion that changing the president and thus increasing the influence of black and “progressive” Democrats would bring improvements. As the presidential election neared and Biden then replaced Trump, protests dwindled. But little has changed! American cops are still murdering black people on the streets! Here illusions in The Greens play a similar role. To be sure, some Greens MPs like David Shoebridge have been among the few politicians to have the decency to participate in BLM rallies. However, because The Greens, like the “progressive” U.S. Democrats, uphold the current capitalist order, they cannot effectively deter racist state violence even when they want to. At protests, Shoebridge offers a strategy of official inquiries and changes through parliament – sometimes even obscuring the racist nature of Australian state institutions by trying to convince people that “there are many good cops.” This strategy simply doesn’t work! On April 15, the NSW parliamentary inquiry, pushed by Shoebridge, into First Nations deaths in custody was released. It offered more of the same as the 1991 Royal Commission. The new report did not even pretend to tackle systematic racism within the police and prisons. Indeed, racism was not even mentioned once in the report’s recommendations! Staunch Aboriginal activists rightly skewered Shoebridge for defending the report. Moreover, although progressive, pro-establishment politicians like Shoebridge do encourage people to participate in actions when they speak at BLM events, the effect of their promotion of reliance on parliament and state institutions is to demobilise struggle. Especially those not directly affected by racist oppression are left with the message that they can leave it up to politicians and inquiries to do the job.

That is why dispelling illusions in positive change through the capitalist state’s institutions and its parliaments is a big part of mobilising the mass resistance needed to deter racist state violence. The racist cop who murdered George Floyd is finally behind bars because there was a massive black-led uprising following his murder and because millions of American workers took strike action in support of BLM. We need militant resistance here to deter racist terror against Aboriginal people on the way to reducing this racist capitalist system to ashes. Inspired by the courage of black deaths in custody families, let’s build toward worker strike action in opposition to state violence against Aboriginal people!