Tag Archives: COVID

How and Why Australia’s
Ruling Class Media Attack China
And Why the Working Class
Must Stand With Red China

Photo Above: The scene on 3 May 2021 at the Ancient City Wall in the Chinese megacity of Xian, capital of Shaanxi Province. The site was packed with tourists enjoying China’s long weekend, International Workers Day (May Day) public holiday. From April 2020 until about Mach 2022, while the capitalist world was being battered with terrible COVID death tolls and lockdowns to attempt to curve the virus spread, most people in China enjoyed the best of both worlds: very few COVID deaths and minimal pandemic restrictions. When outbreaks did occur during this time in particular areas, they were snuffed out in quick time by rapid, resolute and effective local measures so that the overwhelming majority of the population were not affected by either the disease or by pandemic restrictions.
Photo: CGTN

How and Why Australia’s
Ruling Class Media Attack China
And Why the Working Class

Must Stand With Red China

Down With the Far Right-Instigated, COVID “Freedom” Rallies in Australia –
Down With the Far Right-Instigated, COVID “Freedom” Rallies in China!

  • The Similarities Between the Chinese and Australian Versions of Anti-COVID-Response Protests
  • Foxconn Workers Rioted Against the Taiwanese Company’s Failure to Take Adequate Measures to Stop COVID Spread
  • Protests Are Not Rare in China and these COVID Protests Were Not “China’s Biggest Protests Since 1989”
  • The Western Mainstream Media Unleashed a Torrent of Disinformation and Deceit About Events in China
  • The Lives Saved Through China’s COVID Response Was a Great Feat of Humanitarianism. Failing to Stop a Terrible Loss of Life from COVID in the U.S. and Australia Was Brutal
  • Australia’s Capitalist Exploiting Class’ Drive to Try and Help Strangle Socialistic Rule in China is “Rational” From Their Point of View But Diametrically Opposed to the Interests of the Working Class
  • Stand With Socialistic China to Stand by Working-Class Interests
  • The Threat of China Being Engulfed by Capitalist Counterrevolution in the Future is All Too Real
  • Socialist Rule Cannot be Protected if the Capitalists and Their Allies Have Equal Political Rights as the Working Class
  • How Calls for “Democracy” in the Abstract in China End Up Being a Call for the Destruction of the Workers State
  • The PRC Workers State Does Need WORKERS Democracy
  • Mobilise in Action Here in Australia in Solidarity with Socialistic Rule in China

9 December 2022: Over the last five or so years, the Cold War that the U.S.-led capitalist powers have been waging against the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) has grown increasingly hot. Australia’s capitalist ruling class has been amongst the most aggressive participants in this campaign of military, economic and political pressure on Red China. Do not be distracted by recent efforts of Canberra to lower the temperature of their diplomatic disputes with Beijing. This is merely an attempt by Australia’s rulers to protect their hugely profitable trade with China from further injury while continuing to help turn the screws on the PRC. It is crucial to be aware that even while taking steps to restore diplomatic exchanges with Beijing, the Albanese government is continuing its right-wing predecessor’s anti-China military build-up of offensive weapons (including the acquisition of long-range missiles and nuclear submarines). Furthermore, two days ago during ministerial-level meetings with the U.S., it was announced that the Labor government would facilitate “increased rotational presence of US forces in Australia” – forces that are aimed against China. This will include nuclear-capable bomber task forces, fighters and future rotations of US Navy and US Army capabilities.  Meanwhile, in the South Pacific, the new Labor government has been even more aggressive than the conservative administration that it replaced in attempting to sabotage regional countries’ cooperation with Beijing. Moreover, the new Albanese government continues where Morrison and Dutton left off in waging a propaganda offensive against the PRC. It pushes the conspiracy theory that China is persecuting her Muslim, more European-looking, Uyghur minority that live in the country’s northwest – a lie that not only have no Muslim-majority countries (other than the tiny NATO-dependent European country Bosnia) signed on to during UN debates and motions but which most Muslim-majority countries, including many subservient U.S. allies like Bahrain, Egypt, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, have denounced, instead emphatically praising China’s treatment of Muslim Uyghurs. As hardline anti-PRC, ABC News global affairs editor, John Lyons approvingly noted: “Australian policy towards China has not changed one iota between Morrison and Albanese. Only the language has changed” (emphasis added).

It is not only Australian governments that are waging Cold War against the PRC. It is the entire capitalist establishment. This includes the mainstream media. In Australia, this is almost entirely either owned by billionaire tycoons – like Rupert Murdoch, Bruce Gordon (main owner of the Nine Entertainment Group that owns Channel 9, 2GB and 3AW radio stations and the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age and a whole lot of other newspapers) and Channel 7 owner Kerry Stokes – or by the capitalist regime itself, in the case of the ABC and SBS. Their choice method of staging propaganda attacks against China is to frenetically promote, as a serious possibility, some anti-PRC conspiracy theory. Then once facts decisively prove the “theory” completely false, they stop spreading the “theory” but do little to tell readers that the original speculation was false, so that most of the mud still sticks. Then they move on to promoting the next anti-PRC conspiracy theory! To see how this methodology works lets examine the media frenzy surrounding the supposed “purge” of former Communist Party of China (CPC) leader and PRC president, Hu Jintao. During October’s CPC 20th congress, Hu was paid respect by the CPC by being seated next to his successor, Xi Jinping, during the meeting’s sessions. This is despite Hu appearing confused at times during the gathering and from earlier appearances, sadly seeming to be suffering from dementia or some other form of cognitive decline. When Hu, while appearing to have a senior moment, was ushered out of the meeting during its final session, the Western media feverishly spread a conspiracy theory that he had been purged from the CPC by Xi. This is despite the Chinese government explaining that Hu had been ill (while respectfully not mentioning any cognitive decline) and that the aging former leader was ushered out to ensure that he was given his pre-arranged rest time. It was also despite the fact that TV news reports from earlier in the congress showed Xi interacting warmly and respectfully with Hu, despite Hu reaching out to touch Xi affectionately as he was ushered out and Xi then nodding amiably to Hu when the latter speaks briefly to Xi – probably wishing him good luck – as he leaves; and despite official PRC media still mentioning Hu Jintao favourably in its post-meeting wrap up, while featuring footage of him standing next to Xi in its post-congress news broadcast. Seems nothing like a purge! Moreover, four days ago this conspiracy theory was completely blown own of the water. In PRC state media reports of the mourning ceremony for Hu’s recently deceased predecessor Jiang Zemin, supposedly “purged” Hu Jintao was mentioned several times as one of the CPC leaders present at the event. Moreover, in all three photos showing the CPC leaders viewing Jiang’s body, all three not only show Hu … but showing him standing in a pride of place position next to Xi! Yet, as far as we can tell, none of the Australian and other Western media that fuelled the speculation about Hu’s purge, which is basically nearly all the mainstream Western media, have conceded that their previous promotion of this conspiracy theory was wrong given that this “theory” has now been totally blown to smithereens. The BBC was the most despicably dishonest. After giving a lot of air to the “purge” theory or otherwise bizarrely speculating that Hu had been a victim of a power-play by Xi at the October congress, the BBC deliberately hid from their audience the presence of Hu at Jiang’s recent mourning ceremony.

Yet Another Another-China Conspiracy “Theory” Gets Blown To Pieces

Above: When former Communist Party of China (CPC) leader and Chinese president Hu Jintao was ushered out of the final session of the 20th CPC Congress in October, mainstream Western media either emphatically stated that Hu had been “brutally purged” by his successor Xi Jinping or gave much oxygen to this conspiracy “theory”. This is despite Chinese media providing the very credible explanation that the ageing Hu (who sadly seems to be suffering from dementia or some other form of cognitive decline) was unwell and despite very strong evidence that Hu was not purged at all.
Below: This conspiracy theory was definitely blown out of the water just weeks later on December 5, when Hu was shown in several photos on Chinese state media amongst top current CPC leaders at the Beijing mourning ceremony for the death of Hu’s predecessor Jiang Zemin. Moreover, not only was Hu’s presence mentioned several times by Chinese state media but he was standing in the ceremony at the front row just to the very left of Xi Jinping, thus giving honour to Hu. This was also where he was seated during the party congress. The Western media that spread the conspiracy theory about Hu never mentioned that the “theory” had now been blown to smithereens. Some like BBC News even deceptively hid Hu’s presence in their coverage of Jiang’s mourning ceremony. With their “Hu purge” theory now blown to pieces, it did not take these media long to then move on to their next anticommunist, anti-China conspiracy theory.

Photo (below photo): Xie Huanchi/Xinhua

The Chinese and Australian Versions of Anti-COVID-Response Protests

In recent years, among the main targets of the establishment media’s propaganda is China’s response to the pandemic. In order to distract from the fact that the PRC has responded so effectively that her death toll from COVID is less than one-third that of Australia’s … even though she has a nearly 60 times greater population (!!!), the Western media have denounced China’s COVID response as “draconian”. So the media were absolutely ecstatic when demonstrations broke out in several Chinese cities, the weekend before last, against the PRC government’s COVID response. Bearing blank pieces of A4 paper, apparently as a condemnation of censorship, these demonstrations were basically the Chinese version of the large, Far Right-instigated, anti-lockdown, anti-masking rallies seen in Australia, the U.S. and Europe over the last couple of years. One big difference is the size of the protests. In China, despite megacities cities like Shanghai having roughly the same population as all of Australia, each of the protests have thus far only been, at most, hundreds strong. This compares to the COVID “Freedom” demonstrations in Australia which have been up to tens of thousands strong in several cities. Moreover, despite the Western media’s best efforts to insinuate the opposite, the recent protests in China have met with much public hostility. Thus when a handful of China-style “Freedom” protesters held a rally in Guangzhou last week, they were surrounded and angrily scolded by a much larger gathering of local community members. The public shouted at the protesters: “You are not here to help us, you are here to create trouble” and “We Cantonese are very generous, if you need money we can give you some [implying that the demonstrators were paid by Western forces to protest]”.

Despite the huge difference between Western and PRC society, there were nevertheless similarities between the Western “Freedom” protests and their Chinese version. For one, both promoted the conspiracy theory that the COVID-response measures were a deliberate attempt by governments to take away political freedoms. This claim is irrational – for it is against the interests of decision makers in both countries to have economic life constrained by COVID-response measures. To be sure, Australian governments certainly have been taking away people’s ability to express dissent. But they have used other pretexts to do so: including “fighting terrorism”, “combating Communist China’s influence”, “defending national security”, and “protecting the operations of essential services.” Such pretexts to clamp down specifically on their political opponents, are far, far easier for the Australian regime to justify than pandemic restrictions that inconvenience the whole population and hurt the profits of the capitalist exploiters that they serve.

Another similarity between the Australian – and indeed American and European – “Freedom” protests and their Chinese variant is that in both sets of demonstrations, those who personally have the most to gain from pandemic-response restrictions have mostly refused to participate. Frontline wage workers are the most susceptible to catching – and therefore dying from – COVID. Figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show that during last year’s Delta outbreak, the population with the lowest 20% of incomes, which includes a large proportion of frontline workers (and their families) toiling in minimum wage, gig economy and casual jobs, were about five times likelier to die from COVID than the wealthiest 20% of the Australian population. Moreover, frontline workers employed in hospitals and aged care facilities have seen first hand the deaths caused by COVID and have experienced incredible overwork in their efforts to alleviate the horrific suffering caused by the disease. So for very good reason, only a small number of frontline workers participated in Australia’s “Freedom” protests. In the Chinese version of the protests, wage-earning working-class people seemed to have made up an even smaller proportion of the demonstrations than the ones held in Australia. Accounts by the Western media of the profile of the Chinese protesters invariably describe them as being students from elite universities, legal practitioners, journalists, marketing and finance sector professionals, private-sector business owners and the like. In other words people from China’s upper middle-class, or in the case of some of the students from elite campuses and younger professionals, those who aspire to be part of the upper middle-class.  

The class composition of both the Australian and Chinese “Freedom” protests is shaped by a defining feature of all such protests around the world – they embody a selfish impulse of those involved to endanger the lives of large numbers of other people for the sake of their own convenience and economic prosperity. This ethos of these movements naturally attracts to their ranks a percentage of the self employed and of the highly educated middle-class professionals and elite students. This is because the likes of self-employed tradies, owner truck drivers, lawyers, journalists, small shop owners and accountants are usually engaged in an individual form of work where their income-earning work does not mostly rely on collective labour. This individual means of making a living can condition a self-absorbed attitude to their broader life. Moreover, the dog-eat-dog nature of the market that self-employed tradies, small business owners and say lawyers must operate in – where every other service provider in the market is a competitor for business – or the, often furious, competition amongst the aspirational architects or accountants or analysts in a firm to please their boss and rise up the corporate tree, can condition some of these self-employed and other middle-class people to have an individualistic outlook. In contrast, wage-earning workers are often conditioned, by both the collective nature of their production and the need to unite with their fellow workers to defend their common rights, to have a more collectivist outlook. Moreover, especially for workers employed in occupations where the risk of serious work accidents is high, workers instinctively learn to look after each others safety. This sometimes involves class-conscious workers insisting on workplace safety rules being followed against bosses trying to get workers to flaunt the rules in order to speed up production. Thus for many workers, the notion of following pandemic prevention rules to look after themselves and fellow citizens come as second nature. In contrast, self-employed tradies, owner truck drivers and small business owners sometimes see rules in areas like construction standards, road safety, waste disposal and hygiene as obstacles to them making a good profit when they are being squeezed so mercilessly by cut-throat competition. Some of them similarly see COVID response rules as yet another hindrance to their quest for profits. 

To be sure in both China and Australia, organisers of the protests were, for different reasons, able to tap into legitimate grievances. In the PRC, although the COVID response has been spectacularly effective and although, based on this success, improved COVID treatment methods, the apparent reduced lethality of the subvariants of the Omicron strain presently dominant in China and the more contagious nature of these strains combined with their shorter generation interval making it very difficult to implement a dynamic zero-COVID policy, the PRC was already in the process of significantly loosening its pandemic-containment measures when the COVID “Freedom” protests occurred, a few local authorities had not adequately embraced the central PRC government’s new directives. To the extent that protest organisers in China had any success in reaching a broader audience it was through tapping resentment at the inflexibility of these particular local authorities. However, the main demands of the Chinese version of the “Freedom” protests, to end all PCR COVID testing and abolish masking requirements, are a brutal demand that – even when, as Chinese health experts believe, the Omicron strains currently circulating in China are less lethal – would allow the virus to spread uncontained amongst China’s huge population, overwhelming the health system and therefore causing unnecessary deaths of potentially tens of thousands of elderly and health condition-afflicted people.

In Australia too, the main content of the COVID “Freedom” protests was reactionary. Nevertheless, the protests were able to tap into not only frustration with the very real disruption that is caused by pandemic response measures but widespread distrust of the Australian regime. Some people opposed the COVID response measures, because for often very understandable reasons, they do not trust anything that the Australian authorities tell them. Moreover, there were very real examples of unjust COVID-related repression in Australia. This was due to the regime imposing its pro-rich, class bias and its race bias against people of colour into its pandemic response-policing efforts. During last year’s Delta outbreak in Sydney, it was the working-class suburbs in southwestern and western Sydney that were selectively subjected to the toughest lockdown conditions after authorities failed to impose lockdowns to contain Delta when it first took hold in the city’s affluent Eastern suburbs. People in the heavily Asian, African, Middle Eastern and Islander working-class suburbs of Auburn, Campsie, Granville, Fairfield, Villawood, Bankstown, Liverpool and Blacktown were slandered by the media and the NSW government and subjected to heavy-handed treatment from police and army personnel. It has been in these suburbs, as well as towns with high concentrations of Aboriginal people (like Walgett and Brewarrina) and low-income suburbs in general where people have been subjected to the highest rate of COVID-related fines. Meanwhile, the regime failed to provide the services to the peoples of southwestern Sydney needed to minimise the inconvenience caused by the 2021 Delta lockdown. Thus essential workers living in suburbs like Fairfield, who had lockdown exceptions that enabled them to travel for work outside the region, had to sometimes queue for between six to eight hours to get the compulsory test that they needed to work outside the area! For these reasons, some migrants from these areas did participate in the “Freedom” protests out of revulsion with the way that residents in their suburbs were discriminated against.

Yet, given that it is migrants – especially from Tonga, Samoa, Iraq and Lebanon – who have disproportionately suffered the most deaths from COVID in Australia, which naturally makes these communities less partial to anti-pandemic-response protests; and given that these “Freedom” protests have in part been led by white supremacists, the rallies had disproportionately few people of colour participating. And alongside billionaire Clive Palmer’s hard right United Australia Party (UAP), conscious white supremacists really have been driving the “Freedom” protests. The fascist character of many of the movement’s instigators was most evident in Melbourne on 20 September 2021. Then, Far-Right activists – and some self-employed tradies that they roped in – attacked the headquarters of the left-wing CFMEU construction workers union. The “Freedom” horde assaulted union officials and damaged union headquarters.

In China, just like here, protesters shouted slogans for “freedom” and against censorship. But what established the character of some of the protests most clearly is the part that got the Western ruling classes most excited: that in the street protest in Shanghai and the one in Beijing, some of the demonstrators had chanted “Down with the Communist Party!” and “Down with Xi Jinping!” Now media footage of the Shanghai protest shows that it was a minority of the crowd chanting those slogans with many staying silent. Indeed at the Shanghai protest many participants also sang the Communist Internationale at one stage, although there were plenty in the crowd that did not join in too. Yet it was also true that no one in the Shanghai protest moved to immediately remonstrate with the man who started off the anticommunist chants and tell him to stop – although a Reuters news report said that when a small number of participants at the Beijing demonstration shouted out demands for the CPC and Xi Jinping to step down they were quickly rebuked by some fellow protesters. It seems that the protests were diverse in their composition. Nevertheless, it is also clear that those with a conscious agenda of capitalist counterrevolution were seeking to embed their movement within the grievances of those tired with pandemic response measures. Moreover, although many in the Chinese COVID “Freedom” rallies were not anti-communists, it is also true that a fair percentage of the organisers had sympathy for Western-style “democracy” – which in practice means a tyranny of capitalist oligarchs that is only a democracy for the rich. Given that – even polls done by Western organisations have shown that – a large majority of China’s population is currently both emphatically sympathetic to the PRC’s socialistic political order and strongly suspicious of the capitalist system in the West, this puts many of those driving the Chinese “Freedom” protesters on the relative Far Right of China’s political spectrum, even though they were not racial supremacists like their counterparts in the likes of the U.S., Germany and Australia.

When COVID “Freedom” activists called a rally on November 29 in the southern Chinese city of Guanzghou, just five people turned up to support the event (shown in the foreground of the above photo). But when locals saw the protest, a large crowd gathered to denounce the protesters . Many of the locals suggested that the “A4 protesters” had been paid by Western regimes.
Source: Still taken from video on Twitter account of Zhao DaShuai

High-Level Coordination of Those Seeking to Hijack
Frustrations over COVID-Response Measures

Those instigators of the Chinese “Freedom” protests with a broader political agenda seemed to be very deliberate in their attempt to hijack frustrations over COVID-response, just as those with an extreme white nationalist agenda were here. It is remarkable how coordinated the Chinese protests were. The protests were held almost simultaneously in several cities, using similar slogans and similar methods – like the use of the blank A4 pieces of paper. Such a level of coordination can only be achieved if protest organisers already knew each other prior to the actions. This could be attained to a partial degree through social media discussion even if instigators have not physically met. However, as the Western media have told us ad nauseum, discussion about protests on this issue had been censored on social media. Moreover, in Australia, or anywhere else for that matter, the only way a high-level of coordination in protests over any issue could arise is through activists having networked in earlier actions. The first protests in any movement over any issue often lack coherence. Yet what happened the weekend before last were the very first COVID “Freedom” protests in China – all the other COVID-related protests in China were highly localised outbursts against specific local authorities about very local concerns and did not target the central PRC government, let alone raise broader slogans about “freedom”, “democracy” and “censorship”. Therefore, key organisers could not have networked through meeting at earlier such events, because there have not been any! This means that some of the key instigators of the Chinese protests could only have been able to network with each other, because they had already, earlier, been brought together over a shared belief about some other issueslike a shared agenda of promoting, at least aspects of, Western-style “democracy” or at the more extreme end, the weakening of or overthrow of socialistic rule in China. Indeed Western media accounts of the Chinese protests defacto acknowledged this … and celebrated it!

Moreover, the timing of the coordinated protests was more than interesting. Everyone in China knows that on 11 November, the central government announced measures loosening pandemic restrictions and reducing the scope of PCR testing. Western media outlets headlined: “China Cities Reduce Mass Testing as Nation Eases Covid Measures.” So why just two weeks later, as more local governments were announcing easing measures, would some people want to instigate COVID “Freedom” protests? They could only have wanted to, because in seeking to channel frustrations over the inconvenience of pandemic restrictions into support for their broader agenda, they realised that they were … running out of time! The more that measures eased, the less resonance for their agenda these forces would get. It was now or never for them!

There were clear signs of external boosting of the “A4 protests”. For example, a few of the placards in the Shanghai protest reportedly had errors in the Chinese character writing indicating that the writers of the signs did not know well the simplified Chinese characters used in the mainland but rather were native users of the old-style characters still used in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Moreover, those scrutinising the Shanghai protest have said that two known anti-communist activists of Taiwanese background participated and confronted police, including an employee of Radio Free Asia (the U.S. government’s station that it uses to beam anti-communist propaganda into the PRC, Vietnam, DPRK and Laos) of German citizenship. Trotskyist Platform is unable to independently confirm whether this last detail is correct or not. However, what we can say is that Western-funded and trained anti-communist groups would have been involved in supporting and even, to a more or lesser degree, partially instigating the “A4 protests” – just as they did the 2019 pro-colonial riots in Hong Kong. This is apparent even from looking at the website of the U.S. government agency for foreign interference, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). As well as detailing on their website the total of $US2.5 million that they provide to various components of the anti-PRC movement of that (small) section of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang that happen to be anticommunist, the further $US1.4 million that they give to various anticommunist Tibetan groups (including $US18,000 for an Australian anti-PRC group called the Australia New Zealand Tibetan Youth) and the hundreds of thousands more that they continue to donate to the anti-PRC movement in Hong Kong, the NED also details the massive $US6.54 million (that is nearly $A10 million!) that they unleashed to bankroll 26 separate anti-communist organisations doing work within the rest of the PRC. Top on the NED’s list of recipients for work in the mainland PRC and handed out a $581,224 donation is an organisation whose name gives the U.S. government’s overall agenda away: the Center for International Private Enterprise, which in plain speak means the Center for International Capitalism. Similarly, among the recipients are several unnamed groups whose agenda is, “To empower entrepreneurs to protect their property rights”- in other words to “empower” capitalists to protect their “rights” to the fruits of their exploitation of workers labour in China, which fortunately is not truly guaranteed in Red China. However, most relevant to the “A4 protests” are the many, also unnamed, Chinese anticommunist groups receiving big money from the NED with stated agendas like, “To educate and train civil society activists on democratization and social movements, and to provide a platform for discussion of democratic ideas and civil society activism, fostering critical links among those who support democracy in relevant locations.” You can bet that at least some of these groups, bolstered by U.S. government money and the “education and training” that they were thereby able to dispense to “civil society activists” about “social movements”, would have been active in China’s November 26 to 28 “Freedom” protests! We should add that in addition to the more open interference conducted by the NED, the CIA and other Western regime agencies surely also provide more covert funding to counterrevolutionary groups inside China. Moreover, the total funds allocated by Western regime institutions is probably dwarfed by the financial resources poured in by Western anticommunist NGOs – including ones operating under the guise of being “human rights defenders” – which are known for receiving huge donations from capitalist tycoons.

It should be stressed that all we have said above about the Chinese rallies applies only to the highly coordinated “A4 protests”. We are not speaking about the spontaneous protests that have erupted at various times at particular neighbourhoods against local authorities or the protest in Urumqi (capital of Xinjiang Province) on November 24. That protest against the lockdown in parts of Urumqi following a deadly fire was aimed against the local government and implicitly appealed to the central government to pressure local authorities.

Shanghai, 27 November 2022: The man in the foreground holding the mobile phone starts a chant of “Down with the Communist Party!” and then “Down with Xi Jinping” at the Shanghai COVID “Freedom” protest. At the very moment that he begins the “Down with Xi Jinping”-chant, a blonde-haired Western person standing within touching distance of him turns around and smiles approvingly. She is one of the minority of protesters who fervently joins in with the two chants. Who is this person? Obviously, she can speak a fair level of Mandarin Chinese to be able to join the chants and moreover, inbound tourism into China has been stopped since COVID. The question then is, is she a member of one of the anticommunist Western NGOs operating within China under various social-work guises or is she a an attache of the nearby U.S. consulate or a manager for one of the many Western corporations that have offices in Shanghai and thus with a reason for class hostility to working-class rule in China or is she an international student? And if the Westerner was an international student, was her motivation for going to China simply to study or was she sent by a Western government agency or anticommunist NGO for the expressed purposes of quietly promoting a “democratic” capitalist counterrevolution?
Including the amount that it specifically allocates for work in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Tibet and Hong Kong, the U.S. government’s arm for foreign interference, the National Endowment for Democracy openly donates a total of $US11 million ($A16.5 million) to groups pushing its capitalist counterrevolutionary agenda in China. The amount given by anticommunist Western NGOs, often funded by wealthy tycoons, is thought to be even greater.
Source: Still taken by Trotskyist Platform from a video posted by anti-communist Western journalist, Eva Rammeloo on her Twitter feed.

Foxconn Workers Riot Against the Company’s Failure to
Take Adequate Measures to Stop COVID Spread

Even more different to the November 26-28 “Freedom” rallies than the Urumqi demonstration, was the mass workers protests at the huge Foxconn plant in central China’s Zhengzhou. The Foxconn factory makes iPhones for Apple. The Western media gave their audience the impression that these Foxconn protests were aimed against the PRC’s zero-COVID policies. Nothing could be further from the truth! As some of the anti-PRC media had to admit in the fine print: the Foxconn workers actions last month were not at all directed against PRC governments, even the local ones. Instead, it was aimed entirely against the company. Moreover, in as much as the workers’ actions were related to COVID it was not in opposition China’s COVID-response measures. Instead, workers complained that Foxconn was endangering their lives by putting newly recruited workers in the same dormitories as COVID-positive workers. Moreover, the main complaint of workers was actually over wages. The company had deceived workers by promising a much higher wage than they delivered. In response, militant workers bearing the red, pro-communist PRC flag, confronted the lying bosses and rioted. They also walked out of the factory compound and caught buses out of the factory in their thousands. They did so not only over the company’s failure to pay the promised wages, but out of a fear of catching COVID. As even pro-Western Al Jazeera had to report:

“One worker, Fay, said he feared catching COVID and anguished about whether to stay on for two more weeks to claim a bonus for completing his three-month contract. Eventually, he says, he crawled out through a hole in a green metal fence.

“`In the end, I decided that my life was worth more.’”

So you see, the Chinese Foxconn workers actually wanted more rigorous COVID-response measures, not less! In other words, the Foxconn workers’ actions were aimed in the very opposite direction to the A4 “Freedom” rallies. Indeed, if those angry, COVID-concerned Foxconn workers who had streamed out of the plant later came across one of those “Freedom” rallies (which did not begin until several days later) demanding that COVID-response measures be halted and claiming that the threat of the virus has been greatly exaggerated, the workers may well have shown their displeasure at the yuppies and right-wing students gathered at the “Freedom” protest in a more than verbal manner.

The Western capitalist media’s lying portrayal of the Foxconn workers struggle was not only one of their typical attempt’s to slander the PRC’s COVID response but also an attempt to deflect blame from the company that workers were fighting against. So why would the Western media want to protect Foxconn? Well you may very well not know this, because the media went to great lengths to either downplay this important fact, or simply not report it at all, but Foxconn is not a PRC company, Foxconn is a TAIWANESE company. The imperialist media seek to hide this truth, because not only do they want their audience to transfer their revulsion at Foxconn’s greed onto the PRC, they also want to protect the reputation of Taiwan. The latter is the province of China that the defeated capitalists fled to after China’s 1949 toiling people’s revolution. The fleeing capitalists took with them China’s gold reserves that they looted as well as their own ill-gotten personal wealth. The overthrown capitalists seized the island and made it their base from which they hoped to one-day launch a counter-revolution to restore capitalist rule to the mainland. As a result, this rebel capitalist province received massive economic aid from the U.S. and other capitalist powers to build itself up as an industrial power, as well as ever increasing amounts of military hardware. They managed to turn Taiwan into the West’s unsinkable aircraft carrier aimed against Red China.

The treatment of workers in Zhengzhou by Foxconn, whose biggest stake is an $A8.3 billion shareholding held by Taiwanese tycoon Terry Gou, in fact typifies the severe oppression of workers within Taiwan itself. Indeed, this intense exploitation by Taiwanese bosses was recently noticed here. Another Taiwanese corporate giant, 85 Degrees Café had ripped-off, so cruelly, eight Taiwanese students that it had brought to Australia that even Australia’s limp Fair Work Ombudsman fined the company the second largest amount that it has ever imposed on a single company. In last month’s ruling, the billion dollar Taiwanese company was found to have underpaid each of the students over $A50,000 in just 12 months!!! The Taiwanese corporation forced the students who had come here on a working holiday visa to toil between 60 to 70 hours per week in the company’s Sydney factories and retail stores for wages of, only, between $A1,650 to $A1,750 per month. Moreover, although Taiwan is no longer under martial law – as it was in the first four decades after 1949, when, in a notorious period known as the White Terror, the capitalist dictatorship executed tens of thousands of communist sympathisers, other dissidents, members of the island’s indigenous people and anyone with the slightest association with communists – workers right to resist their exploitation remains severely restricted in Taiwan. For example, workers in Taiwanese workplaces with less than 30 employees are not allowed to form a union that can bargain over workplace conditions. Moreover, Taiwanese teachers, public servants and defence industry employees are completely banned from going on strike and the those working in the island’s utilities, health sector and telecommunications industry are barred from taking any meaningful strike action as well. Most infamously, Taiwan’s capitalist bosses often subject their workers to harsh, military-style control. This militarisation of labour combined with the South Korea-style, hyper-capitalist social values that dominate the island – which results in many parents mercilessly berating their children if the latter do not score top marks at school while adults who are unable to obtain careers with high incomes are often outcast as a “failure” – together mean that Taiwan has a very high suicide rate. Indeed, the island’s suicide rate is double that of the socialist-ruled part of China.

When Foxconn set up factories in mainland China, it tried to bring Taiwan-style militarisation of labour to its plants in the PRC. Accentuated by the fact that workers in the PRC, especially those who had previously worked in her socialistic state-owned enterprises (known for their relaxed work environment and overstaffing in comparison with capitalist firms), were not used to such cruel management regimes, this resulted in a spate of suicides at Foxconn’s Chinese factories in the early 2010s. Eventually, pushed by mass workers protest actions, the PRC government cracked down on the Taiwanese corporation, forcing the latter to improve its employees’ working conditions. However, as recent events have proved, Foxconn still mistreats its workers. This calls on the PRC authorities to more decisively repress the greedy Taiwanese corporation.

The oppression of Taiwanese workers has only intensified over the last few years. À la John Howard and his notorious Workchoices industrial relations laws, in 2017-2018, Taiwan’s anti-PRC extremist president and darling of the Western ruling classes, Tsai Ing-wen and her Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government pushed through new laws that significantly diminished workers rights. This was despite large protests and mass hunger strikes by desperate workers. As a result, workers can now be made to work 12 days in a row with only 8 hours break between full shifts. Furthermore, the laws exempted employers of flight attendants, public transport drivers, domestic workers and caregivers from even those minimal restrictions on the amount of hours that they could coerce these workers into toiling. The new laws also slashed the number of public holidays in the island by nearly 40%.

The most brutally exploited workers in Taiwan are the island’s three-quarter of a million migrant workers from countries like Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Sri Lanka. Just like during feudalism, these workers not allowed to move jobs to a different employer. Amongst the sectors where indentured labour is most prevalent is amongst the quarter of a million, mostly women, migrants working as domestic maids for wealthy Taiwanese families. These domestic workers often toil from 5am in the morning until 10pm at night, seven days a week for a nominal minimum wage equivalent to $A190 per week. In practice, they often receive much less because employers frequently refuse to provide workers the income promised by their contracts or use loopholes in the contracts to take away most of their wages as expenses. Moreover, labour-hire brokers – with the permissiveness of the Taiwanese regime – usually force migrant workers to pay them exorbitant administration, recruitment, “training” and travel fees. Often, this means that Taiwanese employers or their brokers are able to ensnare migrant workers into debt bondage – in which workers pushed into debt are forced to do whatever their bosses want to try and repay debts that they will realistically never be able to repay. In other words, many migrant workers in Taiwan are doing forced labour. Some migrant women workers in Taiwan trapped in debt bondage have even been coerced in this way into toiling as sex workers.

The estimated 160,000 migrant workers toiling in Taiwan’s huge deep sea fishing industry face amongst the most barbaric conditions of all. Many are forced to do up to 21 hours per day of back-breaking work for a paltry nominal minimum wage of just $A154 per week. Ship captains and their bodyguards often brutally beat these workers or deny them food and water if they are perceived to not be toiling fast enough or if they make unintentional errors in their work. In a few notorious cases, captains and their bodyguards have even murdered migrant workers and dumped their bodies out to sea – but the full extent of such murders is not known because of the Taiwanese capitalist regime’s intention to deliberately turn a blind eye to, or downplay, such crimes. Moreover, in practice, most migrant fishermen toiling in Taiwan’s fishing industry receive far less than even the paltry, minimum wage. They are usually pushed into contracts stipulating well below the nominal minimum wage. Additionally, not only do the brokers take back a big chunk of the wages in fees, but the Taiwanese fishing firms extract “accommodation” and “food” costs from the workers even while forcing them to sleep in squalid conditions with inadequate food and water, even when they are in port. Indeed, some Taiwanese ship-owners with-hold paying their workers anything at all for months … and a few never pay their workers at all! As a result of all this, many migrant fish industry workers are desperate to quit and return home. However, by using transhipments at sea to get fish to market and take on supplies, Taiwanese deep water shipping vessels are able to operate for years without needing to call at a port, meaning that migrants workers enchained into forced labour have to wait years before having a chance of escaping their plight. Moreover, many are often trapped not only by debt bondage but through having their passports being held by their bosses and sometimes by even being physically incarcerated as virtual slaves. There have been confirmed cases where Taiwanese bosses lock migrant fishermen in underground bunkers when they return to the island’s shores or keep them imprisoned in over-crowded houses with the help of guards.

If one looks hard enough, it is possible to find in a small number of mainstream media outlets a number of accounts of Taiwan’s human trafficking of migrant labour and the appalling lack of workers rights in the island more broadly. However, mostly this information is deliberately buried by the mainstream Western media and is certainly not highlighted at all. In Australia’s capitalist media in particular, accounts of the brutal exploitation of workers in Taiwan are almost completely censored. For Taiwan is a protected species as far as the Western media is concerned. Such burying of the reality faced by working-class people in Taiwan is of course a violation of all the claimed ethics of “openness” and “fairness” that Australia’s mainstream commercial and government news organisations claim to stand by. Yet it is hardly a surprise. Taiwan’s continued existence as a rogue province of China not under the PRC is one of the imperialist ruling classes’ main means to provoke conflict with socialistic China.

A True Freedom Protest

Taipei, 16 January 2022: Hundreds of migrant workers on the island of Taiwan march against the Taiwanese capitalist regime’s draconian policy that prevents migrant workers from changing their employer. The policy helps facilitate the brutal super-exploitation of migrant workers on the island by Taiwanese business owners and by wealthy families hiring domestic maids.
Photo: Jimmy Beunardeau / Hans Lucas.

“Rare Protests in China” that were “China’s Biggest Protests Since 1989”? Really?

Despite their efforts to misrepresent and thereby co-opt into their anti-PRC narrative the Foxconn protests, it was the A4 “Freedom” protests that really had the Western ruling classes excited. Their media have cheered that these COVID “Freedom” rallies have been, as a 28 November ABC News article explicitly claimed, “China’s biggest protests since 1989.” Alongside this assertion, the media have insisted that these recent demonstrations were “rare” examples of protest in China. Ironically, if you look back carefully over Western media articles over the last few years, they have reports on many, many other protests in China. Quite comically, on each occasion the media report that “this is a rare example of protest in China.” However, if all these “rare” protests have been going on, then protests cannot be that rare in the PRC! To be sure, socialistic rule in China is currently not administered in its ideal form – that is a workers democracy where all who defend the rule of the working class and socialism are able to freely advocate their views and scrutinise and criticise the policies of governments and state institutions. The currently, bureaucratically deformed nature of the Chinese workers state means that there are restrictions on the scope of what should be legitimate protest – that is those that are not aimed at mobilising the forces of capitalist counterrevolution. Yet, contrary to the impression that the Western media would like to give, protests are actually very common in China. Indeed, one could even say that Red China’s people have a tendency to protest at the drop of a hat. It is estimated that there are on average somewhere between 300 to 500 protest actions in China every day. Today, protests in the PRC are mostly ones associated with workers strikes (which are usually aimed against private sector or Western/ South Korean/Taiwanese-owned enterprises where workers conditions are well below those at the PRC’s state-owned enterprises), protests by residents against the operation or opening of a nearby polluting factory and quite often, actions against perceived wrong decisions or bureaucratic excesses of local authorities – the latter protests usually appealing (often with success) to the central PRC government to crackdown on local authorities.

Moreover, the media’s claim that the recent A4 rallies were the largest protests in China since the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests is simply not true. In fact, there have been dozens of other protests that have been far larger. Here are just a few. In the late 1990s, China saw a huge number of protests by workers at state-owned enterprises (SOE) against privatisations and downsizing that had been pushed by pro-market then premier Zhu Rongji. Often the rebelling workers would march behind a portrait of Chairman Mao. In one action in Sichuan Province’s Nanchong, thousands of workers at the Jianlihua silk factory angered over lay-offs and pay cuts seized the general manager and took him hostage:

They loaded Huang [the manager] into the back of a flatbed truck and forced him into the painful and demeaning `airplane position’ – bent at the waists, arms straight out the sides.  Then they … paraded him through the streets [of Nanchong] just like the Cultural Revolution … Workers from other factories joined the spontaneous demonstration … 20,000 people took part.”

Timothy Cheek, Living With Reform: China Since 1989, Fernwood Publishing Ltd, 2006

Then in in March 2002, more than 100,000 sacked SOE workers protested across Northeast China against privatisation and under-payment of redundancy benefits. Such sentiments were unleashed again in particularly militant form in July 2009, when some 30,000 workers occupied the steel plant in northeastern Jilin province owned by state-owned Tonghua Iron & Steel after the company was sold-off to a privately owned, that is capitalist, company. In their struggle to resist the privatisation and the planned layoffs, workers beat to death the general manager appointed by the new capitalist owners! Within hours, the local government publicly announced that the privatisation had been cancelled. Just weeks after the Tonghua struggle, thousands of workers at the Linzhou Steel Company, in Henan Province, occupied the factory to oppose the sell-off of the SOE to a privately owned company. Workers mobilised behind a banner with a clearly pro-collective ownership – and therefore pro-communist – sentiment: “Learn from the Tonghua Steel workers! Defend collective wealth!” They also took hostage the assets-control state official managing the privatisation. Within days, their struggle also resulted in victory. Ever since then, there have barely been any attempts at privatisation of any sizable SOE in China.

On 14 August 2011, up to 70,000 people marched through the Chinese city of Dalian to demand the re-location of a chemical plant. The protest succeeded after the city government agreed to move out the plant. However, four years later, there was a militant protest in Linshui county, in Sichuan Province, that was aimed in the opposite direction. Some 20,000 residents demanded that a proposed high-speed railway that had been planned to pass through the county not be amended to another route that would bypass the area. Protesters carried banners demanding: “We want development, prosperity and a railway”. Note, that this was already two and a half-years after Xi Jinping became PRC leader, which the Western media have been claiming led to the constriction of all opportunities for protest in China.

Ten months later, about ten thousand workers at the Shuangyashan coal mine in Heilongjiang Province rallied to protest against the local government for failing to ensure that the, then semi-bankrupt, state-owned Longmay Group pay on time the wages it promised to continue paying workers after the mine was idled. Pushed by this and similar protests, the Xi Jinping government modified its supply-side structural reforms that were originally intended to reduce overcapacity and overstaffing at state-owned coal and steel plants. Beijing now moved to ensure that the SOEs with excess capacity establish operations in other areas, including agriculture, forestry and services, so that the excess workers can be transferred into new jobs. At the same time it turned the focus of its coal and steel sector capacity reduction drive from the SOEs to the closing down of smaller capitalist-owned operations.

However, Mao-portrait bearing rallies appealing to the CPC central government to act against local authorities and workers actions calling to “Defend Collective Wealth” and protect the PRC’s socialistic SOEs, are all not the type of protests that the Western capitalist media want to highlight. If the Australian media were honest they would not label the recent COVID “Freedom” protests, “China’s biggest protests since 1989” but rather call them, “China’s biggest protests since 1989 that had an agenda attractive to Western ruling classes” – that is protests that either included anti-communist elements or had the potential to grow into one aimed at undermining socialistic rule in China.

Nanchang, China, 1 July 2016: Workers at a Chinese store owned by notoriously anti-union American retail giant, Walmart begin a strike. The strike was against Walmart’s plans to introduce a flexible scheduling system that workers fear would turn the mostly full-time, permanent workers in China’s Walmart stores into casual employees like their American counterparts. Chinese Walmart Workers were also angry that Walmart stores often pays workers much less than the average wages paid by Chinese companies in the same area.
Unlike in Australia, there are no laws restricting the right to strike in China. However, as the right to strike is not explicitly enshrined in Chinese law either, it exists in somewhat of a legal grey area. However, although there have been occasions where strike action has faced repression in China, in general, workers are more easily able to wage strike action in China than in Australia. Certainly, workers are not restricted by laws limiting the time in which they can wage industrial action to a narrow window of time deemed the “bargaining period”, as they are here. Moreover, unlike in Australia, Chinese workers do not have to go through the lengthy, momentum-sapping procedure of holding a state-supervised secret ballot election before they can launch strike action. As a result, workers strikes are very common in China. Moreover, living in a workers state where people are taught from the country’s Constitution and from the education system that the working-class is the ruling class, workers in China often have a healthy sense of entitlement. Therefore, when they take collective industrial action against an employer they often take very militant actions such as occupying workplaces, blocking roads and taking bosses hostage.

Photo: By striking Walmart workers in Nanchang

The Australian media’s attempts to convince their audience that protests almost never take place in China is part of their push to create an impression of China as a repressive, “authoritarian” country in contrast to the “democratic” West. As part of this, they hyped up any repression of the A4 protests. For example they focussed on the arrests by PRC police of a handful of protesters – who from video footage appeared to be sitting on road intersections. However, in actual fact, PRC authorities have been rather mild in their response. The few detained were released within hours and at this stage it does not appear that a single protester actually remains held in detention or charged. Compare this with how Australian authorities dealt with COVID “Freedom” protests here. For example in just one COVID “Freedom” rally in Melbourne alone (on 3 November 2020), police arrested 404 protesters after having earlier unleashed capsicum spray against the demonstrators. Then in August last year, a court in Sydney sentenced an anti-lockdown protest organiser to eight months in prison. Let’s be clear: we have little sympathy for any repression faced by the, often Far-Right, organisers of these anti-pandemic response protests. Nevertheless, the contrast between the harsh repression against “Freedom” activists here and the relatively mild treatment of COVID “Freedom” protesters in China is striking given the determination of the Australian media to portray the differences between the Australian system and the PRC one as one of “democratic” Australia versus “authoritarian” Communist China.

Moreover, as those who stand up for workers rights, activists in support of public housing, staunch anti-fascists, sympathisers of socialistic China and climate activists can all tell you, the supposed right to protest and express one’s political views in Australia is inhibited. And the regime has been progressively restricting this right even further. In April this year, the right-wing NSW government, with the ALP’s support, passed laws that allow for people accused of illegally protesting on public roads, bridges, and industrial estates to be jailed for up to two years. Seven days ago, when the Australian media still hadn’t stopped screaming about the supposed repression of right-wing COVID “Freedom” protests in China, a Sydney court outrageously imprisoned a climate activist for 15 months for a protest in April. Deanna Coco was given this extreme sentence for blocking one-lane of the Harbour Bridge for merely 25 minutes. Moreover, on June 19, NSW police conducted an operation against climate activist group, Blockade Australia that makes the PRC’s police seem like teddy bears. When the climate group was merely having a meeting camp northwest of Sydney, police organised camouflaged undercover officers to literally hide in the bushes to spy on the camp. When the spies were detected by camp participants, police unleashed a fearsome force of 100 riot police, helicopters, the dog squad and uniformed cops to descend on the camp and arrest dozens of the group’s members. As a result of this and a subsequent raid, ten activists have been charged, two of whom were imprisoned after being denied bail. Four of the activists are facing up to ten years in jail. The charges allege that the activists were … planning to commit a crime in the future, by engaging in an unspecified future direct action to advocate measures to mitigate climate change! Meanwhile, the Australian regime is seeking to jail former Australian Army lawyer David McBride for up to 50 years for revealing to the media some of the details of the appalling murder of civilians and unarmed prisoners by the Australian military during its occupation of Afghanistan. And let’s not forget the complicity of Australian governments in the brutal ongoing persecution of Julian Assange for bravely reporting details of the U.S. regime’s heinous murder of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Above: Lightly equipped Chinese police basically standby and watch as people on China’s relative Far Right hold a COVID “Freedom” protest in Shanghai on November 27 against COVID PCR testing and masking requirements. A minority of the crowd also chanted explicitly anti-communist slogans. Police did not confront protesters with horses. Only after the protesters had rallied on the streets for many, many hours did police ask the protesters to leave. They then split the crowd into two after a chunk of the crowd refused to leave. The Chinese police then made only made a small number of arrests after some of the protesters provoked police by pushing into them – seemingly to get arrested for the benefit of Western media cameras. Below: Mounted police in Sydney attack protesters at a 24 July 2021 Sydney rally against lockdown and other pandemic-response measures. The NSW government and police had declared the COVID “Freedom” rally illegal and made mass arrests, while establishing a taskforce to identify and hunt down further protesters. We have little sympathy for any repression faced by the, often Far-Right, organisers of these anti-pandemic response protests. Nevertheless, the contrast between the harsh repression against “Freedom” activists here and the relatively mild treatment of COVID “Freedom” protesters in China is striking given the determination of the Australian media to portray the differences between the Australian system and the PRC one as a matter of “democratic” Australia versus “authoritarian” China.
Photo (above left): Casey Hall/Reuters
Photo (above right): Ryo Inoue/Asahi Shimbun
Photo (below left): Mick Tsikas/AAP photos
Photo (below right): NCA NewsWire/Flavio Brancaleone

A Torrent of Disinformation and Deceit

Their deliberate misrepresentation of the Foxconn protests and their lie that the blank A4 paper-bearing COVID rallies were the biggest protests in China since the 1989 were hardly the only chunks of deception that the Australian mainstream media have engaged in during the last couple of weeks. So let us identify some of the different streams that have contributed to the torrent of disinformation that they have engulfed the Australian population with over events in China. One of the favourite claims of the Western media is the notion that “China’s zero-COVID policy has crashed the country’s economy.” Yet in the first year of the pandemic, while the economies of the U.S., Australia, India and other capitalist countries dived into recession, the PRC economy was the only major economy to have positive growth during that year. The following year, the PRC’s economy surged by a remarkable 8.1%. Now, in the third quarter of this year, the PRC’s economy grew at a very decent 3.9% year on year. This compares with a 2.4% annualised growth of the Australian economy and a 0.8% annualised contraction of the British economy. So, so much for China’s pandemic response “crashing her economy”! Crucially, the PRC has been able to handle her pandemic response through methods that have kept the prices of food and other essentials in check. Today inflation in China is running at only 1.6% per year, in contrast to an inflation rate of 6.9% in Australia, 6.8% in India and a whopping 11.1% in Britain. To be sure, the Omicron spread in China this year has slowed her economy from its usual very fast pace. However, although pandemic response measures do reduce economic activity, the spread of the harmful virus is itself very damaging to production. As we have seen here in Australia, people falling ill with COVID has created shortages of frontline workers, while the understandable fear of catching the virus has caused many to voluntarily shy away from usual activities – thereby reducing consumer demand for services in many areas. Indeed, even the ABC’s business editor, Ian Verrender conceded – not when speaking about China of course but about Australia – that “it wasn’t the lockdowns at the root of the economic catastrophe that has befallen us in the past two years. It was a highly contagious virus.”

One of the most cynical mantras repeated endlessly by Australian ruling class’ media is the claim that China’s pandemic response efforts are now failing. Or, in the words of ABC’s chief, anti-PRC propagandist, Bill Birtles, “China now has the worst of both worlds” – that is strict pandemic restrictions on people and a rampant virus spread. Oh, really? Let us check the facts on how bad or otherwise the COVID spread in China really is. The facts are that over the last month, there were 593 COVID deaths in Australia, whereas in mainland China, with its huge population, there we just nine deaths! In other words, in terms of deaths per head of population, in Red China the COVID situation is currently about 3,700 times better than it is in Australia! Doesn’t sound like “China has the worst of both worlds” at all!

Another key piece of deception that the mainstream Western media engaged in is by deliberately giving the strong impression that (although often not explicitly stated so that they could claim that they are “not lying”) China’s people have been basically locked down or subjected to other restrictive measures throughout the whole three years of this pandemic. The truth however is that other than for the initial early 2020 lockdown in Wuhan and the surrounding parts of Hubei Province, when China was facing the rapid spread of a new virus that no one knew much about, as well as a small number of lockdowns for periods in other cities like Xian, the overwhelming majority of China’s people were never put into a stay at home lockdown for any period during most of 2020 and all of 2021. Thus while residents of Melbourne have been locked down citywide for cumulatively four months during the pandemic and Sydney residents were locked down for three and a half months during last year’s Delta outbreak, residents in Shanghai, Shenzhen, Chongqing, Chengdu, Tianjin and most other large cities in China never had to endure a confined to the home lockdown during the first two years of the pandemic. Moreover, while very small proportions of Beijing and Guangzhou were locked down for short periods and other parts of the cities faced short-term restrictions on travel outside the city during particular outbreaks, most of the residents of these megacities also did not experience any lockdowns whatsoever in 2020 and 2021. Indeed, other than for mandatory mask wearing in public transport and other high-risk areas and the blocking of tourist travel into China, the PRC’s rapid and aggressive suppression of outbreaks when they did occur ensured that, for most of 2020 (after the Wuhan outbreak was suppressed) and all of 2021 and into March 2022, most Chinese people were able to go about their lives as if there was no pandemic at all. Outbreaks, of course, still did occur during this time in particular areas. However, when they did, they were snuffed out in quick time by rapid, resolute and effective local measures so that the overwhelming majority of the population were not affected by either the disease or by pandemic restrictions. One could actually say that for two years of this pandemic, the PRC had the best of the both worlds: a lesser proportion of her people subjected to lockdowns than in say Australia and a far, far lower death toll.

This changed from about March this year as the more infectious but apparently less lethal Omicron strain became dominant. Nevertheless, the PRC’s efforts to protect her people’s well-being have continued to be remarkably successful. All year, 599 people have died from COVID in mainland China compared to 14,102 deaths in Australia despites its much smaller population. However, to stop the 2022 spread of Omicron, the PRC was compelled to lockdown significant parts of several cities at various times. Most notably, China’s most populous city, Shanghai, which had avoided any lockdowns earlier, was placed into a strict lockdown in early April that lasted just under two months. Although tighter than the lockdowns in Australian cities, it is still notable that the duration that even Shanghai residents have been locked down for is only half the duration that residents in both Melbourne and Sydney have endured. To obscure this reality, the Western mainstream media have engaged in deliberately deceptive coverage of China’s pandemic containment measures. They have reported lockdowns of particular suburbs, or even just small neighbourhoods, of cities as if those entire Chinese cities have been locked down. Meanwhile, in order to make the number of people under lockdown in China sound much larger than is actually the case, they lump in to their figures of the number of people facing “lockdown measures” (by adding the word “measures” to “lockdown” the Western media believe they have found a means to engage in this slight of hand) the amount of people experiencing only partial restrictions in their local areas – like the closure of karaoke bars and internet cafes – but who are not locked down. They are then able to quote a total number of people supposedly facing “lockdown measures” that sounds large … helped by the fact that any number for either good or bad sounds large when one is dealing with a country of nearly 1.5 billion people! Yet two can play this game. We can use this same method and, looking at the question from the opposite angle, point out that there are hundreds of millions of people in China, perhaps even the majority – including the overwhelming majority of residents in both Beijing and Guangzhou – who have never had to endure a Sydney or Melbourne-style confined-to-the-home compulsory lockdown during this entire pandemic.

In general, residents in China’s megacities have been subjected to compulsory confined to the home lockdowns for considerably shorter periods than those of us living in Sydney and Melbourne.

So why then has the PRC been able to protect her people from COVID so much better than every other large state in the world – including the Australian, U.S., Japanese, Indian, Russian and Saudi Arabian regimes? It is true that after the Australian and other capitalist rulers progressively abandoned any serious moves to contain COVID in the course of 2022, as they put business profits ahead of the lives of the elderly and ahead of the wellbeing of frontline workers and their families, it was the PRC’s determination to continue to put people’s lives first – including when necessary through targeted lockdowns – that enabled her to protect her people far better than the capitalist regimes. However, what about in 2020 and 2021, when governments in countries like Australia were locking down people in their biggest cities for considerably longer than their counterparts in China? There have been three key methods that have been responsible for the PRC’s success in containing COVID. The first is the provision of effective head to toe protective gear for all their workers most vulnerable to catching COVID. Take a look at most photos of health workers and testing staff in Australia during the pandemic and compare that with those of their Chinese counterparts. One will see that the Chinese workers have the benefit of far more comprehensive protective clothing and masking to protect them from acquiring COVID. The second feature of China’s COVID response has been test, test, test! During the height of the pandemic, whenever there was an outbreak, China PCR tested not only close contacts of known cases but the entire population of whole areas where the cases had been. This testing continued until the outbreak was suppressed – with residents often tested as frequently as once every two days. Additionally, frontline workers at high risk of catching COVID are being tested very frequently even if no known cases in their residential areas exist. Crucially, since COVID is often first transmitted into an area via frontline workers of working age and good health before it is passed on to elderly and sick people, the PRC’s frequent testing – and thus early COVID-positive detection – of frontline workers has been able to minimise virus transmission onto her vulnerable elderly and ill populations. Thirdly, during the height of the pandemic, the PRC moved almost every single COVID infected person into a hospital or makeshift hospital until they had cleared the virus. This ensured that not only were all COVID patients given proper care – thus avoiding the awful situation that we had in Australia during the Delta outbreak when people were dying from COVID at home before even being taken to hospital – but that those infected did not pass the virus onto others including older members of the same household.

The PRC’s winding back of its pandemic containment measures, which began before the protests, mainly involve a winding back of this third method – by moving to home quarantine for those with mild or asymptomatic cases. Additionally, the PRC has largely wound back the the use of Method 2. Mass testing of every single person in whole areas or cities where an outbreak occurs will no longer be conducted. However, frequent PCR testing of health sector workers, nursing home staff, childcare workers, school employees and certain other frontline workers will continue. The loosening was based on the declining severity of the Omicron variants present in China, the wide availability of antiviral medications for infected people that had not been available earlier, the Chinese medical system’s greater experience and competency in treating COVID patients and a rate of full vaccination of over 90% of China’s entire population (note that this proportion is relative to China’s entire population and not just to the over 16 year-old population as vaccination figures are reported in Australia). By comparison, at the time much of Australia abandoned strict pandemic preventive measures when NSW on 17 February 2022 removed the requirement for QR check-in before entering hospital venues, retail premises and gyms and removed all density limits on hospitality venues and nightclubs, antiviral medications were not available in Australia (at the time none had even been listed on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme) and Australia’s vaccination rate was lower than China’s was at the time of her recent loosening of COVID containment measures (at the time the number of vaccine doses delivered in Australia numbered 2.04 times its total population whereas by 28 November 2022 China had delivered vaccine doses that numbered 2.45 times her entire population – the ideal figure should be above 3 when all those older than age three have had at least three doses and the elderly and COVID-vulnerable have had four doses). It remains to be seen whether China’s changes are timely, as seems to be the case, or whether, under the pressure of private sector business owners, the self-employed and overseas capitalist governments wanting the Chinese market to operate at full throttle in order to prop up their deteriorating economies, PRC authorities have loosened COVID containment measures slightly too quickly. It is very possible that the PRC has managed to truly see off the pandemic with a very low number of deaths and can return to a situation when most people are not seriously inconvenienced by virus containment measures while COVID deaths are kept to a very low level (as was the case between April 2020 and March 2022). However, there is a small possibility that the PRC may need to partially bring back certain measures if the new guidelines lead to a spike in COVID deaths before the pandemic fully wanes.

The three key methods, referred to in this section of this article, that underpinned the PRC’s COVID response during the height of the pandemic (before vaccines and anti-viral treatments were available or when far more deadly COVID strains like Delta were dominant) could not have been utilised by most other countries even if they wanted to. To provide the massive amount of hazmat suits, medical grade masks, other personal protective equipment and COVID testing kits needed for a PRC-style pandemic response required manufacturers to switch over their production to making these items in quick time. To conduct mass PCR testing and processing on the scale that the PRC conducted required a massive mobilisation of human resources. So did the organisation and transport of large numbers of infected people into centralised quarantine and the provision of food and other services to such a large number of patients. Moreover, the required creation of new hospitals and makeshift hospitals in the space of weeks to suppress new outbreaks in a city was a Herculean task. None of this could be accomplished in societies where the construction companies, manufacturers, transportation firms, pathology firms and other key sectors are under the ownership and control of profit-driven private companies. Such capitalist firms would be loathe to rapidly switch over their operations to providing large amounts of protective gear, testing kits and makeshift hospitals at a low enough price for governments to afford, especially when they knew that the costly re-orientation of their operation to provide the new product would only bring in revenue for the duration of the pandemic. The PRC was only able to implement her three principle pandemic-response methods because her key means of production, distribution and infrastructure construction are under public ownership and because even her private companies are ultimately subordinate to the workers state. In other words, it was the PRC’s socialistic system that made her hugely successful pandemic response possible. It is notable that of all the countries in the world with a population greater than 15 million people, the two countries with the lowest COVID death rate per million residents are both socialistic countries: the PRC and the DPRK (North Korea).

Left: Medical workers at a makeshift hospital in China prepare to deliver medicines to COVID patients  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 last year’s Delta outbreak in Sydney, dozens of people 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 has been much rarer within Chinese health facilities.
China’s spectacular success in protecting her people from COVID comes not from greater use of lockdowns but through, at the height of the pandemic, conducting mass testing of residents during outbreaks, providing high-quality protective gear to health workers and other vulnerable workers and through caring for – and quarantining – every infected person in a hospital or makeshift hospital. China could only make such a response because of her socialistic system based on public ownership of the backbone sectors of the economy and subordination of even the private sector to the workers state. Today, as China loosens pandemic restrictions, it is her state-owned pharmaceutical giants like China Resources Pharmaceutical Group that have stepped up to the plate and greatly increased their manufacture and distribution of anti-epidemic medications to hospitals, community fever clinics and pharmacies.
Photo (Left): Zhu Xingxin/China Daily

What is “Brutal” and What Is Not?

To obscure the truth that socialism was responsible for the PRC’s extraordinarily effective pandemic response is part of why the capitalist powers have been so intent on denigrating her COVID response. Thus, when their media have to acknowledge the PRC’s low COVID death rate, they say that it is only due to the use of “brutal” methods. In attempting to sell this narrative, these ruling classes employ one of their favourite tactics in their propaganda war against Red China. They pick out one particular bad act of a PRC state institution at one moment in time in one particular part of China (and it is always easy to find some examples of such particular events in China since it is such a huge, diverse and sprawling country) … and then claim that this is what is happening in all parts of China, at all times! So accounts of one overzealous local official (or more likely in China’s case a neighbourhood volunteer) in charge of COVID response in one neighbourhood, of one suburb, of one city of China, who has the doors welded of a couple of houses to ensure that its residents stay inside during a lockdown following their earlier breach of the lockdown in that particular neighbourhood at that particular time becomes translated into a claim by Western ruling classes that: “Communist China’s authorities are everywhere and at all times welding shut the doors of residents under lockdown!”

To “justify” their narrative, the mainstream media have supported the conspiracy theory that the November 24 fire at an apartment building in Urumqi that killed ten people was made worse because fire trucks were obstructed due to COVID response measures. PRC authorities have denied the rumours. But let’s say that the conspiracy theory actually is true. Then ten people died, in part, as an inadvertent result of the PRC’s COVID response. That is a tragedy. But the PRC’s pandemic response has also meant that her total COVID death toll is currently 5,235 when it would have been over 4.8 million deaths had China had the same COVID per capita death rate as the United States. Those extra 4.8 million deaths would have been a tragedy on a scale immeasurably more horrendous than the ten deaths from the Urumqi fire. And that is the point! The PRC’s COVID response, far from being “brutal”, has been a great feat of humanitarianism that has saved the lives of the nearly five million people who would have additionally died had she responded to the pandemic the way the U.S. ruling class did.

Now, let’s look at what really is “brutal”. “Brutal” is when a regime allows COVID to spread so wildly that the hospital system is engulfed, patients are dying on mass, already under-staffed hospitals are battered by health workers themselves being struck ill by COVID and those health workers lucky enough to be COVID–free are overwhelmed. Here is how a senior ICU nurse in Sydney described her work during the pandemic in Australia to the ABC’s Background Briefing program:

“In those four or five months that Delta hit, I had more patients pass away on me than I’ve ever had in my nursing career. And it’s not something that you can just go home and act like it’s fine….

 “By mid-January [2022], the simplest way to describe it is absolute chaos. We are seeing ICU filled back up with COVID patients, and a lot of nurses are now close contacts or isolating and unable to come to work….

“There have been times where I’ve been so exhausted that, after a drive home, I sit in the car for half an hour because I don’t have the energy to get out of my car and walk inside the house.

“I’ve heard stories of nurses having to leave their patients in a pool of faeces and urine for a few hours because they’re so busy keeping patients alive and there was no back up.”

Four days ago, even with the worst of the Omicron wave having receded for the moment, Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital still had to beg parents not to send their children there because waiting times at its Emergency Department had blown out to 12 hours. The next day, the city’s Alfred Hospital cancelled “elective” surgery and other hospitals have deferred some surgeries too. Now that is a truly “harsh” situation. However, to truly understand what is “brutal”, consider the following. If the Australian regime had responded as effectively to the pandemic as the PRC did and thereby kept Australia’s per capita death rate down to the level that China had, there would have been just 94 COVID deaths in this country. Instead, there have been 16,441! Those extra 16,347 COVID deaths in Australia occurred because the Australian ruling class failed to respond to COVID as effectively as the PRC did. Granted that the capitalist system in Australia means that Australian governments could never approach the PRC’s pandemic response success even if they wanted to. Nevertheless, part of the additional deaths was due to the regime consciously abandoning determined pandemic response, at a certain stage, in order to maximise business profits. The resulting extra thousands of deaths that occurred in Australia is not just “brutal”, it is actually an indirect form of mass murder – mass murder of mostly lower income people for the sake of the profits of super-rich business owners. Moreover, the remainder of the additional thousands of deaths in Australia compared to Red China is due to the inherently flawed and brutal nature of the capitalist system.

A man fights for his life at the COVID ward in Sydney’s St Vincents Hospital during last year’s terrible Delta outbreak. As a result of both the cruelty of the Australian capitalist regime that put business-owner profits over the well-being of the people and due to the inherently flawed nature of the capitalist system and its inability to effectively mobilise resources to meet social needs, more than 16,000 additional people died from COVID (as of 9 December 2022) in Australia compared to the number of people who would have died had Australia’s death toll per million residents been the same as China’s. That is brutal! All parts of the community have suffered during the pandemic, but those who have passed away from COVID in Australia have disproportionately been people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and also disproportionately from non-European migrant backgrounds.
Photo: Kate Geraghty

Hypocritical Western Media Says: Down with “Freedom Movement” in the West! Support the “Freedom Movement” in China!

The most striking feature of the Australian mainstream media’s reporting of COVID-related events in China over the last couple of weeks is the fact that while they hailed the recent Chinese COVID “Freedom” rallies, only a year or two earlier, they had nearly all been … strongly condemning the COVID “Freedom” rallies in Australia! Take for the instance the “progressive-liberal” Guardian online newspaper. Their stance on the anti-COVID-response protests in Australia and other Western countries is typified by their article from 12 February of this year, which, with plenty of justification, was headlined: “The global ‘freedom movement’ is a carnival of crank and conspiracy – and very dangerous.” Yet, just nine months later, this same Guardian was cheering on the Chinese “freedom movement”. This enthusiastic cheering of the Chinese demonstrations was despite the fact that just like the “carnival of crank and conspiracy” here, many Chinese “Freedom” protesters also voiced crank claims that the that the virus is really not that serious and repeated the same conspiracy theory as the “global freedom movement” that pandemic response measures are a deliberate plot to take away people’s freedoms … even when two weeks prior to their protests the PRC began gradually easing restrictions.

Moreover, given that most people in China have been locked down for a lot shorter time than those of us who live in Sydney and Melbourne, albeit having to do far more PCR tests, the frustrations of those participating in the Chinese version of the “very dangerous”, “carnival of crank and conspiracy” had even less justification than those demonstrating here. Indeed, precisely because people in China have on average been locked down for less time than here, protester anger and chants at the Chinese “freedom movement” rallies (and we are here speaking of the A4 protests and not the Urumqi one) – unlike the most intense manifestations of their Australian version – were not directed mostly against lockdowns. Instead, the main chant at most of the protests was: “I don’t want PCR test, I want freedom.” In the Beijing protest on the morning of November 28, Reuters reported that demonstrators chanted: “We don’t want masks, we want freedom. We don’t want COVID tests, we want freedom.” However, the Guardian and other mainstream Australian news outlets have been careful not to highlight too much the actual demands of the Chinese “Freedom” protesters. To admit that many of their chants were directed against mask wearing makes them sound too much like the pro-Trump Hard Right and clearly does show commonality between the Chinese version of the “freedom movement” and the Western “carnivals of crank and conspiracy.” Moreover, to emphasise the fact that the main demand of the Chinese protests was against PCR testing would make the Chinese protesters sound petty to the Guardian’s Australian readership. After all, more than 16,400 people have died from COVID in Australia, thousands more are suffering the debilitating effects of long COVID, hospitals are overwhelmed, nurses are exhausted to the point of breakdown and Sydney and Melbourne were each locked down for three and a half to four months … and some yuppies, rich kids and young wannabes in China complain about merely having to do PCR tests! Furthermore, the Guardian and the rest of the mainstream media never pointed out that the demands of the Chinese protesters were as obviously irrational as the “freedom movement” here. In Australia, the “freedom movement” simultaneously opposed lockdowns on the one hand and vaccines and vaccine mandates on the other – even though mass vaccination is precisely one of the most crucial tools for avoiding lockdowns. Meanwhile, in the Chinese “freedom movement”, participants opposed PCR testing and mask wearing … even though testing and mask wearing is absolutely crucial to avoiding the rampant virus spread that necessitates lockdowns!

It should be noted that unlike the likes of the Guardian, the ABC, SBS, the Sydney Morning Herald and all the main free-to-air TV channels, the most hard-right, shamelessly reactionary section of the media have supported, or at least legitimised, the Far Right-instigated “Freedom” protests in Australia. In fanatically also supporting their Chinese variant one could say that the Hard Right media were at least being consistent. Indeed, the Hard Right outlets had a field day pointing out the hypocrisy of their liberal rivals when the latter supported the Chinese “freedom movement” after having opposed the Western version. Thus a 2 December article in Murdoch’s disgusting, Fox News outlet screamed as its headline: “Media outlets praise anti-lockdown protesters in China after condemning American demonstrators as ‘extremists’”. Of course in correctly identifying the glaring contradiction in their liberal and mainstream-conservative rivals, the hard-right media’s conclusion is the diametric opposite of ours: while we say that the Far-Right instigated COVID “Freedom movements” should be opposed in both the capitalist West and in socialistic China, the Hard Right insist that they should be supported in both places.

The hypocritical stance of the overwhelming majority of the capitalist media to the “Freedom” protests in Australia and China also extended to their attitude towards the police response to the protests. When police have clamped down upon “anti-lockdown” protesters in Australia, the media have supported this. Thus when “Freedom movement” protesters marched in Sydney in July last year, ABC News reported in a favourable tone, and without any criticism, when NSW Police arrested and charged 57 of the participants and then established a strike force to hunt down and charge still more protesters. The ABC also had zero objection to NSW police minister David Elliot responding to the protest by threatening more severe repression, when they quoted the police minister warning that, “Those that are calling for this to happen again next week look out because these 400 officers will turn into 4,000 if needs be.” Yet when PRC authorities have more mildly dealt with the protests – whether that be the spontaneous, localised protests against local restrictions or the highly coordinated, recent A4 protests – the Australian media have rushed to describe the Chinese police response as “harsh”.

It is not just the bulk of the mainstream media that has taken a diametrically opposite stance towards the “Freedom movement” in Australia and the one in China. Most of the rest of the capitalist establishment have done the same. This February, when tens of thousands of “Freedom” protesters descended on Canberra to oppose vaccine mandates and other pandemic-response measures, then opposition leader, Albanese said that the protesters were ignoring the pressure health systems were under and the hard work of healthcare workers over the previous months. Pointedly, Anthony Albanese told the “Freedom” demonstrators in Canberra to “Go home.” However, the Albanese government definitely hasn’t been telling Chinese COVID “Freedom” protesters to “Go home”! Instead, the Albanese government effectively endorsed their rallies. A spokesperson for Albanese’s foreign minister, Penny Wong, stated that: “We urge Chinese authorities to engage constructively with protesters and address the concerns they have raised.” So you see, Australia’s ruling class establishment have no principle when it comes to supporting or opposing pandemic response measures – rather their only true principles are to maximise profit for the capitalist bigwigs and to do whatever it takes to denigrate and undermine socialistic rule in China.

All Wings of the Capitalist Class Are Hostile to Socialistic China

Despite the mutual contempt that hardline right-wing sections of the media on the one hand and their “progressive”-liberal rivals on the other have for each other and despite their big differences on many issues, not least on their attitudes towards the “Freedom movement” protests in the West, they and the rest of the mainstream media take an identical stance towards China. And that stance is not only support for the Chinese COVID “Freedom” protesters but extreme opposition to the PRC state in every way possible. Similarly, all Australia’s different pro-capitalist political forces, despite their bitter disputes, are united in supporting this Cold War drive. This ranges from the violent, extra-parliamentary white supremacist outfits (including the ones prominent in Australia’s “Freedom movement”) to Pauline Hanson’s racist One Nation Party and the UAP to the Liberal-National Coalition to the TEAL independents to the ALP to the Greens. The latter, to be sure, do not support aspects of Canberra’s military build-up – like the acquisition of nuclear submarines. However, the Greens still support the U.S.-Australia alliance that is aimed against China, albeit calling for it to be amended. More importantly, they zealously participate in the entire propaganda campaign that is aimed against the PRC and support all anti-PRC, anticommunist groups within China.

The common anti-PRC stance of all the pro-capitalist political factions is a reflection of the determination of Australia’s entire capitalist class to help strangle socialistic rule in China. As this U.S.-led Cold War drive gets hotter and hotter, even the faint noises, previously heard from the likes of former ALP politicians Bob Carr and Paul Keating, in opposition to the fanaticism of the campaign, have largely dissipated. In any case they never objected to the goal of undermining socialistic rule in China. They only wanted it to be done in a less provocative manner that would not damage Australia’s lucrative trade with China. The same agenda was held by a small number of the capitalist bigwigs that had massive, very direct trade interests with China, like iron ore miner FMG’s main owner, Andrew Forrest. However, with the Albanese government having moderated the language of its dealings with China, even while simultaneously driving ever harder the Cold War campaign against the PRC state, Forrest has now expressed his satisfaction with the Australian government’s China policy. Simultaneously, Forrest made clear his endorsement of the despicable Western slanders against China over supposed mistreatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, telling the Sydney Morning Herald (16 November) that: “We’re [i.e. China and Australia] not going to agree on Xinjiang. And my fellow Chinese business leaders, and other people I speak to, all know where we [i.e. Australia’s ruling elite] stand.” Indeed, even when Forrest was objecting to the intensity of Canberra’s loud denunciations of Beijing, he was in good part playing a double game. The greedy billionaire wanted to publicly appear like he was opposing excessive attacks on China so that he could protect his reputation with Chinese trade partners but he was at the same time supporting the political forces that have been waging one Cold War attack against the PRC after another. Australian Electoral Commission figures for the last two years that political donation records have been published show that Forrest’s FMG donated nearly $100,000 combined to both the Liberal Party and the ALP at the very time that they were both stepping up their campaign against the PRC. Moreover, in September 2019, when then U.S. president Donald Trump hosted then prime minister, Scott Morrison for a state dinner at the White House to further strengthen the Washington-Canberra anti-PRC alliance … Andrew Forrest attended as one of the invited special guests.

This common position of the capitalist establishment against Red China exists throughout all the Western powers. In the U.S., the hard right, Trumpian wing of the capitalist class is in a bitter conflict with the liberal-mainstream conservative wing. Less than two years ago, that conflict resulted in a violent and deadly confrontation at Washington’s Capitol building. Yet all wings of the capitalist class still manage to cooperate on passing, ever-more extreme ,anti-PRC motions in the congress. It is important to note that such unity does not even exist on the question of the war in Ukraine. Although the bulk of the U.S. capitalist class supports using Ukraine to wage a proxy war against Russia, there is a significant wing of the American ruling class that thinks that it would better serve their interests to build closer relations with Russia. This is reflected in the fact that over a quarter of Republicans in congress favour, at least to some degree, a rapprochement with Moscow. Their reason for this stance however is that they think that the U.S. should retard its predatory pursuits in Eastern Europe to stop driving Russia closer towards the PRC. These rabid anti-communists want a policy that can entice Russia into a grand U.S.-Russia inter-capitalist alliance against Red China.

The Three Closely Related Reasons
Why Australia’s Capitalist Rulers Oppose the PRC

So why are the Western capitalist ruling classes so hostile to the PRC? In particular, why are Australia’s capitalist bigwigs risking harm to their immensely lucrative trade with China by antagonising the latter? Amongst some on the Left there is a myth that this is only because Australia’s rulers are mindlessly “following America”. However, the truth is that Australia’s capitalist exploiting class is as opposed to the PRC as their American senior partners. This is for three closely related – but ultimately one and the same – reasons.

For one, China’s mutually beneficial cooperation with South Pacific and southeast Asian countries is undermining the ability of Australian corporations to plunder these countries. Australia’s imperialist rulers have long had a neo-colonial grip over the South Pacific. They dictate to South Pacific governments. They distort local administrations for their benefit – often with the help of Australian judges, upper bureaucrats and military and police officials dominating key positions in the state machinery of Pacific countries. This is in the service of the rich owners of Australian-owned multinational corporations who reap billions of dollars in profit by pillaging natural resources, exploiting cheap labour and monopolising markets in what they consider to be “Australia’s backyard”. For example, just one such Australian-owned corporation, oil and gas giant Santos – notorious at home for arrogantly dismissing the opposition of the Gomeroi Aboriginal nation to their Narrabrai coal-seam gas project – makes obscene profits from owning all of resource rich Papua News Guinea’s operational oil fields as well as a big chunk of the liquefied natural gas flowing out of both East Timor’s seabed and PNG. However, China’s cooperation with countries in “Australia’s backyard” is allowing Pacific countries to loosen the Australian ruling class’ stranglehold over their countries. You see, the Chinese companies building up infrastructure in the South Pacific and operating other projects there are largely very different to the Australian ones operating in the region. These Chinese firms are mostly not owned by rich, profit hungry shareholders but are under public ownership – that is they are under the collective ownership of all of China’s people. In other words, they are socialistic state-owned enterprises (SOEs) that do not operate mainly to maximise profits but rather for broader social goals needed by China’s people. These include maximising employment, developing poorer areas of China and building up the infrastructure of developing countries friendly to China so that they are better able to trade with her. When operating abroad, these SOEs are directed to help China gain a good reputation and build friendship with especially fellow developing countries by engaging in truly win-win cooperation. As a result, South Pacific countries have increasingly chosen to give development projects to Red China’s SOEs rather than to profit-obsessed Australian corporate bosses.

At other times, governments in the region have used the prospect of turning to Red China as a means to pressure the Australian imperialists to reduce their level of plunder. Take for instance East Timor and its struggles to stop Australian energy giants from stealing the lucrative resources in the Greater Sunrise gas field off its coast. Despite the field lying entirely on East Timor’s side of the seabed mid-line between East Timor and northern Australia, the Australian capitalist regime, aided by their spying on the East Timorese government’s confidential conversations about its resource negotiations with Canberra, bullied East Timor into signing a treaty granting the Australian ruling class 50% of the field’s upstream revenue. However, later in 2018, the Australian government had to back down somewhat. They signed a new treaty that while still allowing Australian corporations to steal a large portion and still preventing the East Timorese from having clear sovereignty over their gas field, now gave 70% to 80% of the upstream revenue from Greater Sunrise to East Timor. Part of the reason for Canberra’s back down was to try and restore its regional reputation following the high-profile exposure of its heinous spying on East Timor. However, the Australian regime’s partial retreat was also motivated by a wish to dissuade East Timor from turning further to China for development cooperation. In other words, whether it is by its SOEs winning development projects that would have been otherwise snared by Australian-owned corporations or by compelling the Australian ruling class to moderate its plunder of South Pacific countries, socialistic China is, unintentionally to be sure, making Australia’s capitalists lose money in the South Pacific. And we are talking here of big money – in the order of tens of billions of dollars over the last two decades. We know that when capitalists face the loss of large profits they become extremely ruthless. And that is why Australian capitalist rulers’ are so obsessed with coercing South Pacific countries to weaken their ties with Beijing. This compulsion to protect their lootings in the South Pacific also explains why the Australian imperialists are so determined to contribute to the combined West’s anti-China Cold Warif anything with even greater fanaticism than their U.S. senior partners.

Papua New Guinea, 2018: Local people wave PNG and Chinese flags as they cheer Chinese President Xi Jinping during his visit to PNG for the 2018 APEC summit. China’s mutually beneficial cooperation with South Pacific countries is very popular with most Pacific peoples. However, by strengthening South Pacific countries’ independent development it has undermined the ability of Australian capitalist companies to loot and exploit the region – thus enraging the Australian ruling class.
Photo: AP

Furthermore, all the Western capitalists know that the continued existence of socialistic rule in China prevents them from turning that country itself into their semi-colony. The Western imperialists not only want to be able to dominate China’s giant market but want to be able to exploit its huge workforce with the same ferocity that they currently exploit workers in the sweatshops of the other populous Asian developing countries like India, Bangladesh, Indonesia and the Philippines. To be sure, since pro-market reforms in the 1990s, China’s leadership allowed capitalists from the U.S., Japan, Western Europe, Australia, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore to extract profits from the labour of mainland Chinese workers. Moreover, as a sprawling and diverse country, there have been some local cases in China of severe exploitation, especially in Western and Taiwanese-owned factories. Nevertheless, since the working class cling onto state power in China, albeit in a deformed and incomplete form, workers wages in China are significantly higher than in the capitalist countries with similar per capita income. Notably wages in the PRC are clearly higher than in her fellow Asian countries Malaysia and Thailand. This is even more so if one adds the approximately 40% of additional labour costs that bosses in China must pay on top of wages (as compared to the less than 12% that bosses on average pay here for superannuation and accident insurance). These go into not only a collective workers pension fund but also into individual workers’ housing provident accounts for Chinese workers to use to buy or pay rent on their homes, as well as into four additional collective workers’ funds for, respectively, unemployment insurance, maternity payments, work-related injury insurance and medical insurance. Moreover, pushed by demands and strikes by workers, since the mid-2000s, Beijing has introduced a pro-worker industrial relations law and carried out a very welcome campaign of harsh repression against greedy bosses that violate workers legal rights or workplace safety regulations. All this together with a court system that – the opposite to Australia – favours workers in disputes with private business owners has led to major improvements in conditions for Chinese workers and a dramatic fall in deaths from workplace accidents. The PRC has come a long way in terms of workplace rights for workers since the 1990s and early 2000s.

Moreover, over the last two decades, workers in socialistic China have enjoyed, by far, the fastest rate of growth of real wages in any major economy. This is not only in comparison to the developed capitalist countries – like Australia where real wages are lower than they were ten years ago and Britain and Italy where wages have plunged even further. The PRC has boosted her workers’ real wages much faster than other developing countries too. Data from the International Labour Organisation’s last Global Wage Report (2020-2021) show that by 2019 (the last year for which ILO data was published), China’s average real wages had more than doubled from what it had been just eleven years earlier; indeed far more than doubled, growing to 2.3 times what it had been! This stunning rate of real wage growth enjoyed by Chinese workers is three times higher than in India, nearly six times larger than in Brazil and infinitely higher than in U.S.-plundered Mexico where workers suffered a real wage cut of 15% during that period. As a result, the likes of Nike and Addidas long ago stopped manufacturing in China and many other Western firms in low-end manufacturing have followed suit. Despite China’s giant market, highly skilled workforce and “First World”-quality infrastructure, these Western corporations are finding it hard to make a sizable profit in China and are transferring their operations to lower wage countries or even back to their home countries.

Therefore, everyday it is becoming clearer to the tycoons running the U.S., Japan, Australia, Britain, Germany, France and the other imperialist countries that the continued existence of socialistic rule in China will thwart their dreams of raking in a fantastic profit bonanza there. Yet these capitalists cannot shake this dream. For as large are the profits that they currently rake in from trading with Red China’s, still, solidly growing economy, they know that they could make far, far more should socialistic rule be destroyed there and they are able to superexploit China’s enormous, well-trained workforce. Moreover, the more that Western rulers’ economies slide towards a new deep recession, the more that they need their hoped-for neocolonial rape of China to prop up their own croaking systems. This is one of the key reasons why the Western capitalist rulers are so hell bent on doing whatever it takes to overturn socialistic rule in China.

However, the capitalist powers also have a far less ambitious but, for them, even more important reason for wanting to destroy the Chinese workers state. For, they understand all too well that the existence of working-class rule in China, in however an incomplete manner, could encourage the working-class masses in their own countries to also struggle for state power. This is despite the fact that the national-centred, compromise-seeking Chinese leadership, goes out of its way to reassure the capitalist rulers in the West that it will do nothing to encourage the class-struggle in the capitalist countries. However, the mere existence of socialistic rule in the world’s most populous country signals to the toiling classes of the world that socialism is indeed possible and that capitalist rule is not “the natural order of things” that must be endured. Therefore, when the capitalist rulers in the West claim that Red China presents an “existential threat”, they are actually right … but not for the reasons that they present to the masses! Contrary to their hysterical propaganda, China does not threaten other countries with predatory interference or wars of conquest. After all, the PRC is the only world power not to have fought a single shooting conflict in the 21st century. Indeed, China has not been involved in a single war for the last 44 years! However, the continued successes of socialistic rule in China does “threaten” to, in the future, inspire the masses in the capitalist countries to fight for socialism.

Even today, it would be striking to the most conscious pro-working class activists in Australia that while in Australia the tycoons have continued to get even richer during the pandemic while workers real wages have continued to plunge, in China it is the exact opposite: the billionaires are losing a chunk of their wealth while the real incomes of Chinese workers and welfare recipients continue to climb. Thus, whereas Australia’s 200 richest tycoons increased their wealth by 16% in just the last year, in the PRC, the wealth of billionaires fell by 18% during the same period, while workers real wages kept on growing in China. Per head of population, China now has six times fewer Australian-dollar billionaires than Australia does.

The inspirational effect of the PRC’s socialist course is muted by the reality that due to the extreme poverty of China’s pre-1949 capitalist days, when she was a brutally exploited neo-colony of Western imperialism, China’s per capita incomes – and thus average wages – still remain many times below that of the richest of the capitalist countries. However, the gap in per capita income between China and the Western countries is being gradually closed every year. As a result, even now, the wages of some workers in the more affluent parts of China like Shanghai and Beijing are higher than they are in the lowest wage parts of the U.S. – in its Deep South. One can say that if the capitalist powers do not first succeed in crushing socialistic rule in China or at least in squeezing the PRC so hard that it chokes off her development, then the per capita income of the PRC will catch up with that of the richest of the capitalist countries in the space of two or three decades. If that were to happen, why would a politically conscious worker in the West then want to accept capitalist rule? Why would they want to put up with a system of inequality, lack of job security, greedy bullying bosses, decaying social services, growing homelessness and periodic economic crises when a socialist system based on workers collective ownership of the key economic sectors is able to produce comparable incomes? Should per capita incomes in socialistic China be allowed to catch up with that of the richest countries, then the Western capitalist order would truly face an immediate “existential threat.” Therefore, the imperialist ruling classes know that they only have a limited amount of time in which to strangle, or at least decisively constrain, China’s socialistic development. That is why they are so obsessive in their opposition to Red China.

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 11 years ago! Workers who rent, which is many lower-paid workers, are even worse off due to skyrocketing rents in Australia. 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) has barely increased from what it was 12 years ago (see red line). By contrast, in the same period the Australian stock market index the S&P/ASX 200 has soared by over 50% (blue line). This is an indicator that while workers real wages have been falling, 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).

Dashed Hopes for a Cold Capitalist Restoration From Above

If the capitalist powers’ hostility to the PRC has become even more fanatical in recent years this is not at all because China has become “more aggressive”, as they claim. Rather, it is due to internal developments within their own countries and within China itself. For one, the late noughties Global Recession, from which many major capitalist economies never fully recovered, has shaken the confidence of capitalist ruling classes in their own system. Moreover, they cannot but notice the growing distrust of their “own” masses in their regimes in the context of inadequate social services and stagnant or falling real wages. All this makes them even more fearful of the example provided by a socialistic country with a rapidly growing standard of living. These fears have been magnified by the strengthening of China’s pro-socialist character over the last few years. You see, in the 1990s and early noughties, China’s socialistic public sector was being eroded by privatisations and a growing capitalist private sector. Alongside these structural economic changes the emerging capitalist class – and a craven upper middle-class layer around them – more loudly demanded ever greater “rights” for private sector “entrepreneurs” to “freely” exploit. With these partial changes in the economic structure and power dynamics of Chinese society, the ideas associated with capitalism – like selfish individualism and worship of those with wealth – gradually gained traction within sections of the Chinese masses. Fresh from finally strangling to death the socialistic USSR, the triumphant Western capitalists looked at China and expected that it was only a matter of time before the PRC heads the same way as the USSR. However, China’s working-class masses had very different ideas. They waged militant struggles against privatisation and agitated against the emerging capitalist class. Pushed by their demands, in the mid-noughties, China’s then Hu Jintao-led government moved to curb privatisations. By the late noughties, with the economic crisis then engulfing the capitalist world having vindicated staunchly anti-capitalist groupings within the CPC, with the 2009 Tonghua and Linzhou steel workers struggles against privatisation showing workers determination to defend socialistic public ownership and with a 2010 strike wave against Japanese-owned auto manufacturers bringing workers demands to the fore, Hu Jintao and Co. moved onto a more aggressive pro-socialist course. The Beijing government began actually renationalising many enterprises – especially in the coal mining and steel sectors. It also focussed its housing policy on massively increasing the amount of public housing.

The right-wing of the China’s ruling Communist Party – the section of the party most under the pull of the capitalists – however pushed back in 2012 – the last year of Hu Jintao’s term. This right-wing influence appeared to continue into the first three or so years of Xi’s presidency. However, the Western capitalists’ hopes that Xi would lead major reforms that would weaken China’s socialistic state sector were dashed. Under the push of the Chinese masses and a new workers strike wave in 2014-2015, Xi Jinping’s administration started veering to the left in the middle of last decade. Corrupt capitalists have been brought to heel and their assets confiscated and turned into the people’s collective property. Xi’s anti-corruption campaign, by deterring private bosses from bribing state officials to gain an unfair advantage, has diminshed the ability of the private sector to grow in influence relative to the socialistic public sector. Indeed, over the last several years, China’s socialist sector has grown much faster than the private sector, thereby reinforcing the economic supremacy of socialist economy in the country.  Thus in the first three quarters of this year, the revenue of China’s socialistic public sector grew by 9% year on year, much faster than the country’s overall economic growth, while the output of the private capitalistic sector was at best stagnant.

Moreover, from late 2020, Xi Jinping’s government moved more decisively to the left under the slogan of “curbing the disorderly expansion of capital”. It cracked down on excessive profiteering by tech capitalists, introduced further curbs on property speculation and made decisive steps to guarantee the wages and rights of gig workers. Although China’s capitalists, via the more liberal, right-wing of the party – personified by the CPC’s then number two ranked official, premier Li Keqiang – again pushed back at the start of this year significantly slowing the momentum to the left, the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) five yearly congress held in October, endorsed a step to the left relative to the previous congress five years earlier, albeit notably pulling back (unfortunately) from the stronger anti-capitalist measures of the late 2020 to 2021 period. Thus the main document voted up by the congress, emphasises struggling “for common prosperity” – which in China means focussing on lifting the incomes of low-income groups and “adjusting” (i.e. curbing) excessive incomes of the rich. The document also stresses increasing social welfare and emphasising green development. Crucially, although the document upholds, incorrectly, the party’s long-standing line to “encourage, support, and guide the development of the non-public sector” it set up guard rails against pro-capitalist backsliding. Thus, not only does the document approved by the CPC congress reassert the need to “unswervingly consolidate and develop the public sector” but refuting the push of the party’s right-wing to “streamline” and “make leaner” SOEs – i.e. downsize them – the document stressed that the ruling party would ensure that SOEs, “get stronger, do better, and grow bigger.” Alongside this emphasis on protecting China’s socialistic SOEs, the CPC congress notably retired or removed from the party’s leading body (its central committee) prominent advocates for the private capitalist sector – including premier Li Keqiang, the party’s previously number four ranked leader Wang Yang and governor of the Peoples Bank of China, Yi Gang (although there are signs that the CPC’s new number two ranked official and the person slated to become the new premier next March, Li Qiang is also somewhat pro-private sector). Moreover, distinct from its somewhat banal statements of China’s commitment to socialism that it would make in the decade and a half after the 1991-92 capitalist counterrevolution in the former USSR, today the CPC, pushed by the sentiments of the most politically conscious sections of the Chinese masses both within and outside the party, very emphatically asserts that the PRC will be unwaveringly sticking to a socialist path. The congress document’s main theme is for the CPC “to lead the Chinese people of all ethnic groups in a concerted effort to realise the Second Centenary Goal [i.e. at the 2049 hundredth anniversary of China’s 1949 Revolution] of building China into a great modern socialist country in all respects.” Given this reinforcing of the socialist character of the PRC over the last decade and a half, the capitalist powers have all but abandoned their hopes that merely through China’s engagement with the capitalist-dominated, world economy and through their own heavy prodding, capitalist restoration will inevitably gain the ascendancy with the aid of a significant section of the CPC leadership. The imperialists realise that they will need to greatly ramp up their military, economic, propaganda and political pressure upon the PRC if they are going to be able to make socialistic rule crumble, or at least weaken, in China. And that is what they have doing!

What may have especially alarmed imperialist ruling classes is that the CPC congress document emphatically asserts that: “Scientific socialism is brimming with renewed vitality in 21st-century China.” Capitalist ruling classes are terrified that such statements of confidence in Marxism from the leaders of the world’s most populous country will not only undercut their lying efforts to convince their own populations that “communism is dead” and that “China is actually just practicing capitalism under the rule of an authoritarian Communist Party” but could “infect” their disgruntled populations with a belief that fighting for communism is worth considering.

Above: COVID deaths per million residents in a range of countries as of 12 January 2023. The figures for China includes deaths in the period from 8 December 2022 to 12 January 2023 after China significantly loosened COVID restrictions in the light of the weakening strength of the Omicron variants present in China and the great improvement in COVID treatments (in both China and internationally), including antiviral medications. On 14 January 2023, China announced her COVID deaths for this period. The loosening did lead to a spike in COVID deaths in China relative to the very few deaths in China in the previous three years as a large proportion of China’s population became infected with COVID. However, because China had earlier successfully protected her people from the more deadly COVID strains and because when most of her people were infected in the December 2022-January 2023 period it was with much weaker Omicron strains, China avoided having anywhere near the death rates of the countries with the highest per capita COVID death rates, like the U.S., India, Britain, Russia, Canada, Brazil and Turkey, which had most of their deaths when the more deadly strains (including Alpha, Gamma and Delta) were rampant and before anti-viral treatments (and largely also vaccines) were available. Indeed, even during the five week period up to 12 Jan 2023 when China had her highest COVID death rate, her death rate per resident was slightly lower than in Australia in the same period and much lower than Australia’s when this country had its equivalent loosening in February 2022. This is for several reasons. Firstly, when Australia opened up, no antiviral medications were able here – they were only listed in the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme several months later. In contrast, several anti-viral medications were available in China by the time that she loosened her COVID restrictions in December 2022. This includes Chinese anti-viral medications, which independent studies have confirmed as being just as effective as their Western counterparts. Also available in China is Pfizer’s Paxlovid, which however due to the exorbitant price that the American pharmaceutical company charges for the medication is available only to those at very high risk of developing severe COVID; this is the same as in Australia after Pfizer’s anti-viral pill became available here three months after Australia opened up (to this day Pfizer’s Paxlovid is only available in Australia to those 70 years of age or older or to those 50 years of age or older with at least two additional risk factors for developing severe disease). Secondly, China has been more effective in triaging high-risk patients for higher-level hospital care. This is because China’s grassroots-centred COVID response based on neighbourhood committees and local community activists means that those at high-risk have their health status and well-being frequently checked up on. Thirdly, China’s vaccination rate was significantly higher when she loosened her COVID response in December 2022 than when Australia opened up ten months earlier. Fourthly, China has a much lower proportion of people who are seriously ill with other ailments than in the U.S., Australia or other Western countries. This is because, being a country catching up from the terrible poverty of her pre-1949, neo-colonial capitalist days, China does not have the same availability of highly advanced medial care that is able to extend the lives of very ill cancer and heart patients in the richest countries for those able to afford the treatment. China’s relatively high life expectancy – her average life expectancy overtook that of the U.S. in 2020 – is instead based on quality preventative medicine, a healthier lifestyle and diet of her people and good primary hospital care. This is reflected in the fact that while China’s average life expectancy is still more than six years lower than Australia’s, her HALE – healthy life expectancy at birth, an indicator of the average number of years that a person can expect to live in “full health” – has caught up to being within a couple of years of that of Australia’s. With a much lower proportion of very ill people kept alive by advanced medical treatments than in the likes of Australia and the U.S. – that is a much lower proportion of the very people most vulnerable to dying should they be infected with COVID – China would be expected to have a much lower proportion of her COVID cases perish from the disease, even discounting other factors.
As a combined result of these four factors, even after China’s relative surge in COVID deaths in the period from 8 December 2022 to 12 January 2023, her total COVID death rate per million residents is still 15 times lower than that of Australia’s and 75 times lower than that of the U.S.! The success of China, Laos and other socialistic countries in responding to COVID shows the advantages of their systems based on common, social ownership of the strategic sectors of their economies. The capitalist powers fear that their own populations will understand this and thus gain greater sympathy for socialism. This is part of the reason why the Western capitalist ruling classes have escalated their propaganda war against the PRC over the last three years and sought to slander her pandemic response.

Sources for figures: Worldometers, Xinhua

Stand With Socialistic China to Stand by Working-Class Interests

Although it is rational from the point of view of Australia’s capitalist exploiting class – if anything that an obsolete class running a decaying system does can be considered rational – to seek to strangle socialistic rule in China, such enmity towards the PRC is completely against the interests of the working class of Australia and the rest of the world. For starters, waging Cold War against the PRC risks Australia’s trade with China that is greatly beneficial to Australia’s masses. Last year, Australia exported nearly $178 billion dollars of goods and services to China. If that revenue were divided up equally amongst the ten million households that compose Australia’s 26 million population, each household would receive a whopping $17,800 per year from exports to China! The damage to this trade caused by the PRC’s understandable reaction to the Australian regime’s barrage of provocations against her is yet to be truly felt. Although China has restricted Australian exports of barley, wine, beef, timber, lobsters and coal, the price of Australia’s by far biggest export to China, iron ore, rose so sharply that the value of Australia’s overall exports to China actually rose substantially last year. However, that trend is now reversing (although Australia’s overall export numbers to all countries are temporarily helped by the present abnormally high prices for it coal and gas exports). Furthermore, regardless of the shorter term fluctuations in iron ore and energy prices, the reality is that with China transitioning quickly towards a more low carbon, higher tech economy, the longer term trend is for growth in China’s iron ore and fossil fuel demand to wane. Therefore, with iron ore sales no longer able to mask the damage done to other Australian exports to China, this country’s masses could begin to see the full harm to their living standards resulting from their rulers’ hostile policy towards the PRC. For although the Albanese government’s toning down of Canberra’s anti-PRC rhetoric may lead to a temporary improvement in Australia’s trade relations with China, in the longer term, the Australian regime’s escalating military build-up targeting the PRC, its aggressive attempts to stifle Pacific countries mutually beneficial cooperation with Red China, its support for exiled anti-communist Chinese groups in Australia, its backing of the anti-China propaganda campaign over COVID, Hong Kong, Uyghurs and Tibet and its attacks on members of the Australian Chinese community who dare to express any sympathy for the PRC will all inevitably lead to new breakdowns in trade relations with China in the future.

To be sure, Australia’s capitalists also benefit much from trade with China, especially since they seize such a disproportionately large share of this country’s national income. However, while the Australian and other Western capitalists are willing to risk their profits from the China trade for the sake of the much huger profits that they could reap if they were able to overturn the PRC workers state and turn China into a giant sweatshop for capitalist exploitation, the Australian working class would gain absolutely nothing from the strangling of socialistic rule there. On the contrary, should the capitalist powers succeed in squeezing to death the Chinese workers state, thereby leading to a new, capitalist regime there that would greatly push down Chinese workers’ wages and conditions, it would allow capitalist bosses in Australia – and the world over – to massively drive down wages and workers rights at home in a race to the bottom.

However, the main reason why it is in the interests of working-class people in Australia and the rest of the world to stand in defence of socialistic China is political. And that reason is quite simply that: the existence of socialistic rule in a gigantic country and the fact that it has achieved such successes in poverty alleviation over the last seven decades proves to the masses of the world that not only is another world other than a capitalist one possible but that such a socialist alternative is actually viable. Encouraging the masses to struggle for socialism is what we need! That is the only way that we can liberate ourselves from the capitalist reality of plunging workers’ living standards, lack of affordable housing, racist attacks on minorities and imperialist war. Moreover, even before the decisive struggle for socialist revolution in Australia is immediately posed, the fact that China is today focussing on continuously increasing the availability of low-rent public housing, cracking down on property speculation and sticking to an economic system that maintains public ownership of the banks, the oil/gas/coal sector and the power industry, can only encourage the urgently necessary struggle for a similar anti-poverty program here.

Yet, against the interests of its base, the current leadership of most of the workers movement, the ALP, is right behind the capitalists’ drive to strangle socialistic China. Exposing this betrayal, there must be a struggle to mobilise working-class people and all leftists in mass actions to defend the Chinese workers state against imperialist threats and internal pro-capitalist forces. Let us oppose the Australian capitalist regime’s anti-China military build up. We must demand: No to the Australian capitalist military acquiring nuclear submarines, missiles, or nuclear capable bombers! All U.S. troops get out of Australia! Close Pine Gap and all other joint U.S./Australia military bases! U.S./British/Australian navies get out of the South China Sea! We must also expose and politically oppose all those National Endowment of Democracy-funded groups and other anti-PRC NGOs based in Australia that are engaged in promoting anti-communist forces within China. Fight back against the propaganda war against Red China over her COVID response, “human rights”, Taiwan, Uyghurs, Tibet, Hong Kong and the Pacific!

Let us also oppose attempts by Australian imperialism to sabotage South Pacific countries’ mutually beneficial cooperation with the PRC. We must defend the right of the Solomon Islands and any other country to engage in security and economic cooperation with socialistic China to the extent that they see fit. Let us support the engagement of the PRC’s socialistic SOEs with the Pacific to help liberate South Pacific countries from the tyranny of greedy Australian imperialist corporations. If we can reduce the plunder of the Pacific by these Australian corporations that exploit us back at home, they will have a smaller war chest to resist our efforts to stand up to them and defend our rights at work.

The Threat of China Being Engulfed by Capitalist Counterrevolution
in the Future is All Too Real

Those who are truly aware of events in China, know how much has been achieved for her people by socialistic rule. Now, with the PRC having, up to now, protected her people from COVID better than any other major country in the world and with her economy continuing to head in a better direction than the capitalist countries, to many supporters of Red China it seems that the PRC is simply unstoppable. However, let us never forget that in 1957 when the Soviet Union stunned the world by putting the first human-made satellite into space and her economy was growing at more than twice the rate of the capitalist countries it seemed that the then most powerful socialistic country was also unstoppable. Yet, just 35 years later, under the tremendous economic, military and political pressure of the combined imperialist powers and with the Soviet Union’s own internal resistance weakened by bureaucratic deformations that had emerged from the mid-1920s – distortions that were themselves a result of capitalist pressure – socialistic rule in the lands of the Soviet Union was destroyed. We must never let that happen to China! To say that the PRC “is big and powerful enough to look after itself” is foolish! Those living in the imperialist countries who say this are often looking for an excuse to avoid the difficult work of opposing the Cold War drive against the PRC. We must be brave enough to openly defend the PRC workers state!

A sober assessment would tell us that despite her stunning achievements, Red China remains vulnerable to strangulation by the capitalist powers. In terms of the number of nuclear weapons, the strength of air and naval power, the PRC remains militarily much weaker than the U.S. and even weaker in comparison to all the U.S.-allied imperial powers combined. More importantly, despite having caught up so much, per capita incomes in China remain several times below that of the richest of the capitalist countries. As long as this remains the case, the PRC workers state will remain under threat.

Moreover, there is an additional factor threatening socialistic rule in China that was not present even in the Soviet Union in its final days. In China there exists a significant capitalist class that has built itself up over the last four decades. This class does not rule as in the capitalist countries … but they sure want to! They chafe at the fact that SOEs dominate China’s most strategic economic sectors. These greedy capitalists want to have full access to these potentially most profitable sectors so that they can extract huge profits in them like in the “normal”, that is the capitalist, countries. They fume at the PRC state power often “bullying” them into starting up operations in poorer regions or, more recently, switching over their operations to pandemic relief items, when all of this is not what is required to maximise profits. They bristle too at the state often siding with workers when there is a dispute over working conditions. Currently, China’s capitalists realise that they do not yet have the strength to be able to make an open bid for power. They know that the Chinese toiling classes, still filled with the egalitarian sentiment that made the 1949 Revolution, would not tolerate that right now. So, for the moment, the capitalists try to expand the sectors where they have the “right” to exploit workers in. To help them do this, these rich capitalists cynically cry poor claiming that the state is “discriminating” against them by favouring the socialistic SOEs. To push this agenda, China’s capitalists have various lobby groups, most notably the All China Federation of Industry and Commerce, as well as various think tanks that they have established – some it turns out are being funded by the U.S. government’s NED to help them protect the “property rights” of “entrepreneurs” (read capitalist exploiters). Just as dangerously, their influence extends into the most right-wing components of the CPC and the state bureaucracy who act as their, conscious or unconscious, defacto spokespeople inside the CPC and the state institutions. China’s capitalists are biding their time for when they can make an outright bid for state power. The fact that the most powerful countries in the world – and indeed most of the world – remains under capitalist rule gives them great encouragement.

Therefore, to help protect socialistic rule in the PRC and all the gains for the masses that have resulted from it, it is urgently necessary to decisively weaken the power of China’s private sector “entrepreneurs”. China’s socialistic SOEs need to be more quickly advanced at the expense of the capitalist private sector. To be sure, with China still catching up with the more advanced countries in important areas of technology, it is necessary for the PRC to continue to have certain joint ventures with Western and Japanese capitalists to help Chinese technical personnel and workers gradually learn advanced technology, skills and processes in areas where they are behind. Currently, the PRC has useful such joint ventures in the auto manufacturing, renewable energy and aircraft manufacturing industry. However, the presence of Western, Taiwanese and Hong Kong capitalists owning operations in lower tech sectors needs to be squeezed out – the PRC no longer needs them as her technology level and capital base has now long passed the stage when she needed investment from foreign capitalists in these sectors. Far more importantly, the power of China’s own domestic capitalists over the sectors that they dominate needs to be overturned. The tech, real estate and light manufacturing sectors need to confiscated from these capitalists and brought into public ownership. Additionally, the danger of the socialist economy being white anted by a large number of smaller-scale capitalists also needs to be averted by ending 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.

The struggle to weaken the capitalists and strengthen the socialistic SOEs can be integrated with the PRC’s existing policies – in particular her “common prosperity” drive, her ongoing moves to further improve workplace safety, her anti-corruption campaign and her moves to curb speculation and excessive leveraging in the real estate sector. For example when a private sector firm violates China’s labour law – rather than receive a fine as it does now – it should be confiscated and brought into public ownership. The same should apply to any company that contravenes workplace safety laws or has a workplace accident that causes serious injury. Similarly, any private company found to have paid even the smallest bribe should be immediately confiscated. Despite the Western media’s deriding of it, the PRC’s moves to crackdown on property speculation under the policy that “houses are for living in and not for speculation” and its restriction of excessive borrowing by real estate developers has had a positive effect. The prices of homes have stopped rising making them more affordable for lower-income people. Moreover, some big-time property capitalists that relied on excessive borrowing and speculation have been brought to heel. In particular, China’s once richest man, Hui Ka Yan, main owner of one-time property giant Evergrande, has lost 93% of his wealth and has been pressured by authorities into selling off some of his luxury homes, private jets and expensive paintings to pay off the company’s debts. The capitalist media see this as a terrible thing and a “property crisis in China.” But with his indebted Evergrande restricted by regulations in its ability to borrow, Hui Ka Yan’s assets have been bit by bit nationalised and brought into public hands. To a lesser degree, other property capitalists have also been hit in a similar way. As a result, in a very positive development, China’s real estate sector has gone from last year having its top five firms consist of three capitalist corporations and only two SOEs to now having four of its biggest five real estate firms being socialistic SOEs. However, the private sector property developers assisted by pro-market “experts” and the right-wing of the CPC have pushed back demanding support for private developers hurt by the anti-speculation and anti-leveraging crackdown. They have been able to use the fact that the private sector’s ongoing influence in the real estate industry meant that the crackdown led to a slowdown in housing construction. As a result, Beijing has backed down somewhat and called for China’s state-owned banks to increase lending support for real estate companies including privately-owned ones (although in subsequent bank announcements the majority of extra lending is at this stage headed towards state-owned real estate firms). Such bending to the pressure of profit-driven real estate tycoons and those within the bureaucracy pushing their concerns must be intransigently resisted. The house building sector must be boosted instead by directing the real estate SOEs to increase construction and by further accelerating the provision of low-rent public housing. The housing sector is not a new, high-tech innovative sector – there is no reason for private “entrepreneurs” to be involved. The real estate sector should be brought entirely under public ownership. Dangerously powerful capitalists should be stopped from emerging from this sector.

A public housing complex in China’s Shanghai. Over the last fifteen 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. The proportion of China’s housing stock that is public housing is now eight times higher than the proportion of public housing in Australia. However, China’s focus on public housing, curbs on property speculation and measures to stop over leveraging by private-sector developers have met with resistance from China’s real estate sector capitalists, pro-private sector economists and from within the right-wing of the Communist Party of China itself. This resistance must be defeated rather than being accommodated. The real estate sector should be brought entirely under public ownership. Dangerously powerful capitalists should be stopped from emerging from this sector.
Photo: Wei Li

The Danger of China’s Upper-Middle Class
Going Over to the Side of Counterrevolution in the Future

If the actual capitalist exploiters were the only force pushing for capitalist restoration in China, the threat would not be so great. For their numbers are small – especially in socialistic China. However, just below the actual capitalist business owners and the managers who act as their henchmen is an upper-middle class layer that includes many people who are economically and spiritually influenced by the capitalist bigwigs. This includes pro-capitalist economists, academics, journalists and lawyers who echo the calls of the capitalists for “greater” rights. It includes state bureaucrats who interact with the capitalists in the course of planning and regulatory decisions and who are sometimes bribed both directly and more often indirectly and subtly – for example by being taken to expensive meals and invited to posh events – by these wealthy bigshots. And more numerously, there are many young highly educated professionals who dream of being the next big tycoon or otherwise admire the capitalist high-fliers and hope to become part of their companies’ managerial and technical elite. It was a similar layer of highly educated youth and young wannabes, alongside some petty capitalists and speculators that were the main social force that drove the capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union. As long as the per capita income and overall technological and cultural influence of the richest of the capitalist countries remains higher than that in the workers state – as was the case during the times of the Soviet Union and is equally the case in today’s PRC – then younger high-skilled professionals in the workers state can fall for promises that capitalism would open up a higher standard of living for them and more exciting opportunities to engage in leading-edge innovation and globally prominent cultural pursuits (like being part of Hollywood!).

Moreover, there is an additional corrupting influence on China’s upper middle-class that did not exist in even the last days of the Soviet Union. Since, there is a sizable capitalist sector in China, some well-paid professionals are able to invest part of their savings in the stock market. They thus become beneficiaries of capitalist exploitation even if share dividends only provide them with a minority of their income. Like, the capitalist bigwigs, some of these people may have lost money as a result of the Xi Jinping government’s common prosperity drive. For example, if they held shares in platform companies they could have had considerable losses when the share price of food delivery platforms dived after Beijing last year forced delivery platforms to guarantee at least the minimum wage for delivery riders. Moreover, even other well-heeled people without shareholdings may have felt a loss of privilege from some of the common prosperity measures. Last year, as part of moves to reduce the homework burden and stress of students, to curb inequality in education and to protect parents from having to fork out ever large 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. This measure, by design, led to a massive reduction in the amount of after-school tutoring. The moves were very popular with not only students but with most parents. However, richer parents hoping to leverage their wealth to buy their kids an advantage over poorer kids and youth from well-off backgrounds whose younger siblings can no longer have the benefit of more tutoring to outcompete with their less affluent peers, may have felt aggrieved by their “loss of freedom” from these measures. It is without doubt that anger over common prosperity measures forms some part of why some of China’s upper middle-class and well-off university students decided to stage anti-government “Freedom” demonstrations late last month. This is no reason to conciliate such sentiments. In fact the opposite is required: the common prosperity drive must be greatly deepened and accelerated to weaken the disproportionate economic – and thus political – power of wealthier layers and thus weaken their ability to obstruct China’s road towards full socialism.

Many of those who joined the A4 protests in part because of their opposition to common prosperity measures would not have necessarily been anti-communists – at least in the subjective sense. Many may have recognised how much has been achieved in China since 1949 and be proud of the PRC’s achievements. That is why some at the “Freedom” protests sang the Communist Internationale. However, even those with such subjective feelings could still be simultaneously animated by a wish to jealously guard their upper middle-class privilege. Thus they may be particularly opposed to Xi Jinping, because they see him as the one pushing the common prosperity measures. Such people would be angered that Xi has been re-elected for a new term as CPC leader and gained greater authority within the party. Thus, some of those “A4 protesters” that still see themselves as pro-communist are likely supporters of figures like Li Keqiang in the pro-private sector, right-wing of the CPC.

It should be stressed that the middle class are not an exploiting class. As a result, it is likely that the majority of young middle-class and even upper middle-class people in China still remain supportive of – or at the least accepting of – socialistic rule. China’s growing economy and growing technological and cultural level has seen the standard of living of these layers and their opportunities for professional growth constantly increase. However, given that China remains behind the most advanced capitalist countries in income and development levels, any future difficulties in economy would see some in this layer lose their sympathy for socialism. Notably, it was during a period of economic stagnation that a sizable chunk of the Soviet Union’s most educated youth and young professionals turn their backs on socialism. That the recent upper middle-class and university student “Freedom” protests in China occurred now is no accident. Although the Western media’s claims that the Chinese economy has “crashed” is a lie, there has been a relative slowdown. Smaller-scale capitalist exploiters and the self-employed in particular have experienced a drop in incomes during the Omicron wave. The recent A4 protests, small components of which stood for weakening or even ending socialistic rule, are an indicator of the counterrevolutionary force that could arise from the upper middle-class and ambitious educated youth should imperialist military and economic pressure reach such levels that they are able to suffocate China’s economic growth.

Socialist Rule Cannot be Protected if the Capitalists and Their Allies
Have Equal Political Rights as the Working Class

Within the upper-middle class and university student, A4 “Freedom” protests in China there were slogans and chants against censorship and also for “democracy.” The latter excited the Western capitalist media who played them up. Other sources reported that at least one student protest, the one in Liangmaqiao in Beijing, even called for “democracy” while simultaneously expressing support for the CPC. Reportedly, protesters chanted “Do the Communist Party and democracy conflict? No conflict! We want democracy, freedom, and the development of the Communist Party back! That’s all! We don’t want revisionism! Don’t be revisionist!” Protesters then implied that without “democracy”, there would be capitalist counterrevolution in China: “If we don’t change, we will follow in the footsteps of the Soviet Union!” Such sentiment would be correct if protesters specified workers democracy. In that workers democracy is crucial to both the efficient running of a workers state and to the active engagement of the broadest forces amongst the toiling classes in the defence of the workers state against counterrevolutionary forces. However, calls for “democracy” in the abstract can mean many things and turns out to be downright harmful when it is called for in a workers state without insisting that it should be democracy specifically and exclusively for the working-class and its allies. To begin to explain why, we need to stress that “democracy” is only a technique of governance of a state. It does not define the purpose and content of the governance of the state. That content is defined by the class content of the state, which in modern times means either a capitalist state or a workers state. In a capitalist state, the state exists to defend the rule of the class that makes profit out of the exploitation of labour and upholds the property system in the economy that enables this: the ownership of the key sections of the economy by wealthy private individuals. In a workers state, the state exists to defend the rule of wage workers and the only organisation of productive property that can enable this: the common, that is public, ownership of the key sections of the economy by all the people.

Capitalists can rule through their state being administered in different forms: an absolute monarchy as in say Kuwait or Qatar, a theocracy as in Saudi Arabia (which is also a monarchy) or Iran, a military dictatorship, fascism as in Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy or parliamentary “democracy.” In even the most democratic of capitalist “parliamentary democracies” where every person technically has the same one vote to elect governments and the same legal “right” to engage in politics, the state is still thoroughly controlled by and serving the capitalists. This is because it is the capitalists who dominate political discourse and disproportionately shape public opinion through ownership of the media and through their enormous wealth giving them the disproportionate ability to fund political parties, pay for political advertising, finance activist campaigns, hire lobbyists and establish influential NGOs and think tanks.

Above: One of the ways that the capitalist class thoroughly dominates political discussion and agendas in capitalist, so-called “democracies” is through using their enormous wealth to establish and fund (and thus control) “independent” think tanks. Take Australia’s two most influential and quoted-by-the-media think tanks on foreign policy and “defence” questions: the warmongering, fanatically anti-PRC, Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) and the pro-Western imperialism, Lowy Institute. ASPI is funded by not only the Australian government, the NSW Police force and the U.S., British, Japanese, Dutch and Canadian governments but also by giant capitalist-owned defence corporations like Lockheed Martin, SAAB, Thales and BAE and by other capitalist companies including Bill Gates’ Microsoft, Mark Zuckeberg’s Facebook (now called Meta), an Australian subsidiary of the Amazon company owned by the world’s fourth richest billionaire Jeff Bezos, as well as by the Property Council of Australia and Western-controlled NGOs. On the Sponsors section of ASPI’s website (Above Left – screenshot taken on 16 December 2022), three giant capitalist defence companies are highlighted as the key sponsors. For its part, the Lowy institute was established by – and is funded by – the billionaire Lowy family as well as by membership fees from major capitalist corporations – including each of the four big banks, BHP, Rio Tinto, Wesfarmers, Boeing and SAAB – and various repressive organs of the Australian capitalist state, including ASIO, the Australian Federal Police, the Department of Defence and the Office of National Intelligence. The Chairman of the Board of the Lowy Institute remains Frank Lowy (Above Right), Australia’s tenth richest capitalist, whose wealth is estimated at $9.3 billion.

Moreover, the enormous economic power of the capitalists ensures that no matter who is elected to parliament, all state institutions themselves are subordinated to the capitalists. The capitalists are able to directly and more often indirectly bribe state officials (including through the latter knowing that to get a lucrative job in the private sector after their political/bureaucratic career is over they would need to be on good terms with the capitalists). Furthermore, due to their control of the economy, key bureaucratic organisations have to consult and cooperate with the capitalist business owners. For all these reasons, capitalist parliamentary democracies no less than fascist and monarchist regimes are the dictatorship of the capitalist class over the working class. Moreover, when capitalist rule is threatened by the revolutionary masses, the capitalists will not hesitate to try to move their state to a more authoritarian or even fascist form in order to preserve their power by any means necessary.

The very opposite to a capitalist state, a workers (i.e. proletarian) state is the dictatorship of the working-class over the capitalist class. Its key roles are to prevent the overthrown capitalists and their allies abroad from taking back power and to protect the dominant role of public ownership over key sectors of the economy to ensure the working-class’ overall economic interests. Just like a capitalist (i.e. bourgeois) state, a proletarian state can have different forms. The ideal form is a proletarian (i.e. workers) democracy in which the working-class freely discuss and debate important decisions and administer their state through elected workers council, called soviets. Such a workers democracy form of administering a workers state was how the Soviet workers state was administered during its first seven or so years, albeit in very difficult conditions of Civil War for much of that period. However, a workers state cannot be administered through the form of parliamentary “democracy”. Because, although in a workers state the capitalists would have been dispossessed from ownership of key sectors of the economy, they would still have disproportionate ability to shape political discourse – including any “free elections”. Russian revolutionary leader, Vladimir Lenin explained why:

“There can be no equality between the exploiters—who for many generations have been better off because of their education, conditions of wealthy life, and habits—and the exploited, the majority of whom even in the most advanced and most democratic bourgeois republics are downtrodden, backward, ignorant, intimidated and disunited. For a long time after the revolution the exploiters inevitably continue to retain a number of great practical advantages: they still have money (since it is impossible to abolish money all at once); some movable property—often fairly considerable; they still have various connections, habits of organisation and management; knowledge of all the `secrets’ (customs, methods, means and possibilities) of management; superior education; close connections with the higher technical personnel (who live and think like the bourgeoisie); incomparably greater experience in the art of war (this is very important), and so on and so forth.

“If the exploiters are defeated in one country only—and this, of course, is typical, since a simultaneous revolution in a number of countries is a rare exception—they still remain stronger than the exploited, for the international connections of the exploiters are enormous….

“The transition from capitalism to communism takes an entire historical epoch. Until this epoch is over, the exploiters inevitably cherish the hope of restoration, and this hope turns into attempts at restoration…. In the train of the capitalist exploiters follow the wide sections of the petty bourgeoisie [the self-employed and other sections of the middle class – TP], with regard to whom decades of historical experience of all countries testify that they vacillate and hesitate, one day marching behind the proletariat and the next day taking fright at the difficulties of the revolution; that they become panic-stricken at the first defeat or semidefeat of the workers, grow nervous, run about aimlessly, snivel, and rush from one camp into the other ….”

VI. Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, 1918

That is why while capitalist “democracy” can nominally allow the “equal” rights of all to engage in political activity and then use their exclusive economic power to thoroughly dominate politics and the state, a workers state administered in the form of workers democracy CANNOT allow equal political rights for all. Instead as Lenin outlined in the above quoted work (which was a response to German left social-democratic leader Karl Kautsky who had attacked the Soviet workers state for not allowing parliamentary democracy), a workers state must EXCLUDE the deposed capitalist class from participation in workers democracy:

“… as long as there are exploiters who rule the majority, the exploited, the democratic state must inevitably be a democracy for the exploiters. A state of the exploited must fundamentally differ from such a state; it must be a democracy for the exploited, and a means of suppressing the exploiters; and the suppression of a class means inequality for that class, its exclusion from `democracy’” [emphasis added-TP].

If the overthrown capitalist exploiters are not in this way prevented from having the same rights to participate in the affairs of a workers state as the working class masses, they will use their still existing advantages – all the more so in today’s China – and their links with the capitalist exploiters ruling most of the rest of the world to take back the power.

In even a healthy workers state administered through a proletarian democracy, it is only as class differences are gradually overcome as the workers state moves towards full socialism and as the threat of capitalist restoration is diminished through the overturn of capitalist rule in some of the most powerful countries that the right to fully participate in socialist democracy can begin to be extended to elements connected with the deposed former exploiting class. Yet, simultaneously with a larger and larger proportion of the population being brought into the administration of a socialist society, the workers state itself (and therefore workers democracy with it) starts to wither away, because its purpose – the suppression of the overthrown exploiting class and their allies – becomes less and less necessary. When a fully communist society has been achieved, which means a society in which all class differences have been fully overcome, administration will still exist. But it will no longer be about the administration and disciplining of people but the administration of things.    

How Calls for “Democracy” in the Abstract in China
End Up Being a Call for the Destruction of the Workers State

In explaining why the “indispensable characteristic, the necessary condition” of a workers state is “the forcible suppression of the exploiters as a class, and, consequently, the infringement of `pure democracy’, i.e., of equality and freedom, in regard to that class”, Lenin showed how talk of “pure democracy” plays a counterrevolutionary role when used after the working class have already achieved state power:

“If we are not to mock at common sense and history, it is obvious that we cannot speak of `pure democracy’ as long as different classes exist; we can only speak of class democracy….
“`Pure democracy’ is the mendacious phrase of a liberal who wants to fool the workers. History knows of bourgeois democracy which takes the place of feudalism, and of proletarian democracy which takes the place of bourgeois democracy.”

Now a slick, nominal socialist may counter that Lenin was speaking at a time when the Soviet workers state was a proletarian democracy, whereas the PRC workers state is today not a workers democracy and that therefore Lenin’s conclusions do not apply. To argue like this would be absolutely wrong! Workers democracy is a method of administering a workers state. But the content of a workers state is the rule of the working-class over the capitalist class. Therefore, although very necessary, the need for workers democracy is completely subordinate to the need to defend the workers state. If the working-class lose state power, then any nominal “democracy” will end up only being a capitalist “democracy” in which the form of “democracy” covers up the fact that the working-class have been deposed from power and are being subjugated under a dictatorship of the capitalist class, in which the only real “democracy” is amonst the various capitalists.

Since there is a lack of genuine socialist democracy in the PRC, the disenfranchisement of the working-class masses from direct administration of the workers state diminishes their political consciousness and weakens their commitment to defending the workers state. This makes the workers state more vulnerable. However, that actually makes it all the more crucial to suppress the political activity of the capitalist exploiters. It is here important to refer here to the correct stance taken by co-leader of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky, who after the Soviet Union’s bureaucratic degeneration in the mid-1920s continued to fight for the unconditional defence of the Soviet proletarian state while struggling to bring back the agenda of proletarian democracy and revolutionary internationalism that Lenin fought for. In response to those calling for “free elections” in the Soviet Union of 1929, that is long after the soviets and the Communist Party had become bureaucratised and true workers democracy had been suppressed in the Soviet workers state, Trotsky insisted:

“We are fighting for proletarian democracy precisely in order to shield the country of the October Revolution from the `liberties’ of bourgeois democracy, that is, from capitalism….

“It is necessary to reject and condemn the program of struggle for `the freedom to organize’ and all other `freedoms’ in the USSR – because this is the program of bourgeois democracy. To this program of bourgeois democracy we must counterpose the slogans and methods of proletarian democracy, whose aim, in the struggle against bureaucratic centrism, is to regenerate and fortify the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

L.D. Trotsky, The Defense of the Soviet Union and the Opposition (1929), Marxist Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1929/09/fi-b.htm

Indeed, today, the call for “freedom to organise”, “liberties” and “democracy” in China is actually the main slogan of the Western imperialists and their allies within China who want to see the restoration of capitalism. They know that, especially given that in China, although the working-class have overall power there is still a rich and influential capitalist class, any “pure democracy” and “freedom to organise” of all classes in China would see the Chinese capitalists and the world capitalist powers together mobilising massive financial and media resources to dominate debate, disproportionately shape “public opinion”, swing any free” parliamentary elections and re-establish capitalism.

This is why, even when coming from those who uphold socialism and the CPC, the call for “democracy” and “freedom” in China in the abstract – without specifying it must be an exclusively proletarian democracy where there will only be full political freedom for the working-class and its allies and for those organisations that uphold the workers state – is a dangerous call that must be rejected. To be sure, those students protesting in Beijing’s Liangmaqiao who made this call very likely do not want capitalist restoration. They may have been from the right-wing of the CPC who oppose Xi Jinping’s common prosperity measures and thus want more democracy in the party to resist him. Or they may be completely sincere and motivated by understandable frustration at the stifling censorship and lack of genuine socialist democracy in the PRC. The problem is that the call for “freedom” and “democracy” in the abstract in a workers state ends up being a call for opening the door to capitalist counterrevolution no matter who makes the appeal – whether they be the capitalist exploiting class and their conscious servants or sincere but misguided supporters of socialism.

This same logic by the way applies to the class-struggle in a capitalist country. Take a strike for example where the workers have set-up a solid picket to stop scabbing. Now, the capitalist enemy that want to defeat the strike will of course howl that workers are violating the rights of the scabs who want to go into work during the strike. However, there may be others who genuinely want the strike to win but simultaneously insist that workers “should have the freedom to choose” if they want to work or not during the strike. Despite their different intentions, both sets of people insisting on “free choice” for the scabs are in practice sabotaging the strike, because if scabs are able to go into work, the strike will likely be defeated.

It tends to be the middle class in both capitalist countries and workers states that are the most prone to placing excessive weight on an abstract posing of “freedom”, “choice” and democracy” without specifying for which class. Why is this? Take for instance the case of China. There, the middle class are neither exploiters of labour themselves nor are they directly exploited wage workers in the private sector who would be much further exploited if capitalist state power was restored, or, in the case of SOE workers, potentially exploited workers – because these workers are not exploited now but would be if capitalism was restored. Since, in this way, this middle class is not as directly affected by the question of which class controls the economy as the working class is, this middle class, even when sympathetic to socialism, tends to downplay the importance of the question of which class rules and the question of which class should “democracy” and “freedom” be granted to.

Of course, the attitude taken to the different sectors calling for “democracy” and “freedom” in China must be different. Those who are conscious capitalist counterrevolutionaries and in organisations funded by the U.S. government’s NED must be sternly opposed by any means necessary. On the other hand, misguided youth who in all sincerity proclaim their solidarity with the CPC while simultaneously calling for “democracy” in the abstract and “freedom for all” must be sympathetically argued with and won over. It should be pointed out to the latter group that the call for “democracy” was in fact the main slogan of the capitalist counterrevolution in the former Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries. This is hardly surprising. After all, those seeking capitalist restoration would not want to admit to the overwhelming majority of the population who would be harmed by such an outcome that they intend to replace a system where everyone collectively owns the key sectors of the economy with a system where just a few rich people will own them. So instead they called for “democracy” and “freedom.” And in both the former Soviet Union and in some Eastern European countries there were not a few people who sincerely wanted to preserve socialistic rule who were sucked in behind these calls. This was especially the case in the former Germany Democratic Republic – GDR (“East Germany”). In the middle and latter parts of 1989 there were mass protests in the GDR by people who were critical of the bureaucratised government, wanted “democracy” and “freedom” but at the same time mostly wanted to preserve the achievements of socialist economy in the DDR. However, in pushing for “democracy” and “freedom” without insisting that any “democracy” must be an explicitly proletarian democracy with freedom for only those organisations that genuinely uphold the workers state, these protesters ended up aiding the West German capitalist class and their imperialist allies in driving through a capitalist counterrevolution made largely in the name of “democracy”.

It must also be pointed out to middle-class, pro-communist youth in China who call for “democracy” and “freedom” in the abstract that, as Lenin made clear in his 1918 reply to Kautsky, the capitalists and their social democratic lackeys were screaming about a “lack of democracy” and “arbitrariness” in the Soviet workers state even when the Soviet proletarian state was still truly in the form of a workers democracy. In other words, when the capitalist powers today shout about a lack of “democracy” in China today, it is not at all because the PRC workers state is currently not a proletarian democracy – it is solely because the PRC is a workers state. The capitalists want “democracy” and “freedom of all to organise” in China purely because they want the freedom to organise a capitalist counterrevolution there – just like they demanded “democracy” and “freedom” in Soviet Russia in even Lenin’s time when the Soviet workers state was in the form of a proletarian democracy. If the PRC workers state was renovated into one truly based on workers democracy, the capitalist exploiters – and their social democratic servants – would then be howling even more loudly about a supposed lack of “freedom” and “democracy” in China.

The PRC Workers State Does Need WORKERS Democracy

The serious threat of a future capitalist counterrevolution in China mobilised under the slogan of “democracy” does not negate the need for proletarian democracy in China. In fact it actually makes this more important. For free discussion and debate amongst workers is needed not only to facilitate innovation and efficiency in China’s socialist SOEs and to resolve day to day disputes in as least disruptive a fashion as possible but is importantly needed in order to undermine calls for Western-style, that is inevitably capitalist, “democracy.” So what would workers democracy consist of in the PRC. For one, censorship of the media and social media would be loosened so that all voices who are not seeking to weaken or destroy proletarian state power or undermine the backbone role of the public sector in the economy should be able to freely advocate their ideas, robustly scrutinise government policies and in the process criticize top leaders if they see fit. Secondly, all parties and NGOs that genuinely uphold the proletarian state and publicly commit to maintaining the dominance of public ownership in the economy should be able to operate as well as compete in elections for representative bodies. Most importantly, administrative power will be held in elected councils of workers (soviets) – which would draw into them other sections of the toiling masses. Each delegate that a lower soviet elects to a higher soviet body would be recallable at any time and all full-time officials of the soviet government should be paid no more than the average wage of a skilled worker. The membership of such soviets would be modelled on that specified in the first constitution of the Soviet workers state, which decreed that: “The right to vote and to be elected to the soviets is enjoyed by … All who have acquired the means of livelihood through labour that is productive and useful to society, and also persons engaged in housekeeping which enables the former to do productive work, i.e., laborers and employees of all classes who are employed in industry, trade, agriculture, etc., and peasants and Cossack agricultural laborers who employ no help for the purpose of making profits…. The following persons enjoy neither the right to vote nor the right to be voted for, even though they belong to one of the categories enumerated above, namely: (a) Persons who employ hired labor in order to obtain from it an increase in profits ….”

The soviet form of administering a workers state is crucial not only because it excludes exploiters of labour. It is also vital because, unlike in a parliamentary system where the working-class is dispersed from each other as they are herded off to vote in elections every few years, in a soviet political administration workers debate and decide on issues collectively in their soviet meeting. In this way, working-class people more readily feel their common class interests with each other and are therefore better able to resist the political pressure of the capitalists both within and outside the country.

However, we should not be naive. Given the presence of powerful capitalists within socialistic China and given the dominance of capitalism worldwide, any freeing up of political debate and censorship within China, even within the scope of workers democracy, would be exploited by the capitalists and their allies. They would use relaxed censorship to both push their agenda and create demoralisation about the present socialist system while trying to evade censorship by claiming adherence to socialist rule. The wealthy capitalists, even while excluded from the soviets, would try to get their ideas into the soviets and their agendas echoed by proxies or politically naïve workers within the soviets. Similarly, the capitalists would also seek to use the greater freedom for pro-socialist parties in order to get worker proxies or others they influence to form new parties that again claim loyalty to the socialist order while in practice pushing to expand the “rights” of the capitalists.

That is why any moves towards genuine workers democracy in the PRC must be accompanied by a struggle to weaken the power of the capitalists within the country. For starters, there must be a demand to expel all exploiters of labour from not only all state representative bodies (which would be a requirement of proletarian democracy in any case) but also to expel all capitalists from the CPC. Late former CPC leader Jiang Zemin and his Three Represents Theory was dead wrong for allowing capitalists into the party. Just as importantly, the power of the capitalists over the economy must be weakened through confiscation of privately-owned firms in sectors where they are not needed and their conversion into public ownership. Indeed, the route to implementing proletarian democracy in China is through the working-class building mass organisations that will, in alliance with sympathetic PRC state institutions, strike decisive blows to weaken China’s capitalists and in the process establish administrative control over China’s socialistic system.

The power of ethnic Chinese capitalists outside the mainland to influence affairs within the PRC must also be combatted. The companies of the property barons, corrupt casino owners, bankers and shipping magnates that dominate Hong Kong and Macao must all be confiscated and brought into common ownership. Socialist revolution in Taiwan to overthrow the tyranny of the likes of Terry Gou and Cheng Hsueh Wuh (the Taiwanese tycoons respectively owning notoriously exploitative companies Foxconn and 85 Degrees Café) must be fomented by appealing to workers longing to free themselves from the harsh militarisation of labour at Taiwanese workplaces and to migrant workers fuming at the savage exploitation that they face in the fishing, domestic work, manufacturing and construction sectors. Let’s fight not for, “one China, two systems”, but for one China under one socialist system!

At the same time, instead of hoping that the imperialists will stop interfering in the PRC’s internal affairs and start truly practicing mutual coexistence with socialistic China, which is never going to happen, Beijing should advance the struggle to extend socialism into the currently capitalist countries by speaking out in support of the working class and oppressed peoples’ struggles in the capitalist world – especially in all the imperialist countries. In summary, the struggle to bring workers democracy to the Chinese workers state must go hand in hand with the struggle to complete the victory of the working class over the capitalists within mainland China and the struggle to extend socialist revolution to the islands of China and onto the other capitalist parts of the world.

Mobilise in Action Here in Australia in Solidarity with Socialistic Rule in China

The above section outlines what we think communists in China should fight for. But we are here in Australia, so we must focus on what we can do here to help protect and strengthen socialistic rule in China. And what we need to do is to mobilise actions in defence of the PRC workers state. By doing so we will affect the balance of political forces within China in the direction of strengthening the resolve of those wanting to uphold and reinforce the socialist foundations of China’s system. We will be able to boost the confidence of staunchly pro-communist elements within China. We can show them that even within the belly of the imperialist countries most hostile to the PRC there are people willing to stand up to the capitalist ruling classes and take open action in solidarity with socialistic rule in China.

The enemies of socialism understand all too well the importance of international pressure in affecting the balance of political forces within China. Thus, while the bulk of the $A15 million in total that the NED spends on advancing its counterrevolutionary agenda for China is given to groups operating inside China, many of their grants also avowedly aim to, variously, “engage in a series of targeted international advocacy actions”, “support an international network of stakeholders to share expertise” and “respond to the increasing importance of exile and diaspora communities in countering Chinese Communist Party (CCP)” by laying “the foundation for a sustainable network of transnational youth activists through activities designed to foster joint strategizing and identification of common goals.” Meanwhile, just days after the A4 protests in China, anti-communists originating from Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China held demonstrations in Melbourne and Sydney supporting the most anticommunist of the protesters within China and promoting their goal of overthrowing the PRC state. Supporters of socialistic rule in China need to build our own actions here with the very opposite agenda!

For, although the A4 protests were very small relative to China’s massive population, it is undoubted that the massive support given to these protests by the capitalist powers and by the anticommunist section of the Chinese diaspora communities living in the West would have had some impact, however small, at least temporarily, on the balance of political forces within China. It would have obviously encouraged those within China who consciously seek capitalist restoration. However, it would have also, to some small degree, strengthened the hand of more rightist elements within the CPC and the Chinese bureaucracy who would have used the advent of the protests and the massive backing that these protests received from the Western capitalist media to argue against Xi Jinping and, more so, others more emphatically on the militantly anti-capitalist, left wing of the party and state, by saying that: “The recent common prosperity measures have angered some of the upper middle-class in our country. We don’t want to make them our enemies. We need to pullback from some of these measures – they have gone too far” and “Look how powerful the Western powers are: they can even help incite protests here within China. We cannot thumb our noses at these powerful forces – they are too strong. We need to accommodate their concerns and meet them half-way in order to mollify them.” Such rightist arguments, to the extent that they are loud enough to actually impact policy, have a disintegrative effect on socialistic rule in China. We must counteract the rightist, ultimately deleterious, pressure being exerted on the CPC and the PRC state by the imperialist ruling classes and by the anticommunist component of the Chinese diaspora communities living in the West. We need to be doing this all the time by mobilising actions here in Australia and other Western countries in solidarity with socialistic rule in China.

Unfortunately, most of the Left in Australia is on the side of those seeking to destroy the PRC workers state. When in 2019, Hong Kong pro-colonial, rich kids staged an anticommunist uprising and an assorted array of anticommunist groups in Australia held protests in support of the anti-PRC rioters – from anti-PRC Hong Kong students to anticommunists from mainland China to the far-right, Donald Trump-supporting Falun Dafa group to supporters of the defeated Western-puppet, South Vietnamese capitalist regime that fled to Australia (and their children) to prominent Australian white supremacists – the Australian left groups, Solidarity, Socialist Alternative and Socialist Alliance all joined in. Even the Socialist Equality Party, which was more tentative in its backing of the Hong Kong anti-PRC rioters, joined at least one of the anti-communist rallies in Sydney.

Today, most of these groups are at it again! Socialist Alliance ran an article in the December 9 issue of their newspaper, the Green Left Weekly, which uncritically cheers the Chinese “Freedom” protests. It repeats the disinformation of the imperialist media, including exaggerating the length of lockdowns in China. Most rabid of all in their hostility to the PRC state is the Solidarity group. The colour front cover of their December magazine is devoted to hailing the Chinese “Freedom” protests. The headline of their 4 December article is even worse. Sounding like the most rabid, right-wing anti-communists, albeit with a “pro-worker” veneer, Solidarity shouts “workers power can bring down the CCP” [i.e. CPC]. Indeed most of the article sounds like something from the Murdoch media or other extreme anti-communist, bourgeois media outlets. Not to be outdone in anti-communist hostility to the PRC are Solidarity’s rivals in Socialist Alternative (SAlt) who have their own article on the A4 protests dated 4 December. They celebrate the most reactionary section of the A4 protesters, hailing that some protesters had chanted, “Communist Party! Step down! Xi Jinping! Step down!” In cheering the Chinese version of the far-right-instigated, “Freedom” protests, SAlt are actually being more hypocritical than their Solidarity rivals. The latter had bent somewhat to the Far Right’s talking points about pandemic restriction measures in Australia. SAlt however stood firm and organised counter-rallies to the reactionary “Freedom” protests in Australia. We supported this and participated in the Sydney counter-protest that SAlt initiated last year. But by supporting the Chinese “Freedom” protests, while condemning the Australian ones, SAlt are behaving just like Albanese’s ALP and most of the capitalist media. And just like them, SAlt will be looking to seize on any spike in COVID deaths in China resulting from the recent loosening of pandemic restrictions to attack the PRC for neglecting people’s health after having just attacked her for her supposedly “draconian” measures to contain COVID!

1 October 2020: Huge, densely-packed crowds throng the Badaling section of China’s Great Wall, located about 80km northwest of Beijing, during the country’s all-week public holiday for the People’s Republic of China’s National Day. For two years after China suppressed her initial outbreak in the first three months of 2020, China had not only very few deaths from COVID outbreaks but suppressed the virus so effectively that her people were able to enjoy a life that was much closer to normal than most other countries in the world. When local outbreaks did occur, they were snuffed out in quick time by rapid, resolute and effective local measures so that the overwhelming majority of the population were not affected by either the disease or by pandemic restrictions. It is only from about late March 2022 as Omicron spread more widely in China, that sizable parts of the country’s population have had to endure lockdowns for periods – usually lasting from between one to eight weeks. Yet many of the far-left groups in Australia have joined the capitalist media in deceptively giving the impression that China has locked down her people continuously for the last three years. The Solidarity group railed against the supposed “three years of lockdowns and restrictions” in China. Sounding equally like Sky News or other of the most hardline right-wing outlets, their rival in Socialist Alternative screamed that “the Chinese Communist Party has relied almost totally on lockdowns and an incredibly punitive quarantine system.”
Photo: Yan Cong/Bloomberg

The excuse that SAlt, Solidarity and Socialist Alliance all use for opposing Red China is to claim that the PRC is actually just another capitalist state. If that was always wrong it is even more ridiculous today after we have seen how radically different and better was the PRC’s response to the pandemic. Even SAlt concede in their article that, “Unlike in the United States, where a `profits before people’ political framework often dominated, resulting in more than 1 million fatalities, China’s policy has averted mass death.” Yet if the PRC state is also a capitalist state just like the U.S. why did it not also put “profits before people.” Why wouldn’t a capitalist regime put profits first – after all that is what they have done in every other major capitalist country in the world? SAlt is also compelled to acknowledge another achievement of the PRC: that last year it overtook the life expectancy of the USA. They quote historian Adam Tooze describing this as “a truly historic marker.” Yet how under supposed “capitalist rule” has this “truly historic marker” been achieved where a huge country that 73 years ago was a backward, subjugated neo-colony with a life expectancy 33 years below that of the USA now overtakes the life expectancy of the imperialist USA. Is that not grossly over-rating what “capitalism” can achieve? And how too under supposed “capitalist rule” was China two years ago able to complete its lifting of every one of its rural residents out of extreme poverty? Are not amongst the most important reasons for needing to overthrow capitalism precisely because it cannot decisively improve the well-being of the masses, cannot lift all out of poverty and cannot truly liberate former colonies and neocolonies from imperialist subjugation? Then how has all this been achieved in a country with one in five of the world’s people? Furthermore, those leftists who claim that the PRC is just another capitalist state have another huge dilemma. How can they explain why Australia’s capitalist rulers – which most anti-PRC left groups acknowledge are imperialist rulers in their own right and not mere puppets of their U.S. senior partners – are engaged in such a hostile military build-up, propaganda war and political campaign against the PRC when the Australian economy (with the lion’s share going to the capitalists) received nearly 40% of its export income last year from trade with China? Why would Australia’s capitalist rulers risk such huge incomes – $A178 billion in total – by antagonising the PRC if the latter was simply another capitalist country? The capitalists are greedy exploiters … but they are not that stupid! The sole reason why Australia’s capitalist rulers are hostile to the PRC is because it is a workers state. That is the only way one can explain the Australian bourgeoisie’s enmity towards the PRC.

Other than for ourselves in Trotskyist Platform, there is one other bona fide left group in Australia that does not buy into the imperialist drive to destroy the PRC state. And that is the Communist Party of Australia. The December 5 issue of the CPA’s Guardian newspaper has an article on the protests in China reprinted from an overseas leftist paper. Refreshingly the article pushes back against the imperialist media propaganda over the A4 protests. The article begins with the plainly true statement: “Establishment media have seized on protests over COVID lockdowns to rehearse their favourite anti-China narratives.”

A problem however is that, aside from it seems the party’s Brisbane branch, the CPA’s stance that China is a workers state that should be supported is mostly left to its newspaper but is not reflected in the party’s actual work on the ground. Take for example, the CPA’s work in the Sydney Anti-AUKUS Coalition opposing the deal for Australia to get nuclear submarines aimed against China. Although the CPA has been a major component of the coalition, in the public meetings and rallies of the coalition, the CPA has shied away from asserting the class character of the PRC as a workers state that should be supported and has backed away from arguing the need to resist the deluge of anti-communist propaganda directed against the PRC or the need to defend the PRC against counterrevolutionary movements like the Hong Kong pro-colonial forces. No doubt some CPA comrades would argue that this is for the sake of the united-front against AUKUS. But such a stance is flawed. For one, it is precisely the effect of the massive propaganda war against the PRC that makes it harder to build movements against the military build up against her. The need to oppose that anti-communist propaganda must be motivated to all that want to oppose the anti-China military escalation. On the other hand, the more that the working-class can be convinced that the PRC is their state, the more that the workers movement can be won to taking an active stance against the multitude of threats against the PRC. Furthermore, given that the other most prominent components of the Anti-AUKUS Coalition are the stridently anti-PRC Solidarity group and the even more anti-PRC Greens senator David Shoebridge (who when he is not engaging with the coalition is vey prominently supporting the fanatically anti-PRC Falun Dafa group and whipping up anticommunist hysteria against the presence of Confucius Institute, Chinese language-teaching schools in Australia), to not challenge anticommunist attacks on the PRC over “human rights” when in an arena favourable to pushing back against such propaganda is to give these anti-PRC forces a blank cheque to spread their counterrevolutionary agitation in the other arenas where they work. More generally, the Australian population is being bombarded with anti-communist, anti-PRC propaganda. If even at events opposed to the anti-China military build up, this propaganda is not refuted then in what arena are pro-PRC leftists going to be resolute enough to openly challenge this propaganda on the ground and proudly declare solidarity with the PRC’s socialist course? Moreover, as the recent A4 protests gave a small indication of, the biggest threat to the PRC workers state is not from direct military attack but from internal counterrevolution. The military pressure of course encourages and strengthens the forces of capitalist restoration. However, it is counterrevolutionaries themselves that are the most dangerous direct threat. Let us not forget that the Soviet workers state was in the end not destroyed by military attack but by the internal counterrevolutionary forces funded and directed by Western imperialism. To argue that opposition to capitalist counterrevolutionary forces threatening the Chinese workers state should be foregone for the sake of building a united-front with anti-PRC forces on the basis of only opposing some of the military escalation against the PRC, is to fail to properly stand in solidarity with socialistic China.

If the Left and workers movement fails to mobilise struggles in open solidarity with the PRC workers state in the imperialist countries, then this will demoralise communists within China and make them feel that no one within the most powerful countries in the world is prepared to take an open stand in defence of them (the CPA president sending solidarity greetings to the 20th congress of the CPC is nice but wholly inadequate by itself – open action on the ground is needed!). On the other hand it will play into the hands of rightist groupings within the CPC who will be able to say that “in the most powerful countries in the world, all the significant forces are against us, so we have to compromise with the imperialists – we have to make concessions.”

It is instructive to look back at what happened during the last Cold War, the 1980s Cold War against the then most powerful workers state, the Soviet Union. At the time, there were much greater numbers of people in the Western countries who considered themselves sympathetic to the Soviet Union then than there are now who support Red China. However, those parties sympathetic to the Soviet Union – including the CPA’s predecessor the SPA – joined in peace coalitions with small-l liberals and pacifists who were against war with the Soviet Union but were also unsympathetic to the workers state and bought into the anti-communist “human rights” propaganda against her. In order to avoid antagonising these bloc partners, the parties sympathetic to the USSR recoiled from ever openly showing their solidarity with the USSR through mass actions on the ground. This was a part of why the counterrevolution triumphed in the former Soviet Union. Here in Australia, not only did a good chunk of the Left – including the predecessors of Socialist Alliance and Solidarity/Socialist Alternative – criminally support the capitalist counterrevolutionary forces arrayed against the Soviet Union, but even the parts of the Left with a pro-Soviet line failed to mobilise in actual open solidarity with the workers state. This and similar behaviour by the Left in all the other imperialist countries helped push the balance of political forces within the Soviet Union in favour of the sell-outs within the Soviet leadership and the outright capitalist restorationists. This must not be allowed to happen again with respect to the PRC!

Trotskyist Platform is proud that we have been the most active group on the Left in openly standing for defence of socialistic rule in China. At demonstrations against AUKUS we have openly advocated solidarity with the PRC workers state. Among the placards we have carried at these events includes ones stating: “Down with the AUKUS Nuclear Submarine Deal! Stand with Socialistic China to Stand by Working Class Interests.” At the Hiroshima Day rally, held days after Nancy Pelosi provocatively visited Taiwan, among the signs we carried was one urging: “Resist Washington and Canberra’s War Drive Against the PRC Workers State! Condemn Pelosi’s Provocative Visit to the Rogue, Anti-Working Class Regime Ruling China’s Taiwan!”

Most importantly, we have initiated and built several united-front actions openly in solidarity with the PRC workers state. When the 70th anniversary of the PRC occurred in 2019 during the midst of the anti-PRC, rich kid revolt in Hong Kong, we joined with the Australian Chinese Workers Association (ACWA) in building an action that saw over 60 people march through the streets of Sydney behind the slogans: “Working Class People in Australia & the World: Stand With Socialistic China!” and “Defeat Hong Kong’s Pro-Colonial, Anti-Communist Movement!” When word and photos of the action found there way back to communists in the North-western Chinese city of Xian, they were thrilled to see that people in Australia would openly take such a stance. Then, this April, we again joined with the ACWA in building an action welcoming China’s anti-poverty measures and calling for key aspects of them to be implemented here in Australia. Bringing out still larger numbers at its height than the October 2019 event, this rally built to advocate urgently needed measures in Australia that the PRC has implemented – including a massive increase in public housing, the guaranteeing of at least the minimum wage for all food delivery workers when working normal hours at a slow pace and the nationalisation of the banks – simultaneously promoted solidarity with socialistic China by pointing to her progressive, pro-working program.

Trotskyist Platform looks forward to working with other pro-PRC forces on the Left in building further united-front actions in open solidarity with socialistic China. All those committed to socialism should understand that we cannot allow the PRC to meet the same fate as the Soviet Union. The small, but notable, openly anti-communist component within the recent COVID “Freedom” protests in China and the broader raising within them of the slogans of “democracy” and “freedom” without an insistence that it must be a proletarian democracy that does not give political freedom to capitalist exploiters, is a warning sign. A warning sign that we must respond to by working harder to build actions to oppose all military, economic, political and propaganda pressure upon the PRC workers state. Let’s defend socialistic rule in China as part of our fight against the decaying, increasingly militaristic, capitalist order in Australia and as part of the struggle against capitalist domination of the world. With the masses in most of the capitalist world today facing plunging real wages and steeply rising prices, with some capitalist countries already on the verge of a deep recession and many others headed there, with extreme racist forces growing in strength within many capitalist countries and with the war-mongering Western imperialist powers waging a dangerous proxy war against a nuclear-armed country (in Russia), the need to overturn capitalist rule throughout the world is more urgent than ever.

The rule of the working-class in every country will open the way to a socialist world that will ensure a future free of unemployment and poverty for every single person on the planet. It will lead to an internationally planned, collectively-owned economy where resources and human labour, in all its creativity, will be rationally and fairly utilised to lift the living standards of all, effectively protect human lives from deadly diseases and respond to the threat of climate change. A socialist world will be one where exploitation of labour, racism, oppression of women, homophobia, imperialist subjugation of the “Third World” and war will be things of the past. Defending socialistic rule in a country where one in five of the world’s people live – however incomplete and distorted that country’s transition to socialism currently is – is essential to ensuring that the victory of world socialist revolution is completed before still deeper capitalist economic crises, the ascendancy of the fascist form of capitalism, imperialist war and climate changed-induced disasters drive the peoples of the world into a hellish existence. 

On 2 April 2022 about 80 people participated in a Sydney rally to demand the implementation in Australia of some of the key measures that the PRC has used to successfully combat poverty in China – including the provision of huge amounts of public housing, the guaranteeing of a minimum wage for food delivery riders, publicly owned banks and a system based on public ownership of the key sectors of the economy. In the course of advocating urgently necessary anti-poverty measures the action simultaneously promoted the progressive character of the PRC and therefore the need to defend socialistic rule there. Above: Some of key slogans raised by the initiators of the action – Trotskyist Platform and the Australian Chinese Workers Association. Below: Rally emcee and Trotskyist Platform editor, Yuri Gromov addresses the rally.
Photo (top two photos and above right photo): Trotskyist Platform
Photo (above left and below photos): Demi Huang/New Impressions Media

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!