Tag Archives: Unions

Anti-Capitalism, Unions

DEFEAT THE MORRISON REGIME’S WAR AGAINST WELFARE RECIPIENTS!

Photo Above: The government’s planned attacks on unemployed workers and other welfare recipients will lead to still more homelessness in Australia.

STOP GREEDY BOSSES FROM SLASHING JOBS!

DEFEAT THE MORRISON REGIME’S WAR AGAINST WELFARE RECIPIENTS!

16 October 2019 – The right-wing Morrison government is waging a multi-pronged attack on Australia’s lowest income people. Having rejected widespread calls to boost the cruelly low, Newstart Allowance, the Liberal-National government is seeking to push through legislation that will extend beyond June 2020 the trials of the Cashless Debit Card. Under the harsh regime of this “cashless welfare” system, welfare recipients will only receive 20% of their income through their bank account. The remainder must be spent through a Cashless Debit Card which can only be used at shops with Eftpos machines and cannot be used to withdraw cash or for alcohol or gambling. The government’s legislation will not only extend the period of the cashless welfare trials in the existing four sites but expand the trials to two new areas: the Northern Territory and the Cape York Peninsula. Welfare recipients in those two areas were already under compulsory income management as a result of the racist Intervention into Aboriginal communities begun in 2007 under the Howard government and extended under the following Labor government. However, the new measure will see the system where 50% of people’s income was restricted under a Basics Card replaced by the even more severe Cashless Debit Card, where 80% of income is quarantined. Moreover, if the new legislation becomes law, a minister will have the power to arbitrarily increase people’s rate of quarantining to 100%!

It is pretty clear that the government’s aim is to use the trials as a stepping stone to impose cashless welfare on most welfare recipients. Last month, the junior partner in the governing Coalition, the Nationals, decided to push for the Cashless Debit Card to be imposed on all people who are unemployed or receiving parenting payments and aged under 35. For his part, prime minister Scott Morrison openly stated that the cashless welfare trials were “commending itself for wider application.”

In yet another scheme to subject economically vulnerable people to more indignities, the Coalition government wants to drug test people receiving either the Newstart Allowance or the Youth Allowance. The measure will be introduced first as a trial at three sites involving 5,000 people. The bill enshrining the scheme is now before the Senate. Those who refuse to be drug tested will have their payments cut off and those that fail a second test will have to pay for the test, which would amount to hundreds of dollars. The scheme is so draconian and punitive that almost all health and drug treatment experts have slammed the plan.

All these proposed measures are not about supposedly using “tough love” to help unemployed people as the government claims. Rather, they will make the lives of low-income people more miserable. For starters, with welfare recipients often having to sub-let from a better-off tenant in order to be able to get rental accommodation (since landlords are reluctant to let to the lowest income people), cashless welfare will mean that many will simply not be able to pay their rent. Moreover, by curbing a person’s use of cash, the Cashless Debit Card will restrict low-income people from buying items at markets or second-hand from other people. They will also no longer be able to get a tradie to do a job at reduced rates for cash. Yet it is precisely the economically poor who most need to be able to  get good deals from cash payments and bargains from markets and second-hand purchases. In short, the imposition of cashless welfare amounts to a sizable cut to the income of unemployed workers. How are people going to afford that when the Newstart Allowance is already so meagre? Take a single person trying to live in the working class Sydney suburb of Auburn, about 35 minutes from the city. The cheapest shared accommodation, single bedroom advertised there is going for $200 a week – that is, $400 a fortnight. Yet Newstart for a single person is just $559 a fortnight and the maximum rental assistance is only $138 per fortnight. So that single, unemployed worker has just $297 per fortnight left after paying rent. How the hell can a person survive on just $148.50 per week? Already many on Newstart are forced to skip meals, avoid using the heater during even freezing winter days and pass over purchases of essential medicines. Now, being denied  the discounts that are possible through cash transactions will drive them further into poverty. And low income people face a second blow. With Liberal and ALP state governments alike continuing to sell off public housing, private landlords will know that they can jack up rents since people will have nowhere else to go.

What these planned new welfare measures aim to do is to stigmatise unemployed workers and all the poor – portraying them as lazy, drug or alcohol-addicted people who need a firm hand to bring them into line and make them job ready. This is a disgusting slander! The reason that so many people do not have jobs and many, many more have less work hours than they want is because of the greed of the corporate bigwigs who are forever trying to boost profits by slashing their workforces and driving those left behind harder for the same pay. Greedy business owners are, meanwhile, reluctant to spend any resources on training new workers unless there is big money to be made out of it. It is because of this capitalist system, where every economic decision is determined by the drive for profits for rich bosses, that there are nearly five unemployed people for every available job. Even if those small percentage of unemployed workers who have become, understandably, despondent at their prospects of finding work are pushed into becoming more active in job hunting this will only mean that instead of 19 people on average applying for each job vacancy, as is currently the case, there maybe say 23 people on average competing for each vacancy (even whether this will occur is questionable since the unbearably low level of the Newstart payment and greater costs inherent with cashless welfare will mean that people often cannot afford to buy clothes for interviews, travel to job opportunities or print their own CVs). Thus, at most, government “tough love” measures will mean that different people will end up getting the same scarce jobs. The same overall number of people will still be unemployed!

What the government’s schemes to stigmatise welfare recipients will do is to severely demoralise unemployed workers and lower their self esteem. When a worker gets retrenched by a boss or a young person struggles to get their first, secure job they feel demoralised because humans by nature want to be able to utilise their skills and as social animals we long to contribute to society’s development. Part of the egalitarian culture of so-called hunter-gatherer societies of the past came from the fact that everyone was able to contribute to satisfying their clan’s needs and those contributions were valued by and, indeed, essential to all. Yet in the profit-obsessed, capitalist system so many people are cruelly denied the basic human need to be able to utilise one’s labour and contribute to social production. These victims of capitalist greed then have to also put up with being vilified by the tabloid press, right-wing TV commentators and radio shock jocks and being looked down upon by a society whose values are shaped by the corporate ruling class. And ever more and more, these people are being stigmatised by punitive government policies like cashless welfare and mandatory drug testing. Meanwhile, the economic hardships imposed on welfare recipients through below poverty-level payments – increasingly compounded by restrictions on their access to cash – lead to social isolation as people can’t afford to travel to social events, pay entry fees to shows or nightspots or even go out for a coffee. So, unemployed workers are pushed into depression. Quite understandably, some in this predicament will seek solace in various forms of escape from reality – whether that be in the illusory salvation of religion or other cults or the “alternate reality” of a drug high.

But any suggestion that it is the lowest income people who are especially prone  to drug use or alcoholism is repugnant. Welfare recipients simply don’t have the money to be buying large amounts of drugs or alcohol. It is the cocaine snorting, chardonnay swilling corporate high fliers, managers, barristers, yuppies, rich kids and the like living in places like Bellevue Hill, Mosman and Vaucluse who get to indulge and spend far more on drugs and alcohol. Of course, the government is not suggesting compulsory drug testing of these social classes – after all, these are the very people whom their regime serves!

In this soulless, dog-eat-dog capitalist society, many people from all classes seek various forms of escape from reality. And as with plunging into religion or cults, using drugs to escape – especially when it results in actual addiction – can often make reality even worse than it currently is. Yet for some of those being isolated and stigmatised at the bottom of this ruthless, class-divided society, having a means of “escape” is what stands between them and deep depression or even suicide. What these people need is not punitive drug testing – and being made to pay for the exorbitant costs of these tests – but an end to the stigmatisation, a system that provides guaranteed jobs for all and something else that definitely does not exist now: widely available and free addiction treatment, counselling and mental health services. Ironically, contrary to its claimed goals, the government’s policies, by further stigmatising welfare recipients will drive more people into seeking to escape reality through drugs, alcohol or religion (the bible-thumping members in the regime like Morrison, Eric Abetz and Christian fundamentalist Andrew Hastie would, of course, love the latter).

In their policies to punish the poor, the right-wing government also imparts their own racial prejudice into the process. The existing cashless welfare trial areas as well as the two new proposed sites have a disproportionately high percentage of Aboriginal residents. Indeed, nearly 80% of people affected by the cashless welfare trials are Aboriginal people. Notably too, one of the three sites selected for the mandatory drug testing of welfare recipients is southwest Sydney’s Canterbury- Bankstown area, a region with a very high proportion of residents from various Asian and Middle Eastern backgrounds. For a regime that oversees racist police brutality against Aboriginal people and the stealing of Aboriginal children from their families; and which regularly incites racist fears against one minority community after another, from Muslims, to African youth to Chinese students, such discriminatory behaviour is not surprisingly overtly racist. Moreover, the racist, rich people’s regime knows that racism is widespread in their society and so think that trialling punitive measures in heavily Aboriginal or heavily Asian/Middle Eastern regions will meet less resistance. Yet all working class people should know that repressive schemes first unleashed against Aboriginal people are often later rolled out more broadly. For example, compulsory work for the dole was first unfurled against Aboriginal people and then subsequently rolled out against most long-term unemployed workers. And, of course, cashless welfare itself began with the racist Intervention into NT Aboriginal communities.

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RIGHT-WING GOVERNMENT: BASHES THE POOR, BASHES THE WORKERS MOVEMENT

So why are Scott Morrison and Co. on this crusade against welfare recipients apart from, of course, the fact that they are heartless, upper class snobs with contempt for the poor! For one, they want to cut spending on welfare. They hope that by punishing welfare recipients and increasing the number of reasons why a recipient will get their payments suspended, they can drive down budget outlays. That will allow them more funds to lower tax rates for their big end of town mates, give negative-gearing tax concessions to wealthy investors buying multiple properties and support the government’s increasingly large budget for spy agencies and for their military build up against socialistic China. Last year, Australia, a country with a relatively small population, was the second biggest arms importer in the world, spending more on weapons imports than China, a country with sixty times our population (see: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-30/australia-worlds- second-biggest-weapons-importer-behind-saudi/11558762)! The rich people’s regime’s annual defence budget is now $38.7 billion which, spread out and spent on welfare instead of war, would amount to about $52,000 per year for every person on the Newstart Allowance!

However, cutting costs is not the government’s only motive. After all, the Cashless Debit Card itself initially cost $10,000 per person per year to administer and even the lowest estimates of this operating cost now stand at $2,000 per person which amounts to about $40 per week that could, instead, be used to boost the income of each welfare recipient!

A big part of the motive for the government’s war on welfare recipients is to blame unemployed workers for their own plight so that people will not focus on those really responsible for joblessness – the corporate bigwigs who, after sweating out millions and billions in profits from their employees, don’t hesitate to throw some of these same workers out of their livelihoods whenever pruning their workforce is what it takes to further boost profits. Thus, despite extracting a whopping $1.2 billion profit out of its workers in just the first six months of this year, Telstra bosses have thrown 3,200 workers out of a job since June last year as part of a plan by this rich Australians-owned company to axe 18,000 workers by the end of 2022. For its part, David Jones bosses are in the process of axing 120 jobs, including 28 jobs at its Wollongong store. This despite the company’s rich shareholders making a $37 million profit last year and over $200 million over the last three years. With more than half of young adults without a permanent job and as the capitalist world lurches into another economic downturn, the capitalists’ government is determined to ensure that the masses don’t identify the greed of the owners of Telstra, David Jones, NAB and the other corporations as the reason for rising unemployment.

And when the parties that uphold the capitalist order aren’t blaming unemployed people for their own plight they use nationalist and racist scapegoating instead. The Liberal/Nationals specialise in blaming migrants and refugees for unemployment, the ALP and Greens are focussed on blaming imported products and guest workers and the far-right outfits, like One Nation, rabidly do both.

Perhaps the main reason that the Morrison government wants to make life more miserable for welfare recipients is to help their rich business-owning mates by driving down the wages and conditions of employed workers. By keeping welfare payments so small and imposing such cruel restrictions on recipients, Morrison and Co. know that unemployed workers will become more willing to accept jobs with terrible wage rates and working conditions. Already there are hundreds of thousands of workers in Australia – disproportionately young or female or migrant toiling away for below award wages in sectors like retail, hospitality, aged care, warehousing and restaurants. Moreover, by making the conditions of life so terrible for those who lose their jobs, the anti-working class government hopes to intimidate existing workers into putting up with poor conditions and shying away from risking involvement in trade union struggles for rights at work. That is why the entire workers movement – and in particular our trade unions must champion the struggle to smash the Morrison government’s attacks on welfare recipients.

RELY ON WORKING CLASS POWER &
OPPOSE THE AUSTRALIAN RICH PEOPLE’S REGIME’S ENTIRE AGENDA

No one should be under the illusion that we can rely on parliamentary machinations to stop the current offensive against welfare recipients. The cross-bench politicians are anti-working class. Tasmanian senator Jacqui Lambie, who may have the deciding vote in the Senate on the various government bills, broadly supports cashless welfare. Under pressure from their working class base, the ALP is now opposing the government’s legislation in its current form. Yet working class activists should not have faith that the ALP will spearhead a movement against the government’s measures. Remember this is the same ALP that previously voted for cashless welfare trials and when last in government implemented perhaps the cruellest of all welfare cuts: the throwing of low-income single parents (mainly single mothers) and their families off the parenting payment and onto the much lower paying Newstart Allowance. Even today, the ALP’s opposition to cashless welfare is hardly staunch. They plan to amend the government’s cashless welfare legislation so that the scheme becomes voluntary. That is, of course, better than being compulsory but that still means that they will be promoting the despicable stigmatisation of unemployed people inherent in cashless welfare. And that stigmatisation is, indeed, half of the government’s agenda!

Now the Greens have been stronger in their opposition to cashless welfare than the ALP. The problem, however, is that the Greens accept the current social order, reject the idea of workers organising as a class against it and, themselves, receive big donations from rich capitalist high-fliers. Yet it is only mass action of the working class against the capitalist class that can force the capitalist politicians  to retreat from their current course. When we see such militant, mass action – backed by the power of the union movement – then suddenly some cross-benchers or even government politicians, realising the need for the class that they serve to make concessions, will miraculously “discover” the injustice of their war on welfare recipients. So let’s have mass working class struggle to demand a complete end to cashless welfare, a total rejection of drug testing of welfare recipients, a massive increase in public housing and a big increase in the Newstart Allowance. However, we should not stop there. We need to fight for the basic human right of all people, who are able to do so, to use their labour and talents to contribute to social production. That means launching industrial action struggles to stop all job slashing plans by business owners. It also means demanding laws stopping all profitable companies from cutting jobs and laws which force profitable businesses to increase hiring at the expense of their profits. And to truly enable working class mothers to fully participate in work life we need to fight for free around-the-clock childcare, free pre-school education and free school lunches at all schools. To all these measures, especially ones that force business owners to retain more staff than is optimal for their profits, the capitalists will scream that this is unaffordable and impractical. To this we must reply: if your system cannot even provide jobs for all and, thereby, also utilise every person’s skills and energy for society’s benefit then it is so cruel and so irrational that it has got to go. We working class people will take the banks, factories, mines, transport and communication systems, utilities and agricultural land into our own able collective hands and run a socialist system that will serve all working class people and all the poor.

To realise this perspective we need to turn around the program that currently dominates our unions. Most of our unions remain led by a pro-ALP agenda that, while critical of companies when they cut jobs, rarely takes any action against this except occasionally in the small minority of cases where job losses are related to companies moving operations offshore. Instead, the only “strategy” that pro-ALP union leaders have to win more jobs for workers is to make economic nationalist appeals to restrict imports, curb the entry of guest workers or favour local businesses. Yet, such protectionism never helps save any workers’ jobs as overseas countries will inevitably retaliate with their own measures against Australian producers. All such schemes end up doing is dividing Australian workers from our true allies – the workers of all countries – while bringing us into a bloc with the very people that we need to be struggling against: the job-slashing local bosses. So we need to replace this Laborite perspective with one based on irreconcilable opposition to the local capitalist exploiting class. We need a union movement and a workers party that do not restrict themselves to demands that are tolerated by the capitalists but which, instead, unite the working class to fight for what we and all the downtrodden need. That means waging all out class struggle – including in defiance of anti-strike laws – to oppose job cuts by business owners, to smash the Morrison government’s entire war on welfare recipients, to defeat its planned laws making it easier to deregister militant unions and to force profitable companies to increase hiring at the expense of their profits. Such a program is part of a far-sighted perspective to win a future socialist society where it will be the working class and poor – and not the cruel capitalist exploiters – who will be the new ruling class of a fair and kind society and who, one day, will even abolish the very notion of a society divided by classes and the systematic, unequal distribution of wealth.

Anti-Capitalism, Anti-Imperialism, China, Communism, Unions

Against the Right-Wing, Western-backed Protests in Hong Kong

Against the Right-Wing,
Western-backed Protests
in Hong Kong

Socialistic PRC Should Extradite Even More Tycoons to Face Justice on the Mainland and Have Their Ill-Gotten Assets Nationalised!

10 June 2019 – Australia’s big business and government-owned media have been lionising the recent, often violent, right-wing protests in Hong Kong. They report that driving the protests are businessmen, shopkeepers, lawyers and university students. This is a protest pushed by large sections of Hong Kong’s capitalist class, the upper middle-class and younger wannabe capitalists. They fear that the socialistic state ruling mainland China will gradually undermine their privileged position (see also this letter by a comrade written some five years ago which dissected similar anti-communist protests at the time: https://www.trotskyistplatform.com/greetings-for-the-october-1-anniversary-of-chinas-great-1949-revolution/).

The groups opposed to the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) within Hong Kong are not only being encouraged by the mainstream Western media but are being funded by the U.S. government’s National Endowment for Democracy (here the National Endowment for Democracy’s own website lists some of the anti-PRC programs that they openly fund in Hong Kong – one of which they deviously portray as being for workers rights – https://www.ned.org/region/asia/hong-kong-china-2018/ , however their covert funding is many times larger). They are also being filled with cash by Hong Kong’s own capitalist class and by capitalists in mainland China. A particular reason that capitalists are up in arms over Hong Kong’s proposed new extradition law – the object of yesterday’s protests – is that it will make it easier for the PRC to continue cracking down on mainland capitalists hiding out in Hong Kong. Although, unfortunately, the compromising Beijing leadership has allowed some people to become capitalist tycoons within China, the great thing is that the PRC often comes down hard upon these capitalists. While in Australia, the likes of James Packer, Gina Rinehart and Andrew Forest are above the law, the biggest tycoons in China are often nabbed for corruption. Moreover, if their rate of exploitation has become excessive, especially in a way that puts the broader economy at risk, the PRC authorities sometimes bow to public pressure and crackdown on these hated corporate bigwigs. Sometimes they even laudably confiscate the assets of these billionaires and bring them into public ownership – i.e. carry out the socialist program.

1 July 2019: Violent, pro-colonial protesters smash into Hong Kong’s legislative building and hoist the flag of the former British colonial regime that brutally occupied Hong Kong.
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The particular incident that is driving Hong Kong’s capitalist elite and upper-middle class yuppies to oppose the planned new extradition law is the kidnapping two years ago of greedy Chinese billionaire Xiao Jianhua from a Hong Kong hotel by PRC authorities. That is why many of those involved in yesterday’s anti-PRC protests were carrying signs like: “no kidnapping to China.” PRC authorities ended up taking Xiao Jianhua to the mainland for questioning and detention. Xiao is now awaiting trial for corrupt activities. The PRC workers state has also taken over a bank that he owned, Baoshang Bank – one of the rare privately-owned banks in China – and given it over to state-owned banks to run. In other words, the bank has been effectively nationalised. This is fantastic! For more details on this nationalisation and the bringing down of Xiao Jianhua and other greedy billionaires in Hong Kong by Red China see the following mainstream media articles:

ttps://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-crime/article/2067271/hong-kong-luxury-hotel-turned-tycoon-hideout-away-prying

https://www.ft.com/content/a9430b20-7e15-11e9-81d2-f785092ab560

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-24/missing-bosses-add-to-risks-of-investing-in-china-quicktake-q-a

https://sg.news.yahoo.com/financier-xiao-jianhua-shed-holdings-084259428.html


More Chinese capitalists hiding out in Hong Kong should be extradited and have their assets nationalised. Any real socialist would want this!

Moreover the PRC should abandon its deal with the British imperialists who stole Hong Kong in 1842. Britain seized Hong Kong after winning the Opium War against China. In winning that predatory war Britain’s capitalist rulers not only stole Hong Kong but won the “right” to turn half of China into drug addicts for the sake of their profits, the “right” to “concessions” granting them and other imperialist powers control of key parts of China and the right to control and plunder China’s markets. In the 1997 deal between China and Britain that finally returned Hong Kong to China, the PRC (wrongly) agreed to maintain Hong Kong’s capitalist system for at least 50 years. The deal meant “one country – two systems.” The PRC should renege on this deal – imperialist powers should have no right to dictate what system exists in any part of China or any other country for that matter. No more one country – two systems! It should be one country – one socialist system! That means that the assets of the Hong Kong capitalists should be confiscated and brought into public ownership. In particular, Hong Kong’s huge and vital port should be confiscated from notorious billionaire Li Ka-shing and his son, Victor Li. Li Ka-shing and Victor Li control Hutchison Port Holdings, which as well as owning Hong Kong’s ports also controls a port terminal at Sydney’s Port Botany, where they are notorious for union-busting attacks on workers jobs and working conditions (see: http://www.mua.org.au/mua_takes_hutchison_to_court_over_wharfie_sackings_hutch).

If the PRC puts Hong Kong’s capitalist bigwigs out of business, the social base for the right-wing anti-PRC movement will be greatly weakened. More importantly, nationalising the businesses owned by the Hong Kong tycoons will allow the wages and working conditions of workers in Hong Kong’s ports and service sectors to be greatly improved and will provide the resources to finally improve the atrocious living conditions of the hundreds of thousands of working-class Hong Kong residents either living in cage-like “homes” or tiny slum-like apartments. In other words a move to bring the socialistic system to Hong Kong would be popular amongst the working class and poor of Hong Kong. It would also illuminate – for all to see – the clear class question involved in the issue of support or opposition of PRC influence. It would become clearer to the working class masses of Hong Kong that their interests lie in being ever more closely a part of Red China. Moreover, a blow against the capitalists of Hong Kong would give confidence to those within the mainland seeking to preserve socialistic rule there. That struggle is a difficult and fraught struggle as the PRC workers state is facing aggressive pro-capitalist demands from Chinese private business owners, Western-backed “dissidents,” the imperialist rulers of Australia and the U.S. (the latter with its fervent demands during the trade disputes that China stop supporting the socialistic, state-owned enterprises that dominate her economy) and soft-on-capitalist elements within the Chinese leadership and bureaucracy itself.

Therefore anyone who supports working class people’s interests and socialism should support increased PRC influence in Hong Kong, should unequivocally oppose all anti-PRC movements there and should call for the PRC to bring Hong Kong’s economy under socialist, public ownership.

17 August 2019: A spirited, 3000 strong pro-PRC demonstration gathers outside the Sydney Town Hall. The rally opposed the anti-PRC rioters in Hong Kong.

One of the Trotskyist Platform (TP) placards at the 17th August 2019 demonstration where over 3,000 people marched through the streets of Sydney in opposition to the pro-colonial rioters in Hong Kong who have been seeking to undermine the region’s incorporation into the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). The march was several times larger than even the biggest of the rallies held in Sydney supporting the right-wing, pro-colonial opposition in Hong Kong. This is despite those anti-PRC actions in Australia being massively supported and built up by the entire capitalist media.

Nearly all those participating in the 17th August march were international students from China or people from the local Chinese community. However, a multi-racial group of TP supporters also joined the pro-Red China march. As well as standing in solidarity with the action, our contingent opposed the Australian ruling class’ escalating Cold War repression of supporters of socialistic China as well as other socialistic states (such as the brave pro-North Korea political prisoner in Australia, Chan Han Choi) and emphasised that defending the PRC workers state is in the very interests of the working class and oppressed of this country. We also distributed a leaflet at the demonstration that not only opposed the anti-communist opposition in Hong Kong but called for socialistic rule to be brought to Hong Kong so that all of China can be in one country under one socialistic system.
Anti-Racism

United Action by Multi-Racial Working Class will Stop Racist Attacks of Australian Regime & Far Right Thugs

Ruling Class Politicians & Media
Manipulate Crime Reports, Bolster Racial Hatred

United Action by Multi-Racial Working Class will Stop
Racist Attacks of Australian Regime & Far Right Thugs

29 August 2018: On the 4th of August, Abdullah Qaiser was on his way to a library in Newcastle. But what had seemed to be just another evening for this student from Pakistan turned sinister when a group of people surrounded his car to rob him. And when they realised that he was a person of colour, the situation became life threatening. The white-skinned, racist criminals suddenly turned very violent. They called the student a “terrorist.” One attacker shouted at the 21 year-old, “Go back to your f**king country, you do not belong over here” and then punched Abdullah Qaiser with a knuckle duster so hard that he blanked out. Now, he requires surgery. 

The worst thing about this racist attack is that it is far from being rare. On May 17, for example, a 25 year-old man went on a rampage in the Sydney suburb of Randwick specifically honing in on any Asian background person he could see (https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/man-allegedlytargeted-asian-people-in-random-randwick-rampage-20180518-p4zg0m. html). He punched and kicked at least seven people of Asian appearance including several women and a 70 year-old man. For every such incident there are hundreds more occurring in this country that never make the news: instances of racist rednecks terrorising Aboriginal children, ripping off the headscarves of Muslim women, calling African people the N-word and bashing South Asian, Chinese and other East Asian-origin residents and international students.

The racist rants of ruling class politicians and the mainstream media are inciting this violence. One of their means of stirring up poisonous nationalism is to ridiculously hype up claims that China is “buying up” and “interfering” in Australia. Actual facts mean little to these hate mongers! Perhaps their most tried and tested method of sowing division is to brand various racial minorities as being especially prone to crime. Their latest favourite targets are African youth “gangs” – especially those made up of South Sudanese youth – who they label a “grave threat.” It is the hard right-wing Home Affairs minister, Peter Dutton – who last week came within a whisker of becoming prime minister – who is leading this hate-fest. His claims, which were backed by then prime minister Turnbull, are as ridiculous as they are vile. The truth is that crime committed by South Sudanese youth makes up just a tiny proportion of all crime. But that won’t stop the racist radio shock jocks at 2GB from amplifying Dutton’s claims.

Even less xenophobic media outlets, like the ABC, engage in the racist reporting of crime by only publicising the ethnicity of perpetrators when they happen to be people of colour! If one is consistent in noting the ethnicity of criminals then – even if we exclude the Australian state’s horrific massacres of Aboriginal people – one would find that the majority of Australia’s most ghastly crimes have been committed by people of white European heritage. Australia’s biggest mass murder since World War II, the 1996 Port Arthur shooting massacre of 35 people, was perpetrated by the blonde-haired white guy, Martin Bryant. The most deadly shooting since then was the Margaret River massacre perpetrated by another white man, Peter Miles, just three months ago when Miles heinously shot dead his wife, daughter and four grandchildren. All this does not at all mean that white people have a greater propensity to commit murders – since they do make up a majority of this country’s population. But it does show how deceitful it is for politicians and shock jocks to brand various non-white ethnic groups as being especially prone to crime.

Australia’s State Authorities:
Covering Up Racist Hate Crimes, Perpetrating Racist Brutality

The racial background of those who commit unwarranted acts of violence against others is, in fact, irrelevant. The one exception to this is when the crime is actually racially motivated. Yet, it is precisely in these cases that the mainstream media, police and courts suddenly insist that race is irrelevant to the crime! Take, for instance, the attack on Abdullah Qaiser. Incredibly, NSW Police released a media statement claiming that the attack was not racially motivated. Understandably, Abdullah Qaiser was perplexed:

“I wasn’t expecting them to say that it wasn’t a racial attack.
“If it wasn’t a racial attack, then why were they calling me a terrorist and saying I don’t belong here?”
https://www.news.com.au/national/nsw-act/crime/pakistani-student-who-was-savagely-bashed-says-he-is-surprised-by-police-statement/news-story/ddd1ffc9e7ef8c1c667f8eb6eb59dc36

An even starker case was the murder in Brisbane of Indian-origin bus driver, Manmeet Alisher, by white man, Anthony O’Donohue. On October 28, 2016, O’Donohue boarded Manmeet’s bus and threw a firebomb at the immigrant. The murderer was noted for ultra-right-wing conspiracy theories and he had an extreme hatred of trade unions. Most significantly, two other Indian-origin bus drivers told of how O’Donohue had previously made racist remarks about them. And yet the presiding judge, Jean Dalton, not only decided that O’Donohue was not mentally fit to stand trial – thus, enabling the murderer to get away with a shorter sentence in a mental facility – but outrageously declared that the attack was not racist. The mainstream media, including supposedly “progressive” types like the ABC and The Guardian, followed suit. Yet, Manmeet’s family and friends who held a protest rally outside the court were not buying it. Feeling a strong sense of injustice, they insisted that the murder was racist. As family spokesman, Winnerjit Goldy, stated:

“Why did he choose Manmeet?”
“Manmeet’s friends and other Australians live in fear that they don’t feel safe in Australia.”
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/aug/10/brisbane-bus-drivers-killer-declared-unfit-to-stand-trial

It is little surprise that the police and courts would seek to whitewash the racist nature of hate crimes. For the Australian state authorities are themselves the biggest perpetrators of racist violence. The Australian regime brutally persecutes refugees in hell-hole prison camps. And video footage that was finally released last month showing how six heavy set prison guards brutalised to death 26 year-old Aboriginal inmate, David Dungay, illustrates the horror that cops and screws are unleashing against Aboriginal people. Racist state oppression, in its turn, incites redneck terror on the streets. Today marks the second anniversary of the murder of the 14 year-old Aboriginal child, Elijah Doughty, who was chased and deliberately run over by a 55 year-old racist white man in WA’s Kalgoorlie-Boulder region. Can any sane person deny that the racist rants of ruling class politicians and media hounds and the fact that state authorities are brutalising Aboriginal people – and getting away with it – without a doubt fuelled the racist, social media frenzy against Aboriginal youth in that town that culminated in this hate crime.

Keep Them Separated – Dividing the Masses is
Good for the Big End of Town Capitalist Exploiters

It is rabid right-wingers like Katter’s Australian Party and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation who are driving the racist offensive. But they are definitely not alone. In May, NSW Labor leader, Luke Foley, inflamed hostility to migrants by claiming that refugees are swamping Western Sydney leading to a “white flight” of Anglo families from these suburbs and a shortage of jobs and infrastructure. The ALP’s agenda was evident in January, too, when Dutton was spreading nonsense that Victorians are “scared to go out to restaurants” because of “African gang violence.” The day before Dutton’s racist outburst, Deputy Labor leader and supposed “Labor Left,” Tanya Plibersek claimed that it was “undoubted that many Australians aren’t feeling safe” and that people in Victoria particularly “feel that there is a risk that they will be the victim of gang-related violence” (https://www.theguardian. com/australia-news/2018/jan/03/peter-dutton-says-victorians-scared-togo-out-because-of-african-gang-violence). She then went on to criticise the right-wing government for not giving more funding to the Federal Police! In other words, ALP leaders were pushing, at best, a slighter softer version of the Hard Right’s anti-African hysteria.

The current politicians sow racial divisions because they all ultimately serve, with more or less enthusiasm, the capitalist big end of town. The capitalists – from billionaires like Andrew Forrest and Gina Rinehart to smaller-scale business owners – make huge profits from paying workers far less than they are entitled to for the actual productivity of their labour. This is the basic tactic capitalists have employed since the start of the Industrial Revolution to ensure their filthy profits by underpaying the working masses. From the vast surplus value of the workers of the world’s exploited and accumulated labour are built the now unimaginably enormous pyramids of stolen gold from atop of which the ruling class of capitalists rule most of the Earth. Quite naturally, this small class of exploiters fears that the masses of the world’s working class people will one day seek to unite against them. Indeed, they need politicians to divide the exploited working class and divert their growing frustration into self-destroying channels. Frustration over lack of job security, low wages and unaffordable rents is diverted onto innocent targets like Aboriginal people, other coloured ethnic communities and people who are toiling, just like we working class people are in Australian are but only abroad. The exploiters want workers to be divided so that we do not unite to resist the capitalist governments’ attacks on militant workers’ unions like the CFMEU. The media, from Channel 7 which is owned by the billionaire, Kerry Stokes, to Sky TV and The Australian and Daily Telegraph newspapers owned by the Murdoch family are always ready and willing to scapegoat racial minorities. And perpetrating racist divide and conquer schemes is easy for the Liberals, Nationals and even more right-wing parties since these parties are, themselves, dominated by capitalist business owners as well as wannabe capitalists. For the ALP it is more complicated. The Labor Party is, in its actual composition, a party made up of workers and some leading ALP figures even originally got involved in politics for the sake of improving the lot of the masses. Yet, the ALP seeks to improve workers’ position within the current capitalist order. That means that they not only chase corporate funding but, more broadly, seek the acceptance, or at least acquiescence, of the big end of town. ALP hacks are for ever looking over their shoulder, fearful that the demands that they place upon the capitalists will backfire on them and overly annoy the capitalist class and its all powerful media. Thus, ALP politicians not only invariably capitulate to the sentiments created by the racist, capitalist media but, moreover, the more that they recoil from a perspective of workers’ struggle against the capitalist exploiters the more they seek to “satisfy” the frustrations of their mass base by advocating a divisive agenda to favour the majority, local white workers over and against refugees, migrants and our producer sisters and brothers abroad.

Financially insecure small businessmen and self-employed contractors, whose economic position naturally means that everyone else in the market, including counterparts from other ethnicities, are seen as competitors, can be especially prone to buying into racist appeals. To a lesser extent, so too can workers at tiny workplaces who are largely not organised into unions and are often isolated from fellow workers. Many smaller-scale capitalist exploiters, a chunk of the middle class self-employed and a few workers from smaller workplaces are, thus, moving towards the ultra-racist, Far Right.

All this is pulling the mainstream conservative parties ever further to the right. Of course, there are “liberal” capitalists who worry about the overt nature of the Hard Right’s racism. The pursuit of international trade, investment and predatory imperialist interventions in the Asia-Pacific region lead bourgeois liberals like Turnbull, Julie Bishop and Christopher Pyne to favour a more disguised form of white supremacist rule than the openly proud, xenophobic “conservatives” do. This is the essence of last week’s leadership brawl in the Liberal Party. Although the Hard Right who toppled Turnbull did not succeed in getting their man Dutton into the prime ministership, the new prime minister, Scott Morrison, is almost as openly bigoted. As a minister in the former Abbott government, it was Morrison who drove the brutal military-led “turn back the boats” policy against refugees.

This movement further and further to the right of conservative parties is occurring worldwide. The hard right Donald Trump seized the leadership of the U.S. Republican Party and now, as President of the U.S.A, is administering an ultra-racist agenda. This has incited an escalation in racist violence – something that was already all too present during the rule of earlier administrations. Last year, people inspired by the racist Alt Right alone murdered 17 people in the U.S.; and that does not even include any of the racist murders committed by rednecks who aren’t overtly political. Just like in the U.S. and Australia, conservative parties administering governments in Hungary, Ukraine, Russia and elsewhere are also lurching further to the right. Meanwhile, in Italy, Switzerland and Austria, far-right parties are actually major parts of governing coalitions. In countries like Canada, Sweden and France where hard right parties are not in government, racist terror on the streets is also escalating. Even in developing capitalist countries, racist forces are gaining ground. India’s prime minister is a Hindu fundamentalist who, earlier, as chief minister of Gujarat province not only promoted school textbooks that glorified Nazism but also incited a horrific anti-Muslim pogrom that killed over 2,000 people. Meanwhile, in Indonesia, far-right extremists have been ever more viciously attacking the country’s Chinese and Christian minorities.

Thankfully, there is one huge exception to this alarming trend of growing racist reaction. In the world’s most populous country, the Peoples Republic of China (PRC), a person from one of that nation’s numerous ethnic minorities or an international student can be almost certain that they are not going to be attacked or abused on the streets just because of their ethnicity. It is no accident that this big exception to the rule happens to be the only large country in the world which is not under capitalist rule. Although capitalists have been allowed to gain a significant place in the Chinese economy, the PRC still represents a fundamentally different system and continues to be dominated by socialistic, state-owned enterprises. The Chinese working class, albeit in a deformed way, continues to cling onto state power and that makes a world of difference.

For Militant Anti-Racist Struggle Driven by
Multi-Racial Working Class & Minority Communities

The danger facing racial minorities in most of the world was made all too clear in the German city of Chemnitz over the last few days. Seizing on the death there of a man during a fight with immigrants, thousands of fascists descended on the city chanting “foreigners out” and giving Nazi salutes. The neo-Nazis rampaged through the city bashing any person of colour they could find. Terrified immigrants stayed locked in their houses for days. Although the 1990 capitalist reunification of Germany was associated with a resurgence of far-right violence, Germany has not seen such a huge unleashing of fascist terror since the end of Nazi rule. The fact is that if the decaying capitalist system is allowed to run its course and the far-right resurgence is not combated immediately, a number of countries may well experience an outright takeover by Hitler-style fascists within the next decade.

The multi-racial working class must be mobilised to protect targeted communities from the rising tide of racist reaction. This is a matter of self-defence for the workers movement. By terrifying ethnic minority workers, racist attacks intimidate this crucial section of the working class and, thus, damage the capacity of the entire workers movement to resist the exploiters. Moreover, racism harms workers unity and the ability of workers to fight against the ever-increasing attacks on their wages and unions. Therefore, the working class movement must spearhead the following action program:

  • Mass mobilisations of trade unionists standing alongside people from African, Asian, Middle Eastern and Aboriginal backgrounds as well as Muslims, Jews, LGBTIQ communities and leftists must stop the fascists when they try to mobilise in public. Similar mobilisations must over-run any training centre or bunker that violent white supremacists seek to establish. It is difficult to mobilise against the numerous, disparate acts of racist violence by garden variety rednecks that occur every single day. However, by dealing severe blows in public to the extreme, politically racist elements, we can send a strong message to the unorganised racists that it is not in their interests to stick their ugly necks out and commit racist attacks.
  •  All racist government policies must be opposed. We must fight to free the refugees, stop all deportations and win the rights of citizenship for all refugees, guest workers and overseas students.
  • The workers movement must be mobilised to support Aboriginal people’s struggle for justice and demand an end to the state’s systematic oppression which leads to so many black people being killed in state custody by racist police and prison guards. This perspective must seek to build towards trade union industrial action in support of justice for victims of racist state terror.
  • Economic nationalist schemes must be rejected – protectionism does not save jobs but, instead, by pitting workers in one country against another, makes it harder for workers to unite to stop their bosses slashing jobs. What we need in order to fight for secure, permanent jobs for all is class struggle action demanding that capitalist business owners increase hiring at the expense of their fat profits all around the globe.

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In waging such struggles we must be aware that as long as capitalism with its social decay, unemployment and need for racist divide and conquer schemes continues to rule the roost, racist violence and the threat of a full-on fascist takeover will be ever present. However, to advance towards the socialist revolution that is needed to sweep away the capitalist order, we must unite working class people and teach them to understand their own power through mobilising actions right now against racist and anti-union attacks. That means we need to struggle for a new program to gain the ascendancy in our trade union movement: a program that rejects the currently dominant agenda of Laborism with its false hopes in salvation through parliament and its divisive economic nationalism. More than ever, we need a program based on militant class struggle and the building of genuine unity between workers of all races, local, guest and international workers.

Concerned Progressive Small-l Liberals & Social
Democrats Powerless to Stop Right-Wing Racist Reaction

Many small-l liberals and respectable “dissenting voices” have expressed alarm at the increased incitement of racial, misogynist and homophobic hatred by mainstream figures. Their concern is genuinely felt. However, because they are part of the capitalist establishment that is the root cause of the growing social reaction, they are powerless to resist the Far Right or to even identify the factors behind its growth. Thus, we see fair-minded, middle class commentators in the media, academia and NGO milieu tying themselves up in knots as they try to explain away the rise of the Extreme Right by pointing, variously, to things like automation of production, social media culture causing people to not listen to each other, a lack of education about democracy, contemporary leaders being not what their forebears were … indeed just about anything but the plain truth that those at the top of the decaying capitalist order actually need to promote racism and other forms of bigotry for the sake of dividing and diverting the masses that they exploit.

Some ALP, and more often Greens, politicians do sometimes rebuff the most extreme statements from hard right-wing politicians. However, such resistance tends to be weak or inconsistent because the ALP and The Greens, themselves, uphold the racist capitalist order. When you do hear Greens – and less often Labor – politicians speaking out strongly against bigotry is when they are speaking to a particular, sympathetic audience, like at an anti-racism rally, in which case they work hard to get all the votes they can get! Yet, rarely will you hear them emphasising the same message to the general public – for example in their election platforms.

Unlike the “progressive” mainstream politicians chasing the perks and fame of a parliamentary career, anti-racist activists from the Far Left are, for the most part, idealistic people driven by a genuine hatred of racism. However, most of the avowedly socialist groups tail after the ALP and The Greens. Though these groups often do make correct criticisms of these parties, their basic strategy for social change revolves around campaigning to elect ALP/Greens governments and then hoping to use mass pressure to push these governments to the left. The most shameless about following this perspective is the Solidarity group but the strategy of Socialist Alliance and Socialist Alternative is, in essence, the same. At the rally held in Sydney on the day Scott Morrison became prime minister, leading members of the Solidarity group openly urged the pro-refugee activists gathered to campaign at the next elections for the ALP and Greens … and, yes, to also pressure these parties to be fairer to refugees. These “far left” rally organisers allowed an ALP youth leader to speak and put forward an ALP election pitch without making anything, even nearing, a commitment to opposing the imprisonment of refugees on Manus and Nauru and without having to face any criticism from rally organisers.

How bankrupt this “campaign for the ALP/Greens and push them to the left” strategy is can be seen by recalling that it was the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd Labor regime in its final months that introduced the heinous policy that every asylum seeker arriving by sea will be imprisoned in an off-shore camp with no chance of residency in Australia. Now, Shorten’s ALP is descending even further into White Australia chauvinism. Last year, the Labor Party ran a video saying that it would “Employ Australians First” with visuals where nearly all the Australians shown were white Anglos. The ALP advertisement’s unmistakable racist message – that white people had to be supposedly protected from having their jobs taken away by non-white people – was so blatant that even right-wing politicians attacked it for dog whistling to racism!

The Greens have, by contrast, sometimes spoken out against such overt White Australia racism. Yet, The Greens simultaneously push divisive economic nationalist appeals – for example, by calling for tougher restrictions on guest workers and schemes to restrict steel imports. Such policies that call for putting the interests of (mainly white) Australian workers over (overwhelmingly coloured) workers from “Third World” countries inevitably reinforce White Australia xenophobic prejudices. NSW Greens senator, David Shoebridge, who, to his credit, has sometimes spoken out in support of Aboriginal victims of state violence, has been coming to the aid of the far-right Chinese-based group, Falun Dafa. Falun Dafa are characterised by extreme homophobia, a fascistic urge for racial segregation and a belief that mixed-race people are inferior. They have even held joint meetings with the white supremacist Party for Freedom and several of their members are One Nation supporters, including former One Nation candidate, Shan Ju Lin, who was later dumped as a candidate because her Falun Dafa-style homophobia was so extreme that it was an embarrassment even to Pauline Hanson, herself!

The support of a progressive Greens parliamentarian for the racist and homophobic Falun Dafa typifies more broadly why the Greens and the ALP can never be an effective force against bigotry. Shoebridge defends Falun Dafa because he shares that outfit’s anti-communist hostility to Red China. This flows from an outlook which, like that of the rest of the ALP and Greens, is based on accepting the existing capitalist order whilst seeking to make some progressive reforms to it through parliament. Greens and ALP politicians understand all too well that winning parliamentary seats and gaining acceptance of any reforms made there requires winning the confidence, or at least the acceptance, of the capitalist bigwigs who shape elections and parliaments through their domination of the media, NGO think thanks and political donations. The Greens and ALP will, inevitably, continue to kowtow to the capitalist ruling class in all major areas, be it their hostility to socialistic China or their need to divert the exploited masses with reactionary nationalism. No amount of left-wing pressure is going to fundamentally change this. Indeed, even a party that is substantially more left-wing than either the ALP and The Greens but which still acquiesces to capitalist state power cannot deliver serious relief from racist reaction and union-busting. Just look at Greece. To the cheers of Australian left groups like Socialist Alliance and Socialist Alternative, the radical left-wing party, Syriza, gained strength and eventually won Greek elections in 2015. Yet, in government they are administering anti-working class austerity measures that are as savage as did the conservative governments before them. Today, racist and homophobic violence in Greece continues to be on the increase.

Instead of looking for salvation through parliament, we fight for mass actions to force capitalist governments to grant concessions – such as pulling back from anti-working class and racist measures. Such gains can be won not because of the virtues of a particular party holding government office but when the masses have mobilised strongly enough to force the enemy to grant a concession. Illusions that progressive change can come through electing ALP or ALP-Greens governments is one of the biggest obstacles to such militant, mass struggle. For such illusions make the working class and the oppressed falsely believe that the capitalist state can be their friend and that progressive change does not require the arduous and often hazardous road of extra-parliamentary struggle.

As the federal elections draw near and reformist left groups divert well-meaning youth into the dead end “campaign for the ALP/ Greens and push them to the left” strategy, we will be working harder than ever to warn of the hopelessness of such a parliamentary-based strategy as part of our fight to mobilise the working class and all the oppressed in mass actions against racist violence and against the racist policies of capitalist governments. Let’s organise powerful actions of workers and “ethnic” communities to defend targeted minorities from violent far-right scum. Let’s join together to over-run and smash to smithereens the bunkers and training gyms of white supremacist paramilitary groups! Let’s build mass struggle – that will lead to workers’ industrial action – and demand justice for Aboriginal victims of racist state violence, the closure of the Manus and Nauru hell-hole detention camps, an end to all deportations and full citizenship rights for all refugees, guest workers and international students. The time is right – not just in words but in real, on the street, militant action – for workers from all countries to unite and fight!