Arguing for socialism

Report on 'Towards a Socialist Australia'

2011-12-06T21:44:00.000-08:00

[The following report was presented to the Socialist Alliance Melbourne district meeting on December 6, 2011 and later to Geelong branch. While it was speaking to the first draft of the resolution (see Towards a Socialist Australia), I think the main points made remain relevant.]

Purpose of the resolution

The basic purpose of the document is to make a clear, logical and succinct case for socialism and explain what we want. We have policy resolutions on a great range of questions but nothing that pulls it all together and explains what we are fighting for, the big picture — a fundamental change in the way our society and economy is organised and what some of the key elements of this are.

The document is an extended argument. It is not really a conjunctural document — except, of course, to outline the looming catastrophe of climate change and an economic crisis which may well end up being worse than the Great Depression. The document doesn't mention everything about Australian or world politics and I think it would be a mistake if we tried to do that. In my view it's concerned with the main line of the argument.

The text is not burdened with lots of references for figures quoted (although they could be added in small print at the end if this is thought to be desirable).

If we can get broad agreement on a document like this, I think it would be a big step forward for the Socialist Alliance and a big element in solidifying us around an overall vision of what we are struggling for.

What will we do with the resolution? If we adopt this document, however modified by the conference, I imagine we would print it up — like the climate charter or our Gender Agenda. It would be something very useful to be able to distribute to interested people and to initiate discussions around, especially with new members.

Some key ideas in document

Overall, the global political temperature is heating up: the physical temperature is climbing and climate change is definitely here and worsening; and the world economy is in growing crisis. These things are fueling an unprecendented rise of opposition to the insanities of neoliberalism on a global scale.

The draft explains that the our government is making no meaningful response to climate change. For example, the corporate rush to open more and more coal mines is truly insane.

And official claims that Australia is protected from the storm buffeting world capitalism are demonstrably untrue. Several decades of neoliberal attacks have already made life very stressful for a considerable number of people. And we can be sure that a lot more misery will find its way here even if it develops more slowly than in Europe.

There is also the scandal of continuing Indigenous oppression and disadvantage, exemplified by the continuing bipartisan attack of the Intervention.

Can't reform or control capitalism

On thing that is clearly implied but not openly stated is that we don't think you can in any realistic way reform or control capitalism. I think it's fair to say that the Greens' view is that through legislation the excesses and abuses of the system can be reined in. However, in my opinion there is absolutely no evidence that this will ever really happen.

Even if there are resonable laws on the books, they are flouted, ignored or simply not enforced. Look at Baiada Poultry in Victoria, for instance. How could a big company break the law by paying so many workers cash in hand for so long and no government agency ever did anything whatsoever about it?

Working people create the wealth of society

The labour of working people creates the wealth of society. The rich are wealthy not because of their genius but because they are able to appropriate the toil of the masses.

The bosses are able to do this because they own the means of production. We have no alternative — we have to work for them. We get wages, they get the surplus — the profits.

The economy is a social enterprise, a product of the work of the mass of the people yet it is controlled by a handful of people, the 1% and is run solely to make profits for them. That is the source of our problems and it has to be addressed up front.

Economy must be in hands of society

While privatisation (especially of basic services like health, education, power and water) is very unpopular, there is almost zero public discussion on reversing the sell-offs and even less about expanding the public sector to new areas of the economy. It is not discussed and very few people would believe it is remotely feasible.

But we can't duck or fudge this issue. The corporations which control our economy, on which we all depend, must be taken over by society, that is, nationalised — or, if you prefer, socialised. Unless this is done, nothing can be changed; we certainly won't stop climate change. The late socialist ecologist Barry Commoner once said that the role of the corporations and bringing them under social control was a big unspoken taboo in the United States. That's still true and here as well.

Should absolutely everything be owned by society, right down to a corner store? We don't need to pronounce on that. The draft simply says the key sectors of the economy (what is often termed the 'commanding heights') should be in public hands. In my opinion all the corporations should be taken over. Small businesses (a store, etc.) are not the problem.

Critique of capitalist democracy

The draft contains the basic socialist critique of capitalist democracy — on one level it's real but the formal rights are severely circumscribed in practice. As long as the economy is privately owned it will be limited.

For example, dissident voices are largely excluded from the mass media, which is mainly privately owned. Look, for instance at the progressive comedian Catherine Deveny. For some years she had a column in the Age. She had a very high profile and really served it up on some issues. But she fell from grace and the paper axed her. Now you hardly hear about her. The mass media has a tremendous power and reach and ability to shape public concerns and perceptions.

Whole areas of social life are excluded from democratic oversight — the economy and the state machine (law, the government departments, etc).

Murdoch has one vote; so does the homeless person living in a box under a bridge. But what does that vote mean in practice? It's very much a soporific — you suffer in daily life but at the ballot box we are all equal. But after you have your vote things go on exactly as before — or your workplace may be closed and you are out of a job. You didn't get to vote on that.

For real democracy

The draft sketches some of the main changes we want to see. First of all, the economy should be in the hands of society. Control of the social economy is a fundamental basis of people's power.

It's true the draft doesn't outline a new institutional framework (i.e., organs of people's power) but that would be rather speculative and what is outlined is certainly radical enough!

With their latest pay rise our federal pollies have risen into the social stratosphere compared to the mass of their constituents so our demand that MPs work for average workers' wages plus the other points is effectively a call for a new system.

Public officials should be elected — judges, heads of departments, etc. We can argue exactly who but the elective principal should be seriously extended into the state bureaucracy.

Likewise workers should control their workplaces and elect their managers.

Economic plans (at all levels: central, regional, local) should be discussed and the key elements voted on.

The road to the future

It is pointless to set down some schema about exactly how socialism will come about. There have been so many variants and history will doubtless show us new ones in the future.

But the main the main lesson of all history is that no progressive change will come about without a big struggle. The capitalists will not give way unless they are compelled to do so and the only force that can do this is the organised, united, mobilised power of the people.

All sorts of campaigning organisations can play a part. But the classes oppressed by capitalism need above all a political leadership, i.e., a mass militant socialist party which unites as many as possible of those actually playing a leading role in the struggle.

Beyond these basic points we don't really need to go here.

What would a socialist government do?

Paragraph 69 deals with the hoary old reproach addressed to socialists that we think everything will automatically be miraculously changed the day after capitalism has been abolished.

History is made by human beings and mistakes, detours and relapses are all possible. All we claim is that by taking control of the economy and establishing a system of peoples power we have established the best possible framework for moving forward and tackling the problems inherited from the past.

Is socialism possible?

What should we say here? In my opinion we have to mention all the polemics of the ruling class ideologists against socialism and what lies at the heart of them, that is, the ludicrous notion that an appeal to greed is better that banking on solidarity and social cooperation.

I think we also need to at least mention Stalinism. If we don't other people will raise it: what about the Soviet Union etc? Some comrades don't want anything explicit here which would be a barrier to joining up with people from the old CPs, from the Maoist or state capitalist traditions. I understand that but I think we have to find a formulation which says or implies that the future will be different, otherwise I think the document will be unconvincing on this point.

Towards a socialist Australia

2011-11-30T21:26:00.000-08:00

[This was written as part of the process of preparing a draft resolution for the Socialist Alliance January 2012 National Conference.]

A world in turmoil

The 21st century is shaping up to be a pivotal one as human society faces a profound and deepening crisis.

Runaway climate change caused by soaring greenhouse gas emissions threatens the survival of life on the planet.

Alongside this developing ecological disaster the capitalist world is being shaken by what is perhaps its greatest ever economic crisis.

The capitalist response to these challenges is business as usual and ever more severe attacks on the welfare of the people and restrictions of democratic space. Huge resources are expended on repression, militarism and war rather than urgent and equitable solutions to the challenges we face.

Climate change real and immediate

The reality of climate change is manifesting itself ever more sharply in a host of 'extreme weather' events. The media headlines are dominated by reports of heatwaves, droughts, melting ice-sheets, floods, seawater incursions, extra-severe winters, hurricanes and tornadoes. All exact their toll of human misery, especially in the Third World which is in no way responsible for the crisis.

The solution to climate change is known and simple: rapidly phase out the use of fossil fuels and make a mass-scale switch to renewables. But gigantic economic interests at the heart of the capitalist system have massive investments in coal, oil, gas and nuclear power and will not change.

The sole operating imperative of the big corporations is to secure the greatest possible profits for their super-rich owners — regardless of the consequences to the planet and its people.

Economic meltdown

Combined with the ecological crisis and flowing from the same fundamental cause is an ongoing crisis of the international capitalist economy, possibly more severe than the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The United States, the mainstay of world capitalism, is gripped by seemingly intractable problems. The ruling class refuses to countenance serious tax increases or curb militarism so the government is debasing the currency and attacking welfare entitlements. Millions of people have been evicted from their homes.

In Europe the response of capitalist governments to the crisis is savage austerity and further selloffs of state assets.

In all cases the governments first task is to protect the bankers and speculators whose unrestrained greed has brought on the problem.

Governments avoid climate action

Australia has the highest per capita greenhouse gas emissions of any country. We not only depend heavily on fossil fuels but are the world's largest exporter of coal. In an insane denial of the desperate seriousness of climate change, there is a veritable orgy of new coal mines being planned and developed across the country. In many instances prime farmland is being destroyed putting our food supply in peril.

Rather than a full-scale switch to renewable power sources, the federal ALP government is promoting a move to gas, another fossil fuel with an emissions profile almost as bad as coal. Thousands of coal-seam gas wells using the incredibly destructive hydraulic fracking technology are being sunk across the continent, threatening people's health and livelihoods.

Also taking place is a massive expansion of uranium mining to fuel the nuclear industry (so far in other countries). Nuclear power with its potentially catastrophic safety risks, unresolvable waste storage issues, and high greenhouse gas emission footprint is no solution to climate change — but it is immensely profitable.

The switch to renewable energy across the board is being blocked by those who profit from the polluting industries. Lib-Lab governments have refused to invest in clean industries and green jobs, instead choosing to subsidise the fossil fuel industry to the tune of billions each year.

In NSW and Victoria the state Liberal governments have imposed crippling restrictions on the wind and solar industries, making the take-up of these sustainable technologies far less feasible or economically attractive.

Economic crisis already here

Apologists for the system constantly tell us that Australia is faring better than most in the world economic storm. The reality, however, is very different.

It is true that we have not yet experienced the savage cutbacks that the Greek people are facing. But decades of neoliberal attacks have already had a marked impact. Privatisation, outsourcing, casualisation, restructuring, deregulation and user pays are radically changing the conditions of life of the great majority. Insecurity and fear of the future is widespread and growing.

Utilities bills are soaring to previously unimagined levels presenting a real challenge to large numbers of ordinary people. The rising cost of living, health care and education are slowly undermining and destroying the lives of millions.

Real distress grips a significant part of the population. Two million people — 9% of the population — live in poverty. The poorest 20% owns only 1% of total household wealth, while the richest 20% owns 61%. At least 100,000 people are homeless on any given night.

As in the United States, Australia has its working poor, that is, people whose wages are too meagre to cover their basic expenses or give them any degree of comfort or security.

Many pensioners are condemned to a miserable existence on a disgracefully low fortnightly payment.

The unemployment benefit is even worse and is impossible to live on. While the official unemployment is a 'low' 5.3%, the real figure for people looking for fulltime work and unable to find it is at least double that.

Indigenous oppression remains

Since white colonisation began in 1788 the Indigenous population has suffered the trauma of invasion, enslavement, assimilation, genocide, racist exclusion, land theft, the destruction of life, language and culture, and the denial of basic human rights.

The Rudd government's official apology was an important symbolic step forward but remains a hollow gesture. The scandal of black deaths in custody continues and racism is endemic.

The Northern Territory Intervention is a massive bipartisan attack on Indigenous rights and welfare. It represents an attempt to gain control of enormous potential mineral wealth for the benefit of the corporate rich.

Corporate welfare versus social welfare

Australia is a wealthy, industrially developed First World country. We have the material-technical means to give everyone a decent comfortable life and be able to help out our poorer neighbours.

Yet calls to address the disgraceful state of healthcare, housing, welfare and social services are met with the mantra 'Where's the money going to come from?' At the same time the big corporations post ever higher profits which flow solely to their shareholders (the 1% oligarchy).

While social programs face endless cutbacks, 'corporate welfare' is booming with handouts, tax breaks, concessions, and cosy contracts such as public-private partnerships. The official company tax rate is a very low 30% but many of the big corporations pay far less. Faced with the opposition of the mining industry, the federal ALP government capitulated, abandoning its projected mining super-profits tax.

Billions are wasted on militarism. Australia has been an enthusiastic participant in the imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These countries have been wrecked and hundreds of thousands killed. When desperate refugees try to flee to a new life in our country they are demonised by the government and subjected to fresh torments.

Economy must be owned by society

The source of all our problems is due to the fact that the economic infrastructure of society is privately owned. A tiny handful of people — the capitalist class, the 1%, the super-rich, the corporate oligarchy — own the means of production, distribution and exchange. They own the corporations that own the mines, factories, banks, transport networks, supermarket chains, media empires, and so on.

The Rupert Murdochs, James Packers, Gerry Harveys, Gina Rienharts, Andrew Forrests, Frank Lowys etc. dominate the headlines but behind each of these pillars of the 1% is an army of workers whose stolen labour makes up their profits.

The economy is a social enterprise. We all depend on it and the labour of working people keeps the wheels turning. But because the capitalists own it they get the profits. The workers get wages and getting a decent wage is a constant struggle against entrenched corporate power backed by the state.

The media constantly talk about 'the markets' as if they are some sort of all-powerful deity whereas actually this is code for profit-crazed capitalists and greedy speculators. The economic universe we are presented with excludes any alternative. But our economic and social relationships are a human creation, not an act of god. They can be changed.

The economy must be brought under social ownership and control. The commanding heights of the economy should be publicly owned (whether federal, state or municipal). The privatisations of recent decades should be reversed and the public sector massively expanded.

With the economic levers in our hands we could elaborate a conscious plan focused on meeting human needs. Combating climate change and building a sustainable economy would be the most urgent priority.

Plans would be democratically decided. Workplaces would be controlled by their employees. There would be no obscenely overpaid CEOs and insecure badly paid workers with no say in what happens.

Capitalist democracy purely formal and limited

While clearly an advance on dictatorship, capitalist democracy is more formal than real. Every few years we get to choose which of two neoliberal parties will govern on behalf of the rich. So much of the electoral spectacle is theatre as the media tries to pretend that there are real differences between the pro-corporate Coalition and the equally pro-corporate Labor Party.

The very limited democracy we have does not extend to the economy, the workplace or the state apparatus. There ownership rights, managerial prerogatives, and hierarchy and subordination rule largely unchecked.

The civil liberties we enjoy are real and important. They are a result of past struggles. But they are fundamentally undermined by severe practical limitations inherent in the way capitalism works.

We enjoy the right of free speech. You can shout your head off on just about any subject but the corporate media is privately owned and essentially inaccessible to ordinary people so the audience you can reach is limited.

Workers' ability to fight the bosses for better wages and conditions is heavily circumscribed by anti-union laws which criminalise a whole range of activities (strike action except under limited conditions, solidarity action, etc.).

For real democracy, for people's power

We need a system of popular democracy that empowers the mass of people.

A first step is public ownership of the economic base of society on which we all depend. Real democracy is impossible if one part of society owns the economy and the other part is compelled to work for them.

Parliament requires some fundamental reforms. MPs should carry out their duties on the wages of an average worker. They should be subject to recall through a simple process if their electors are dissatisfied. The voting age should be lowered to 16 years.

All public officials in leading positions should be subject to election and recall.

Workers should be able to elect their managers and generally control their workplaces, especially in regard to health and safety. Anti-union laws should be scrapped.

The main goals and targets of economic activity should be publicly discussed and voted on.

The mass media should be radically opened up to reflect the interests and concerns of ordinary people.

How will we get there?

How will fundamental social change come about? The road to the future is not charted but long experience shows that we will get nothing unless we fight for it. The struggle of the people, of the great working-class majority, is decisive in winning real change and defending it.

The capitalist oligarchy and its hangers on will fight to the end to defend their privileges and ill-gotten wealth. They will not simply hand over the keys to the mansion and quietly leave. They will have to be compelled to stand aside. Only the power of the organised and mobilised working-class majority can do this.

The creation of militant campaigning organisations is crucial. The most important of these is a mass-based, fighting socialist party, uniting as much of the real vanguard of the struggle as possible.

History teaches us that there are many possible scenarios for the victory of the people. The struggle will decide. But even if popular forces committed to fundamental change win an electoral victory, we will have to mobilise in the streets, workplaces, schools, campuses and neighbourhoods to defend any progressive moves made against the power of the corporate rich.

Towards socialism

If we have overcome capitalism, if the economy is socially owned and controlled, if we have a system of institutionalised popular power — then we have a framework for effectively dealing with the ecological and social problems of the past.

The most urgent order of business of a real people's government would be an emergency program of action to tackle the looming disaster of climate change. We need to make a forced march to build a sustainable economy. We need to ensure our food and water supply, prepare to live under higher temperatures, and so on.

A peoples' government would sign a treaty with the Aboriginal people recognising their original dispossession and move rapidly to overcome Indigenous disadvantage at all levels and in all sectors of society.

The guiding principle of a post-capitalist society would be the welfare of the people. The satisfaction of the needs of the people — all the people, not just a few as in the past — would be the aim of all economic activity and social policy. Gradually more and more basic goods and services could be provided without charge (healthcare, education, transport, welfare, etc.).

Each individual would have the means to live a life of dignity and fulfilment, without exception. Discrimination and prejudice would be wiped out. Everyone would be looked after to the limits of our possibilities; no one would be abandoned to their fate.

This is socialism — a truly human society.

Is it possible?

Apologists for capitalism have long devoted enormous efforts to polemicising against socialism. They constantly try to prove that it is a completely utopian exercise, flying in the face of human nature; that it will never work; or that it will always lead to Stalinist dictatorship.

Of course, the idea that society will only function if we have a system of organised, institutional greed — that is, capitalism — is completely ludicrous. Our current problems have arisen precisely because we have such a society. To save our ourselves we need a sharp change of direction

The capitalist apologists ignore the fact that anticapitalist revolutions in Russia and China began in very difficult economic circumstances and faced constant attacks from the imperialist powers that used war, terrorism and economic sabotage to undermine them. If they had met support and disinterested aid, things may well have turned out completely differently.

Overcoming the power of the 1%

2011-11-13T01:01:00.000-08:00

[Green Left Weekly, #903, November 16, 2011]

The global Occupy movement has focused the spotlight on the dichotomy of the 1% versus the 99%. Who are these 1%? In the United States the 400 richest individuals have as much wealth as the bottom 150 million. A similar picture would apply in all the major capitalist countries.

Economy owned by the 1%

The source of their power derives from their ownership and control of the economic infrastructure of society. A relative handful of people own the means of production, distribution and exchange. They own the corporations that own the mines, factories, banks, transport networks, supermarket chains, media empires, and so on.

This is monopoly capitalism. Each sector of the economy is dominated by a few giant corporations. They are continually engaged in ruthless competition — against each other and against their workforces.

The concentration of economic power is increasing. In Australia, for instance, Coles and Woolworths together account for 75% of grocery and liquor sales. The German giant Aldi is steadily pushing in. Coles parent company Wesfarmers owns the huge Bunnings hardware chain and Woolworths intends to open its own chain to take the struggle right up to its rival.

From time to time capitalist apologists trumpet that we have a "shareholding democracy". This is patently false. Some ordinary people may have shares to augment their basic income but they control nothing; their investment is just a cheap loan to the company. Real control remains completely with the 1%.

Working class

In order to survive, ordinary people have to work for the corporations of the 1%. The great bulk of the population in countries like Australia and the US belongs to the working class, i.e., people who have to work for a living. A still substantial number are state employees but their environment is an increasingly corporatised, "profit" driven one.

The modern working class is very diverse. It ranges from a Vietnamese woman outworker sewing garments for miserable piece rates in her living room to a highly skilled welder earning over $100,000 a year on a big infrastructure project.

Who creates the wealth?

The economy is a social enterprise. We all depend on it and the labour of working people keeps the wheels turning. But because the 1% own the bank, factory, mine, freight company or supermarket they get the profits. The workers get wages and, as we know, getting a decent wage is a constant struggle against entrenched corporate power backed by the state.

There is an alternative

In the media we are constantly confronted with the phrase "the markets". This is code for profit-crazed capitalists and greedy speculators. The economic universe we are presented with excludes any alternative. This is simply self-serving ideological rubbish.

Our economic and social relationships are a human construct, not an act of god. They can be changed.

Capitalism arose out of the historical process. Its rise was marked by ferocious struggles — against the old feudal order, against working people, and against peoples in other countries who resisted colonial conquest.

Economy should be socially owned

The Occupy movement is assailed by establishment critics who ask what are our demands. But clearly what we want is a world where there is no 1% dominating society.

Socialists argue that the only way this can happen is if the economy is brought under social ownership and control. The commanding heights of the economy should be publicly owned (whether federal, state, municipal or cooperative).

Plans would be democratically decided. Workplaces would be controlled by their employees. There would be no obscenely overpaid CEOs and insecure badly paid workers.

This is the socialist perspective. It will take a massive prolonged struggle to overcome the entrenched power of the 1% but there truly is no alternative. Either we overcome them or they will destroy the planet and most of us along with it.

Hands over the city: Towards an urban nightmare

2011-10-08T19:43:00.000-07:00

[This is an edited version of a workshop talk given on October 2, 2011 at the World at a Crossroads conference in Melbourne.]

In this talk I want to give an overview of the crisis of our cities as I see it. The city I focus on is Melbourne, where I live. But I doubt that the broad situation is much different in the other states.

Cities corporate 'free-fire' zones

Modern cities are "free-fire" zones for the corporations. And the situation is getting worse. We can't work out what to do without understanding this basic reality.

Everything is organised for the profit-making convenience of the corporations, especially the ubiquitous "property developers". If councils raise any serious objections to the plans of the developers, major projects face an override by the state government planning minister. This power is used more and more frequently.

As a result of the purely capitalist development of our cities we face a combined social and ecological crisis that is becoming ever more alarming.

The title of this talk — Hands Over the City — comes from a 1963 Italian movie by Francesco Rosi. Rod Steiger plays a ruthless developer in Naples whose crappy block of flats collapses killing several people. A lone communist on the city council fights to reveal the corrupt relationships between municipal officials and developers. The story sums up a period in Italian postwar political life.

Developers on the loose

Melbourne's development has always been shaped by the pressures of property developers and big capitalists. Michael Cannon's 1966 book The Land Boomers deals with the speculative boom in the Melbourne of the 1880s and early 1890s. Reading it today gives one the feeling that nothing fundamental has changed in well over a century. Cannon describes the development of the rail system:

Hundreds of miles of track, some of it quite useless, pushed out from the egocentric city to the rampant suburbs and the far countryside. Hardly a member of parliament whose vote could be bought went without his bribe in the form of a new railway, a spur line, or advance information on governmental plans to enable him to buy choice land in advance — the value of which was enormously enhanced when the line went through. It was a dispiriting chapter in Victorian political morality.[1]

"Developers" are really capitalist sharks preying on the fish of the public. They will always act this way and governments will always be disposed to accommodate them.

Bay dredging

One horrible recent example of the profits-first orientation of business and government is Port Phillip Bay. Big capital pushed for the dredging of the heads irrespective of all the warnings of damage to the bay and its ecosystem.

Despite former ALP premier Brumby's blithe claims that all the doomsayers had been proven wrong, today Portsea's bayside beach is disappearing — a disintegrating sandbag wall vainly trying to hold back the water — and others have been hit hard. The widening and deepening of the heads will accelerate the impact of climate change in years to come.

A consequence of the reckless development of Melbourne's port is that inner city residents (Footscray, Yarraville, etc.) are living in a unending nightmare as heavy trucks from the docks rumble past their doors 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They bring with them intolerable levels of noise and emissions, and serious safety issues.

This is the Melbourne equivalent of Sydney's airport crisis. A major piece of economic infrastructure has been sited right next to where people live and its operation is dramatically worsening people's quality of life.

Building sustainable cities

Under the heading of sustainability we need to consider: How our cities are structured; how we move around; how we house ourselves; how we get our power and water; and how we get our food.

'Big city' & urban sprawl

Melbourne now has just over four million inhabitants and is fast closing on Sydney’s 4.5 million. Since 2001 our population has increased by some 600,000 people.

Melbourne faces a projected doubling of population in the next decades. Under current conditions this means more sprawl as housing estates gobble up farmland in all directions — to Ballarat, Geelong and Warragul.

All this new development will be served by yet more roads. Many more people will face Los Angeles style hours-long car commutes to get to work. The already grossly inadequate public transport system will face collapse under unprecedented demands.

The corporate media uses the perfectly rational fear of this horrible prospect to whip up hatred against migrants and refugees. The problem however is not people per se but the system which puts corporate profitability ahead of human need — that is the very essence of capitalism.

Green wedges &open space

We face a constant erosion of public space and now the Baillieu government is reviewing the ban on development in the non-urban green belt that surrounds the city beyond the urban growth boundary — the so-called "green wedges". About one-third of the total green wedge area is public land, including national parks, other parks and reserves and protected water catchments.

Clearly it is setting the scene for unleashing developers on an area absolutely vital to the health of the city. And with an increased likelihood of devastating bushfires due to climate change, to push further into the bush seems like complete madness.

Freeway madness vs public transport

Successive Labor and Liberal governments have promoted a policy of roads, more roads and yet more roads. Modern freeways are huge industrial installations that scar the landscape, causing severe loss of amenity, noise pollution, and health problems.

In his 1973 work Energy and Equity, the social critic Ivan Illich puts the spotlight on the dubious benefits of commodified motor vehicle transport:

The model American male devotes more than 1600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly instalments. He works to pay for gasoline, tolls, insurance, taxes, and tickets. He spends four of his 16 waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it. And this figure does not take into account the time consumed by other activities dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts, and garages; time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer education meetings to improve the quality of the next buy. The model American puts in 1600 hours to get 7500 miles: less than five miles per hour.[2]

Creating livable cities and coping with peak oil and the climate crisis all mean there must be a truly radical shift to public transport. But our Lib-Lab governments absolutely refuse to do it. Timetables are cut, trams and trains ever more crowded, purchases of rolling stock are woefully inadequate, no new lines are built and the whole system is generally starved of resources.

Age cartoonist Tandberg’s view is spot on!

Housing in crisis

Today's housing crisis has a number of aspects.

There is a crisis of housing affordability as speculators push prices beyond reach of ordinary people. Of those who actually buy a house, a growing number are suffering "mortgage stress" as their ability to meet their commitments falters (job loss, casualised low-paid work, etc.).

There is a rental crisis as too many people chase too few properties. Many cannot afford to buy and the rental stock is grossly inadequate. Vacant properties exist but are not made available due to "banking" by developers.

There is a crisis of public housing. Very little is being built and the existing stock is under savage attack. Under the cover of creating "social housing", hundreds of units have been privatised and thousands more are slated to suffer the same fate. Precious space on public housing estates is being handed over to private developers for a song.

Instead of building public housing governments would rather give welfare recipients an inadequate subsidy to pay to their private landlord. Some 1.1 million renters now receive Commonwealth rent assistance amounting to $3 billion a year — a big indirect handout to landlord "investors".[3] How much better it would be if these funds were used to build quality public housing so low income people could permanently escape from the clutches of landlord vultures.

Not surprisingly homelessness is a problem now suffered by tens of thousands in Melbourne. This could be solved very quickly — if there was the political will. Build tens of thousands of decent public housing units, take over vacant buildings and convert them to residential use, peg rents to a fixed percentage of income, and so on.

Sustainable housing is restricted to new developments, with the requirements watered down to suit the greedy developers. A massive government financed program to retrofit all existing stock never gets a look in.

Power bill nightmare

Privatisation by Labor and the Coalition in the 1990s means power bills are now soaring to pay for big infrastructure upgrades. The only reason we have to pay for these is because the power companies are now in private hands and exist to make a profit. Otherwise the cost could be borne by higher taxes on the big end of town and government infrastructure loans.

And now we are confronted by a rollout of expensive "smart meters". This is absolutely the wrong way to go. While electronic smart meters may not be inherently bad, as presently configured and used with new tariffs they are designed to help the power companies, not ordinary people.

If you switch your power consumption to the middle of the night you'll get some concession but if you don't, life will become impossible for many ordinary people. A lot of low income people may well end up eating cans of dog food in the dark.

And making the big switch to renewables or promoting real energy conservation? Don’t hold your breath.

Water security

Labor set up the Wonthaggi desalination plant. Despite some theatre on the issue, the incoming Baillieu Liberal government never intended to cancel the contract.

Of course, there is plenty of water in the storages right now but the clear projection under global warming is for severe shortages. However, instead of pushing ahead with the Wonthaggi monstrosity the government should be aggressively rolling out rainwater tanks and other conservation measures across the city. Instead, it is doing absolutely nothing.

Food supply

Our food supply is in the grip of giant corporations, especially the two supermarket colossi — Coles and Woolworths. While supermarkets offer an undoubted convenience, as constituted they are unsustainable energywise, and gouge customers and small suppliers alike.

As climate change starts to bite really hard it will be intolerable that our food is in the hands of the corporate profiteers. Coles and Woolworths should be nationalised. This would bring prices down and small farmers and other suppliers could be guaranteed fair prices for their produce.[4]

'Private-public partnerships'

Both Labor and Liberal governments favour "private-public partnerships" for major projects. This guarantees their corporate friends much higher profits and the state bears all the risk if problems develop. The redevelopment of Spencer Street (now Southern Cross station), the East Link tollway, and the projected new rail tunnels across Melbourne are all PPPs.

Kenneth Davidson's hard-hitting columns in the Age have lifted the lid on the PPP scandal. The makeover of Southern Cross cost hundreds of millions of dollars more that would have been the case had the government done it alone.

And what did we actually get at Southern Cross for all our money? Despite the much vaunted innovative roof design, there is no rainwater collection; there is no exhaust system and the buildup of fumes makes staff sick; and a section of the wondrous roof collapsed in heavy rain!

What should we aim for?

When everything around us is the result of rampant capitalism it can get hard to envisage anything fundamentally different. But we have to contemplate radically different arrangements — and fight for them. There is no solution whatsoever under the regime of private "developers" and their government facilitators.

Along with all the fights that are taking place over immediate issues we have to campaign for a sharp change of direction — for a completely different sort of society. Creating green, livable cities will require a massive fight for people power.

We have to put the corporate "property developers" out of business. A public housing corporation should be the main player here.

A radically expanded public sector must play the key role in promoting transport, housing, services and jobs.

Only in this way will we be able to develop an emergency program to fight climate change and prepare for what's coming.

Notes

Michael Cannon, The Land Boomers (Melbourne University Press: Melbourne, 1966), p. 39.

See http://www.ecotopia.com/webpress/energyEquity/node2.html.

Simon Johanson in the Age, September 26, 2011.

Interestingly this is the position of the Lyndon LaRouche-inpired, far-right Citizens Electoral Council. See http://cecaust.com.au/main.asp?sub=releases&id=2011_03_08_Parity_Pricing.html

How we work to win mass support

2011-09-07T04:12:00.000-07:00

[Talk given at the Socialist Ideas Conference organised by Socialist Alliance & Resistance, Melbourne, September 3.]

Will the level of popular and working-class struggle rise significantly in the coming years? How can we overcome or neutralise the deadly effect of ruling class propaganda on the minds of so many ordinary people? Can left-wing forces rally significant support and lead big struggles? How do we work towards this goal?

Bible sects like the Jehovah's Witnesses or the Mormons go door to door preaching their message. Their success depends on the scope of the effort: How many people can they mobilise and how many doors can they knock on? It also depends on the general level of social distress and alienation in society, on the number of people searching for solace and comfort.

Socialists obviously don't reject propaganda — we are putting it out all the time — but our strategy is — and must be if we are serious — fundamentally based on something else.

Utopianism

Before the Communist Manifesto (written in late 1847) socialism was necessarily utopian. Marx and Engels had the greatest respect and admiration for their great utopian predecessors who operated in the first decades of the 19th century, before the Industrial Revolution had really developed and transformed society. These were the Frenchmen Charles Fourier and Henri Saint Simon and the Englishman Robert Owen. They took over all that was valid in their ideas. As Engels put it later:

. . . To the crude conditions of capitalistic production and the crude class conditions correspond crude theories. The solution of the social problems, which as yet lay hidden in undeveloped economic conditions, the utopians attempted to evolve out of the human brain. Society presented nothing but wrongs; to remove these was the task of reason. It was necessary, then, to discover a new and more perfect system of social order and to impose this upon society from without by propaganda, and, wherever it was possible, by the example of model experiments. These new social systems were foredoomed as utopian; the more completely they were worked out in detail, the more they could not avoid drifting off into pure fantasies.[1]

Lenin explained that utopianism was defined by its ignoring of material interests, i.e., the real interests of the various social classes. In particular, the anti-social behaviour of our ruling class is not the result of ignorance or misunderstanding but flows from their real social situation as capitalists who live off the exploitation of wage labour and are immersed in a competitive struggle for survival.

Today we often encounter utopian thinking, especially in the green movement. On the one hand, this has a progressive aspect in that many people can see that things should be — and could be — so different. For instance, we clearly have the material-technical means to abolish world poverty, to tackle climate change, etc.

But on the other hand, there is often no understanding that the capitalist class which is responsible for the appalling situation our world faces will fight to the end to preserve its power and privileges and can only be overcome by an even greater force — the organised struggle of the masses for a society that puts people's needs before profits.

Capitalism's gravediggers

In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels paid tribute to the great utopians but took a different approach. For them, the working class is not just the suffering class, not simply the biggest class numerically, but the essential product of capitalist development. The bosses own the modern means of production but the working class operates them. The exploitation of the working class is the source of capitalist profit: the workers get wages, the bosses get the profits.

The working class operates the social means of production and they operate them collectively. Their objective class interest is not to become petty proprietors but to collectively own the means of production — that is, to achieve socialism. As the Manifesto puts it, in the working class the bosses produce their own gravediggers. Or, to put it another way, the working class is a revolutionary — or potentially revolutionary — class. Socialism will develop out of the possibilities revealed by capitalism itself and through the struggle of the social grouping created by capitalist development — the working class.

Bridging the gap

But between these general and absolutely correct propositions and the actual development of big struggles against the system — let alone revolutionary struggles — there is an enormous task to carry out, a big gap to bridge, a huge political space to cross. That's what we are concerned with all the time.

It is actually no easy matter for the working class to fulfil the great progressive role that Marx and Engels saw for it. At various times many people on the left have come to doubt that they can ever do it.

Under capitalism, the working class is a ground-down, deeply divided mass — it is basically fodder for exploitation by the bosses in the workplace. Workers are forced to compete against each other for jobs. They are divided by nationality, ethnic background or skin colour; by skill and type of work (blue collar, white collar, etc.); by their wage and general conditions of work; and by age and gender. These divisions are skilfully exploited by the capitalist class to keep the workers disunited and turned in on each other.

The only antidote to this extreme heterogeneity is a conscious struggle for organisation and unity in order to fight for a new society. And the highest form of this unity is a mass fighting socialist party. Here is how Lenin put it in his famous 1904 polemic One Step Foward, Two Steps Back:

In its struggle for power the proletariat has no other weapon but organisation. Disunited by the rule of anarchic competition in the bourgeois world, ground down by forced labour for capital, constantly thrust back to the "lower depths" of utter destitution, savagery, and degeneration, the proletariat can, and inevitably will, become an invincible force only through its ideological unification on the principles of Marxism being reinforced by the material unity of organisation, which welds millions of toilers into an army of the working class.[2]

We can see today in Australia and other imperialist countries what a crippling effect the lack of a big militant workers party has on the struggle.

Ruling class weapons

Today we are acutely conscious of the all-pervasive mass media constantly spewing out ruling class propaganda to block or divert the working class from taking up the banner of progressive social struggle. Think about all the horrible things the capitalist politicians and media hacks deploy from their arsenal of noxious ideological weapons.

Nationalism and flag waving
Think of Gillard and Abbott attending yet another funeral for an Australian soldier killed in Afghanistan. They look solemn and sad and intone the usual crap about sacrifice and "finishing the job". Samuel Johnson's aphorism that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel inescapably comes to mind.

Genuine love of one's country should mean caring about the welfare and the actual conditions of life of the mass of people who live in it. It has nothing to do with the militaristic, ANZAC-type rituals and empty rhetoric we cop all the time.

We live in a class-divided imperialist First World country. On the one hand, there is the capitalist oligarchy and their hangers on; on the other hand there is the mass of the working people. We have nothing in common with them. There are in fact two Australias, not one. The "national interest" is their interest; the flag is their flag.

Nazi leader Hermann Goering cyncially explained the ruling class attitude to patriotism in a discussion with the US psychologist Gilbert at Nuremburg shortly before his suicide:

"Why, of course, the people don't want war," Goering shrugged. "Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a parliament or a communist dictatorship . . ."

"There is one difference," I pointed out. "In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars." [A rather fanciful notion in the light of post-World War II history.]

"Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."[3]

Scapegoating
Then there is general xenophobia and scapegoating of refugees, Muslims (the burqa, terrorism, etc), and guest workers (457 visa workers or whoever).

And no one should think that anti-Semitism is a dead letter in countries like Australia, that the Holocaust somehow took it permanently off the ideological menu. "The socialism of fools" is always there beneath the surface and under certain conditions can become a live issue again. The crimes of Israel are certainly a factor promoting anti-Semitism, despite progressive anti-Zionists routinely condemning it.

Consumerism
Another big ideological distraction is consumerism, promoted endlessly by the media. The implicit idea here is that happiness and meaning in life comes from consuming (or aspiring to consume) a huge array of various bright and dinky products. The bosses need to promote consumerist attitudes because their profits depend on us buying and continuing to buy the absolute rivers of stuff that pour off the assembly lines. As we know, consumerism is not only inimical to a happy life but is completely unsustainable. Furthermore, poverty means that masses of people are actually unable to "consume" the basic necessities of life.

The bosses objectively need all these tools and distractions since today they have nothing to offer the mass of people. The welfare state — a product of past struggles — is being systematically attacked and white-anted on all fronts. In regard to social expenditures it's one cutback after another. But for militarism and corporate welfare there is always plenty of money.

Repressive laws
And if the ideological weapons aren't sufficient to immobilise people and prevent serious struggles from developing, there is a growing arsenal of reactionary laws in place. Trade unions are not illegal — Heaven forbid! After all, we live in a democracy! — but they have less and less legal room to do anything meaningful in defence of their members. Despite an ocean of verbiage, the harsh anti-union laws brought in by Howard have substantially been kept by Rudd and Gillard.

Then there are the so-called anti-terror laws. Today they are being used to pick off isolated targets (such as Muslims who engage in rather foolish talk and are entrapped by police provocateurs). Tomorrow they may be used against more "mainstream" targets.

Variability of popular consciousness

Some people look at all this crap and come to feel that nothing can be done.

Socialists have to keep our feet on the ground. Our starting point must be the insoluble contradictions of the system. The bosses can keep telling people that shit smells like roses, that life is wonderful, but that approach won't work forever. Unpleasant reality eventually intrudes and today it is starting to intrude big time as people's modest dreams vanish in front of their eyes. Think of Iceland, Greece, Ireland and Britain — or the US where scores of thousands of people are being evicted from their homes each month.

As Abraham Lincoln famously said: "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time."

Or, to put in it Marxist terms: At the end of the day, which is more powerful? People's daily experience of exploitation, oppression and alienation or the capitalist lie machine?

Racism & refugees
We often hear well-meaning people tell us that ordinary people are stupid or apathetic and that we get the governments we deserve. But this is untrue on so many levels.

Firstly, newly elected governments always claim a mandate for all their policies but often the election has hinged on one or two things which, moreover, they have lied about. (Howard lied about Workchoices and no one being worse off; Rudd and Gillard lied about scrapping it.)

Secondly, popular consciousness is not a given once and for all but is highly variable, even contradictory. Look at Australia over the last dozen or so years in regard to racism and refugees. The record shows a tremendous variability.

In March 1996 the ALP was defeated and the Howard government elected; October 1998 Howard was relected. Pauline Hanson became an MP and launched her vicious, xenophobic campaign. But anti-Hanson forces also mobilised in the streets, to significant effect.

In August 1999 East Timor's independence referendum was held amid a bloody Indonesian terror. Large demonstrations and protests in support of the — non-white — East Timorese took place in Australia. Howard was eventually forced to send in troops to protect the population.

Then in August 2001 the Tampa incident took place. At the federal elections in November the Howard government was re-elected. Gradually the lies were exposed. But with war and oppression driving refugees from Sri Lanka and Afghanistan to take big risks to try to get here by boat, and with Labor in office in Canberra and unwilling to confront the Coalition in any real way, the whole ugly issue has been whipped up again.

Today there are obvious contradictions in popular attitudes to refugees. In fact, the policy of successive governments of keeping detainees far away from population centres and continually demonising them is a backhanded tribute to their perception of the basic human tendency of people to reach out and help other people suffering in front of them. We can see this in the very significant impact of the recent SBS TV program Go back to where you came from.

Aboriginal rights
We can also look at popular attitudes towards Aborigines. On May 28, 2000 hundreds of thousands took part in a massive reconciliation march across Sydney Harbor Bridge. Another huge march took place some time later in Melbourne. But when Howard launched his Northern Territory "intervention" in 2007 many people were confused and mute in the face of the barrage of propaganda about supposed child abuse and "dysfunctional" Aboriginal families. The truth will out but that will take time and persistent struggles.

Opposition to imperialist war
In February and March of 2003 huge demonstrations against the looming US-led invasion of Iraq took place across Australia. These were a genuine popular outpouring of revulsion against Washington's threatened "shock and awe" attack on Iraq. But Howard and Co pressed ahead. People became despondent (no one had listened) and official patriotism kicked in along with all the usual lies from the always obliging establishment media. The real level of death and destruction was kept from the people.

And now we are again bogged down in a brutal imperialist war — this time in Afghanistan.

Our propaganda

Obviously the socialist and progressive movement has to put out its own propaganda, to let people know what we think about what is going on and what we think should be done. This is most effective when it accompanies, arises out of, or is part of actual struggles, especially those in which we are involved.

This is sometimes very hard. We have to be willing sometimes to wear some isolation and even unpopularity. In a discussion in Mexico with his US followers before World War II, Leon Trotsky explained:

We must have the courage to be unpopular, to say "you are fools", "you are stupid", "they betray you", and every once in a while with a scandal launch our ideas with passion. It is necessary to shake the worker from time to time, to explain, and then shake him again — that all belongs to the art of propaganda.[4]

We have an inspiring example of what Trotsky was talking about right here in Australia. In late January 1934, with many workers unable to find jobs the mining town of Kalgoorlie in WA errupted in anti-migrant riots (largely directed against Italian workers) — people were attacked and houses were burnt down. A handful of communists fought against this madness and sought to turn the workers' anger against the bosses — its rightful target. Gradually their tireless and courageous activity bore fruit and they had some significant successes against the racist white-Australia AWU officialdom. There is an excellent article recounting this episode in the July 7, 1999 issue of Green Left Weekly.

Linking today's struggles to our socialist goal

The situation we face today in Australia is a rising level of discontent and distress coupled with — for a whole number of reasons — a very low level of struggles. Yet the background to all this — the objective situation — is increasingly alarming. The acute social crisis and harsh austerity we see in a number of European countries is clearly what is in store for us. Resource boom notwithstanding, it is already happening here in a slower way. And climate change — which threatens the human race with utter catastrophe — is accelerating and no capitalist party here has the slightest intention of doing anything meaningful about it.

Our general approach must be to try to link struggles around the immediate issues of concern to people with our goal of a workers government which will expropriate the capitalists, bring the economy under social ownership and control and reorganise it to meet urgent human needs — dealing with climate change the foremost among these.

This approach is summed up in the term our "transitional method" or "transitional program", the aim of which is to bridge the gap between the present and the future, between where we are now and where we need to be.

The Communist Manifesto contains a 10-point transitional program of measures a workers government would carry out. It hit the deck as Europe errupted in the great 1848-49 revolutionary upsurge. While the program speaks to the reality of that time, many of its demands are (sadly) clearly not out of place even today!

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.

4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.

5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.

6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of wastelands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.

8. Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country.

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc., etc.[5]

Transitional program

On an April 2007 edition of Aló Presidente!, the immensely popular weekly television program of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez — "a television chat show like no other", as the British Guardian aptly described it — he urged viewers to study Leon Trotsky's Transitional Program and repeatedly waved it around.

Trotsky's impassioned 1938 document did not invent transitional demands — Marx, Engels and Lenin all used the same approach — but it is a masterful exposition of our method and the thinking behind our arsenal of demands. While it was written against the backdrop of the great crises of the 1930s — the Great Depression, fascism, huge popular struggles and looming world war — much of the program remains deeply relevant to our situation today.

Trotsky describes the goal of the program is:

. . . to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demands and the socialist program of the revolution. This bridge should include a system of transitional demands, stemming from today's conditions and from today's consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat.[6]

Things in Australia today may be somewhat less stirring but the basic method used has to be the same. We become involved in all manner of struggles as the issues present themselves — that is a given beyond our control. But at all times we seek — in the most appropriate way — to raise the question of the burning need for a sharp change of direction in how society operates — for a society that puts people before profit, i.e., for socialism.

I would urge all comrades to follow Chavez's advice: Read the Transitional Program and then look over our policy documents or our election manifestos. You will see the same basic approach here. Let's look at one particularly relevant example.

Nationalisation
Recently Bluescope Steel — a spin-off of the old BHP — announced that it intended to scrap its export business and shed 1000 workers in Wollongong in NSW and Hastings here in Victoria. Socialist Alliance has called for the company to be nationalised to protect jobs and drastically reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. The federal ALP government, of course, has announced yet another handout to the company which will do nothing to protect the workers jobs.

Trotsky's Transitional Program has a section on nationalisations: that reads very well today:

The socialist program of expropriation, i.e., of political overthrow of the bourgeoisie and liquidation of its economic domination, should in no case during the present transitional period hinder us from advancing, when the occasion warrants, the demand for the expropriation of several key branches of industry vital for national existence or of the most parasitic group of the bourgeoisie.

. . . we demand the expropriation of the corporations holding monopolies on war industries, railroads, the most important sources of raw materials, etc . . .

The necessity of advancing the slogan of expropriation in the course of daily agitation in partial form, and not only in our propaganda in its more comprehensive aspects, is dictated by the fact that different branches of industry are on different levels of development, occupy a different place in the life of society, and pass through different stages of the class struggle. Only a general revolutionary upsurge of the proletariat can place the complete expropriation of the bourgeoisie on the order of the day. The task of transitional demands is to prepare the proletariat to solve this problem.[7]

We also call for the nationalisation of the banks, the energy and power sector, and the transport system in order to tackle climate change and reorient the economy to meeting urgent human needs.

(Of course, we don't want publicly owned enterprises to be run like Australia Post, i.e., as a business that rips off its customers, is engaged in permanent warfare against its own workforce, and has a CEO who rakes in $2 million a year!)

Three types of demands

Any transitional program will be made up of three broad types of demands.

There are immediate demands, e.g., stop this hospital closure, better OHS conditions, etc. Then there are democratic demands, e.g. for civil liberties, troops out of Afghanistan (let the Afghanis run their own country) etc. Finally there are transitional demands, e.g., a sliding scale of hours (divide up the available work among all workers with no loss of pay), nationalise the banks, etc. These demands more directly point the way to a post-capitalist reorganisation of the economy.

We shouldn't see any hierarchy of importance among these different types of demands. No one is superior to the other in terms of mobilising power. The impact of any demand depends on the political situation in the given country. The huge struggle around the Vietnam war in the 1960s and '70s, for instance, was fought around the basic proposition of self-determination for the Vietnamese, all foreign troops out — a democratic demand.

Only one program

It is important to stress that our program is a whole, a package to guide us in our struggle for socialism. In presenting it we may say, for instance, here is our "gender agenda" — our program for women's liberation. But this way of presenting things should not be taken to mean that women's oppression can be ended under capitalism.

Similarly, we may say here is our program to fight unemployment. But abolishing capitalism's "reserve army of labour" will really only be possible if we get rid of capitalism.

In conclusion: Working class and popular consciousness is not fixed or static but is highly variable. We should base our work on the fundamental contradictions of the world capitalist system rather than the state of popular consciousness at any particular moment. There will be upsurges from time to time and we should prepare ourselves for these. Our transitional approach is the best way in which to intervene in the daily struggle, in which we always strive to link the present with the socialist reorganisation of society.

Notes

Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (Resistance Books: Chippendale, 1999), p. 63.
Lenin, "One Step Forwards, Two Steps Back", Collected Works, Vol. 7 (Progress Publishers: Moscow, 1977), p. 412.
http://www.snopes.com/quotes/goering.asp
Trotsky, The Transitional Program and the Struggle for Socialism (Resistance Books: Chippendale, 1999), p. 76.
Marx-Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Resistance Books: Chippendale, 1998), pp. 62-63.
Transitional Program, p. 25.
Transitional Program, pp. 32-33.

On Eritrea's national day, little to celebrate

2011-05-10T06:00:00.000-07:00

[Green Left Weekly, #879, May 18, 2011]

On May 24 Eritreans around the world will mark the country's national day. After an epic three-decades-long liberation struggle, in 1991 the liberation forces wrested control of their capital, Asmara, from the occupying Ethiopian army. Two years later a new, independent Eritrea was formally established.

But the following years have proved a bitter disappointment for the people of this small (population five million), former Italian colony on the Red Sea. In a development reminiscent of Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe, the fruits of victory were appropriated by a power-hungry clique around the dictator, Isaias Afewerki.

Police state

Eritrea today is a police state. Since independence in 1993, only the ruling party has been permitted to operate and no national elections have ever been held. There is no independent media and human rights violations by the regime's security forces are severe and widespread. All Eritreans between the ages of 18 and 50 are liable to indefinite forced labour with no compensation.

As a result of these harsh and often unbearable conditions thousands of Eritreans have fled abroad.

According to the 2006 census, there were 2020 Eritrea-born people in Australia, more than half in Victoria. But some estimates put the total number of Eritreans in Australia at around 5000 (presumably including people born in refugee camps abroad plus those born in Australia to Eritrean parents).

Life in Australia for non-white immigrants is often very hard. In a context of deepening government-driven austerity, they have to deal with widespread racism and discrimination and a general lack of understanding of their situation.

Tragedy in Libya

Many Eritrean refugees live in camps in neighbouring Sudan. Others end up in other north African countries like Egypt and Libya, whether looking for work or seeking transit to Europe.

The popular uprisings in the Arab world have rightly inspired people in the region (including in Eritrea) and internationally. But for those Eritreans living in Libya the turmoil has ushered in a period of great fear and uncertainty. The fact that Gaddafi's mercenary army has included fighters from Eritrea hasn't made their lives any easier.

Many have attempted to flee to Italy, often with tragic consequences. An April 6 online article by Jerome Taylor in the British Independent newspaper highlighted the extreme risks associated with such journeys.

Father Mussie Zerai, a Catholic cleric based in Rome, told The Independent today that his contacts in Tripoli have seen five bodies in a hospital that were recently washed back onto the Libyan coast. They are thought to be part of a group of approximately 335 predominantly Eritrean and Ethiopian migrants who left Tajura [Tripoli] on March 22 and have not been heard from since . . .

'There are five bodies in total, two women, two boys and an Egyptian who we believe was the boat's captain,' Father Zerai said. 'Their bodies have gunshot wounds in them. Somebody shot them after they left Libya.'

It is not clear who may have murdered the migrants . . .

Furthermore, he continues:

Italian coastguard vessels were scrambled in the early hours of this morning to intercept a boat which capsized in rough weather just 40 miles from from [the Italian island of] Lampedusa. The vessel was thought to be carrying up to 350 Eritrean, Somalian and Sudanese refugees and set sail from Libya two days ago. By lunchtime rescuers had been able to pluck just 48 people alive from the water.

In the Eritrean diaspora opposition forces are organising. Whatever its ups and downs, the upsurge in North Africa and the Middle East has already had an impact in other parts of Africa. We can only hope that in Eritrea too the Afewerki dictatorship finds its day of reckoning closer than it thinks.

Cuba: challenges and changes

2010-10-12T17:32:00.000-07:00

[The slide show and text of a talk given to the Geelong branch of Socialist Alliance on October 6, 2010.]

Before we begin, let's get oriented by looking at the map of Cuba in the Caribbean. Cuba is almost 1200km long and very narrow (generally it is only about 100km across).

From Havana it is 175km across the Florida Straits to the island of Key West, the nearest part of the USA; Miami, the centre of so many counter-revolutionary plots, is 370km away. Jamaica and Haiti are close neighbours. And as the crow flies, some 2180km away is Caracas in Venezuela where a revolutionary process is underway.

An inspiring revolution
For over 50 years tiny Cuba (its population is currently about 11.25 million) has punched well above its weight in world politics. That's because it carried out an authentic socialist revolution and has ceaselessly fought to defend and extend it in the teeth of remorseless pressure from its giant neighbour.

The Cuban Revolution has been marked by its tremendous internationalism, the high points of which have been its armed intervention in Angola in support of the struggle against the South African apartheid regime and its unstinting medical aid to the Third World.

The Cuban Revolution has shown that a Stalinist bureaucratic degeneration is not inevitable. There are bureaucrats in Cuba but the Fidelista leadership has largely managed to contain this danger by its constant vigilance, mass campaigns and appeals to the people.

Revolution faces biggest challenge
Today the Cuban Revolution arguably faces its biggest challenge. It is confronting severe economic problems. There appears to be a growing bureaucratic danger, an alarming growth of corruption, widespread popular recourse to the black economy in order to survive and a growing social differentiation among the population.

What makes all this even more challenging is that the historic generation which led the original revolutionary process is slowly passing from the scene. The imperialists (and more than a few people on the left) are convinced that the passing of Fidel and Raul will signal the collapse of the revolution.

In this talk I want to present this crisis in its context, to explain where it comes from, the current situation in broad outline and what changes the Cuban government is proposing.

Enormous external pressures

Whatever weaknesses that exist and mistakes that may have been made, the key background to Cuba's current economic woes is the absolutely enormous external pressures bearing down on them — pressures of this magnitude would have destroyed any other country.

US blockade
Foremost among these is the US blockade. Begun in 1960 after Cuba nationalised US enterprises, it is all-encompassing. As Cuban foreign minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla recently described it, the blockade is an "economic, commercial and financial siege that has lasted half a century".

A report prepared to be presented to the next session of the UN General Assembly puts the direct economic cost of the blockade to Cuba at $US750 billion.[1] To put this figure in perspective, it is approximately seven times Cuba's current GDP of $US110 billion![2] That is, the blockade has cost Cuba seven years of development!

We might well wonder where would Cuba be today if there had been no blockade.

The innumerable bourgeois commentaries on Cuba's economic problems rarely dwell, if at all, on the impact of the blockade. The imperialists and their flunkeys go on about how socialism doesn’t work but make absolutely no acknowledgement of their own — far from insignificant — contribution to Cuba’s problems!!

Collapse of USSR
Almost from the start, the Soviet Union's support for Cuba was hugely important to its survival. For instance, the USSR bought Cuba's sugar and citrus crop at preferential (i.e., fair trade) prices and supplied oil and other aid in return.

Of course, Cuba was negatively influenced by various Soviet ideas and practices but if it had not had Moscow's backing it might not have survived.

The 1991 collapse of the USSR meant Cuba immediately lost 80% of its exports and imports. This ushered in a desperate struggle for survival — literally. GDP fell by a third. People almost starved. These years are called in Cuba "the special period in time of peace". The worst time was the early to mid-nineties.

Today, living standards on the island are still below the 1989 level.

'Natural' disasters
If all this were not enough, in 2008 Cuba was severely affected by climate change. Three hurricanes — Gustav, Ike and then Paloma — pounded the island, causing around $10 billion of damage.

Ike was the most destructive hurricane in Cuba's history. The nickel plants were damaged, crops were hit. The already bad housing situation was seriously worsened; hundreds of thousands of homes were destroyed and a great many dwellings remain in dire need of repair.

And on top of the devastating hurricanes, Cuba is in the grip of drought. Although Cuba is normally lush and wet, in the face of climate change that doesn't mean what it used to. The country's water storages are currently only about 40% full and the population is being urged to save water. In 2004 a severe drought hit agriculture hard in the east of the island.

Collapse of nickel price
Cuba is a major world supplier of nickel and cobalt. It has a third of the world's proven reserves of nickel, which is essential in the production of stainless steel and other corrosion-resistant alloys. Cuba also produces about 10% of the world’s Cobalt, a critical metal in the production of high-performance alloys.

In April 2007 the price of nickel reached $US52,000 per tonne but at the end of 2008 it had crashed to about $9000. It has since climbed back to around $20,000. In 2007 nickel brought in $2.8 billion and was Cuba’s leading export earner but this figure fell to $1.5 billion in the following year.

Cuba's nickel is sold mainly to Canada, China and the Netherlands. (The Canadian multinational Sherritt operates a big nickel plant as a joint-venture with the Cuban government.)[3]

Development of tourism
Tourism has developed massively in the last two decades and in 2009 some 2.4 million holidaymakers visited the island. Tourism earns the country about $2 billion per year although receipts dropped 12% in 2009 due to the global financial crisis (the number of visits held up but stays were shorter and less money was spent).

Most of the hotels and resorts are joint ventures between Spanish and Canadian operators with the Cuban government.

However, important as tourism is to the national economy, it also brings with it some very serious problems. Especially worrying is the social differentiation which results as some Cubans have access to higher earnings and foreign currency (tips, payments in kind, selling services and goods to tourists). Prostitution has also staged a certain comeback, although it cannot be compared to either the past or to other Latin American countries.

Tips of tourism workers are meant to be handed over to the state but this is probably unenforceable.

The importance of nickel and tourism as export earners takes place against a backdrop of the decline of the once mighty sugar industry. Production was 8 millions tons before the collapse of the USSR, the projection for 2010 is only 1.2 million tons. The government is trying to attract foreign investment.

Venezuela
The development of the revolutionary process in Venezuela has been a life-saving boost for Cuba. Apart from the enormous lift in morale — the feeling that they are no longer alone — there have been very material benefits.

Venezuela is now Cuba's main source of imports (31% in 2008). The special relationship with Venezuela has also meant credits for projects at low interest rates and various joint ventures.

Cuba has sent tens of thousands of health workers to Venezuela (in 2006 the figure reached 33,000) and these have been vital in enabling the key medical "mission" Barrio Adentro to get off the ground.

Cuba is also helping to train Venezuelan doctors and thousands of Venezuelans have received surgical treatment in Cuba (50,000 got free eye surgery in 2005). In return Cuba gets vital oil cheaply from Venezuela.

A fibre-optic cable is being laid from Venezuela to Cuba via some other island countries. When this is finished Cuba will at last have access to cheap high-speed internet connections. (At the moment Cuba pays a Canadian company through the nose for a slow connection.)

China-Cuba relations growing
Developing economic relations with China has also been very important. China has supplied Cuba with buses and trains and household goods, it has provided long-term credits and takes a significant amount of Cuba’s nickel output. China is also playing a role in helping Cuba prospect for oil offshore.

Having a trade relationship with China is very important in offsetting the US blockade. China is simply too big to be pushed around by Washington.

Economic problems

Current economic situation
Here are some basic facts about Cuba's economic situation:

1. Between 2001 and 2003, the Cuban economy grew at an average annual rate of 2.9%; between 2004 to 2007, the figure was 9.3%. In 2008 GDP growth dropped to 4.1% and in 2009 to 1.4%.

2. Cuba's earnings from the export of goods have been hard hit by the fall in commodity prices — primarily nickel (40% of total exports in 2009) but also sugar (13%).

3. At the same time the cost of key imports (fuel and food) has risen significantly. As a result, Cuba's balance of payments for the export and import of goods is heavily in deficit — in 2009 it was $6.5 billion.

4. This deficit is only balanced by the massive export of services. This is made up of tourism receipts ($2.2 billion gross in 2007) and payment (mainly from Venezuela) for the provision of medical personnel (estimated at over $5 billion in 2007). One inescapable problem of this heavy reliance on the export of services is that it is largely dependent on factors outside Cuba's control, i.e., Chavez and the Venezuelan revolutionary process and the vagaries of the tourism market.

5. Another very important source of hard currency is remittances from Cubans living abroad, mainly in the US. These are estimated at $600 million to $1 billion annually. The downside, however, is that the remittances create a division between those Cubans who have access to them and those who don't.

6. Food comprises a large part of Cuba's imports (17% in 2009). 70% of its food is imported. In 2008 it spent $2.2 billion on importing food — 567,000 tons of rice and 246,000 tons of dried beans cost it $700 million. Replacing expensive imports with locally produced food is a major objective of the Cuban government. A big part of this is to encourage more people to take up farming and make the conditions of agriculture much more attractive.

7. At the beginning of 2009 a crisis in servicing its foreign debt ($19.5 billion) led the government to freeze around $1 billion in the bank accounts of foreign firms. A lot of these funds are still frozen.

Two-tier currency
Cuba has a two-tier currency system, designed to impose a hefty tax on all foreign currency brought into the country, whether by tourists, remittances or business.

There are ordinary pesos and convertible pesos (CUCs). All foreign currency has to be converted in CUCs. US dollars attract fees and taxes of about 20%; other currencies only 10%.

There is a network of special shops ("dollar shops") selling all sorts of goods at much higher prices. These stores take only convertible pesos.

This system is very unpopular with those ordinary Cubans who have no access to CUCs. The government has pledged to eliminate the CUC and has made a small start this year.

Daily struggle
88% of Cuban workers are employed by the state. Only 12% work in the private sector (private farmers, artists) — this includes 142,000 self-employed (less than 3% of total workforce).

The average wage in Cuba is about $20 per month. However, there are no taxes on this income, healthcare and education are free, people own their homes or pay a only a very small rent to the state.

In addition there is the libreta, the ration system. In place since 1962, the libreta allows everyone to purchase from list of basic commodities at subsidised prices.

But today the ration only covers about half the month. Furthermore, over the last few years it has been reduced. For instance, last November potatoes and peas were removed from the libreta. Previously Cubans could buy 4 pounds of potatoes per month at about 1 cent per pound. Now they can buy as much as they like but at 5 cents per pound.

The government simply cannot afford to keep the libreta going as before and there is even talk of phasing it out completely.

The net result of inadequate wages and pensions and the inadequate libreta is that most people are forced to supplement their income with various kinds of activities.

Social inequality is growing as some people are better placed, that is, their jobs enable them — one way or another — to more easily get precious CUCs.

Black economy
The black (non-official) economy encompasses a whole range of activities, from the largely harmless to the seriously criminal and everything in between. There is a very informative study on this by Canadian academic Arch Ritter (although he is very anti-Fidel).[4]

Some examples include: Selling homemade crafts to tourists, selling homemade food on the street; paying extra or bribes to get scarce goods or services; stealing goods from the state and selling them; using a state car as a private taxi; selling jobs in the lucrative tourist sector with prized access to dollars (tips and services).

A 2007 study by the Communist Youth (UJC) found that more than 282,000 young people in Cuba neither worked nor studied; a lot of these are concentrated in Havana. Obviously they get by one way or another. But such facts cause great popular resentment and undermine social morale.[5]

Mere prohibitions and increased vigilance by police and law enforcement bodies won’t solve the problem of the black economy when weighty economic realities are driving people towards it en masse simply to survive.

Reform plan

Raul argues for reform
On April 4, 2010 Raul Castro addressed the congress of the Communist Youth League (UJC). He set out the main considerations behind the reforms which have been announced throughout the year:

Today, more than ever before, the economic battle is the main task and focus of the ideological work of the cadres, because the sustainability and the preservation of our social system rest upon this work.

Without a sound and dynamic economy and without the removal of superfluous expenses and waste, it will neither be possible to improve the living standard of the population nor to preserve and improve the high levels of education and health care ensured to every citizen free of charge.

Without an efficient and robust agriculture that we can develop with the resources available to us — without even dreaming of the large allocations of times past — we can’t hope to sustain and increase the amount of food provided to the population, that still depend so much on the import of products that might be cultivated in Cuba.

If people do not feel the need to work for a living because they are covered by excessively paternalistic and irrational state regulations, we will never be able to stimulate a love for work nor will we resolve the chronic lack of construction, farming and industrial workers; teachers, police and other indispensable trades that have steadily been disappearing.

If we do not build a firm and systematic social rejection of illegal activities and different manifestations of corruption, more than a few will continue to enrich themselves at the expense of the labour of the majority, while spreading attitudes that directly attack the essence of socialism.

If we maintain inflated payrolls in nearly every sector of national life and pay salaries that fail to correspond to results achieved, thus raising the amount of money in circulation, we cannot expect prices to cease climbing constantly or prevent the deterioration of people’s purchasing power. We know that the budgeted and business sectors have hundreds of thousands of excess workers; some analysts estimate that the surplus of people in work positions exceeds one million . . .

In summary, to continue spending beyond our income is tantamount to consuming our future and jeopardizing the very survival of the revolution.[6]

Reform plan
There are a number of key points to the reform plan:

1. One million workers are to be cut from the state payroll over five years; half a million by next March.

2. Many smaller state enterprises in light industry and agriculture are to be converted to worker cooperatives so hopefully a lot of workers will remain in their current workplaces but under different ownership and remuneration arrangements.

3. 178 occupations are now open to private enterprise; in 83 of these owners can hire workers other than relatives.

4. Previously announced agricultural reforms aim to make farming easier and more attractive: land is freely available in usufruct to those who want to farm; purchases of equipment and supplies is to be localised and made easier; produce prices raised; restrictions on selling are to be significantly eased.

5. An essential corollary of this is that the tax system is to be revamped so that the government can profit from all the increased private activity — without, of course, killing it off.

Reforms: aims and risks
The economic reforms have a number of interrelated objectives:

1. To trim the state payroll and increase the productivity of the state sector.

2. To increase economic efficiency by stimulating people's self-interest.

3. To draw people out of the black economy into open legal economic activity which can be regulated and taxed.

4. To increase make Cuban agriculture a lot more productive, increase food production and reduce or eliminate the huge food import bill.

5. To make daily life less stressful by making things easier: having services that work, food readily available.

6. Obviously, along with the reforms, the state will need to significantly raise wages and pensions.

There are very real risks. We know that the market always creates inequality and a stronger petty-bourgeois layer. There will need to be a strong regulatory and tax regime. Of course, bourgeois critics — and Cuba has whole armies of them — never worry about such things: the right to exploit and profit is presumably an inalienable human right.

However, despite the risks, Cuba has no real choice. It is trying to establish a clear framework so that it can improve the country's economic performance and maintain all the gains of the revolution.

Bureaucracy & corruption

Over the past year or so there have been a number of very disturbing incidents which show there are some real problems in the party and state apparatus. But they also show that no one, even the most high-ranking officials, is unaccountable or above having to answer for their actions.

Top leaders dismissed
In March 2009 a number of central leaders were dismissed from their state and party posts for serious errors. Most prominent among them were Carlos Lage Davila, Politiburo member and effectively Cuba's prime minister since 1986, and Felipe Perez Roque, Central Committee member and foreign minister.

According to a June 29, 2009 Inter Press Service article: "Raúl Castro’s moves were aimed at eliminating 'test tube' leaders — a term that refers to young people who leapt from youth organisations to powerful positions — and at putting an end to parallel structures of power in order to strengthen the country's institutions . . . Disloyalty, erratic behaviour, dishonesty and abuse of power are the main charges against those involved . . . "[7]

Lage and Perez did favours for Lage's lifelong friend Conrado Hernández and talked with him far more freely than they should have. Hernández was a representative for Basque businesses in Cuba. He was also an informant for Spanish intelligence (CNI). Through him the CNI made recordings of Lage and Perez slagging off Fidel, Raul and other top leaders.

Lage had ambitions to the post of first vice-president of the Councils of State and Ministers, which was instead given to José Ramón Machado Ventura in February 2008.

In one of his periodic "reflections" touching on the affair, Fidel said that "the sweet nectar of power for which they hadn’t experienced any type of sacrifice awoke ambitions in them that led them to play out a disgraceful role. The enemy outside built up their hopes with them."[8]

Reportedly, Lage now works as a pediatrician, Perez as an electrical engineer.

In fact, a large part of the Cuban cabinet was replaced in the first part of last year, either for being too close to foreign business or being ineffective in dealing with corruption.

Rogelio Acevedo
In April this year the head of the Civil Aeronautics Institute of Cuba, General Rogelio Acevedo, was dismissed. As a teenager he had fought in the Sierra Maestra and was a veteran of the war in Angola.

He and/or people in his department sold space on Cuban airliners to foreign companies and kept the proceeds for themselves. Apparently, they even planned to buy a plane themselves for several million dollars to cater for their growing business. The ripples of the investigation have spread wider and wider.[9]

Inspection department set up
In August last year a Comptroller General's Department was established. Its charter is to monitor government departments and crack down on corruption. The current Comptroller General is Gladys Bejerano Portela.

An inspection department like this is obviously needed but is only part of the solution to a problem with deep roots. Hopefully if the new reforms work and the material situation of the population eases, some of the pressures promoting corruption will also ease. But of course a lot of corruption seems to take place where foreign companies interact with Cuban entities and that is not going to change.

In a widely noted speech in 2005 Fidel warned that while the revolution could not be overthrown by external intervention, it could be undermined from within — by corruption and the spread of a self-seeking culture in the apparatus.

Esteban Morales affair
In April this year, 68-year-old academic and longtime CP member Esteban Morales was expelled from the party because of an article he wrote — "Corruption, the True Counter-Revolution". Here are some passages:

When we closely observe Cuba's internal situation today, we can have no doubt that the counter-revolution, little by little, is taking positions at certain levels of the state and government.

Without a doubt, it is becoming evident that there are people in positions of government and state who are girding themselves financially for when the revolution falls, and others may have everything almost ready to transfer state-owned assets to private hands, as happened in the old USSR . . .

. . . corruption is a lot more dangerous than the so-called domestic dissidence. The latter is still isolated; it lacks an alternative program, has no real leaders, no masses. But corruption turns out to be the true counter-revolution, which can do the most damage because it is within the government and the state apparatus, which really manage the country's resources.

He refers to the Carlos Lage and Perez Roque cases as well as Rogelio Acevedo. He stresses that the US and other intelligence services are keenly studying what happens in Cuba:

They're looking for confirmation for the words of the commander-in-chief, watching closely what happens every day in Cuba, digging into everything that may allow them to find out where is the real counter-revolutionary force in Cuba, a force that can topple the revolution, a force that appears to be not below but above, in the very levels of government and the state apparatus.[10]

The alarming thing is that this trenchant antibureaucratic polemic from the left got its author expelled from the party. Morales appealed but this was rejected. What is going on? This is hardly a good sign. It can only serve to intimidate those CP members who want to raise real concerns.

Other problems

'Dissidents'
In March 2003, 75 people were jailed as paid US agents. From that moment on they were 75 "political prisoners" to the West and its media. Most have now been released, the latest batch were freed in July and went to Spain — where a number of them subsequently complained that the authorities seemed to have lost interest in them!

Another manufactured "prisoner of conscience" was Orlando Zapata Tamayo who starved himself to death in prison in February. He was not a political prisoner but had been jailed for fairly serious criminal acts. Cuban doctors did everything possible to save his life (as acknowledged by his mother). But he was hailed by Washington and the European Union as a "political prisoner". (A trenchant article by French academic Salim Lamrani sets out the issues.[11])

Party congress
The Communist Party congress (the last one was held in 1997) was to have been held in November 2009 but at the Central Committee meeting in August last year it was postponed without any new date being set. As Raul said: "Because of the laws of life, this will be the last [congress] led by the historic leadership of the revolution."[12]

The reason given for the postponement was the need to decide on how to tackle the problems of the economy. Also, arrangements for the post-Fidel and Raul era will have to be finalised and all this needs more preparation.

Transition of leadership
The leadership generation that led the original revolution is slowly passing from the scene. They have fought world imperialism without flinching for over 50 years but they can't defy the laws of physiology.

There are many people on the left who think that when Fidel and Raul gone and if the embargo is lifted, the Cuban Revolution will be finished. I don't think this is anything like a certainty; there are many possibilities. There is a significant part of the population which fervently believes in the revolution and will fight to preserve it. But it is undeniable that Fidel has played an historic role. He has been an enormous factor in the equation of the struggle, just like Lenin before him.

The leadership transition that has been going on for some time is critical. A number of "test-tube communists" who looked very good for a while revealed fatal weaknesses. Hopefully, this is a relatively limited phenomenon and the Communist Party will push forward the leaders that the hour demands.

A useful chart and review showing the personnel making up the central Cuban party and state bodies as of April 16, 2009 has been prepared by the Open Source Center, a US government intelligence body. Since this was published there have been some changes due to death (e.g., Juan Almeida), change of responsibilities or sacking (e.g., Rogelio Acevedo).[13]

Conclusion

Imperialists howling
Imperialism will never be reconciled to the Cuban Revolution. The reason is simple. Notwithstanding all its problems, Cuba shows what a socialist revolution can do. It is a constant negation of the madness of capitalism, a demonstration to the Third World — and not only it — that there is indeed an alternative path of development, that it is possible to build a society which really does put people’s needs first.

George Bush set up his Cuba "transition office" to plan for the restoration of the "free market" once the revolution has been overthrown or collapsed. Obama is less crude but we can be absolutely sure the US is still plotting and scheming to effect regime change in Cuba.

As Esteban Morales pointed out, the imperialists are undoubtedly counting on the internal weaknesses of the revolution. They hope that the current forced turn to the market will provide openings for capitalism.

And imperialism will keep banging on about human rights in Cuba. Considering the record of the United States, both at home and abroad, this is hypocrisy on a truly cosmic scale!! But with the media behind you, mere facts don't present any insurmountable obstacle.

Revolution still fighting
The Cuban revolutionaries will struggle no matter what. But as we know, there is no socialism in one country and Cuba's future is tied up with development of the international struggle — particularly with the progress of the revolution in Latin America.

That said, making the necessary reforms at home remains vital to easing some of the most pressing problems bedevilling Cuba and giving it a much needed breathing space.

It is also important to understand that if the Cuban Revolution has its problems so does the other side. US imperialism's quest for world domination has not been going so well lately . . .

Ever since 1959 the Cuban Revolution has been a tremendous example and inspiration to the revolutionary and progressive forces around the world. It has shown the power of the people united behind a revolutionary leadership. It has shown that bureaucratic degeneration is not inevitable, that the danger of Stalinism can be contained. And in an historically unprecedented way, Cuba's medical aid abroad has shown what human solidarity is capable of.

The Cuban Revolution is our revolution too and we should do everything we can to spread the truth and support it.

Notes

See US Blockade Causes Billions in Losses to Cuba.

Cuba’s GDP at the official exchange rate is $56 billion but calculated at PPP (purchasing power parity) it is $110 billion according to the CIA website https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/cu.html.

For some basic facts on the Cuban economy see http://www.traveldocs.com/cu/economy.htm.

See http://www.cubasource.org/pdf/economic_illegalities.pdf#search=.

Patricia Grogg, "The Challenge of Boosting Productivity", Inter Press Service, April 30, 2008, http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=42191.

See http://machetera.wordpress.com/2010/04/05/raul-castros-address-to-cubas-young-communist-league/.

See http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=47421.

See http://www.juventudrebelde.co.cu/cuba/2009-03-04/healthy-changes-in-the-council-of-ministers/.

See http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=22348.

See http://progreso-weekly.com/2/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1589:corruption-the-true-counter-revolution&catid=36:in-cuba&Itemid=54.

See http://www.voltairenet.org/article164489.html#article164489.

See http://www.france24.com/en/20090801-raul-castro-postpones-key-communist-party-congress-.

See http://www.fas.org/irp/world/cuba/chart.pdf and http://www.fas.org/irp/world/cuba/overview.pdf.

Market greed or a planned economy for social need?

2010-07-28T18:13:00.000-07:00

[The slide show and text of a talk given as part of Melbourne Socialist Alliance’s Socialist Ideas Seminar series on August 28, 2010.]

The starting point for a discussion of planned economy or the present market-based capitalist one has to be the situation we are facing today. Humanity faces some huge problems.

Global warming is an unprecedented crisis. If not tackled effectively and urgently it could lead to the decimation of the human race, leaving a small population of survivors living in desperate circumstances in a radically changed and inhospitable environment — if not to the very end of human life on the planet.

Then there is the global economic crisis and its attendant attacks by the capitalist class on the living conditions of the people; mass poverty and hunger in the Third World (and not only there); and finally there is the permanent imperialist war drive, aimed at subjugating the Third World and consuming vast resources which might otherwise be used to give a better life to all.

These problems are directly due to the operations of the capitalist system. They cannot be overcome — in the interests of working people — except by radical anticapitalist measures.

That is, we can't rely on the capitalist market to solve them: capitalism is the source of the problem, not the solution.

Capitalism driven solely by profit

Under capitalism, the economy is privately owned. In Australia, a small number of people — probably a few thousand at most — effectively own all the factories, communications media, banks, mines, supermarkets, freight systems, and so on.

The basic operating principle of capitalism is to maximise profits. The whole system is focused on this. Any talk about a "triple bottom line" — in which profit and social and ecological concerns rate equally — is pure fantasy. There is only one bottom line and that is profit. Look at BP: some years ago it painted all its service stations green but we now know just how much that was really worth.

Under capitalism social needs are only satisfied incidentally. If a person has a need and money, then to that extent their need will be met. Otherwise it is not.

Take housing, for example. In Australia there are an estimated 100,000 plus people without a home and probably a lot more living in truly dire conditions.

Objectively, we have the resources to easily give everyone decent accommodation. Federal and state governments could take over unoccupied dwellings, take over and convert empty office blocks, and embark on a crash program to build tens of thousands of quality public housing units. But the various Lib-Lab outfits at the helm simply refuse to take the measures necessary and as the homeless don't have the necessary purchasing power, they remain homeless.

No overall economy-wide planning

Socialists have long accused capitalist economy of being anarchic. What does that mean?

There is no overall plan for production and other economic activity. There is no overall plan to meet social needs. Each capitalist company operates to maximise its profit. Until they try to sell what they produce they have no idea what will happen. It may be they can't produce enough of what customers want — or they may produce way too much and be unable to sell it, which will lead to a crisis for that company (or even the whole economy).

That is, the verdict on what the company has done — was it "rational" or not — comes after the fact of production. The market then "corrects" the decisions previously taken. That is, the company is forced to adjust its production and/or its prices; in extreme cases it may even collapse or be taken over by a competitor. As Ernest Mandel puts it:

Production for the market is production for unknown customers, in unknown quantities, and with unknown financial results.[1]

This is why the whole economy must endure the boom and bust of the business cycle, an immensely wasteful and dislocating phenomenon repeated roughly every 7-10 years. In the boom period, profits rise, everyone wants to get in on the act, investment and production rises, eventually leading to saturation of the market and overproduction in a given sector. Investment stalls, workers are laid off, there is a big consolidation as companies are taken over or merge. Eventually excess inventories are cleared, the surviving firms start investing and producing, workers are hired and so it all starts again.

Planning — irrespective of whether it is good or bad, dictatorial or democratic — is different. A goal is set in advance and then resources are allocated to try and realise it. Thus in the Soviet Union under Stalin there was the First Five Year plan from 1928 to 1932. A whole set of production targets were set down and various measures (factories, workforce, etc.) taken to achieve these objectives.

Planning within capitalism

However, we should be clear: capitalism does know planning — not on the level of the economy as a whole, but on the level of the corporation.

Think of the Ford Motor Company. It is a huge multinational corporation — US-owned but producing and selling across the globe. Parts and components are produced in various locations and then moved to where they are assembled. The "just-in-time" system, which radically reduces the inventories that are held, means planning of the production process must be intense and effective.

Airbus A380
Another example of the tremendous amount of planning that takes place in capitalist production is provided by the Airbus A380, a giant double-decker aircraft which can carry up to 850 passengers over long distances.

Airbus is a consortium of a number of European aviation companies. All the component parts for a given aircraft have to be made or obtained and delivered to the plant in which they are needed at precisely the right time. It is a vast international planned economy as the following description vividly makes clear.

Major structural sections of the A380 are built in France, Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Due to their size, they are brought to the assembly hall . . . in Toulouse in France by surface transportation, though some parts are moved by the A300-600ST Beluga aircraft used in the construction of other Airbus models.

Components of the A380 are provided by suppliers from around the world; the five largest contributors, by value, are Rolls-Royce, Safran, United Technologies, General Electric and Goodrich.

The front and rear sections of the fuselage are loaded on a roll-on/roll-off . . . ship leased to Airbus . . . in Hamburg in northern Germany, from where they are shipped to the United Kingdom. The wings, which are manufactured at Filton in Bristol and Broughton in North Wales, are transported by barge to Mostyn docks, where the ship adds them to its cargo.

In Saint-Nazaire in western France, the ship trades the fuselage sections from Hamburg for larger, assembled sections, some of which include the nose. The ship unloads in Bordeaux.

Afterwards, the ship picks up the belly and tail sections . . . in Cádiz in southern Spain, and delivers them to Bordeaux. From there, the A380 parts are transported by barge to Langon, and by oversize road convoys to the assembly hall in Toulouse.

Roads and canals were widened and replaced; and new barges were developed to deliver the A380 parts. After assembly, the aircraft are flown to Hamburg Finkenwerder Airport . . . to be furnished and painted . . . Airbus sized the production facilities and supply chain for a production rate of four A380s per month.[2]

Such aeroplanes are not produced and stacked on supermarket shelves; they are produced in response to definite orders by specific airlines. Nevertheless, when it embarks on a project like the A380, Airbus does not know if it will be a commercial success. That depends on whether it can gain sufficient orders in the teeth of competition from its main rival, the US giant Boeing. So here too we see an intense planning process within the corporation versus anarchy and struggle outside it in the marketplace.

Ernest Mandel has termed this contradiction of capitalism partial rationality and it is profoundly characteristic of the system.

Huge waste of precious human and natural resources

Capitalism wastes human and material resources on a prodigious scale. If the economy were in public hands and operating according to a conscious plan aimed at addressing climate change and the satisfaction of basic human needs, there are a lot of resources that could be mobilised.

Free up economic resources for useful activity
For a start, a large part of the economy is purely specific to capitalism and would be pointless without it: insurance, real estate, advertising (which accounts for a major part of the cost of goods), most of the financial sector, luxury goods and services for the rich.

We should also mention organised crime which is a very specific sector of the economy (characterised by a very high rate of profit and a propensity to settle disputes by killing people). In some countries the drug trade is the biggest single sector of the economy by profit. Globally, profits from drug trafficking are estimated at about $600 billion.[3]

In a rational system the resources and workforce currently committed to these sectors could be redeployed to socially useful areas.

Existing productive forces not fully utilised
Capitalist economies have very substantial excess capacity, i.e., they can produce much more without any new investment in plant or labour. In the developed capitalist countries in normal times this is typically around 20%. This is inherent in an economy made up of competing private interests, without overall economic planning. Every capitalist builds plant to get into the game and the products can’t be sold so production is cut back.

Capitalist recessions and depressions represent a massive waste of resources. For a greater or lesser period the economy partially shuts down. Too much production is the very cause of want and misery. (During the Great Depression of the 1930s coffee and oranges were dumped in the ocean and milk was poured down coal mines in an effort to keep prices up.)

Even in normal times (i.e., not during a recession) capitalist economy is marked by substantial unemployment and underemployment. Official unemployment in Australia today is 5.1% but the real figure is probably at least twice this. What a crazy situation! One section of the workforce is suffering from overwork — whatever happened to the eight-hour day? — while another section suffers from lack of work and yet we have so much that needs to be done.

In the Third World unemployment and underemployment is massive and large numbers of people are forced to try to survive in the so-called "informal economy".

Conserve precious resources
Capitalism is consuming resources as if there is no tomorrow, e.g., fish stocks, minerals and metals, fossil fuels. (If, for example, we are going to use fossil fuels — the heritage of immense geological ages — they should at least used conservatively and for a definite purpose, such as bridging technologies while sustainable alternatives are brought on-line.)

We should also mention the waste of precious material resources in industry. If the economy were guided by human need and conservation we would move to closed loop processes where the "waste" from one process would be the feedstock for another; absolutely everything possible would be recycled.

Climate change means we will have to look carefully at what we produce. If products are consuming large amounts of energy (aluminium) or water (rice, cotton, dairy products) we would have to consider how much of these we should produce and what we do with these products.

For instance, from the point of view of energy and water conservation, we should try to produce food near to where it is to be consumed. It is irrational to produce wine in Victoria, with its high embodied water content, and export it across the globe to wipe out the wine industry in France or Italy where they have produced wine for millennia.

In the supermarkets at the moment you can buy cans of Italian tomatoes for 75 cents and tins of South African peaches at $1.50. How can it make sense (from the social point of view) to export these things half-way around the world and sell them so cheaply? How are they produced? How much scarce water do they embody? How much energy is expended in transporting them? Get rid of the profit motive and we can make a rational assessment of what is going on here and what we should do.

Militarism
Capitalist militarism consumes vast resources worldwide. According to the figures of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, in 2009 some $US1.5 trillion was spent on arms — 47% of this by US imperialism. This amounts to $225 for every person on the planet, 2.7% of world GDP.

A large proportion of the world's scientists and engineers work for the global "military-industrial complex".

It is also worth noting that the Pentagon is a major contributor to global warming. It is the world's largest institutional consumer of oil products. This plus the wars it wages (Iraq in particular) creates huge amounts of greenhouse gas emissions.[4]

A recent report revealed that some 850,000 people work for a myriad of US "security" agencies.

Consumerism, planned obsolescence
Capitalism must sell "stuff" — endless quantities of it. If the consumers don't realise they want it they must be conditioned to want it. This is where "consumerism" comes from. Of course, people's psychology is affected ("shop till you drop") but that is purely derivative — the driving force is capitalism and its imperative to sell commodities to realise profit.

Of course, people need to buy the necessities of life (today we might include computers and internet connections in this category). But so much stuff produced is crap which we do not rationally need and the production of which the planet cannot sustain.

A key part of capitalist consumerism is ensuring that products wear out prematurely so that you have to buy replacements (clothes, appliances, cars, etc.). Instead of "planned obsolescence" we should make things so that they last a lot longer. Capitalism has no real interest in this because it undercuts its essential need to keep selling stuff — year after year after year.

We should also mention here the waste represented in having numerous companies produce the same product. "Choice" is one thing but, really, how many different brands of toothpaste do we need? Surely a few dentally significant variations should be enough.

Can capitalism be reformed?

The key question we have to answer is whether capitalism can be improved or reformed. Can a mixture of government regulation and incentive bring about fundamental changes — for the better? The short answer, in my opinion, is that no, it can't.

Capitalism has certainly changed over its centuries-long existence. Even imperialism — what Lenin termed the highest stage of capitalism — has changed since its approximate inception around 1900. But has its rapacious, exploitative essence changed? I don’t think you can make any convincing case that it has.

Even the welfare state which developed in major western countries in the postwar period now seems to have been simply an episode, a product of working-class pressure in the context of the cold war and the postwar boom. Everywhere it is being dismantled as fast as the bosses can overcome popular resistance. The "global financial crisis" has simply provided an excuse for savage attacks on living standards (privatisation, layoffs, cutbacks, etc.).

And in a number of Third World countries (India, Iran, etc.) the "state capitalist" economies (i.e., capitalism with strong state sectors, often with subsidies on key necessities) are being dismantled and opened up to foreign firms.

When we consider the scale of what is happening, the idea that the private profit system can be tamed or humanised by regulation or somehow induced by bribes (more politely called "economic incentives") to radically change its behaviour, seems simply fantastic — an exercise in wishful thinking that has absolutely no basis in reality. Everywhere today we see ever more corporate rapacity and less and less real control.

Regulation a farce
In a whole number of areas real regulation, enforced by vigilant inspectors, has been replaced by the farce of "self-regulation". In Victoria and NSW, for instance, the state used to regularly inspect restaurants for breaches of the health code. That has fallen away drastically and today the only activity seems to take place after a food poisoning scare: there will be a rash of inspections to reassure the public and then it's back to business as usual.

The business pages of the Age are full of accounts of corporate scams and rackets — all detected by the so-called "regulators" only after the culprits have vaporised the life savings of hundreds and thousands of investors.

The massive BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has shown that the "regulators" were asleep at the wheel — or rather, they weren't ever expected to do anything else. Incredibly, the incident seems unlikely to lead to a halt in deep-sea drilling.

It would seem so much more rational to invest the huge sums expended in searching for the last remaining pockets of oil on building windfarms and solar power plants, on radical energy conservation measures, on public transport and so on. But the "rationality" that operates here is the unbridled thirst for profit by huge energy monopolies like BP and Exxon; the government does their bidding — that’s what it's there for.

The recent book Death by Rubber Duck deals with the alarming effects of the host of chemicals we are exposed to every day (in food, in plastics, and so on).[5] There are some 70-80,000 chemicals out there, the real effects of which on humans are largely unknown. The attitude is pretty much that if people don't straight away drop dead on contact, then it's safe for commercial exploitation. So much for "regulation".

Not in their class interest
The only realistic conclusion is that capitalism remains true to itself. The sort of changes we want to see are simply not in their class interest. The whole tide is going in the other direction, towards even more unbridled rapacity, towards a more exploitative system.

I'm reminded of some lines in Brecht’s play St Joan of the Stockyards. It's set in Chicago in the early 1920s during a desperate strike in the stockyards. In one scene the financial magnate Pierpont Mauler (after robber-baron J.P. Morgan) has had an apparent epiphany and declaims:

And as for the thing made of sweat and money
Which we have erected in these cities:
It already seems as though a man
Had made a building, the largest in the world and
The most expensive and practical, but —
By an oversight, and because it was cheap — he used dog-shit
As its material, so that it would have been very difficult
To live in and in the end his only glory was
That he had made the biggest stink in the world.[6]

'Commanding heights' of economy must be in public hands

The only way around out of the impasse to which capitalism has brought us is to take over bulk of the economy and put it in public hands (whether federal, state or municipal). This publicly owned economy would then be operated according to a rational nationwide plan.

If the greater part of the economy — if not almost all of it — were in public hands then crises such as we are experiencing today would be avoided because the bulk of production would be for other parts of the state-owned economy and would not be subject to the market.

In the 1921 debate in the Soviet Union on the New Economic Policy Lenin referred to the "commanding heights" of the economy — heavy industry, banking and foreign trade — and argued that if the Soviet state retained control of these its rule would be secure whatever compromises it had to make with capitalist forces at home and abroad.

Here too we say that the "commanding heights" of the economy must be in public hands.

Soviet example
The Great Depression of the 1930s was eventually "overcome" on a capitalist basis only by World War II. But there was another path of development and at the time it made a great impression on masses of people suffering under the anarchy and madness of the capitalist crisis. This counter-example was the Soviet Union. As the capitalist world was in a tremendous crisis due to an "overproduction" of goods, the USSR was surging forward in the mighty collective effort of the first Five-Year Plan.

At the beginning of his classic 1936 work, The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky sums up what was achieved:

The vast scope of industrialisation in the Soviet Union, as against a background of stagnation and decline in almost the whole capitalist world, appears unanswerably in the following gross indices. Industrial production in Germany, thanks solely to feverish war preparations, is now returning to the level of 1929. Production in Great Britain, holding to the apron strings of protectionism, has raised itself 3 or 4% during these six years. Industrial production in the United States has declined approximately 25%; in France, more than 30%. First place among capitalist countries is occupied by Japan, who is furiously arming herself and robbing her neighbours. Her production has risen almost 40%! But even this exceptional index fades before the dynamic of development in the Soviet Union. Her industrial production has increased during this same period approximately 3½ times, or 250%. The heavy industries have increased their production during the last decade (1925 to 1935) more than 10 times . . .

Gigantic achievement in industry, enormously promising beginnings in agriculture, an extraordinary growth of the old industrial cities and a building of new ones, a rapid increase of the numbers of workers, a rise in cultural level and cultural demands — such are the indubitable results of the October Revolution, in which the prophets of the old world tried to see the grave of human civilisation . . . Even if the Soviet Union, as a result of internal difficulties, external blows and the mistakes of leadership, were to collapse . . . there would remain as an earnest of the future this indestructible fact, that thanks solely to a proletarian revolution a backward country has achieved in less than 10 years successes unexampled in history.[7]

Problems of Soviet development
Of course, the Soviet experience was marked by some grave problems and in the eyes of many people this fatally compromises the whole project of planned economy. I think this view is mistaken but we have to be able to respond to it.

Soviet industrialisation was undertaken under Stalinist bureaucratic leadership. It was delayed for five years (the Left Opposition led by Trotsky argued for it from 1923) and then rushed with unsupportable targets. Light industry and the consumer goods sector was neglected in favour of heavy industry. The working class suffered a big decline in its living standards, which undermined productivity. There was tremendous waste of human and material resources. Extreme social inequality developed between a privileged bureaucracy and an impoverished working class and peasantry. There was no democracy, no corrective to bureaucratic mistakes and arbitrariness. The whole thing was overcentralised and relied on managers motivated by economic incentives.

As Trotsky explained at the time, great gains could be registered by these priority-shock methods as long as it was a question of extensive growth — taking up the slack of underdevelopment at whatever cost. But as soon as that phase ended and quality became an issue, problems would develop because that needed democracy, the active creative involvement of the workers, and rising living standards.

The Soviet industrialisation under Stalin and his successors was marked by extreme environmental degradation. But as John Bellamy Foster explains in his book Marx's Ecology, Lenin had a different approach and the early Soviet conservation movement prospered while he was at the helm. Under Stalin it was attacked and destroyed.[8]

Bureaucratisation, social inequality, lack of workers' democracy, the command-and-administer economy, and the disregard for the environment were not essential parts of what happened — these were due to the Stalinist counter-revolution which began in the mid-1920s.

What we should take from the Soviet experience of planned economy is the tremendous resources available when a whole country is mobilised behind an overriding goal. But it can all be done so much better with genuine workers’ democracy.

Cuba
Revolutionary Cuba provides an alternative model of a planned economy. Cuba has had to contend with the US blockade. It has made some serious economic mistakes but it has been able to acknowledge them, make the necessary changes and is still moving forward.

Bureaucracy has so far been held in check, there is real workers' democracy and popular mobilisation and enthusiasm. There has been a great emphasis on developing a communist and revolutionary consciousness among the people and relying primarily on motivation and idealism rather than monetary incentives. The conduct of the leaders (especially Fidel and Che) has set an example which still resonates with tremendous force.

However, today the revolution faces arguably the biggest challenge in its history. The historic revolutionary leadership is passing from the scene; there are serious economic problems (especially food self-sufficiency); extreme weather events have battered the country setting back its economic development by years; the spread of bureaucracy and corruption appears quite alarming; social inequality has grown; and a section of the population (including many young people) is disengaged from the revolution.

We should certainly not write off the Cuban Revolution nor cease to publicise its remarkable and inspiring achievements but we should endeavour to have a realistic view about the dangers that it confronts.

The mechanism of economic planning in Cuba differs markedly from what took place in the Soviet Union. A draft central plan is elaborated and then discussed in workplaces across the island in a vast process of consultation and feedback. Changes are then made and the plan is adopted.

Cuba’s ongoing "energy revolution" shows what can be achieved when the key economic levers are in the hands of the state. There is an illuminating account on the Renewable Energy World website.[9] This is an example which should be studied by climate activists. These impressive results didn't require setting a "carbon price" or using other devious market mechanisms but came about as a result of political will, planning, and consciousness in a context where the economy was in the hands of the people.

Arguments

I would urge comrades interested in the idea of a socialist planned economy to read Ernest Mandel’s 1986-88 debate with Alec Nove in New Left Review. Mandel’s basic argument is that:

. . . I believe that it can be shown that there are objective tendencies in the most advanced countries which indicate the presence of the material, technical and human resources needed for planning, and at the same time these advanced societies also show the heavy cost that is paid for the absence of planning.[10]

Modern economy too complex to plan?
One the arguments Alec Nove advanced against Mandel was that the modern economy was too complex to plan. In the case of the Soviet Union, Nove estimated there were about 12 million products. Only the market could ever allocate these rationally.

However, Mandel pointed out that many if not most of these were intermediary products and spare parts. These are generally not allocated by the market but are made to order. The same applies in capitalist economy today.

Within the Ford Motor Company or the Airbus consortium, for example, once the decision has been taken to produce so many units of a given model, the production of various intermediary products and components is determined. Planning takes place within the firm to make sure that every part arrives on time where it is supposed to in the requisite quantity. The key "political" decision is which primary products to produce and how many.

As for the remaining products, studies show that most people’s consumption patterns are relatively stable and little subject to change. As Mandel explains:

. . . what do studies of actual consumer behaviour, including of working-class consumption, in the advanced capitalist countries tell us . . . They show that the great majority of currently produced goods are bought in customary shops, or from customary service distributors, independently of price fluctuations. It is no exaggeration to say that this holds for at least 80% of the consumption of the average consumer.

… Economic relations of this kind involve neither a real market economy, nor bureaucratically centralised planning. What they represent is elementary forms of spontaneous cooperation. They will often remain relatively stable for years, if not decades.

… That is how most business is conducted today in capitalist — and "socialist" — countries: based on habit, custom, routine and the natural cooperation that grows from mutual knowledge and foreseeable results.[11]

What replaces the profit motive?
Capitalist economy operates according to the profit motive. Competition between the corporations drives innovation as each attempts to get an edge over its rivals by producing goods more cheaply or finding a new killer product. What would take the place of competition in a non-capitalist, publicly owned economy? What force would promote innovation?

The answer is simple: the boundless creativity of the masses of ordinary people. As Mandel points out, historically, most key discoveries and inventions have had little to do with the profit motive. Who wasn't affected by the deeply moving sequence in Michael Moore's movie Capitalism: A Love Story about Jonas Salk and the discovery of the polio vaccine in the mid-1950s. Salk refused to patent his life-saving discovery ("Could you patent the sun?" he asked an interviewer) and the vaccine remains in the public domain.

Competition under capitalism may drive some innovation but it also stifles it. If a company with a big investment in one technology discovers a completely different one it is unlikely to simply write off its existing plant and equipment — that would be irrational from the point of view of its economic self-interest. Many inventions have been suppressed or simply not taken up.

The other point to make here is that the innovation may be in socially retrograde areas. How much creative energy is sucked up by the "defence" sector (i.e., militarism) to work out new and more effective technologies of domination, destruction and killing people?

Freed from the constraining shackles of capitalism, massive amounts of creativity could be freed to concentrate on solving the problems facing humanity (medical, environmental, social). If ordinary people really did control their working environment what might they be motivated to do?

Bureaucracy and corruption
The Soviet bloc countries were bedevilled by bureaucracy, privilege and even outright corruption. On a different level Cuba is grappling with it too. Some years ago Fidel warned that the Cuban Revolution could not be overthrown by attack from without but could be fatally damaged from within. Lack of revolutionary idealism, corruption — these are the challenges.

Historically the Cuban Revolution has waged a tremendous struggle against bureaucracy, almost from the moment of taking power. The weapons have been democracy, the repeated mobilisation of the people, the great example of commitment and self-sacrifice of the leaders, the tremendous resources put into improving the life of the people, constant self-criticism and rectification, the very real egalitarianism practiced, and so on.

As I mentioned early, there seem to be some very serious challenges right now. There seems to be a real softening of revolutionary fibre in sections of the apparatus and some spectacular examples have come to light in the last year or so.

It is not foreordained that these things will always get the better of a revolutionary process. Cuba has so far lasted for over 50 years in the teeth of hostility from the US imperialist colossus across the Florida Straits and it would be defeatist and not a revolutionary attitude to say that it cannot surmount its current difficulties.

Workers' self-management
Real democracy in the country and the economy is vital to the socialist project. Self-management in a nationalised economy is the best framework to develop the revolutionary initiative and creativity of the working class. Control in the factories and workplaces is also the best corrective to bureaucracy and corruption. Managers should be elected by the workforce and should be accountable to them.

The national plan is decided by the elected bodies of popular power but it has to be implemented (and corrected) in the local production units.

How will we get there?

Of course, at the end of the day, the key question is how will we get from our current capitalist economy to a rationally planned one?

Obviously, this will only happen as a consequence of fundamental social change — a social revolution which replaces the rule of the capitalist class with that of the working people. And as we know there is no roadmap to that. We will have to find our own way, albeit bearing in mind the experiences and lessons of the past and standing on the shoulders of the generations who have struggled before us.

But right now we need to put forward certain ideas as part of our transitional program to address the multiple crises we face and mobilise the people.

Tackling climate change demands that we nationalise — at the very least — the entire energy and power generation and distribution sector, the transportation sector (including the vehicle makers), and the banks. We should have no faith in market mechanisms to play any positive role here, except an absolutely marginal one.

We have to push the idea of public ownership and a rational, nationwide plan. Nothing else will do. Eventually the idea of bringing the bulk of the economy into public hands and elaborating a plan for social need will gain more traction. More and more people will come to understand that the capitalist profit-driven economy is way, way past its use-by date and will kill us all if we don't replace it with a people-centred socialist one.

Notes

Socialist Planning and the Market, p. 55.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A380#Production.

See http://en.rian.ru/world/20100530/159275376.html.

See the December 16, 2009 article by Sara Flounders at http://www.workers.org/2009/world/pentagon_1224/.

Slow Death by Rubber Duck by Rick Smith & Bruce Lourie (University of Queensland Press: St Lucia, 2009).

Bertolt Brecht Plays, Vol. II (Methuen: London, 1965), p. 173.

Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (Pathfinder Press: New York, 1972), pp. 6-7.

Marx's Ecology (Monthly Review Press: New York, 2000), pp. 243-244.

See http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2009/04/la-revolucion-energetica-cubas-energy-revolution.

Socialist Planning and the Market, p. 8; it is also available online at http://tinyurl.com/mandel-planning.

Ibid., p. 25.

Free speech victory in Brunswick

2010-06-12T00:48:00.001-07:00

[An edited version of this article appeared in Green Left Weekly, #841, June 23, 2010]

Green Left Weekly and Socialist Alliance have won a victory in our free speech struggle at Brunswick's Barkly Square shopping centre. Our Saturday morning card table stalls can now continue as before.

Management stopped our stalls in late November and offered us a completely unacceptable deal. We began our campaign in late February and in the next three months it developed considerable momentum.

Each week we held protest stalls at the centre and had to deal with the cops when management called them. But the police were on their best behaviour: they realised we were hardly major crime and, moreover, had significant local support. The response from shoppers was warm and extremely heartening. Almost 1000 signed our petition and people were clearly outraged at the ban and concerned at the ongoing privatisation of public space.

A number of people (19 that we know of) sent protest emails to management; we letterboxed thousands of residents in a broad area around the shopping centre; and on May 8 we held a widely supported free speech protest which marched down Sydney Road, right through the shopping centre and rallied in the forecourt. We developed support in the CFMEU and AMWU and various officials made phone calls to the ISPT (Industry Super Property Trust — the actual owners) on our behalf.

ISPT and management clearly felt the pressure and wanted the big stink we were causing to go away. Some of their actions seemed rather ill-considered. In the beginning they obviously expected big things from the police but were quickly disappointed. At the end they issued an order banning Dave Holmes from the shopping centre — but then right away arranged to meet with us to discuss the issue!

The deal which we have accepted means we can go back to our regular Saturday morning stalls at the carpark entrance. However, we have had to agree to increase our public liability insurance cover from $10 million to $20 million.

In addition, we have had to apply to Moreland Council for a permit for our stall on MacDougall Street (a laneway that goes through the centre on the less busy side of the complex). This has been granted but will have to be renewed each month.

(In over a decade council has never taken the slightest interest in our activities on MacDougall Street and clearly only acted in response to management's pressure. But while permit regimes are not good and Green Left Weekly has tried to avoid them around the country, we wanted to get this issue off the table so we could concentrate all our efforts on the dispute with the centre.)

A related issue which we raised in our campaign is access by progressive community groups to the centre. While we were not able to advance on this and there remains no independent right of access (management's insurance demand is a big problem here and it also appears that they want to avoid an open slather), we will do what we can to accomodate progressive local action groups through our stalls.

All in all, we have won an important victory. We didn't want to be banned and this situation was unexpectedly forced on us. Nevertheless, our campaign has achieved some real gains: the forces of darkness have been beaten back, at least for now; a number of supporters became involved on various levels; it has raised our profile in the area (and not only there); important links have been developed with other groups; and we have increased public awareness on a vital issue which will be with us as long as we live under corporate capitalism.

Now that we have won a victory, the challenge for us is to make sure that we take full advantage of it. That is, we need to have a stall at the carpark entrance every single week and, weather permitting, on MacDougall Street as well. If you are interested in helping out, please get in touch.

Eritrea's national day

2010-05-23T01:47:00.000-07:00

[Greetings given to May 22, 2010 meeting at the Melbourne Resistance Centre celebrating Eritrea's national day.]

Comrades, on behalf of Socialist Alliance I would like to extend warm solidarity greetings to this meeting celebrating Eritrea's national day.

Epic & bloody struggle

From 1890 to 1941 Eritrea was part of the Italian empire. With the outbreak of World War II, the Italians were defeated by Britain which ruled the country under a UN 'trusteeship' until the country was forcibly federated with Ethiopia in 1950.

In 1961-62 Emperor Haile Selassie dissolved the federation and declared Eritrea to be merely a province of Ethiopia. An armed struggle for independence then began and continued for three decades (even after the emperor was overthrown and replaced with the so-called 'Marxist' regime of Mengistu).

Finally, on May 24, 1991 the Eritrean capital, Asmara, fell to the liberation forces, ending the epic and bloody struggle for independence. A UN-supervised referendum two years later resulted in an overwhelming vote for independence and Eritrea formally came into being on May 24, 1993.

Conservative forces

As you may know, most Eritreans have not been able to truly enjoy the fruits of independence. Within the liberation movement, conservative, power-hungry and self-seeking elements around Isaias Afewerki came to dominate the new country. As Dan O'Connell wrote in the Spring 2006 issue of Middle East Report:

Eritrea is a nation in a perpetual state of emergency, under siege by its own leaders, with thousands of its citizens in prison for their politics, none of them charged with a crime or given a day in court to defend themselves. The rest of the population is denied the most basic rights of speech, assembly, press and religious practice, as a constitution ratified eight years ago has yet to go into effect and young people called up for short-term military duty seven years ago remain in uniform or on assignment in civilian jobs at national service pay . . . The party in power — the only one legally permitted to operate — is not even accountable to its own leadership structures or membership. [http://www.merip.org/mer/mer238/connell.html]

This phenomenon — of the independence movement falling victim to, or becoming dominated by, a new privilege-seeking bourgeois layer — is, unfortunately, far from unknown in Africa (and not only there). For instance, this is what happened in Zimbabwe, with the emergence of the Mugabe military-police dictatorship and even, it has to be said, in South Africa following the fall of apartheid.

Faced with repression under the Afewerki dictatorship large numbers of Eritreans have been forced to leave their homeland and go into emigration. Several thousand have settled in Australia, mainly in Victoria.

We can understand the sadness and pain such refugees must feel, having been forced leave the country in which they grew up and then cope with all the problems of a strange and often not very welcoming new one. All the while there is constant concern for family and loved ones who have remained behind.

Racism & discrimination

Unfortunately, many migrants and refugees in Australia suffer racism and discrimination. Stupid and hateful prejudices are whipped up by the media and right-wing forces in order to create scapegoats and stop people uniting to fight against the capitalist system that is ultimately responsible for all our problems, from climate change to jobs and housing.

And this looks like getting even worse. It's an election year and kicking the most vulnerable sections of our society appears to be simply irresistible for Lib-Lab politicians racing for the trough of public office.

Socialist Alliance stands with all those who are victims of racism and works actively to build all movements against it.

Long collaboration

In conclusion, comrades, I would stress two things:

Firstly, we value our long collaboration with our Eritrean brothers and sisters, especially with comrade Tewelde who is an active member of Socialist Alliance.

In spite of all the obvious difficulties, it is extremely important that progressive forces in the various migrant communities become involved in Australian politics. All the victims of the neoliberal capitalist system here need to unite and fight together for something better — for a system that puts people's needs before business profits.

Secondly, we are very happy to join with you in celebrating Eritrea's national day and look forward to the time when your homeland is truly free and ordinary people there can build a better life in freedom, peace and wellbeing.

Thank you.

Free speech? Sort of . . .

2010-05-17T01:08:00.000-07:00

[Green Left Weekly, #838, May 26, 2010]

We supposely live in a free country. But do we actually have free speech in Australia? Well, sort of . . .

Obviously, the situation here is completely different to a military dictatorship where people live in fear of a knock on the door. In some countries there is no Green Left Weekly, no right to protest, and dissidents are jailed and tortured. In Australia we do have some real and important democratic rights. However, there are severe practical limitations on effectively exercising these rights — that is, exercising them in a way that anyone actually hears what you're saying.

Not an absolute right

In the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick Green Left Weekly is waging a fight to regain the right to operate its regular Saturday morning stalls at the Barkly Square shopping centre.

In most suburbs if you want to access people you can either letterbox (which has some big limitations: it is very indirect and there is no immediate feedback) or you go to the malls and shopping complexes. But the latter are surrounded by signs saying 'Private property. Keep out.' — unless you are there to spend money. Shopping complexes are like the old market places where everybody goes — except that they operate solely to make a profit for their owners.

Politics is just a distraction. And it's getting worse. Earlier this year a mall owner was reported as saying that election material wasn't wanted in shopping centres because it only distracted the punters.

Should it be like this? As Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez has said, private property is not an absolute right. That is, the collective — the community or society — has rights (or should have rights) which override those of private interests like a shopping centre. But not under capitalism.

Who actually hears you?

If you are a media magnate and own a TV station, mainstream daily or a chain of local newspapers you won't be worried about such things. Your opinions get broadcast to hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people — all the time, on any subject.

But if you are small campaign group or a socialist organisation it is a different matter. You can freely shout your head off: Down with Abbott! Down with Rudd! Down with capitalism! People before profit! But who actually hears you?

In our campaign at Barkly Square we have tried to reach shoppers with our protest stalls. Almost 900 people have signed our petition calling for our stalls to be allowed to operate as before. We have letterboxed thousands of nearby homes. On May 8, we organised a broad demonstration which focused on the whole issue of community stalls and access at Barkly Square.

On March 3 we were lucky to get an article in the local Moreland Leader which alerted tens of thousands of residents to what was going on. But we can't count on such coverage, especially when we are raising fundamental questions about how the private profit system actually operates to effectively marginalise dissenting opinions.

Insurance racket

One issue at Barkly Square concerns public liability insurance cover. Left-wing stalls actually began at Barkly Square in the 1980s and have continued — with varying degrees of regularity — ever since. To my knowledge no-one has ever impaled themselves on our card tables or tripped over them. But after our 2005 struggle with centre management Green Left Weekly has had to have $10 million of cover. Management wanted to make it $20 million but were forced to back off. Most readers have probably never realised how dangerous a card table can be.

The requirement to have public liability insurance is a real barrier to free speech. Maybe the centre is genuinely worried about the prospect of an accident and being sued and want to protect themselves or maybe the insurance requirement is just a filter to exclude undesirables like Green left Weekly. In any case, such requirements are an enormous imposition on a small group and in practice serve to kill democracy. They flow directly from the madness of capitalism. The next logical step will be to insist that people walking down the street have public liability insurance in case someone falls over them and injures themselves.

No doubt all this is good for the insurance racket but a simpler solution might be to have a society where nobody needs 'insurance' because everybody is properly looked after if they have an accident or their house burns down or whatever.

Other impediments

In building the May 8 free speech rally posters were stuck on light and telegraph poles up and down Sydney Road. Within a day GLW duly received a phone call from the Moreland council threatening us! It would be nice if one didn't have to resort to covering the street poles but what other options does one have to reach out to people? Not many.

Another obstacle to actually realising free speech in practice is the lack of ready availability of cheap venues. There are plenty of places available for hire but generally the prices aren't cheap. But if you are looking for a free or low-cost venue the choices are severely limited. Council facilities are often scarce, booked out months in advance, are expensive or impose conditions such as not charging for entry. In many cases we end up in bars or pubs which are often less than ideal and our welcome depends on how much custom we attract.

1933 . . . and today

Diagonally opposite the Brunswick Town Hall is a monument which commemorates an incident which took place in 1933. (In my opinion it is rather anaemic considering the heroic event it celebrates but, nevertheless, there it is.)

In those days Brunswick was a grim working-class suburb deep in the misery of the Great Depression — unemployment, home evictions and poverty stalked the streets. The unemployed, led by the Communist Party, fought back. The right to hold street meetings was a bitterly fought issue.

A Nationalist government was in office in Spring Street. The extremely right-wing police commissioner, General Thomas Blamey, was on a mission to wipe out working-class radicalism and Brunswick was a prime target. Street meetings were brutally crushed by baton-wielding cops, activists were arrested and many were jailed.

On May 16 the free speech struggle climaxed when young CPA member Noel Counihan (later a famous artist) locked himself in an old lift cage bolted to the boards of a heavy horse-drawn cart, which was in turn chained to a verandah post. From his improvised citadel, with the cops unsuccessfully trying to batter their way in, Counihan spoke for 15-20 minutes to a crowd estimated at 10,000. Eventually he came out and was arrested.

This was a turning point in the campaign. The state government soon backed off and street meetings were more or less permitted to proceed without police interference.

Seventy-seven years later it is not police basher gangs that are the main obstacle to free speech. The main enemy today is the far more indirect workings of modern neoliberal corporate capitalism. (Private property, keep out! Shout your head off, we don't care, because no one will hear you . . . We control the mass media and we won't give you access.)

What can we do?

Speakers at the May 8 free speech rally pointed out that a number of free speech fights are going on around Melbourne. Greens' stalls at the nearby Northcote Plaza shopping centre have been shut down by security. Activists attempting to have stalls at Southern Cross railway station (supposedly public space) have been moved on. A similar situation applies at Federation Square.

All these things must be resisted wherever possible and to the fullest extent. Radicals in the past have always had to battle for free speech and today is no different. Capitalism is leading us to the edge of the precipice. It wants to silence those who are pointing out the looming catastrophe and the need for a sharp turn toward a society where people's needs come before private profit.

Free speech under attack in Brunswick

2010-03-01T14:43:00.000-08:00

[Green Left Weekly, #828, March 3, 2010]

MELBOURNE — Green Left Weekly is currently involved in a free-speech fight in the inner-city suburb of Brunswick. At the end of November, the management of the busy Barkly Square Shopping Centre stopped GLW from operating our regular Saturday morning card table stalls.

They tried this before in 2005 but after a vigorous public campaign they agreed that the stalls could continue. For the next four years everything proceeded smoothly. But now they want to restrict us to one stall in a completely dead location and impose oppressive insurance conditions to boot.

On February 20 we returned to campaign for our rights. Many shoppers were supportive and in an hour and a half we collected about 80 signatures on a petition. Management called police who shut the stalls and threatened to charge the operators.

The action of Barkly Square management is an attack on freedom of speech. Their attack on us is also an attack on the right of any community group to set up a stall and hand out material to shoppers.

Stalls a part of Brunswick life

Green Left Weekly’s stalls distribute the alternative press and leaflets supporting a range of progressive causes. They are part of the varied community activities which make multicultural Brunswick such an interesting place in which to live.

From our stalls shoppers can obtain material supporting rights for workers, women and refugees; real action on climate change; opposing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; and so on. Obviously not everyone agrees with our political views but we hassle nobody and many people appreciate our presence.

Public space is being taken away from us

Barkly Square management’s attack on us is part of a disturbing pattern around the country. Public space is being shrunk and privatised.

Today’s big shopping centres are really public spaces — we are all have to go there and many people do so simply for social contacts — but they are owned by big business whose only concern is making a profit.

A prime example of this attitude is the Barkly Square carpark. Once completely free, like many others around Melbourne it has been handed over to a gang of sharp operators who make money by "fining" people for not displaying their parking tickets.

More and more, the right to free speech is being restricted. Alternative views are marginalised. A non-profit newspaper like GLW is not like the huge Fairfax and Murdoch corporate press. It is sold by volunteers on the streets, at shopping centres and markets, at demonstrations and other public places.

Recently mall owners have even said they want to ban handing out election material in shopping centres during the next federal elections — it distracts shoppers from making their purchases!

Defend free speech

Green Left Weekly is asking that Barkly Square management return to our earlier agreement and allow our weekly card table stalls to continue as before on Saturdays at the front and back of the complex.

Protests can be sent to: Maureen Vercoe, Centre Manager, Level 1, 90-106 Sydney Road, Brunswick 3056; call the centre office on 9387 8411 to register your opposition; or send an email to Centre Management (please cc us at GLW Melbourne).

For further information or to help the campaign, call Green Left Weekly on 9639 8622.

Asylum seekers: No room at the inn

2009-09-26T19:17:00.000-07:00

[Green Left Weekly, #812, September 26, 2009]

With seven boatloads of asylum seekers intercepted in September, Australia’s Christmas Island detention centre is fast filling up. It now holds 677 detainees. ALP Home Affairs Minister Brendan O'Connor told a conference that people smuggling was one of the key threats facing the country. But even he had to admit that the primary reason people seek refuge is because of "push factors" such as "war, civil conflicts, famines".

Tens of millions on move

The world is in chaos. Within countries and between countries, tens of millions of people in the Third World are on the move, fleeing war, oppression, and climate change. They are deperately looking for a way out.

As climate change bites deeper and deeper, the "push factors" are going to get radically worse resulting in very large-scale population displacement.

In Bangla Desh, for instance, whole areas are becoming uninhabitable due to daily inundations by sea water at high tide. A recent TV newsclip showed villagers waist deep in water, reaching down to grab handfuls of mud to build a precarious levee on which they could live — if only for the moment.

And in southern Iraq, two million people have just about run out of water as the Tigris and Euphrates rivers dry up. Mexico is currently being ravaged by a drought of unprecedented scope and severity.

Misery caused by West

The misery of the Third World is a result of the rapacity of the giant Western corporations and the wars fought by the Western powers to maintain their world empire. Climate change is fundamentally due to the mad, unsustainable profligacy of the major Western capitalist countries and their refusal to make the urgent large-scale transition to renewables that is necessary to avert catastrophe.

Australia is an integral part of this apparatus of madness. It has been a loyal supporter of the United States in its criminal war in Afghanistan and it supported the Sri Lankan regime in its war against Sri Lanka’s oppressed Tamil minority — two conflicts which have generated the largest part of the recent crop of asylum seekers trying to reach Australia. And as the world's highest per capita emitter of greenhouse gases and the world's largest exporter of coal, Australia is a significant contributor to climate change.

The solution is really very simple. We need to reverse course and work to create a better world — a world without war and misery — and take urgent steps to tackle climate change. Then people wouldn't be forced to make desperate attempts to find sanctuary in faraway places.

Building walls

But the Western governments are going the other way: they won't change course and they are building walls around their countries to hold back the tide of refugees. There is definitely no room at the inn. Costa Gavras wonderful new film, Eden is West, shows the journey of one young asylum seeker as he travels from an unknown country to Greece and eventually to Paris, in constant danger of apprehension by the police and deportation back to his starting point.

Our government fans the hysteria over "border protection". A major task of our navy seems to be the interception of wretched boatloads of refugees. And being really proactive, our government now pays Indonesia to intercept refugees planning to travel to Australia and send them back to the misery they came from.

There is even a popular reality TV show — Border Protection — that is doing its bit for Fortress Australia. Of course, the real threats to Australia's working people come not from outside our borders but from inside — from the capitalist corporations and their Lib-Lab governments which are steadily destroying our economic security and civil liberties and now the very climatic conditions which make life on earth possible. And all the while they sow hatred and division to divert us from a struggle against the profits-before-people system which is responsible.

The government must be forced to change its policy on refugees. For a start: it must shut down all the detention centres, both on Christmas Island and the mainland. Allow all asylum seekers to immediately apply for asylum in Australia. Let all asylum seekers who seek refugee status be accepted into the community.

Communism in Australia

2009-05-30T21:33:00.000-07:00

[The text of a talk delivered to the conference A Century of Struggle — Laborism and the Radical Alternative. Lessons for Today. The gathering was held in Melbourne on May 30, 2009; it was organised by Socialist Alliance and sponsored by Green Left Weekly.]

The original Communist Party of Australia ceased to exist in 1991. (The present CPA is the renamed Socialist Party of Australia, the result of a pro-Moscow split from the old CPA in 1971.) So it is a long while gone. Many comrades here would have had no experience of it.

Yet for most of its 70-year history the CPA was Australia's major left party. At times the party had a significant impact on Australian politics — especially in the grim years of the Great Depression, during World War II and during the Cold War. Cynics used to make cracks about the "party" of ex-members of the CPA being the biggest political formation in the country but what is true is that over these seven decades probably scores of thousands of people saw the party as the vehicle with which to fight for a better world.

For decades the CPA was a strong militant force in the trade union movement. It played a key role in supporting various national liberation struggles (Indonesia in its independence struggle against the Dutch after World War II and much later East Timor in its fight); it fought hard for civil liberties (we can mention the Egon Kisch case in the 1930s and the fight against Menzies push to ban the party in the early 1950s). In the field of culture the CPA — through writers such as Jean Devanny, Frank Hardy, Dorothy Hewett and Katherine Susannah Prichard — developed a strong influence.

Resistance Books will shortly publish a new book, The Aboriginal Struggle and the Left by Terry Townsend. It shows convincingly that each significant gain won by the Aboriginal rights movement has been achieved through an alliance between this country's Indigenous people and the working-class and socialist movements — an alliance in which the CPA played a key role.

However, despite the many undeniably positive chapters in the CPA's history there was another side. The CPA was created to fight for socialism and it recruited on that basis. But a gross contradiction developed. At the end of the 1920s the party became Stalinised. This meant that on all fundamental questions its politics were subordinated to those of the privileged conservative bureaucracy which had usurped power in the Soviet Union.

Thus in the 1930s, despite its dramatic growth, the Stalinist Third Period sectarianism prevented it from building a really serious broad challenge to the whole system. During World War II the party acted as a super-patriotic booster of the war effort, deliberately heading off workers' struggles for better wages and conditions. And ultimately, the CPA's uncritical identification with the USSR severely compromised the struggle for socialism and ended up demoralising many of its militants.

Even when it broke with Moscow after the 1968 Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia, the CPA was unable to properly settle accounts with Stalinism. Rather than moving in a revolutionary direction, it moved to the right. It spent its last decade playing a pivotal role in selling the anti-worker, wage-freezing ALP-ACTU Accord which so devastated the trade union movement during the Hawke-Keating years.

I would urge comrades to get a copy of the dossier we have put together on the history of the CPA. It is a selection but it does provide some of the key materials for anyone wanting to study the history of the party. In particular, I would commend the excellent 1995 series of Green Left Weekly articles by John Percy, a former longtime leader of the Democratic Socialist Perspective — in my opinion they provide the essential Marxist framework for understanding the CPA's real strengths and real weaknesses.

Over the past year or so I've read quite a few books about the CPA, memoirs by former CPA members and biographies. It is profoundly moving to read accounts of the passion, commitment and courage of earlier generations of revolutionaries, especially when so often it all ended in disillusionment and loss of faith when finally confronted by the reality of the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union. I would have liked to be able to refer to some of these but there is simply no time.

Today, I can only indicate some of the critical issues and periods in the history of the CPA. The history of the Communist Party is a truly vast subject and I hope comrades will be encouraged to study the topic further. There is a parallel session today on the CPA and the left in the trade unions so I won’t go into that except in the most general way. I especially want to focus on the CP's policy towards the ALP at various times. This is a question of great interest to socialists today.

Origins

On October 30, 1920, 26 people met in Sydney to found the Communist Party of Australia. It adopted a statement of aims which said in part:

… By monopolising and holding by any and every means of skill, cunning, deceit and even terrorism, all the means of subsistence, a dominant class perpetuates the existing form of society, whilst the proletariat, deprived of everything, sometimes even of bare subsistence, is subject to degradation and most humiliating slavery. Thus does modern society present itself a system wherein one class provides all things, and owns nothing, whilst the other class own everything and produce nothing. The Communist Party recognising this contradiction sets itself to abolish the system, to overthrow this class monopoly and to abolish the private ownership of the means of production.[1]

The participants at this meeting came from four groupings:

1. The so-called "Trades Hall Reds", a group of left-wing union officials around Jock Garden, secretary of the NSW Labour Council. They were exponents of the One Big Union idea and of working within the Labor Party ("boring from within" what they saw as the "mass party" of the Australian working class). Also in this group was W.P. Earsman of the Sydney Labor College who became the provisional secretary of the new party. (Earsman was a delegate to the Third Congress of the Comintern in June-July 1921 where Trotsky helped ensure his credentials were fully recognised.)

2. The other main group was from the Australian Socialist Party, led by its secretary Arthur Reardon. The ASP specialised in Marxist propaganda and opposed working in the Labor Party.

3. The third current was former IWW members. The Industrial Workers of the World, the Wobblies, had an heroic history. A sui generis form of syndicalism, the IWW had been severely hit by state repression during World War I. Tom Glynn, one of the 12 IWW members framed on charges of conspiring to burn down Sydney, attended the founding conference.

4. Finally there were various other socialists such as Guido Baracchi (the subject of Jeff Sparrow's recent book, Communism: A Love Story), Adela Pankhurst (of the famous suffragette family), and J.B. Miles of the Queensland Communist Group.

The problem of the Labor Party

Within two months the new party split and the ASP left. The main political issue was what attitude to take to the ALP. The ASP saw the CPA as opportunist and the CPA regarded the ASP as sectarian. In August 1922 the Comintern recognised the CPA as its Australian section and by the end of the year most ASP members had moved over to the CPA.

But the problem of the ALP remained. Lenin got in right back in 1913 when he characterised the Labor Party as a liberal capitalist party. The ruling class has turned to it at times of crisis (World War I, the Great Depression, World War II) or in order to carry out structural changes which would be difficult for the traditional capitalist parties because of their sectional interests. While its electoral base is in the working class it is certainly not a workers party or a two-class party as many have argued at various times (any more than is, say, the Democratic Party in the United States). In order reach the masses who look to Labor our tactics can be extremely varied but the key thing here is political clarity on just what the ALP is.

In 1920 Lenin had written 'Left-Wing' Communism — An Infantile Disorder. It contained a section urging British communists to support the election of the Labour Party against the Liberals and Tories — in order to get a sympathetic hearing from the British workers. Lenin was actually in favour of the British communists affiliating to the Labour Party — as long as they could retain full freedom of action and propaganda.

In 1921 the Comintern's Third Congress adopted the united front line. This recognised that in Europe the postwar revolutionary wave had ebbed and the task now was to use intelligent united front tactics to make gains around issues of immediate concern to the masses, strengthen the communist parties, and put pressure on the social-democratic misleaders — either cooperate with the communists or stand exposed as accomplices of the bosses.

At first glance, this approach might have seemed to have vindicated Garden and the "boring from within" approach but this was not so. As Alastair Davidson explains in his 1969 history of the CPA:

[The CI's united front policy] appeared to be similar to the policy already adopted by the CPA in accordance with Australian socialist tradition. Both advised party members to work through the trade unions and labor parties and emphasised the need to concentrate on piecemeal demands rather than extreme revolutionary attitudes. But there was one crucial difference … The Comintern's advice to work with labor parties was not based on any belief that these parties were now acceptable. They were still just as untrustworthy, but they had the support of the workers. The object in uniting with them was not to refurbish them or to capture them but to steal their support and destroy them. All parties other than communist parties were considered outmoded political forms. This attitude differed from that of Garden or the VSP members who had chosen to work in the ALP, and it took the CPA some time to realize the difference.[2]

In line with Garden's conceptions, all CPA members joined the ALP in 1922. At the June 1923 NSW ALP conference the CPA gained probationary affiliation to the Labor Party. The conference also adopted a socialisation objective. The CPA then went all out to win support for ratification of their affiliation at the next conference. But Lang and other right-wingers campaigned strongly against them and at the October 1923 conference, the affiliation decision was rescinded, albeit over strong opposition. The NSW ALP almost split over the decision. However, the ruling stood and soon CPA members were also banned from belonging to the federal or state Labor parties.

This new situation led to considerable debate in the CPA. Guido Baracchi proposed that the CPA dissolve itself into the ALP. When the December 1925 party conference rejected this proposal he resigned. Garden stood in the 1924 NSW elections and was shocked when he only received 317 votes. He flipped over and began collaborating with Lang, now leading a mildly reformist state government. He was expelled by the CPA late in 1926.

At the start, the CPA had from 750 to 1000 members; by the middle of the decade it was down to 280. Most of those who had left had joined the ALP. The main reason for these losses was the party's opportunist interpretation of united front work (the other part was the difficulties created by the mild boom of the first part of the 1920s). A lot of party members were miseducated on the nature of the ALP and the tasks of the CPA in relation to it. (This assessment, I might stress, is not that given by Alastair Davidson: like many others he blames the Comintern's "sectarian" united front policy.)

Stalinisation

In 1925, Jack Kavanagh, an Irishman, came to Australia from Canada where he had been one of the central leaders of the CP there. He joined the CPA and soon became its central figure. A lot of Stalinist myths surround Kavanagh but the truth is that he stopped the party's decline and gave a much greater weight to Marxist education and propaganda. As Jack Blake, a longtime CPA leader, argues in a 1972 article:

It was at this stage that Kavanagh became prominent in the struggle against Garden and against his policy, which would have meant the liquidation of the Communist Party. Kavanagh emerged as the most effective leader of the struggle to defend the existence of the Communist Party and develop it into a revolutionary party along Leninist lines.[3]

At the December 1927 party conference he introduced a new constitution aimed at reorganising the CPA along democratic-centralist lines, replacing the old social-democratic forms that had applied hitherto.

Kavanagh was also strongly opposed to party members submerging themselves in the ALP. He insisted that all communists in the ALP and the trade unions declare their CPA membership, even at the risk of victimisation.

However, in 1929-30 Kavanagh and his supporters were defeated in the inner party struggle by the Lance Sharkey-J.B. Miles-Herbert Moxon group which had the backing of the Comintern, now solidly under Stalinist control. The fundamental process going on here was the Stalin leadership's drive to destroy any independent-minded leaderships in the CPs and replace them with hand-raisers completely loyal to Moscow. The political issues were secondary.

But the Labor Party question did loom large in the struggle. First at issue was the position to be taken for the May 1929 Queensland state elections. The state ALP government had angered workers by its right-wing pro-boss policies. In the so-called "Queensland resolution", drawn up by the ECCI with input from some CPA leaders, the CPA agreed to stand several CPA candidates, to support genuine left-wing ALP candidates, and elsewhere to put ALP candidates on the spot and urge a non-vote for them if they didn't repudiate the actions of the government. I understand this to mean that the CPA did not urge a vote for Labor ahead of the Nationals — a serious tactical mistake. In the event, Labor was defeated but CPA candidates did reasonably well in relation to the ALP candidates.

With a federal election due in October 1929 the party had to decide on its policy. However, rather than follow the Queensland policy the party leadership decided to urge a vote for Labor against the hated Bruce Nationalist government while promoting an independent CPA campaign clearly distinguished from Labor. (The party felt it was too weak to stand its own candidates.) The CPA leadership argued that, looking at Queensland, it was clear that however bad the ALP government had been, the Nationalists in office were far worse. A similar argument applied federally. All this should sound very familiar to us.

The Open Letter

On October 13, 1929 the Comintern Executive Committee (ECCI) sent an Open Letter to the CPA, for distribution to the membership. This Stalinist document said, among other things: "Even at its conference of December 1928, the party could not give a proper political estimate of the Labor Party or define its fundamentally social-fascist character [I'll say more about this shortly], its aggressively counter-revolutionary role in the present situation … apparently the party regards itself as being merely a propagandist body and as a sort of adjunct to the Labor Party." (This charge, of course, was ridiculous. Does the Socialist Alliance policy of putting the ALP ahead of the Coalition in elections mean we are an "adjunct" to the Labor Party?)

The Open Letter went on to emphasise the need for the CPA to "assert itself as the only true working-class party" and "to conduct open warfare against the party of class collaboration".[4] This is fine in general, but there are appropriate ways and inappropriate ways of exposing the ALP and its rotten capitalist politics.

Comintern intervention was decisive in swinging party opinion behind the Sharkey-Miles-Moxon grouping. At the Ninth Party Congress (December 26-31, 1929) Kavanagh and his supporters were defeated and removed from the central leadership. One of the first acts of the new leadership was to cable the ECCI "offering unswerving loyalty to the new line" (that is, the Third Period, "social-fascist" line). This leadership change marks the beginning of the Stalinisation of the CPA. It still had to complete the process but this was accomplished in relatively short order.

In 1930 the Comintern sent an emissary to Australia to oversee the thorough Stalinisation of the party. He was an American called Harry Wicks, known in Australia as Herbert Moore. (Much later he was exposed a longtime FBI agent.) He pushed through a new constitution and oversaw the expulsion of Kavanagh and his main supporters. Even Moxon got the chop leaving Miles and Sharkey as the two central figures — Miles as general-secretary and Sharkey as president.

The Third Period

The Sixth Congress of the Comintern in 1928 had saddled the communist parties with the disastrous schema of the "Third Period". According to the Comintern analysis, adopted at its Sixth Congress in 1928, after the crisis of World War I and the immediate turbulent aftermath, and then the stabilisation of the 1920s, world capitalism was now in its third period. This was one of decisive crisis, in which revolutionary situations were on the immediate agenda just about everywhere and the task of the moment was to organise for the socialist revolution. The problem with the "Third Period" line is that it confused real possibilities of development with the actual situation.

As we know, stormy struggles did occur in many countries and revolutionary possibilities did open up but these still had to be developed with a correct program of transitional demands to win leadership of the masses. The Third Period line pushed the CPs into all sorts of ultraleft mistakes, into substituting slogans and abuse for a correct policy.

And the tactical prescription which flowed from it was disastrous. The Comintern argued that not only were the pro-capitalist social-democratic leaders holding back the masses and preparing the ground for reaction and fascism — which was absolutely true — but that they were a variety of fascism — “social-fascism” — which was absolutely ridiculous. Their rank-and-file followers, whom the CPs were striving to win over, were also "social-fascists" — which was even crazier. Left social-democrats — "left social-fascists" in the Stalinist categorisation — were even worse because they could more readily mislead the masses.

When the Great Depression came and capitalism did enter a period of tremendous dislocation and political turbulence, the Comintern’s ultra-sectarian "Third Period" line prevented the communist parties from being able to correctly relate to the situation and win leadership of the masses.

For example, in Germany in the later 1920s and early thirties, this sectarian line prevented the potentially formidable labour movement from uniting its forces to check Hitler's rise to power. Instead, the working class remained divided between social-democracy and communism. As Trotsky tirelessly stressed, whatever their differences it was necessary for the workers' movement to unite for self-defence against the growing fascist menace. If it did not do this it would suffer a catastrophic defeat. Trotsky also pointed out that a successful campaign against the Hitlerite threat would open the way to a socialist revolution in Germany. The social-democratic leaders certainly didn't want to fight but the sectarian CP line made it easy for them to avoid the struggle. How different would world history have been had the Marxist-Leninist policy advocated by Trotsky been followed …

CP sectarianism & the Great Depression

In Australia, the Third Period schema meant a crazy sectarianism toward the ALP and its mass base. At a time when the faith in the system of large numbers of workers was being shaken as never before, when they were groping for a way out of their misery, the CPA line made it so much harder for them to cross over to the revolutionary camp.

Of course, the ALP leadership was loyal to the capitalist system, just as it is today. But the most fruitful way to expose the Labor misleaders in the eyes of its followers was not just through general propaganda but by constantly trying to achieve unity in action in fighting for the interests of the masses. Only in the struggle will large numbers of people lose their illusions. Criticism is certainly not excluded but it must be relevant to the issues at hand and formulated in relation to the struggle as it unfolds.

In Australia the Third Period line meant that the ALP leadership was simply denounced. The abusive "social-fascist" tag was also applied to the Labor membership, repelling them at the precise moment when many of them were having serious doubts about capitalism and the parliamentary approach. As Jack Blake recounts:

We believed we had to fight both the openly capitalist parties and the Labor Party, the main blows to be struck against the Labor Party which was considered to be the first barrier to the development of revolutionary struggle. It was thought that as the Labor governments had revealed themselves as supporters of capitalism, all that was needed to win the workers away from the influence of the Labor Party and bring them under the leadership of the Communist Party was the use on a wide enough scale of strongly worded agitation and propaganda. This was the ground on which members of Labor governments, Labor Party and trade union leaders were described as "social-fascists". When left trends emerged in the Labor Party and trade unions in various states these were branded as "left social fascists" who were more dangerous to the working class than open right-wingers like Scullin and [Victorian ALP Premier Ned] Hogan.[5]

Here is an example of the CP's abusive style of polemic taken from a 1930 article in the Workers Weekly:

The advancements made recently in the organisation of the unemployed movement have so alarmed the filthy crew of social-fascists that they are engaging in a frenzied campaign of sabotage and treacherous intrigue in an endeavour to break up the UWM and place the unemployed once more at the mercy of Hogan's gang of professional starvers of the unemployed. In this foul conspiracy the usual bunch are playing a leading role — Duffy, Monk and Cameron. The prostitute socialists are gathering all the opportunists, degenerate stool pigeons and scum that infest the ALP and placing in their hands the agencies for the distribution of state food stuffs …[6]

This absurd and destructive line was applied in NSW both to the movement headed by Lang and to the Socialisation Units. Common sense would seem to dictate that the CP should have attempted to form the closest links in the struggle with the units and their mass base. When Lang was dismissed by Governor Game in 1932, an enormous crowd assembled in Sydney's Moore Park in a very radical mood, with a section calling for arms. The CP had cut itself off from influencing this development and, with Lang heading off to his country farm until everything blew over, it went nowhere. It could have been very different.

It is true that the CPA grew from about 250 members at the end of 1929 to over 3000 in 1935 (only 200 of whom were women). The CPA grew despite its deeply sectarian line because the crisis was very deep and disillusionment with the ALP was widespread; it was heavily involved in leading the immediate struggles of the desperate masses; and because it was identified with the Soviet union which was engaged in a massive industrialisation while the capitalist world was in crisis.

However, far bigger opportunities were wasted because of the CPA's Stalinist sectarianism towards the ALP and its mass base.

That being said, we should note that its work in this period laid the basis for the later very significant growth of CPA influence in the trade unions. Most of its later leading cadre came out of the unemployed movement. As Ralph Gibson explains:

… The highly democratic grass-roots organisation of the unemployed [in the early 1930s] threw up many talented new leaders. Many of these moved into industry as the depression began to lift and more jobs became available. This was a period when new militant personnel was badly needed in the unions. Many of the union officials at this time were not only right-wing, but incompetent, and it was urgent to fill their places. Leaders of the unemployed, largely Communist Party members, commended themselves to their fellow unionists as people who could do the job required. Thus Ernie Thornton, of Collingwood Unemployed, became state, and then federal secretary of the Ironworkers' Union. George Frank, of Richmond unemployed, finished as federal secretary of the Carpenters' Union (later BWIU). Jim Munro, of North Melbourne Unemployed, became an organiser of the Timber Workers' Union. Tom Hills, who led the unemployed in Port Melbourne was prominent in Waterside Workers' Federation activity. Brand, leader of the Brunswick Unemployed Single Men's Group, became president of the Victorian Branch of the Ironworkers' Union when Thornton transferred to the national office in Sydney. And so one could continue. Looking round the Trades Hall Council chamber any Thursday evening in the 1930s, one would see a great many faces familiar from the days of the unemployed battles, mainly much younger faces than the Trades Hall average.[7]

Switch to 'Popular Front'

The Seventh Congress of the Comintern in 1935 junked the Third Period line and adopted the so-called "Popular Front". Fascism was the biggest danger to world peace and the main enemy of the working class. The task of the day was the search for "collective security" and anti-fascist fronts embracing the broadest forces. The reason for this backflip was that Stalin had become seriously alarmed by Hitler's victory in Germany and had no faith in working-class revolution. Hence the Soviet Union's main aim was to secure an alliance with the imperialist democracies, above all Britain and France.

The 1936-39 Spanish civil war showed just how counter-revolutionary this line was. Stalin did want to defeat Franco but not by revolution which would have alienated Britain and France. The Stalinists strangled the Spanish Revolution and demoralised the republican masses. (This is shown very well in Ken Loach's powerful film Land and Freedom.) The defeat of the revolution in Spain made World War II a certainty — the imperialists could safely go to war without having to fear working-class revolution. Had it gone the other way in Spain, World War II could not have happened — something else would have been on the agenda.

In Australia, at its 11th Congress in December 1935, the CPA committed itself to try to achieve an alliance with the ALP against the menace of fascism and war. While the ALP steadfastly rejected any idea of affiliation, the CPA completely tailed the ALP.

CPA activist Gil Roper left the party in 1937 and joined the Trotskyists. He made a scathing public assessment of the CPA’s intervention in the federal elections that year:

… All Leninist principles were scrapped. The party leaders refused to nominate independent candidates (with two exceptions), called loudly for unconditional support of the Labor politicians, and unblushingly sowed the most dangerous reformist illusions about electing a "fighting Labor government", which would legitimise "a better life" for the people. Miles falsified history: "Is it a gross error", he said, "to see the Labor governments as administrations which never benefited the workers or always betrayed the workers." What contemptible deception! Shades of Andrew Fisher, Hill, Hogan, Scullin, Lang, Forgan Smith and the rest. Is it not, rather, the truth to say that Labor governments have been merely the reflection of the level of the class struggle, that any reforms legislated have been forced by extraparliamentary activity of the masses? Is it not also irrefutable that at all critical junctures Labor governments in Australia have allied themselves with the capitalist state against the workers — whether in 1914 or in the latest brewery strike in Brisbane? …

As the campaign developed, the party leaders and press sank to the most vulgar deception and parliamentarism. All the ancient stock-in-trade of the reformists was displayed once again by the party leaders. The number three party election leaflet touches zero: "British policy … endangers the empire … The Lyons government supports this perilous policy … Stand by the League of Nations.” And the party members collected thousands of pounds … to pay for this rubbish.[8]

As John Percy explains in his Green Left Weekly series, this episode illustrates the basic reality that the fundamental impact of Stalinism on the CPA was a right-wing one. The Third Period madness was an exception — Stalin was still consolidating his power and the "left" turn internationally was part of this process.

Imperialist war

On August 22, 1939 the Hitler-Stalin pact was announced. Shortly afterwards Hitler invaded Poland, Britain and France declared war on Germany and World War II was underway.

Like communist parties everywhere, the CPA was thrown into turmoil by the Hitler-Stalin pact. After years of strenuous anti-fascist propaganda and activity, the pact was a bitter pill for Australian communists to swallow. But the party did accept it (although it lost some members who couldn't stomach the new line).

In this period the CPs downplayed their opposition to Germany and played up the imperialist nature of Britain and France. (As Trotsky said in this regard, half-truths are the worst kind of lies.) The CPA opposed the war as an imperialist conflict. In June 1940 the CPA was declared illegal by the Menzies government. However, the party had prepared for this eventuality and coped quite well with its new underground existence. Printing presses were hidden under floor boards in houses; money was secreted away; public meetings would be held in the names of individuals; and by using the press of front organisations and trade unions the party was partly able to compensate for the ban on the party's publications.

Work inside the ALP

One feature of the CPA's policy toward the ALP in the Popular Front period was the work the party did inside the Labor Party, particularly in NSW. As new members joined the CPA they were advised to keep their membership secret and join (or remain in) the Labor Party.

In 1936 the NSW ALP, still controlled by former premier Jack Lang, had reconciled with the federal Labor Party, thus bringing to an end a four-year split. However, in 1937, state Labor MP Robert Heffron and left forces opposed to the Lang machine broke away and formed the Industrial Labor Party — often called the "Heffron Labor Party". The CPA supported the Heffron party and CP-led unions affiliated to it. Jack Hughes, president of the Labour Council, assistant state secretary of the Federated Clerks Union, and a prominent figure in the ILP, was sympathetic to CPA policies. A unity conference between the ILP and the ALP in August 1939 saw the Heffron forces win control of the united party from the Lang machine. The new state ALP leadership was thus strongly influenced by the CPA and many members of its executive were secret (or not so secret) CPA members or at least sympathisers.

A clash with the federal Labor leadership developed from around the March 1940 state ALP conference. The conference adopted an antiwar resolution. As well as opposing the war now underway, the resolution included a "hands off Russia" section:

Conference makes it clear that while being opposed to Australian participation in overseas conflicts, we are also opposed to any effort of the anti-Labour government to change the direction of the present war by an aggressive act against any other country, with which we are not at war, including Soviet Russia.[9]

Lang and his supporters left the party, the federal ALP executive repudiated the resolution and state executive retreated and rescinded it. Hughes and the state secretary, Evans, were expelled. They and their supporters then formed the Australian Labor Party (State of New South Wales). This party was effectively controlled by the CP.

The Hughes-Evans Labor Party (or State Labor Party) initially polled a respectable vote in various electoral contests (over 6% in the September 1940 federal elections) but this declined over time. During the period of the CPA's illegality, the State Labor Party was a useful vehicle for getting out CP propaganda. In January 1944 it amalgamated with the CPA to form the Australian Communist Party. The electoral base of the SLP drifted back to the official ALP.

Everything for the war effort

On June 22, 1941 Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. The party now made a complete about face on the nature of the war. As a later CPA document argued:

[The attack on the USSR] changed the character of the war into a war of independence on the part of democratic peoples against fascist imperialist aggression, and it plainly revealed the aims of the fascists to conquer the whole of the world and to enslave all of the independent nations.[10]

In truth, however, World War II combined five different types of conflicts: the imperialist war for redivision of the globe, the struggle of Soviet Union for its survival, the resistance of the masses to Nazi occupation, the liberation struggles of the colonial peoples (against "democratic" Britain, France and Holland), and the struggle of semi-colonial China against the Japanese imperialist aggression. The first war could not be supported, the other four wars were just and deserved the support of socialists.

The falseness of the CPA characterisation can easily be seen by considering the main result of World War II: namely, the emergence of the "democratic" USA as the number one global superpower whose tentacles would gather the whole "free world" in their bloodsucking, crushing, counter-revolutionary embrace. Hitler Germany's aims and means were modest by comparison to those of the United States with its drive for global domination.

After June 1941, although it remained illegal, the party functioned more and more openly. The Curtin government took office in October 1941. It lifted the ban on the CPA at the end of 1942.

The party grew rapidly during the war. By September 1943 it had 20,000 members and a year later it reached its peak of 23,000. Its primary appeal to prospective members, of course, was its identification with the heroic and widely admired resistance of the Soviet Union to the Nazi invasion. At its height some 4000 communists were serving in the armed forces.

The CPA became an all-out supporter of the war effort — it became the "leading war party". Its message was that workers should defer any settling of accounts with the bosses because fascism was the main enemy. The party opposed strikes and supported speed-ups. CP-led unions even disciplined members who caused strikes or took too many sickies! The mines were a particular flashpoint and the CPA leadership of the union struggled to avoid stoppages and keep coal production up.

Prominent CP trade union leaders, like Ironworkers leader Ernie Thornton and Jim Healy of the Watersiders, were put on various government industry boards to ensure operations proceeded smoothly without disruption.

As the CPA tailed the Labor Party, all serious criticism of the ALP was dropped. As Craig Johnston explains:

After June 1941 this emphasis on the bourgeois aspect of the "twoclass" nature of the ALP was dropped in favour of emphasis on its progressive aspects. Welcoming the ALP as the predominant force in Australian politics, the CPA saw its policies as progressive in the existing political situation and in comparison with the conservative parties. A broad people’s movement could support the Labor government, even though it was not a people’s government, because it gave greater continuity to production and assured munitions to the armed forces. The united front “from above” was possible again. The growth of communism and of the working class were seen in a deterministic way as guarantees that the ALP would develop in a progressive direction, giving way to a people’s government paving the way for socialism.[11]

Postwar

While CPA membership fell away from its wartime peak figure, the party still had some 12,000-13,000 members in 1946. In the trade unions, according to Alastair Davidson, from 25-40% of workers supported CP industrial policies.

At the September 1947 ACTU congress, most of the policies supported by the communists were adopted. CPA leader Tom Wright was defeated for the presidency by only 176 votes to 138.

While the CPA anticipated dominating the next congress, it turned out that 1947 represented the peak of their influence in the trade union movement. At the 1949 gathering the CP and the left had the same strength as in 1947 but the strength of the right had greatly increased giving it a decisive majority.

'Black armada'

After the end of the war Australian unions — with the wharfies playing the key role — rendered important assistance to the Indonesian nationalist movement struggling to free their country from Dutch colonialism. Robin Gollan calls this "the most decisive act of international solidarity ever performed by Australian trade unions".[12] In August 1945, two days after the Japanese surrender, Sukarno and Hatta proclaimed the Indonesian republic. Over the next four years Australian unions imposed various bans on Dutch shipping going to Indonesia. The CP-led Waterside Workers stand attracted considerable support. The story of this struggle is told in Rupert Lockwood's book Black Armada.

Cold War

The wartime alliance between the Soviet Union and the capitalist Allies didn't long survive the war. Churchill’s March 1946 "iron curtain" speech in the US marked the beginning of the Cold War. The US undertook to rebuild war-ravaged capitalism in Western Europe and to consolidate the imperialist camp (the "free world"). In the US itself a witch-hunt was launched to tame the labour and radical movement. Concessions were also made: the postwar "welfare state" social reforms in the leading western countries were the combined result of working-class pressure and the need of the imperialists to secure domestic peace in the Cold War contest with the Soviet Union. Two defining events in this conflict were the Berlin airlift (June 1948-May 1949) and the Korean War (June 1950-July 1953).

The Comintern had been dissolved by Stalin in 1943 as a gesture to his wartime allies. In September 1947 the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) was founded as a replacement for the Comintern, to coordinate the action of the CPs in the new situation. In eastern Europe capitalism was overturned and bureaucratically deformed workers states established. Internationally, the CPs made a sharp turn to the left.

Growing anticommunism

In Australia the completely unreal wartime hope that socialism could be quickly and peacefully ushered in quickly faded as anticommunism grew.

In 1945, the ALP started to establish Industrial Groups in the trade unions. The groups' formal aim was to rally support for ALP candidates against the communists and they fought the CP tooth and nail in the union movement. The clandestine Catholic Social Studies Movement — the "Movement" of B.A. Santamaria — provided the mass base and leadership of the groups. Eventually their activities would provoke the 1956 split in the ALP.

The RSL barred communists from membership and called for banning the party. This became the policy of the Menzies-led opposition.

In June 1949 CPA leader Lance Sharkey was jailed for 18 months. His crime? A journalist had asked him what would be his attitude if the Red Army invaded Australia — an event not exactly on the cards! — and Sharkey had given an answer (actually, not a bad answer).

The seven-week coal strike took place in June-August 1949. The coal miners had many legitimate industrial demands. But the CP, which led the Miners Federation, unwisely escalated the struggle into a contest with the Chifley ALP government. It is clear that the CP saw the strike as a struggle against the ALP for hegemony in the labour movement — an utterly fantastic notion. Chifley put troops into the mines. The NSW government used its emergency powers to jail CP officials of the Miners Federation, the WWF and the FIA when they refused to hand over union funds (they got 6-12 months). Eventually the miners voted to return to work without satisfaction of their demands and the CP's leadership of the union was badly damaged.

The strike was a big factor in the defeat of the Chifley government in the December 1949 federal election which ushered in over two decades of Coalition rule in Canberra.

Attempt to ban the Communist Party

In April 1950 Menzies introduced a bill to "outlaw and dissolve the Australian Communist Party". The Korean War began in June and Menzies committed Australia to send troops to help the US. The ALP supported the government. Menzies started talking about preparing for a third world war within three years.

The CP dissolution bill became law in October 1950. The CP and 10 unions appealed to the High Court. In March 1951 the act was declared unconstitutional. In the May 1951 elections Menzies was returned in both houses. He set a referendum for September that year to give parliament the power to outlaw the Communist Party.

The ALP decided to campaign for a "No" vote. Evatt (now the ALP leader following Chifley's death) waged a vigorous campaign. (The anticommunist Grouper element in the ALP ran dead on the issue.) The Communist Party waged an all-out drive for a "No" vote. In the event the referendum was narrowly defeated (by some 50,000 votes, with three states recording a majority against). Despite the narrow margin, this was a significant victory. Had the vote gone the other way Australia would have taken a major step along the road to a police state.

Three years later the CPA had to endure the Petrov affair, staged by Menzies to damage the ALP. Following the sensational defection of Petrov and his wife from the Soviet embassy in April 1954, a royal commission was established, ostensibly to investigate Soviet espionage in Australia. It held hearings from May 1954 to March 1955. While no prosecutions resulted, people were hauled before it and, with the help of the media, reputations were trashed and job prospects damaged.

1956 and after

In February 1956 the 20th Congress of the CPSU took place. It was here that Khrushchev made his famous "secret speech" denouncing some of the crimes of Stalin. (While extremely important, the speech avoided any discussion of why all this had happened, sheeting it home instead to "the cult of personality" — an "explanation" which explains absolutely nothing.)

The speech was soon published abroad (the New York Times ran it in full). It had a shattering effect on many of the CPs. The CPA leadership hunkered down, attempted to suppress the speech and denied its authenticity. The Hungarian anti-bureaucratic revolt and the bloody Soviet intervention against it in October of that year compounded the crisis in the CPA.

Several hundred people left the CPA or were expelled. They included many of the party's intellectuals (Ian Turner, Stephen Murray-Smith, Helen Palmer, Bob Gollan, Miriam Dixson, George Petersen, and so on). The CPA managed to survive this crisis (compare this with Britain where it had a much greater impact).

An event which had a greater impact on the party was the Sino-Soviet split of the early 1960s. This led to a split in the CPA in 1963 when the pro-Chinese elements led by Ted Hill broke away to form the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist). This struggle was centred in Victoria. It was in this period that Laurie Aarons rose to prominence in the central leadership and it was he who led the fight against Hill.

1968 saw the "Prague Spring" in Czechoslovakia and the push for "socialism with a human face". In August the Soviet Union invaded to crush it. This time the CPA decisively condemned the intervention and broke with Moscow over it. This led, over the next three years, to a split by a section of pro-Moscow trade union officials who went on to form the Socialist Party of Australia in 1971.

Final decade

While the CPA made some moves to attract new radical forces into the party in the late 1960s and in the seventies, the main move was to the right.

Whitlam was sacked by Kerr in 1975 and subsequently defeated in the following election by Malcolm Fraser. Labor came in under Bob Hawke in 1983. Its big selling point to the bosses was the ALP-ACTU Prices and Incomes Accord. The CPA was instrumental in devising this wage-freezing social contract and selling it to the union movement.

The CP's key operative was Laurie Carmichael, the assistant secretary of the metalworkers union. The Accord, maintained through the Hawke-Keating years, had a devastating effect on the labour movement: union organisation on the job atrophied, union coverage shrank dramatically and workers' relative wages declined.

In the mid-later 1980s the CPA backed away from the Accord for a period and the Socialist Workers Party (today the Democratic Socialist Perspective, to which I belong) became involved in its New Left Party project (we would have preferred direct discussions but this was what they insisted on). A section of the CP membership was very enthusiastic about our collaboration but the central CP leadership got frightened by the whole thing and it went nowhere.

In 1991 the CPA dissolved, leaving its assets in the Search Foundation (which is ongoing).

Conclusion

A number of former members of the Communist Party are very well disposed to the Green left Weekly project and to the Socialist Alliance. I think this is extremely gratifying and we value it highly; it has great symbolic importance.

I think this development also points to the task facing the socialist movement: not to agree on interpretations of history (interesting as that will always be to serious political people) but to regroup, to attract the scattered forces of discontent, to unite all those who want to fight against capitalism and for the socialist alternative. At this point we do not need an ideological party — in today's conditions that approach will get nowhere — but rather a party that can unite the maximum forces in struggle. We can build and develop this party and its program as we proceed together in the fight.

The achievement of world socialism remains the task of our time. As never before in human history, the choice is simple: socialism or extinction. Those who take up this challenge in this country stand on the shoulders of the Communist Party and all those socialists who preceded us. We should study their experience and take from it everything which is positive.

Notes

Quoted in Socialist Review, Vol. 2, No. 2, May 1972.

Alastair Davidson, The Communist Party of Australia: A Short History (Hoover Institution Press; Stanford, 1969), p. 25.

Jack Blake, "The Australian Communist Party and the Comintern in the Early 1930s", Labour History, No. 23, November 1972.

The full text of the Open Letter can be found at http://epress.anu.edu.au/oul/mobile_devices/ch03s04.html#d0e7809.

Jack Blake, "The Early Thirties", Arena, No. 25, 1971.

Quoted in Charlie Fox, Fighting Back: The Politics of the Unemployed in Victoria in the Great Depression (MUP: Melbourne, 2000), p. 52.

Ralph Gibson, The People Stand Up (Red Rooster Press: Ascot Vale, 1983), pp. 40-41.

Gil Roper, "What Is Happening in the Communist Party?", The Militant [Sydney], November 29, 1937, reproduced at http://members.optushome.com.au/spainter/roper.html.

Quoted in Craig Johnston, "The Communist Party and Labor Unity, 1939-1945", Labour History, No. 40, May 1981, p. 88.

Quoted in Davidson, p. 82.

Johnston, op.cit., p. 86.

Robin Gollan, Revolutionaries and Reformists: Communism and the Australian Labour Movement 1920-1950 (George Allen & Unwin: Sydney, 1975), p. 183.

The Great Depression: Lessons for Socialists

2009-04-01T23:47:00.000-07:00

[This is an edited version of a talk delivered at the World at a Crossroads Conference in Sydney, Easter 2009. It was organised by the Democratic Socialist Perspective and Resistance and sponsored by Green Left Weekly.]

It is widely recognised that the current global economic crisis is not a normal recession of the kind which characterises the capitalist business cycle — that is, it is not one of the periodic downturns which inevitably follow a boom period. Rather, it is a fundamental slump.

It is also clear that the current crisis is the biggest crisis of the world capitalist system since the Great Depression of the 1930s. In fact, there are reasons for believing that it may well turn out to be much more serious.

Several articles in the Melbourne Age this year have acknowledged in passing that the 1930s depression was really overcome only by World War II with its mass call-up into the armed forces and the conversion of the economy to all-out military production. In the United States, for instance, 1933 was the worst year, with unemployment of almost 25%. While there was some revival of the economy in 1934 and after, in 1939 unemployment was still over 17%. Only the onset of the war changed this situation. It was essentially the same in Australia.

This raises several questions: How will the current crisis be overcome? Indeed, will it be overcome at all? (After all, in today’s conditions a new world war seems ruled out.) Or, if it is "overcome" in official terms, where will that leave the mass of working people in terms of jobs, wages and conditions, housing and social services — and in the face of rapidly onrushing global warming?

The impact of the Great Depression was especially severe in Australia — there was mass unemployment and widespread poverty, hunger and homelessness. The faith in the system of large numbers of working people was shaken and many moved leftwards in their search for answers.

While do not expect a carbon copy of the 1930s depression, some things will surely be similar — for instance, the utter greed and ruthlessness of the capitalist class, and the wretched role of the ALP and the trade union bureaucracy. Other aspects could well be markedly different.

At any event, we should study the last great crisis of world capitalism which began some 80 years ago and draw the necessary political conclusions from it. This will help to arm and fortify us in the struggle ahead.

This talk is not a history. I want to give comrades a feel for some of the political issues of the depression and the resistance it engendered. Hopefully you will want to study it further.

Prelude — the 1920s

The 1920s were the prelude to the Great Depression in Australia.

Depictions of this period as a boom time are seriously wide of the mark. Unemployment was rarely below 8% and on the eve of the late-1929 stock-market crash the figure was 10%. From the start of 1927 Australia was already in recession.

During the 1920s federal and state governments had borrowed heavily by selling bonds in Britain to fund extensive public works (such as the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the new national capital of Canberra). By end of the decade this source of funds had dried up. Australia's export earnings plunged as the price of wool, wheat and base metals on the world market dropped by almost half.

Before the depression proper had begun a series of big class battles had resulted in severe defeats for some of the most militant sections of the working class. In 1928 the waterside workers were badly defeated in a national strike; their leaders were jailed and a licence ("dog collar") system was imposed on them. The next year the Timber Workers Union was almost destroyed in another big struggle and the Arbitration Court increased their hours and worsened their conditions. In March 1929 the NSW coal bosses locked out the miners to force them to accept a 12½% wage cut. After 15 months (during which one miner was killed by police at Rothbury) the miners were forced back on the employers' terms.

Labor had been out of office since the conscription split during World War I in which Billy Hughes had defected from the ALP and formed a Nationalist Party government with the Tories. From early 1923 Australia had been ruled by a coalition of Stanley Bruce's Nationalists and the Country Party of Earle Page. The Bruce-Page government was widely hated by working people. A crisis developed when Bruce issued an ultimatum to the states to hand over their industrial relations powers to the federal government or he would abolish the federal arbitration commission. His government was forced to the polls in mid-October 1929. In a Howard-like denouement, the Bruce-Page government was annihilated, with Bruce defeated in his own seat by a trade union official.

(It should be pointed out that the elections had not involved the Senate which remained under the control of the anti-Labor forces. Scullin resisted calls from radical elements of his own party to quickly force a double dissolution while Labor's popularity was high and gain a majority in the upper house. As it was, even if the Scullin government had been minded to push ahead with some progressive measures it would have been blocked in the Senate; on the other hand, this fact was another convenient excuse for inaction.)

Labor had little time to indulge in the euphoria of victory. Two weeks after the elections the October 29 New York stock market crash ushered in the Great Depression. James Scullin's ALP government lasted a little over two crisis-wracked years.

'There's been lies told'

Here are a few figures to set the scene. In 1929 Australia's GDP was £800 million, in 1932 it had fallen to £550 million. Exports dropped from £150 million to £80 million, and imports from £150 million to £50 million. Unemployment rose to 19% in 1930, 27% in 1931 and 29% in 1932.

In 1937 Canberra parliamentary journalist Warren Denning published Caucus Crisis, his study of the Scullin government. The following passage gives a feel for the shattering impact of the depression on Australian society:

… the [Scullin] government had barely taken office before the threatening depression deepened swiftly into menacing reality. Wool values were plunging downward, dragging other primary industries with them. Within a matter of months the depression which had been affecting the outside world made its impact felt in this country.

During 1928 the almost complete stoppage of work on Canberra, then being built out of loan money, was followed by the drastic curtailment of all loan expenditure. This had exceeded £40 millions a year in the most prosperous years, helping to create a fictitious prosperity which the unhealthy high prices of raw materials in the early postwar years had confirmed. Batch after batch of men engaged on public works, or on activities subsidised or paid for by the Commonwealth, were economically demobilised, joining the vast stream of unwanted workers pouring out of the factories because people no longer had the money to spend, and therefore the capacity to buy. Added to by the workless rural hands, registered unemployment rose to over 300,000 and towards 400,000 employable people, more than 30% of the working population of Australia.

More people than the total number of taxpayers in Australia soon were on or below the breadline … and at the end of 1930 more than a million people were directly affected by the diverse but concentrating forces which had created the depression. In a population of a little over six million, this meant that a terrifying number of people, of all ages and degrees, were actually in want, for few had saved anything for the proverbial rainy day, and, indeed, a lifetime of saving on the meagre basic wage could not materially have helped. This was the outlook which faced the Scullin ministry very soon after it had assumed office.[1]

Jack Blake was one of the longtime key leaders of the Communist Party. In a very interesting 1971 article in Arena magazine, he drives home the human cost of the crisis:

At the beginning of the depression there was no relief for unemployed workers. Slowly relief began, handed out by various charitable organizations: the Salvation Army, church missions, Ladies Benevolent Societies. For a considerable time even this relief was given only to married workers with families. There was nothing for single men and women whatever. Even the married man received a maximum of five shillings a week, first in the form of a package of groceries, later in the form of an order for groceries. As for single men they slept in public parks from which they were constantly driven by the police, or they slept on the concrete floors of shelters without bedding of any kind: their sustenance was a bowl of soup at the charity centre soup kitchen; they were prosecuted if they tried to sleep in stationary railway carriages, Later, when some of the single unemployed men were placed in old World War I army camps the food they were provided with cost nine pence per day for each worker; others went "on the track", harried from one dole town to another.

The massive unemployment figures still do not complete the picture of the times. In most of the industries which were still working, rationing of work and part-time work were the order of the day. Where rationing was in force the workers on the payroll had to agree to share the available work, which meant employment for only half the week; in the case of part-time work the factory itself closed down for half the week or for one week in two. Because of this about half of those workers still in employment were in fact working only half time and accordingly receiving half wages.

It is not very easy for anyone who didn't live through it to mentally picture the conditions in which hundreds of thousands of workers existed. They were quickly deprived of their possessions: their furniture and their clothes. Evictions from homes were common, workers moved into other empty houses only to be again evicted. So the cycle went on. We held many of our meetings in such houses; much of the furniture in them was made from packing cases, there was often no floor covering on the worn floor boards, bedding consisted of a few ex-army blankets supplemented by old sacks sewn together, and old coats, cooking utensils were few and primitive, in many cases electricity and gas had been cut off. Children lacked warm clothing in winter and didn't get enough to eat.[2]

Finally, here is a recollection of a victim of the Great Depression:

When did I realise I'd been took? When I found myself eating garbage. At age 27, a qualified surgical toolmaker, I stood at the back of an Adelaide restaurant and waited for the rubbish tins to be put out. Halfchewed meat, vegetable peelings, hunks of bread, all slopped up with cold gravy and tea leaves and burned fat. It makes you spew to think about it. Yet there might have been 30 or 40 men waiting there in the dark, night after night. That's when I thought, Bob, you've been done. There's been lies told — politicians, churches, bosses, they all tell lies to protect something.[3]

Coalminers sold out

At the height of the depression, Labor governments were in office in Canberra and four states — NSW, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania. Any progressive planks in their platforms were quickly abandoned. They faithfully carried out the austerity program demanded by the bosses, aimed at placing the burden of the terrible crisis squarely on the backs of working people. Let's look at some key issues.

The Scullin government began by selling out the coalminers. In 1929, Theodore, the treasurer in the Scullin government, had told the miners that if the ALP was elected, it would reopen the mines in the coalfields in northern NSW on their terms within a fortnight. Naturally, the miners strongly supported the return of a Labor government. After the election, Theodore made the belated "discovery" that in fact the government had no constitutional power to do any such thing.

NSW Labor leader J.T. (Jack) Lang, then in opposition, expressed a different attitude. As historian Miriam Dixson explains:

[At a December 1929 conference of ALP and union leaders] Lang demanded that the federal government confiscate Richmond Main and Pelaw Main which he described as "the richest mines in the world". He thundered, in a style to become a household byword in his term of office as premier during the depression:

"I know the right thing to do — it is the lawyers' job to tell me how to do it. I do not ask lawyers whether I am right or wrong. I tell them I want to do something; they must tell me how to do it. If I were prime minister fresh from the elections with a mandate to open the mines in a fortnight I would seize them and work them under the conditions of the lawful award. Seize your mines, and if necessary pass your law later on."[4]

Lang was undoubtedly a capitalist demagogue but here he powerfully expresses a fundamental truth of the class struggle: If you have the power and the backing of the people then use it boldly — laws and constitutions are entirely a secondary matter.

In the event, despite their epic struggle the coalminers were forced to return to work on the bosses' terms.

Niemeyer and the Premiers Plan

Scullin invited Sir Otto Niemeyer, a leading British Treasury official and a director of the Bank of England, to come to Australia and advise the government. Niemeyer met with Scullin and the state leaders at a special premiers' conference in Melbourne in August 1930. Unsurprisingly, Niemeyer's message was that Australian living standards were too high and would have to be reduced. This produced the so-called Melbourne Agreement which called for balancing government budgets by slashing expenditure, giving priority to repaying the British bondholders, and savage wage cuts.

This program undoubtedly worsened the effect of the depression.

In line with Niemeyer's prescription, in January 1931 the Arbitration Court reduced the basic wage by 10%. Just as is the case today, the argument then was that reducing wages would create jobs. In fact, all that happened is that the bosses' profits increased. It didn't lead to an increase in job-creating business investment — capitalists will only invest if they can thereby make a profit and that will only happen if there is actually a market for what they produce (that is, needs backed by actual purchasing power). Wage cuts don't increase the market, they don't increase consumer demand for products, they don't increase purchasing power — in fact, they will obviously reduce all these things.

Another special premiers conference in May-June 1931 adopted the Premier's Plan for combating the depression. This called for: (1) A 20% reduction of all adjustable government expenditure (wages, salaries, pensions, social service payments). (2) A 22½% reduction in the interest to be paid on all government debts. (3) Raising taxes. (4) Reducing bank interest on deposits and loans. (5) Mortgage relief.

This savage plan deeply divided the Labor Party and led to severe disillusionment among its working-class supporters.

No action on banks

The official platform of the ALP called for nationalisation of the private banks. The banks refused to provide funds for anything other than the immediate needs of the government. If the government was to have the means to carry out any sort of effective program to deal with the crisis it would have to gain control of the financial sector. However, as Warren Denning explains, Scullin did no such thing:

The Labor ministry never made, and never really contemplated, any real attempt to put its banking policy into operation …

Banking reform, however, became an intense issue within the party itself, so assiduously did the ministry postpone any decisive action. Throughout his two years of office nothing was further from Mr. Scullin's mind than any attempt to nationalise the banking institutions of Australia, which is provided for in the platform of the Australian Labor Party, the platform on which he accepted leadership …

At the same time it always seemed to me that if Labor really believed in its financial policy, really believed that financial reform was essential to the placing of economic society on a firmer footing, the time to attempt its application was the first opportunity they had of doing so. To postpone it to some indefinite date in the future, and in the meantime to patch up the system which they had fervently declared to be unpatchable, and to consolidate the private banks against whom their political hatred was concentrated, seems a strange paradox.

The time to attack an enemy is when he is weakest; not to nourish him tenderly until his full strength is attained, and then make an onslaught. Depression had in 1930-31 forced the banks perilously close to collapse, and had Labor seriously believed in its banking policy, that was the time to strike. In recovering from the depression, the private banks, their fingers burnt and their eyes opened by the mistakes of the past, have become consolidated into an almost impregnable position; and if Labor ever does try to carry out its policy of nationalisation, it will have to face a pretty contest.[5]

At this time there was no Reserve Bank. The head of the state-owned Commonwealth Bank was the arch-Tory Sir Robert Gibson. He was a law unto himself and he demanded Scullin carry out the harsh medicine of the Premiers Plan. Not only did Scullin fail to carry out ALP policy on bank nationalisation, in August 1931 he actually reappointed Gibson to his post for a further seven years. And he did this behind the back of his own party — Scullin was actually on the boat to Britain for an Imperial Conference when his cabinet colleagues back home learned what he had done.

(As an aside, in the light of the unsuccessful 1947-49 effort by the Chifley ALP government to nationalise the private banks, Denning's final comments are remarkably acute.)

Lang: 'greater than Lenin'?

In New South Wales, the ALP won the November 1930 elections and Lang became premier. Although he had voted for the Premiers Plan, rather than follow Scullin whose popularity was rapidly falling, Lang now advanced his own plan. The key elements were a moratorium on interest payments to the British banks and a renegotiation of the terms of the loans (not at all without precedent in the period after World War I), and lower domestic interest rates.

Lang was riding a tiger of left-wing radicalisation in the New South Wales Labor Party. His plan, while not in itself anticapitalist, gave him a platform for his radical-sounding demagogy. The Lang plan won wide support within the NSW ALP. Some of his publicists proclaimed that "Lang is greater than Lenin".

In May 1931 Lang and the NSW ALP executive were expelled from the federal Labor Party. There were now two ALPs in NSW: the rump federal ALP and the much larger Lang party. Lang's supporters in Canberra comprised five MHRs and two senators.

In Canberra, a group of right-wing Labor MPs led by former Tasmanian Premier Joseph Lyons had gone over to the opposition benches. And in December 1931, when the Lang group in federal parliament voted against the government, Scullin was defeated. In the subsequent election Labor lost badly to the new Lyons-led United Australia Party, a fusion of the Lyons turncoats and the Nationalists. (Labor would not return to office until Curtin's wartime government in 1940.)

In April 1932 the NSW government suspended interest payments to the overseas bondholders. In response, in May the state governor, Sir Philip Game, sacked Lang who was heavily defeated in the following election.

NSW Socialisation Units

One result of the depression was the development of a strong left movement in the NSW Labor Party. At the state ALP's 1930 Easter conference a motion was passed to establish a Socialisation Committee. Over the next four years this became a mass movement.

Associated with local ALP branches, Socialisation Units were set up, mainly in Sydney but also in other urban centres. By the time the movement was wound up at the 1933 Easter conference, there were 178 such local units. While the bulk of unit members were also members of the Labor Party, many were not and official policy on this point went through numerous changes. The Socialisation Committee published a monthly newspaper, Socialisation Call, and a regular feature each week in the official Labor Daily. Regular education classes were held by the units.

From July 1932 a strong push was made to create Socialisation Units within the trade unions.

Lang was not in the least sympathetic to socialism but he realised that, in the circumstances of the time, it would be disastrous to frontally oppose the left. Rather he and his "Inner Group" (of which former 1920s CPA leader Jock Garden was the most prominent member) cleverly and cynically decided to ride the socialist tiger and try to wear it down. Lang presented himself as a committed advocate of "socialisation". However, this was a very risky game.

Things reached the point that the 1931 Easter ALP conference adopted a Socialisation Committee motion for a "Three-Year Plan" of transition to a socialist state to be carried out by the Labor government. This moved things way beyond vague rhetoric. The resolution committed the party to something extremely radical and very definite. The Lang group had been taken by surprise. However, furious overnight lobbying by the Inner Group prepared the ground for having the motion rescinded the next day.

Why did the NSW socialisation movement fail? There are two main factors here. Firstly, the leaders of the Socialisation Committee were essentially utopian socialists. For them "socialisation" was to come about, not through the development of the class struggle, but by education and propaganda. Secondly, related to their utopianism, they had no clear idea of the nature and role of the ALP leadership as the "labour lieutenants of capitalism". It was only after some time that they finally realised that Lang was not on their side and that the Socialisation Units had to win control of the party.

You can read about this whole episode in Robert Cooksey's book, Lang and Socialism.[6]

Communist Party leads resistance

Jack Blake explains the vanguard role played by the CPA:

… [The Communist Party was] expressive of the militant collectivist and solidarist strain of the Australian workers' movement. We were in the forefront of every active militant struggle that took place, the first organisers of the Unemployed Workers Movement (UWM), the organisers of the struggle for unemployment relief, the leaders of the dole and sustenance work strikes and demonstrations.

In the conditions of economic depression the small Communist Party, reviled by "respectable" society and the newspapers, emerged as almost the sole force for militant action and struggle. Where there was despondence and hopelessness the communists brought the spirit of struggle, organization and the will to fight. Activism was not an original discovery of the 1960s, it was the outstanding characteristic of the communists of the 1930s. From morning to night for seven days a week the communists were out speaking and organizing at the dole depots, at factories, in houses, on the streets, writing leaflets and duplicating them on handmade silkscreen duplicators using homemade gelatine rollers, pasting up posters, chalking demands and slogans. The manner in which our widespread, constant activity and our skill in organization startled the establishment was shown by the Melbourne Argus: it estimated that we had more than 10,000 active members in Victoria alone at the end of 1932 — we did not have one-tenth of that number.[7]

Party of the unemployed

In The People Stand Up, longtime CPA leader Ralph Gibson recounts that when he joined the CPA in the early thirties it was largely a party of the unemployed: "Its members were not just talking about poverty. They were among the multitude who were deep in it."[8]

When the Great Depression first hit Australia and a great wave of unemployment engulfed the country, there was no unemployment insurance for eight months.

The CPA played a decisive role in building the unemployed movement and in fights to actually win the dole and then for improved dole and relief payments.

A national Unemployed Workers Movement (UWM) was set up in Sydney in July 1930; CPA members played the key role in setting it up there and in Melbourne. In the big cities there were repeated demonstrations of the unemployed. These actions won the dole and the first payments were made in June 1930. The CPA played the decisive role in leading these struggles.

Charlie Fox's study, Fighting Back: The Politics of the Unemployed in Victoria in the Great Depression, gives a feel for the frenetic pace of activity of the CPA cadres:

To be an active member of the UWM you had to give your heart and soul to the movement; you had to be involved in a constant round of meetings, rallies, lectures and entertainments. The Collingwood UWM broadsheet, Breadline, describes a week’s activities in 1932:

Monday 8pm. Dance. Silver coin collection.
Tuesday 8pm. General branch meeting. Everybody invited.
Wednesday 8pm. Street meeting. Watch footpaths for places.
Thursday 8pm. Dance. Silver coin collection.
Friday 8pm. Meeting. Youth section.
Saturday pm. Lecture. Good speakers, open discussion.

The leaders of the UWM were, and had to be, dedicated, tough and resilient characters. They organised and proseletysed relentlessly. They constantly argued among themselves and frequently fought battles with the police and their enemies in the reformist labour movement.[9]

In mid-1931 the UWM claimed 31,000 members, in 1934 the figure was 68,000 and the organisation continued to grow until 1936. In response to the success of the UWM, the ALP and trades hall councils formed their own unemployed organisations but the CPA-led UWM outstripped them in numbers and militancy. Not surprisingly, the UWM was a major source of recruits for the CPA.

The UWM fought for improved conditions for the unemployed. These struggles were successful in winning higher dole payments and in gaining a rent allowance for the unemployed to stop people being evicted from their homes.

In 1932 the government tried to introduce "work for the dole". Previously there had been short-term relief work for which wages were paid. But work for the dole made the unemployed work for their pittance. In Melbourne, the beautification of the grounds of the Shrine of Remembrance (that icon of bourgeois patriotism and militarism) and the Yarra Boulevard were the two main projects. The unemployed organisations were unable to prevent the introduction of this scheme, but in mid-1933 an heroic eight-week strike of the jobless in Melbourne succeeded in winning a substantial increase in the amounts paid.

Resisting evictions

Eviction or the threat of eviction was a constant reality for the unemployed. The UWM often spearheaded struggles against evictions. Some of these actions were veritable battles against the police attempting to evict people from their homes and throw them onto the street.

Charlie Fox gives some vivid examples:

As the Depression deepened, however, the organisations turned their attention to evictions. Perhaps the first of the violent eviction fights, which dominated the public image of the wars over housing, took place in Brunswick in July 1930. The circumstances were rather fortuitous, because the eviction began as hundreds of local unemployed men were marching nearby. Their attention was attracted by a neighbour:

“To the unemployed men the mention of the word bailiff was like waving a red rag at a bull [reported the Brunswick-Coburg Gazette]. Without further parley the entire squad was on its way to Gold Street at the double.

"In her kitchen Mrs Carruthers had just heard the agent instruct the bailiff to mark certain furniture. At that moment there was a commotion and through the doors and windows streamed the modern knight errants. A push sent the bailiff reeling back into a chair where an enterprising gentleman tipped a dish of water over him. The agent and the bailiff were then subjected to some rough handling as they were bundled unceremoniously down the passage and thrown out of the house where they were seized upon by the crowd numbering several hundred who were waiting in the roadway.

"The agent and his clerk managed to escape in a motor car whilst the bailiff who was again roughly handled made a break for the South Brunswick railway station nearby. His progress was expedited by the avengers and he was almost thrown over a post and rail fence before he got out of the danger zone."

A year later, confrontation like this had become firmly identified with the Unemployed Workers' Movement, which gloried in its reputation for confrontation.[10]

Here is another example:

The climax of direct action against evictions came early in 1932. On March 1, South Melbourne unemployed workers caused damage worth £50 to the interior of a house in Cobden Street from which a family had been evicted. They then marched 400 to 500 strong to the estate agent's office and tore up his business books. Continuing on to his house, they were confronted by police and dispersed. However, three days later the house was set on fire and further damaged. It seemed that arson was to be the unemployed's final weapon in the fight against evictions …

Then, later in March [1932], there were extraordinary scenes in Brunswick as the unemployed came seemingly from everywhere to fight an eviction in [Charles Street]. The local paper [the Brunswick-Coburg Gazette] described the scene:

"Thousands of men congregated about a home in [Charles Street]. From early morning men marched to the place from numerous suburbs, the first detachments arriving as early as 5.30am. Hundreds marched four abreast from Preston and some of the men came from a place so far distant as Williamstown. All day long the thoroughfare was blocked up over a considerable length by a seething mass of humanity."[11]

Often evictions became pitched battles as activists barricaded and defended houses against assaults by the police.

Expansion of trade union work

Alongside the Unemployed Workers Movement, the other key organisation through which the CPA attempted to lead the working class in the first part of the 1930s was the Militant Minority Movement (MMM). It was first established in 1928 with CPA leader Jack Kavanagh as its first secretary.

Ralph Gibson points out that: "The economic crisis, while it stimulated struggle among the unemployed, on the whole dampened it among employed workers." Strike activity declined as did trade union membership (due to loss of faith in unions along with an inability to pay union dues). "… there was no real strike movement till the ice broke with the Wonthaggi mining strike of 1934."[12] (depicted so well in the movie Strikebound).

However, the CPA was able to advance its industrial work, especially in traditionally militant sectors like the miners. This was despite its overall Third Period sectarian line. In his 1969 history of the CPA, Alastair Davidson summarises its gains in the first years of the Great Depression:

In early 1933 the MMM usually captured only low positions in militant unions, gains which were basic successes, but did not become news. In late 1933 and 1934 it started to capture militant unions at the state level. It also spread its activity throughout the entire Australian union movement. In 1933, through good organisation as well as essentially "pork chop" policies, the MMM captured the presidency of the Victorian Federated Engine Drivers and Firemen’s Association as well as several positions on the Victorian Tramways Union executive. It also consolidated its hold on positions in the WWF and was only narrowly defeated in the Amalgamated Engineering Union elections.

In [January] 1934 it captured its first union at the federal level, [when Bill Orr became secretary of] the Miners' Federation, and throughout 1934 and 1935 it captured positions at the state level. By 1935 it decisively influenced a number of unions in various states: the ARU, the Leather and Tanners', the Federated Ironworkers' Association, the Tramways and Engineering unions, and the Miners' unions.

It also led a militant minority which included about 20% of Australian unionists. It was winning influence in the Victorian, New South Wales, and New South Wales South Coast labor councils once again. Nearly all its successes at this stage were limited to traditionally militant unions, but it was also building its influence in the lower units of unions which were not traditionally militant.[13]

The CPA's key trade union cadres came mostly from the party's unemployed work. For instance, Ernie Thornton, who became a leading figure in the Federated Ironworkers Association, had been a leader of the UWM.

The Militant Minority Movement was a very interesting phenomenon. However, one thing we should be clear about is that this was not just a "rank-and-file" movement. It certainly aimed to organise the ranks of the unions but it also aimed at winning leadership of these organisations and as it had success in this regard, the concept of the militant minority became somewhat anachronistic. Whole unions were won by militants and followed a militant line.

Free speech

The CPA engaged in numerous free-speech fights through the 1930s, often through the Unemployed Workers Movement. One hard-fought campaign took place in Brunswick in Melbourne in 1933. A state law banning "subversive" gatherings was used by the police — under the command of the reactionary police commissioner, General Thomas Blamey — to break up meetings of radicals and the unemployed. The struggle was at its fiercest in Brunswick. Dozens of members of the UWM were arrested in repeated protests during Friday late-night shopping.

A celebrated incident took place on May 16 at the corner of Sydney Road and Phoenix Street in Brunswick. CPA member and artist Noel Counihan had himself locked inside an old steel mesh lift cage bolted onto the back of a horse-drawn cart which was securely chained to a verandah post. From the safety of his improvised fortress he spoke to a large and growing crowd — one estimate put it at 10,000 — for 15 or so minutes on the situation of the unemployed, the right to free speech, war and the rise of Hitler. The police were beside themselves. Earlier that evening in Brunswick a free-speech activist had been shot in the leg by the cops. With the police smashing at his cage with an improvised battering ram, Counihan eventually came out and was duly arrested.

After three months, the campaign was finally successful. The Nationalist state government backed off and brought in a new, less restrictive law and street meetings were generally allowed to proceed without police harrassment.

Then there was the famous case of Egon Kisch in late 1934-early 1935. Menzies, the attorney-general in the UAP federal government, banned the Czech communist writer from entering Australia to address a congress of the CPA-led Victorian Council Against War and Fascism. When Kisch courageously jumped from his ship in Melbourne — breaking a leg but briefly touching Australian soil — the whole government effort to exclude him backfired. He eventually made a triumphal tour of Australia, speaking to large crowds and gaining enormous publicity for his message.

Rise of right-wing militias

In response to the rise of working-class militancy, various anti-labour militias began to be organised around the country by businessmen, ex-army officers and other right-wing adventurers.

The most prominent of these was the semi-fascist New Guard in NSW, led by ex-army officer Eric Campbell. Its slogan was "King and Country" and its aim was to break up CPA, Socialisation Unit and Lang Labor meetings. At its height, its numbers reached some 50-100,000. The CPA was forced to set up a defence guard to protect its meetings. But in February 1932 the New Guard met its match in the "Battle of Bankstown" when 200 of its thugs in dozens of cars attacked a workers' meeting and were driven off in complete disarray. After Lang's dismissal the New Guard went into sharp decline.

'Third Period' sectarianism

The CPA was formed in 1920, inspired by the victorious Russian Revolution. It took some time before a united communist party was consolidated. Through the twenties the party struggled to find the correct strategic and tactical orientation toward the ALP. Then, in 1929-31, under the pressure of the Comintern, the old leadership around Jack Kavanagh was forced out and a new Stalinist team installed, led by Lance Sharkey and J.B. Miles. Under this leadership the party adopted the policies associated with Stalin's ultraleft "Third Period" schema and a typical top-down Stalinist form of party organisation and control was implemented.

Through its frenetic activity in the struggles of the day, especially among the unemployed, the Communist Party grew rapidly. At the beginning of 1929 it had about 250 members; in 1934 the figure was almost 3000. As mentioned above, it began to win positions in the trade unions, laying a strong basis for a growing influence in this sector later in the decade.

However, the truth is that the CPA's sectarian politics prevented it from building a possibly much larger party and leading a much more serious challenge to the whole system.

As we know, stormy struggles did occur in many countries and revolutionary possibilities did open up but these still had to be developed with a correct program of transitional demands to win leadership of the masses. The "Third Period" line pushed the CPs into all sorts of ultraleft mistakes, into substituting slogans and abuse for a correct policy.

And the tactical prescription which flowed from it was disastrous. The Comintern argued that not only were the pro-capitalist social-democratic leaders holding back the masses and preparing the ground for reaction and fascism — which was absolutely true — but their rank-and-file followers were also "social-fascists". Left social-democrats — "left social-fascists" in the Stalinist categorisation — were even worse because they could more readily mislead the masses. When the Great Depression came and capitalism did enter a period of tremendous dislocation and political turbulence, the Comintern’s ultra-sectarian "Third Period" line prevented the communist parties from being able to correctly relate to the situation and win leadership of the masses.

We believed we had to fight both the openly capitalist parties and the Labor Party, the main blows to be struck against the Labor Party which was considered to be the first barrier to the development of revolutionary struggle. It was thought that as the Labor governments had revealed themselves as supporters of capitalism, all that was needed to win the workers away from the influence of the Labor Party and bring them under the leadership of the Communist Party was the use on a wide enough scale of strongly worded agitation and propaganda. This was the ground on which members of Labor governments, Labor Party and trade union leaders were described as "social fascists". When left trends emerged in the Labor Party and trade unions in various states these were branded as "left social fascists" who were more dangerous to the working class than open right-wingers like Scullin and [Victorian ALP Premier Ned] Hogan.[14]

Here is an example of the CP's abusive style of polemic taken from a 1930 article in the Workers Weekly:

The advancements made recently in the organisation of the unemployed movement have so alarmed the filthy crew of social fascists that they are engaging in a frenzied campaign of sabotage and treacherous intrigue in an endeavour to break up the UWM and place the unemployed once more at the mercy of Hogan's gang of professional starvers of the unemployed. In this foul conspiracy the usual bunch are playing a leading role — Duffy, Monk and Cameron. The prostitute socialists are gathering all the opportunists, degenerate stool pigeons and scum that infest the ALP and placing in their hands the agencies for the distribution of state food stuffs …[15]

This absurd and destructive line was applied in NSW both to the movement headed by Lang and to the Socialisation Units. Common sense would seem to dictate that the CP should have attempted to form the closest links in the struggle with the units and their mass base. When Lang was dismissed by Governor Game in 1932, a huge crowd assembled in Sydney's Moore Park in a very radical mood, with a section calling for arms. The CP had cut itself off from influencing this development and, with Lang heading off to his country farm until everything blew over, it went nowhere. It could have been very different.

Another path of development

As we have pointed out, the Great Depression was eventually "overcome" on a capitalist basis only by World War II. But there was another path of development and at the time it made a mighty impression on masses of people suffering under the anarchy and madness of the capitalist crisis. This counter-example was the Soviet Union. As the capitalist world was in a tremendous crisis due to an "overproduction" of goods, the USSR was surging forward in the mighty collective effort of the first Five-Year Plan.

At the beginning of his classic 1936 work, The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky sums up what was achieved:

The vast scope of industrialisation in the Soviet Union, as against a background of stagnation and decline in almost the whole capitalist world, appears unanswerably in the following gross indices. Industrial production in Germany, thanks solely to feverish war preparations, is now returning to the level of 1929. Production in Great Britain, holding to the apron strings of protectionism, has raised itself 3 or 4% during these six years. Industrial production in the United States has declined approximately 25%; in France, more than 30%. First place among capitalist countries is occupied by Japan, who is furiously arming herself and robbing her neighbours. Her production has risen almost 40%! But even this exceptional index fades before the dynamic of development in the Soviet Union. Her industrial production has increased during this same period approximately 3½ times, or 250%. The heavy industries have increased their production during the last decade (1925 to 1935) more than 10 times …

Gigantic achievement in industry, enormously promising beginnings in agriculture, an extraordinary growth of the old industrial cities and a building of new ones, a rapid increase of the numbers of workers, a rise in cultural level and cultural demands — such are the indubitable results of the October Revolution, in which the prophets of the old world tried to see the grave of human civilisation … Even if the Soviet Union, as a result of internal difficulties, external blows and the mistakes of leadership, were to collapse … there would remain as an earnest of the future this indestructible fact, that thanks solely to a proletarian revolution a backward country has achieved in less than 10 years successes unexampled in history.[16]

We can add a postscript to this assessment. In 1967 — the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution — Isaac Deutscher, the renowned biographer of Trotsky, published The Unfinished Revolution, his well-known study of the Soviet Union. He pointed out that if allowance is made for all the years the USSR took to simply get back to prewar levels of production (following the devastation of World War I, the Civil War, and then World War II), then in the equivalent of a mere 25 peaceful years — from a very low base — it had created the second most powerful industrial economy in the world.

Despite all the howling of the bourgeois ideologues, nothing will ever be able to erase from history this "indestructible fact". Put aside Stalinist bureaucratism and repression, the deliberate neglect of consumer needs in favour of heavy industry, the damage to the environment, and the eventual final collapse of the Soviet Union — these things were in no way essential corollaries of this prodigious economic effort — the example of the Soviet Union nevertheless shows the truly enormous power of collective human labour, once it is freed from the shackles of capitalism and allocated according to a conscious plan.

Conscious, planned effort needed

The world capitalist system will not simply collapse. It will continue until it is overthrown by the struggle of the people. But if it does continue, humanity will pay a tremendous price. The burden of the current slump will be placed on the backs of the people. The crisis of global warming will not be meaningfully addressed — with completely catastrophic consequences for humanity.

But the example of the Soviet Union as Trotsky outlined it remains. Today we need nothing less than the same sort of massive, conscious, planned effort to mobilise the whole population and all the resources of our society to tackle the looming catastrophe of global warming. However, such a gigantic emergency mobilisation won't be done and cannot be done on the basis of capitalism and the profit motive but only on the basis of a nationalised, planned economy.

The restructuring of our economy to make it sustainable on all levels and to cope with the consequences of global warming will provide more than enough work for everyone. But this requires that we tear control of the economy out of the hands of the profit-mad capitalists, place it in the hands of the people and use it to benefit society.

Notes

Denning, Caucus Crisis (Cumberland Argus: Parramatta, 1937), pp. 57-58.

Blake, "The Early Thirties", Arena, No. 25, 1971, p. 45.

National Times, a feature on the Great Depression published in 1971, quoted in Socialist Worker, June 1983, p. 3.

Dixson, "Rothbury", in Cooksey ed., The Great Depression in Australia (Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, 1970), p. 23.

Denning, pp. 63-65.

Cooksey, Lang and Socialism (ANU Press: Canberra, 1971).

Blake, p. 47.

Gibson, The People Stand Up (Red Rooster Press: Ascot Vale, 1983), p. 29.

Fox, Fighting Back: The Politics of the Unemployed in Victoria in the Great Depression (MUP: Melbourne, 2000), p. 51.

Fox, pp. 146-147.

Ibid., pp. 152-153.

Gibson, p. 42.

Davidson, The Communist Party of Australia: A Short History (Hoover Institution Press: Stanford, 1969), pp. 59-60.

Blake, p. 49.

Fox, p. 52.

Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (Pathfinder Press: New York, 1972), pp. 6-7.

Not a normal recession but a fundamental slump

2009-03-19T16:49:00.000-07:00

[Speech at the Melbourne launch of the pamphlet Meltdown! A Socialist View of the Capitalist Crisis (Resistance Books: Sydney, 2009); March 19, 2009]

Our pamphlet tries to briefly sketch for the reader some the main features of the current economic crisis and its main social and political consequences.

The first point to grasp is that this is a not a normal recession of the kind which characterises the capitalist business cycle — that is, it is not one of the periodic downturns which inevitably follow a boom period.

Rather, it is a fundamental slump. It is clear that the current crisis is the biggest crisis of the world capitalist system since the Great Depression of 1929-33. In fact, there are reasons for believing that it may well turn out to be much more serious.

Several articles in the Age recently have acknowledged in passing that the 1930s depression was only really overcome by World War II with its mass call-up into the armed forces and the conversion of the economy to all-out military production.

In the United States, 1933 was the worst year, with unemployment of almost 25%. While there was some revival of the economy in 1934 and after, unemployment in 1939 was still over 17%. Only the onset of the war changed this situation.

This raises several questions: How can the current crisis be overcome? Indeed, can it be overcome at all? Or, if it is "overcome" in official terms, where will that leave the mass of working people in terms of jobs, income levels, housing, and social services?

Scope of the crisis

A few examples will suffice to indicate the scope of the present crisis:

1. Economic activity is slowing sharply around the world. In the US, in the last quarter of 2008 the economy contracted at an annual rate of 6%; in Britain it might shrink by 4% in 2009. And in Japan industrial output fell by a whopping 27% in the November-February period!

2. In the US and Britain, the major banks are technically insolvent, i.e., their debts are not covered by their assets, most of the value of which has evaporated or has been revealed to be fictitious — the notorious "toxic assets". In both countries the government has taken large or majority stakes in the main banks, thereby effectively nationalising them. Of course, in the US in particular this has all sorts of ideological consequences and the government has been at pains to deny that this happened and has shied away from exercising any real control.

3. Tiny Iceland is in meltdown. Its three big banks were taken over by the government after they went belly up with external debts eight times greater than the country's entire GDP. The government resigned after stormy demonstrations. The economy has sharply contracted, inflation is rising, unemployment is rising and living standards will fall sharply (wages, pensions, etc.).

4. The small Baltic republic of Latvia has suffered a similar collapse. Other East European countries are also at risk — and not them alone.

5. In the United States — the centre of the storm and the heartland of world capitalism — industrial giants like GM and Ford are on the verge of bankruptcy.

Unemployment is in the US rising sharply. Officially it is 8.1% (12.5 million people) but if you add in part-time workers who want full-time work the figure is 14.8%. And if the government was still calculating the unemployment rate using the same criteria and methods that were used before the Clinton administration changed them, the "official" unemployment rate today would be just over 19%. This is nudging up towards the levels of the 1930s depression. In any case, such a level of joblessness is a sharp indictment of the capitalist system.

Homelessness is growing as people can't afford rents and as people default on their mortgages. Tent settlements are sprouting on the outskirts of towns and cities across the country. At the same time, under various categories there are some 19 million vacant homes (out of 131 million dwellings) — enough to house at least 60-80 million people!!!

According to the US financial information agency Bloomberg, the US government has so far committed $11.6 trillion to bail out the bosses. By way of comparison the entire US GDP is about $14 trillion. But none of this money is being spent to keep people in their homes or get the homeless off the streets and into houses — let alone to provide jobs for the millions of unemployed.

What caused the crisis?

There is always a contradiction in capitalism between the limited purchasing power of the masses and the need of the capitalists to sell the unending river of commodities they produce — much of which is necessary but also a large part of which is unsustainable consumerist crap ("stuff"). Studies have shown that 70-80% of the economy depends on such consumer spending. But in the United States, the real wages of the working class have essentially been stagnant since the early 1970s, if not actually going backwards.

1. In this context, consumer spending was maintained, and the growth of the economy assured, by several means. Family incomes have been held up by people working longer hours and having both partners working. More and more goods were purchased on credit. Consumer debt was increased by the massive expansion of the credit card system.

2. It was further massively increased with new mortgage schemes. The banks popularised the notorious "sub-prime mortgages" where low income and struggling consumers were duped into signing up for home loans they couldn't really afford. When the low-interest honeymoon period ended, there were large-scale defaults. This is what eventually brought down the financial house of cards the banks had built.

3. The other major factor has been government spending. For decades the United States has run enormous budget deficits which have led to an ever-growing national debt. Ultimately, these deficits have been necessary to prop up the economy in a situation where the consumer spending of workers was inadequate. A major part of these deficits has been the mind-boggling sums squandered on US imperialism’s military machine and its endless wars.

Any other country doing this would have long ago suffered national bankruptcy. But ever since the end of World War II the US has been the capitalist world superpower, qualitatively superior to its capitalist rivals, both economically and militarily. At the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, it virtually decreed to the rest of the capitalist world that the US dollar would be the world reserve currency — as good as gold (of which the US had the biggest stocks anyway). The US was the world's largest creditor. It financed its deficits by selling Treasury bonds (i.e., government IOUs) to the rest of the world.

Today, huge amounts of these bonds are held by China, Japan and the Middle East oil countries. They will only continue buying them if they consider the US is viable proposition. And unlike in 1944, the US is now the world's biggest debtor country.

Some capitalist leaders are calling for a new Bretton Woods conference. But everything has changed since then. In 1944 the US imposed its diktat. Today, such an agreement would have to be negotiated and given the lack of unity between the major players this is very unlikely. So the future in this regard is unclear.

Can the capitalist class get out of it?

Can the capitalist class get out of the crisis? Will the capitalist system collapse?

The bourgeoisie can always get out of any crisis in the sense that the capitalist system will always survive, the biggest capitalists will survive.

There will be no automatic collapse once a certain point is reached. According to folklore, a vampire can only be killed by driving a silver stake through its heart at the crossroads at midnight. Similarly the capitalist system must be overthrown by the struggle of the people. Otherwise it will continue, though at tremendous cost to the human race. And bearing in mind the crisis of global warming, we can even foresee the end of human existence on our planet if capitalism is not replaced by socialism.

What does the crisis mean for the working class and poor?

One way or the other, the enormous sums being thrown at the crisis will be paid for by the working class.

1. There will be long-term, high unemployment, especially for young people. This will fuel all sorts of alienation and social breakdown (crime, violence, drugs, etc).

2. There will be massive attacks on the working class and the poor. Jobs, welfare, pensions, healthcare will all face savage attacks.

3. Home evictions could rise significantly, even in Australia. Low interest rates have given a much-needed breather to many mortgage-stressed families here but a large rise in joblessness could make the situation start to resemble that in the US. Homelessness will most likely rise significantly.

4. And however bad the sistuation is in countries like Australia, it will be massively worse in the Third World.

The impact on politics will be profound

The impact of the crisis on the class struggle and politics will be profound. Everyone should understand that we are entering into a new period. The outlook of the working-class masses will be severely shaken up.

The combination of the economic crisis and climate change is dealing a massive blow to bourgeois ideology and all the happy consumerist crap about the market.

Last month's unprecedented heatwave and bushfire crisis — the hundreds of deaths and the fact that the fires seemed on the verge of breaking into the suburbs proper of Melbourne — really shook a lot of people. Imagine when all that is combined with large-scale unemployment, economic distress and insecurity. The government's do-nothing policies, its business-profits-before-everything orientation, and its general blather won’t go down very well.

The old party system will break down as more and more people look elsewhere for solutions. The left will have its chance but it will be a battle with the right for influence as racist, xenophobic, and nationalist nostrums are put forward to head off the developing radicalisation of the masses and channel the discontent back into safe pathways which do not challenge the capitalist system.

Framework and program for the struggle

As is already the case today, the struggle will be waged around all issues and on all levels.

The question of nationalisation is unavoidable. As we have seen in regards to the banks in the US and Britain, the bosses and their politicians have their own peculiar version of nationalisation — don’t mention the dreaded N word, have ownership but don't take control, and restore any enterprise to financial health with the aim of handing it back later. Our concept of nationalisation is totally different. It involves running any state-owned enterprises as pubic utilities under worker and community control to help build a better life for all.

Our overarching position is to fight for the people to take control of the economy. The "commanding heights" of the economy must be in public hands. This means large-scale nationalisation — of the financial sector, the factories and mines, the transport system and so on.

With all the main levers of economic activity in the hands of society we would have the material basis for creating a decent existence for all and to go all out to make our contribution to combating climate change and dealing with the inescapable consequences. We are fighting for a government based on the working people to replace the present Lib-Lab capitalist regime.

We have a world to fight for

The final article in the pamphlet deals with the Great Depression of the early 1930s. It seeks to remind us what happened in capitalism’s last big slump, especially in regards to the Communist Party. In conditions of acute crisis and widespread social distress, a small party — although severely hobbled by its Stalinist allegiance with an extremely sectarian ultraleft line but nonetheless militant and dynamic — gained considerable influence in the Australian working class.

It won't be exactly the same this time around but the left will have its chance. We should realise this, brace ourselves and resolve to fight harder than ever to make sure humanity has a future.

Nylex succumbs to 'oversupply' of water tanks

2009-02-28T01:55:00.000-08:00

[Green Left Weekly, #785, February 28, 2009]

Victorian plastics manufacturer Nylex as been placed in the hands of receivers. Nylex is a well-known name — the company produces the iconic Esky, water tanks, wheelie garbage bins, hose and garden fittings, and interior trimmings for car manufacturers.

According to the February 13 Age, "The drought and a government rebate stimulated demand for water tanks, but oversupply pushed down prices and demand collapsed after substantial rain in Queensland and NSW." The slump in the auto industry also contributed to the company’s woes. In the end, the banks (ANZ and Westpac) called in their loans.

The jobs of its 700-strong workforce are in the balance. The receivers may or may not find a buyer for Nylex but any new owner is likely to heavily restructure the company, leading to substantial job losses.

However, the notion of an "oversupply" of water tanks when Victoria is faced with an unprecedented water crisis is utterly ridiculous. Any "oversupply" is purely the result of the capitalist economy and government policy. But the moment we stop thinking about corporate profits and start to think about what is objectively needed to ensure the survival of the state's five million people, then things look rather different.

The centrepiece of the Brumby ALP government's water plan is the $3 billion plus Wonthaggi desalination plant. This monstrosity will produce large amounts of greenhouse gases, thus further driving global warming. It will be privately run, thus effectively privatising a significant part of our water supply. The water will be hugely expensive and Melbourne residents will be heavily slugged to pay for it.

A far better strategy would be to invest instead in a large-scale emergency program of water conservation, waste water recycling and stormwater harvesting. One key part of this would surely be to provide every house and block of flats in the state with an adequate water tank (and grey water recycling) system.

Part of Kevin Rudd’s "stimulus" package is the pledge to provide free insulation (including installation) to every residential dwelling in Australia. That, at least, is something we can support. The state government should do the same with water tanks. Furthermore, it should require all commercial buildings to be similarly fitted out. Such a program would require some millions of water tanks in all specifications. The "oversupply" of water tanks suddenly evaporates.

The Victorian government should put Nylex under public ownership and control. It should become the monopoly producer of water tanks and set about hiring thousands more workers to staff the production facilities required. Thousands more jobs would be created in all associated areas.

Global warming has been caused by profit-mad capitalism (really, with apologies to Kevin Rudd, the only sort of capitalism). The economic meltdown which is now devastating our economy and wrecking the lives of thousands comes from same source. The only way for us to have any hope of a future is to fight to bring our economy under public ownership and control, with the charter to restructure our activity to make it sustainable and people-centred.

The collapse of Nylex is yet another illustration of the sheer anarchy of the capitalist economy. Under capitalism the means of production are owned privately and companies live or die according to whether they are profitable. Naturally enough, the idea of a socially owned economy, driven by the imperative to meet social needs, doesn't get a look in. Whole armies of media pundits and academic experts will tell us that such a notion is dangerously utopian and simply won't work.

Suffice it to say that climate change and the economic crisis are putting such nostrums to the most severe of tests. If capitalism survives, most of the world’s people will not.

The DSP in the 1980s

2008-10-01T00:06:00.000-07:00

[Introduction to Building the Revolutionary Party: Jim Percy Selected Writings 1980-87 (Resistance Books: Chippendale, 2008)]

This is the second volume of writings and speeches by Jim Percy, one of the founders of the Democratic Socialist Perspective and its longtime central leader until his death in 1992. These seven items — reports given by Jim to conferences and leadership gatherings of the DSP (or Socialist Workers Party as it was known in this period) — span the years 1980 to 1987.

This was a period of considerable ferment in Australian and world politics. In 1978 and 1979 there occurred a number of anti-imperialist revolutions — in Afghanistan, Iran, Grenada and Nicaragua. At home, the March 1983 federal elections resulted in the ouster of the Fraser government and the beginning of more than a decade of ALP rule under Hawke and Keating. Labour's general neoliberal orientation and the experience of the ALP-ACTU’s wage-restraining Accord produced significant disillusionment.

Right through the 1980s the SWP remained a small cadre organisation of several hundred members. But it was extremely active and reacted with considerable dynamism to the political openings that presented themselves while holding fast to its basic Marxist-Leninist ideas.

During the 1980s the DSP engaged in some significant rethinking on a number of key questions — on Trotskyism and the Fourth International, our international connections, the Labor Party and how to build a mass socialist party — without which we would not have been able to respond adequately to the challenges of the period.

To enable the reader to place these reports in a more fruitful context, this introduction will briefly sketch some of the background. To make things clearer, the key issues are treated separately but it should be remembered that a lot of this overlaps.

Turn to industry

In 1979 the SWP took the decision to attempt to implant the great bulk of its cadre in industrial jobs in order to link up with working-class militants in what it hoped would be a labour fight-back accompanying the late 1970s economic downturn.

A large part of the SWP's then membership were students or ex-students who had obtained white-collar jobs following university. The party's base in the industrial working class was very weak. The "turn to industry" as it was known, was a wrenching experience for the party. Its success demonstrated a tremendous commitment on the part of the membership to reorient their lives; the SWP's composition changed significantly; and the party gained valuable workplace and trade union experience and a big boost in its self-confidence.

But the fundamental political premise of the turn was mistaken — the anticipated fightback was only a hope and it did not eventuate. The sharp all-out turn based on an incorrect schema needlessly lost a lot of members. Jim's report to the January 1986 party conference ("Recent Experiences in Party Building") makes a sober assessment of the whole experience.

Break with US SWP

Through the 1970s we had a very close relationship with the US SWP. Founded by James P. Cannon in 1928 and collaborating closely with Leon Trotsky in the 1930s, it had a tremendous and inspiring history. We learned a lot from it. We organised Australian tours of SWP leaders such as George Novack and Evelyn Reed. In the debates in the the Fourth International — the world Trotskyist organisation to which we both belonged — we were closely aligned with the US party.

But towards the end of the decade and into the 1980s, strains began to emerge in this relationship. Cannon had always stressed that revolutionary parties had to stand on their own feet and make their own decisions. Parties that aren't really independent, he said — that don't develop their own authentic leadership teams — aren't going to get anywhere. But as our party developed the Americans seemed reluctant to treat us as equals. Differences emerged over Cuba, Afghanistan and the nature of the turn to industry as well as several other questions.

It became apparent that the US party was developing into a cult around the SWP national secretary, Jack Barnes. Our relations with the US SWP came to a head at their August 1983 National Committee meeting. There they launched an unprecedented, unheralded, all-out attack on our party, accusing us of all manner of things and saying our leadership was "finished". When we heard of this we broke off all relations with them and any of their international co-thinkers who endorsed this outrageous attack.

Our attitude was that comradely discussion and debate between revolutionaries is one thing but this is impossible with people who think you are "finished". We also ended up expelling five comrades who had become a secret faction loyal to Barnes.

The US SWP's degeneration under Jack Barnes marked a sharp break with the traditions of the party. Today the US SWP is a bizarre pro-Cuba sect. An analysis of the reasons for this degeneration can be found in Doug Lorimer's article "Cannonism versus Barnesism" in our book, Building the Revolutionary Party: An Introduction to James P. Cannon (Resistance Books: Chippendale, 1997).

Opposition to Labor's Accord

In the first years of the 1980s the SWP experienced significant growth, both numerically and in the impact of the party.

In the March 1983 federal elections we ran an ambitious campaign — easily the most significant socialist electoral effort by any left-wing group for a long while — standing 48 candidates for the House of Representatives and the Senate. Half a million campaign leaflets and 80,000 posters were produced.

We campaigned on a radical program, especially against the ALP-ACTU social contract — the notorious Accord which was the hallmark of the incoming Hawke ALP government.

While our vote was modest — we received 41,000 votes in the 38 seats where we stood, an average of 1.5% — the whole exercise was a great success in reaching thousands of people with a militant message.

That Easter in Melbourne we held a very well-attended Karl Marx Centenary Conference. Guest speakers included Fourth International leader Ernest Mandel and US socialist Peter Camejo.

The increased profile of the SWP was noticed by many on the left. Not long afterwards the Trotskyist SWP began discussions with the decidedly pro-Moscow Socialist Party of Australia (today the Communist Party of Australia — the old Eurocommunist CPA wound itself up in the early 1990s). While it surprised many, the twin bases of this new collaboration were both principled and timely — opposition to the Accord and defence of the Soviet Union against imperialism.

With the SPA we were able to launch the Social Rights Campaign which sought to rally support to fight the Accord. In Easter 1984 a very successful Social Rights Conference was held in Melbourne — the first nationally-organised action against the Hawke-Keating wage-freeze. It was attended by almost 700 people from across the left (but not, of course, from the Communist Party, which was solidly behind the Accord and which had been instrumental in selling the project in the union movement).

Rethinking our line on the ALP

The hated Fraser Coalition was no longer in office but the new Hawke ALP government was a big shock to many Labor supporters. This came to a head at the party’s July 1984 federal conference where the commitment to no uranium mining was ditched in favour of a three mines policy.

Along with the anti-worker Accord, the big switch on uranium mining spurred a big rethink of our line towards the ALP. Hitherto the SWP shared the general Trotskyist attitude that the ALP was a workers' party with a procapitalist leadership — a so-called two-class party — and the struggle was to replace this leadership with a genuine left one. Studying more closely Lenin, Trotsky and Cannon we realised that this analysis was dead wrong and would shut us off from real opportunities to move forward.

At the SWP's September 1984 National Committee meeting Jim gave a report — "The ALP, the Nuclear Disarmament Party and the 1984 elections" — which argued that the correct Marxist view of the ALP was that it was a bourgeois party — albeit with a significant working-class electoral base. We could give it critical support at election times against the traditional bosses' parties in order to gain a hearing from the workers who followed it. We could also apply this critical support tactic to any other capitalist or middle-class formation whose followers we were trying to influence. Our pamphlet Labor and the Fight for Socialism (New Course Publications; Chippendale, 1988) contains Jim's 1984 report along with a 1986 SWP resolution on the Labor Party.

Equipped with our new line we were able to plunge into the ferment around the Nuclear Disarmament Party and the December 1984 federal elections. The NDP had been formed in June 1984 on the three planks of closing all US bases in Australia, no nuclear weapons or visits of nuclear-powered ships to Australia and no uranium mining. With the sellout at the ALP conference, the fledgling NDP got a tremendous impetus. Branches formed around the country; Midnight Oil singer Peter Garrett joined the party and campaigned to be its lead NSW senate candidate — a campaign the SWP actively endorsed. In its enthusiastic support for, and participation in, the NDP the SWP was alone on the left.

In the event, the NDP gained over 600,000 primary votes, marking a watershed in Australian politics. The idea that no serious left-wing political formation could exist outside the ALP had been decisively disproved.

However, after its great debut, rather than looking outwards and reaching out to the masses who had voted for the party, the NDP leadership around Garrett turned inward, intent on entrenching their own dominance by undemocratic means, driving out the left wing forces (especially the SWP) and taking the party to the right. Defeated at the April 1985 national conference, this clique walked out, shouting loudly to the media about the SWP's supposed stacking of the gathering. The NDP continued for many years but the split had irreparably damaged its prospects.

Break with Trotskyism

From its inception our current had seen itself as part of the world Trotskyist movement. At the 1972 founding conference of the Socialist Workers League (as we were then called) we applied to join the Fourth International. During the 1970s we invested considerable financial and cadre resources in the international organisation, with Jim Percy and other leading comrades doing solid stints overseas working on leadership bodies of the FI in Europe and the FI-sponsored magazine Intercontinental Press in New York.

We learned a lot during our time in the Fourth International but our involvement also brought with it significant problems as debates spilled over into our own organisation. Six months after our founding congress we suffered a damaging split, not over questions of the class struggle in Australia, but because of the differences in the Fourth International. (The split was only healed some six years later.)

An accumulation of things — a re-thinking on the Cuban Revolution, the 1979 Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, the 1983 break with the US SWP — caused us to question whether Trotskyism was an adequate framework for us. We looked at Lenin with fresh eyes and discovered that his theory of two-stage revolution far more correctly described the general dynamics of revolution in the semicolonial countries than did the Trotskyist theory of permanent revolution.

We wrote a document — "The Struggle for Socialism in the Imperialist Epoch" — and put it forward for a vote at the 1985 congress of the Fourth International. This document represents our settling of accounts with Trotskyism.

In August 1985, the SWP National Committee voted to end our affiliation with the Fourth International, a decision ratified by the party’s 11th Congress held in January 1986. Of course, this decision did not mean ending collaboration with the FI or those sections playing positive roles in their own countries. Since this decision our international contacts and connections have expanded dramatically.

The reader is referred to our pamphlet, The Democratic Socialist Party and the Fourth International (Resistance Books: Chippendale, 2001), which contains reports by Jim Percy and Doug Lorimer on the question of Trotskyism and the Fourth International.

Later developments

It's worth mentioning several later developments, even though they fall outside the scope of this book. But they further illustrate the tremendous drive of the SWP/DSP to forsake sectarianism and seek out new openings and new possibilities of collaboration — even with forces with which we had long been locked in combat.

In 1986 the Communist Party moved away from its previous slavish adherence to the Accord. Noting this important development, we sought to enter into discussions with it. This led to our involvement in 1986-87 in the New Left Party project that the CPA had initiated with some of its allies. Despite some encouraging signs at first and the very positive attitude of a section of the CPA membership, in the end the whole thing blew up because of the sectarianism of the dominant leadership of the party and its refusal to break with Laborism.

As the New Left Party episode ended we began fresh talks with the leadership of the Socialist Party of Australia. It must be remembered that this was the period of the Gorbachev-led Perestroika process in the Soviet Union and the SPA was feeling the ground shifting beneath it. Both parties were very pro-Soviet — we in our way and the SPA in its — and we had both opposed the Accord from the start. In addition, a section of their membership warmly welcomed the thought of unity with the more youthful and energetic SWP.

However, just as we had embarked on trying to draft a joint program, events in China intervened. On June 4, 1989, the Stalinist Chinese regime carried out a massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. The SPA supported this action whereas we vehemently condemned it. The unity process was finished. We renamed ourselves the Democratic Socialist Party — perhaps not the most exciting name in the world but we wanted to make a clear political point about our conception of socialism and put ourselves in the best position to withstand the anti-socialist propaganda barrage.

In 1990-91 the DSP participated in various Green Alliances around the country. We considered ourselves the left wing of the green movement, with far more right to call ourselves green than many of the right-wing elements that rallied to the new banner. But as things crystallised out, the dominant forces in what went on to become the Greens of today sought to proscribe socialist forces and we were frozen out of the new formation.

Green Left Weekly

Since it first appeared in September 1970, the [newspaper] Direct Action had been our flagship, the main public face of our tendency. We had very much built ourselves around it. But in 1990 we explored the possibility of launching a new independent, broad left paper and sought to involve other forces in the project.

There was a lot of interest in the idea and it was publicly launched at an extremely successful Socialist Scholars Conference held in Sydney in late September-early October and attended by some 1100 people. At the end of the year we suspended Direct Action and threw our resources behind Green Left Weekly, the first issue of which appeared early in 1991, in the midst of the ferment around the first Gulf War.

Jim was not only the inspirer of the whole project but was also responsible for the wonderful name. As things have turned out, while the DSP and Resistance still carry the heavy burden of the actual production, distribution and fundraising, Green Left Weekly has proved to be an excellent vehicle for spreading the socialist message far and wide and reaching out to new forces. And while still very much a shoestring enterprise, the paper has attracted a significant number of devoted readers and supporters.

The period sketched above was a momentous one for our movement. We cleared away a lot of debris from our past and demonstrated a tremendous energy and flexibility in trying to find a way forward and engage with broader forces.

Jim was very much the architect of this process. But life took an unexpected turn and he was cut down by cancer in October 1992 — he was only 43 years old. We have included as an appendix the obituary article which appeared in Green Left Weekly. It helps to round out the picture of Jim as an extremely gifted and committed leader who made an enormous contribution to the struggle to build the revolutionary socialist movement in Australia and abroad.

Nationalisation: a key demand in the socialist program

2008-08-01T19:50:00.000-07:00

[This article is an edited version of a talk originally given to the Melbourne branch of the Democratic Socialist Perspective in August 2008.]

For all the misery it represents for ordinary people, there is at least one positive result of the current capitalist financial crisis. The idea of nationalisation is getting an airing again in the West, however squeamish bourgeois leaders and pundits may be about using the actual word. Of course, this is clearly a case of governments mobilising massive resources and taking drastic action to save bankers and speculators from the consequences of their greed but, nevertheless, there it is. And if nationalisation — state or public ownership — is allowable in this dubious instance, why not for far more deserving and urgent causes such as saving the planet and the lives and welfare of masses of working people?

The question of nationalisation is important because it is simply impossible to conceive of addressing a whole series of key problems facing us today without a major expansion of the public sector and bringing the "commanding heights" of the economy under state ownership and control. Firstly, of course, there is the overriding issue of climate change and all the things related to that — especially energy and water sustainability, food security and the preservation of workers' jobs as the economy is restructured. Then there is the struggle to preserve workers' jobs and livelihoods in the face of widespread downsizing during the economic downturn.

By way of an introduction, the reader is referred to two articles I wrote for Green Left Weekly in 1995 (issues of September 6 and October 3 — see elsewhere on this blogsite). They provide a useful overview of the whole question of privatisation and nationalisation from a socialist perspective. The political background was the 1992 election victory in Victoria of the Coalition under Jeff Kennett. His seven years in power were marked by a veritable orgy of neo-liberal restructuring and harsh attacks on working people.

Public ownership in the past

Today we are living in the period of total neo-liberal madness — madness, it should be stressed, from the point of view of society as a whole but not from the capitalist standpoint — when just about everything in sight has either been privatised or is slated for privatisation. In official circles, the idea of state enterprise is decidedly on the nose. As the wretched Victorian Labor state transport minister Lynne Kosky has notoriously said, the government is not, or should not be, in the business of running the transport system. But it wasn’t always so …

In fact, historians have dubbed the period 1850-1914 in Australia as "colonial socialism". Large-scale public activity was carried out — especially in transport, communications, water supply and sewerage systems, and immigration to boost the population. Of course, it wasn't really socialism but rather public enterprise in the service of capitalism, creating the infrastructure that private enterprise needed but couldn't effectively organise itself.

The 1930s were the culmination of this process. The 1989 Evatt Research Centre publication State of Siege (Pluto Press Australia: Leichhardt, 1989) explains:

… the 1930s provide the highwater mark in the development of public enterprise and regulations … [The labour historian Brian] Fitzpatrick described a "remarkable change" in which "systems like supervision of labour relations in industry, and the institution of public financial and industrial undertakings … the New Protection and public competition with private enterprise in production" took hold. It gave "an impression that an experiment in state control or modification of capitalism was being pursued". [p. 5]

However, the reality was that private capital never lost its control of the country's economic organisation. It accepted public economic activity in essential areas in which it could not profitably operate — the railways are the prime example here. State enterprises which didn't come under this heading were generally sold off (as were the profitable NSW government brickworks, metal quarries and pipeworks in 1936).

Neo-liberalism today

Since the early 1980s, neo-liberalism has been in the ascendant. Internationally capitalism is in a period of sharply intensifying economic competition. Everywhere it demands that social expenditures be cut to the bone and handouts and tax breaks for big business increased; and it wants to get its hands on every bit of hitherto public enterprise that it might use to turn a profit.

The first of my 1995 articles lists the five main forms of privatisation under neo-liberalism: outright sell-offs, contracting out, liberalisation and deregulation, abrogation of responsibilities, and implementation of a user-pays regime. I don’t want to spend any time on these here — I'm sure we are all familiar with many examples under each heading.

We can also dismiss without much discussion the ideological justifications for privatisation. Whatever the faults of public enterprise under capitalism — and we are far from denying them — the idea that the private sector is inherently better or more efficient is utterly ludicrous. The only real "efficiencies" of the private sector lie in slugging the public and putting its hand out for ever more government subsidies and concessions.

We oppose privatisation in all its forms. It is a massive attack on working people and our quality of life. In opposition to neo-liberalism we must advocate nationalisation, public ownership and a massive expansion of public sector on all levels (federal, state and municipal). If we are to cope with a whole series of problems we need rational, democratic social and economic planning and for this all the "commanding heights" of the economy must be in public hands.

Transitional Program

On an April 2007 edition of Aló Presidente!, the immensely popular weekly television program of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez — "a television chatshow like no other", as the British Guardian aptly described it — he urged viewers to study Leon Trotsky's 1938 Transitional Program. We can only concur. And in the light of the current global financial crisis some passages seem especially relevant.

There is a section on advancing the demand for the nationalisation of particular sectors of the economy.

The socialist program of expropriation [writes Trotsky], i.e., of political overthrow of the bourgeoisie and liquidation of its economic domination, should in no case during the present transitional period hinder us from advancing, when the occasion warrants, the demand for the expropriation of several key branches of industry vital for national existence or of the most parasitic group of the bourgeoisie …

The difference between these demands and the muddleheaded reformist slogan of "nationalisation" lies in the following: … we reject indemnification … we call upon the masses to rely only upon their own revolutionary strength … we link up the question of expropriation with that of seizure of power by the workers and farmers.

The necessity of advancing the slogan of expropriation in the course of daily agitation in partial form, and not only in our propaganda in its more comprehensive aspects, is dictated by the fact that different branches of industry are on different levels of development, occupy a different place in the life of society, and pass through different stages of the class struggle. Only a general revolutionary upsurge of the proletariat can place the complete expropriation of the bourgeoisie on the order of the day. The task of transitional demands is to prepare the proletariat to solve this problem. [Trotsky, The Transitional Program and the Struggle for Socialism (Resistance Books: Chippendale, 1999), pp. 32-33.]

We should stress that today our language — as well as our political circumstances — is a little different. When we advocate nationalisation we can leave open the question of compensation ("indemnification"). For us this is a question of political expediency and not of principle. In Venezuela, for instance, in most cases the state has purchased the enterprises it has nationalised — of course, the government has driven a hard bargain but it has the oil wealth and this policy is probably better politics (at this point at least) than outright confiscation.

In Australia, in the event of nationalisation we would advocate full compensation to any ordinary small investors who are simply trying to augment their modest incomes. But for large corporate owners and investors our attitude to compensation would be wholly determined by political considerations. Morally, we consider that we owe them nothing. Their enterprises have been built up through the toil of the workers and slugging the public. In most cases we would be in favour of simply expropriating the big capitalists. However, in certain exceptional circumstances it might make political sense to negotiate with the former owners in order to secure their cooperation.

Following this section, Trotsky includes a separate one devoted to the nationalisation of the banks and the financial sector.

It is impossible to take a single serious step in the struggle against monopolistic despotism and capitalistic anarchy — which supplement one another in their work of destruction — if the commanding posts of banks are left in the hands of predatory capitalists. In order to create a unified system of investments and credits, along a rational plan corresponding to the interests of the entire people, it is necessary to merge all the banks into a single national institution. Only the expropriation of the private banks and the concentration of the entire credit system in the hands of the state will provide the latter with the necessary actual, i.e., material resources — and not merely paper and bureaucratic resources — for economic planning. [ibid., p. 33]

How well this reads today! Rather than bailouts of the criminals responsible for the financial crisis, "merge all the banks into a single national institution" and "create a unified system of investments and credits, along a rational plan corresponding to the interests of the entire people". Use the truly immense resources suddenly revealed by the government response to the crisis to tackle global warming, keep people in their homes and provide everyone with decent jobs.

Of course, we are keenly aware that, ultimately, only the installation of a workers government based on the mobilisation of the working class and its allies can solve the problems of society. But the nationalisation demand points to what is necessary and is a key part of the struggle to get there.

Objections and problems

When the question of public ownership and nationalisation is raised, we often encounter various objections.

1. People might say, under capitalism what is the real difference between private and public ownership? For instance, look at the truly appalling Australia Post. It is run like a private corporation. Profitability and service to big business is its main concern; it has a whole raft of obscenely overpaid executives; in an effort to undermine the union and cut costs, it is engaged in a continuous assault on its work force; and through aggressive contracting out it is slowly privatising the whole service. (And, we might add, our post offices more and more resemble flea markets: as one waits in the inescapable queue one can peruse the merchandise bins offering André Rieu CDs or various dinky gadgets …)

Is this the sort of thing we want? Clearly not. We advocate something radically different. We want public enterprises to be run as genuine public utilities — public service and workers rights should go hand in hand. Public enterprises should be run democratically, controlled by boards representing both the community and the workforce. The corporate bludgers should be cleaned out; managers should be elected and receive workers wages with only modest margins for skill and responsibility.

2. Another argument is that the public doesn't relate to the idea of public ownership and nationalisation. However, this proposition is not borne out by the facts.

Firstly, look at the struggle in NSW: there the public massively opposes the sell-off of the power industry. Whatever the problems of the state-owned power industry — and there are a lot of them — people realise that privatisation will only make things radically worse.

Secondly, as the crisis deepens a lot more people will relate to calls for nationalisation and public ownership. Right now, lots of workers don’t relate to many things that we believe are objectively necessary. Our struggle is to get a hearing for our ideas.

Thirdly, as mentioned above, the intervention of capitalist governments around the world to prop up their system has been in sharp contradiction to their ideology of yesterday. The market wasn't left to sink or swim. In the US and the UK the government has taken over certain financial institutions lock, stock and barrel, i.e., it has nationalised them, whatever spin it tries to put on this fact. Thus, it seems, nationalisation is not only not impossible but even desirable in some instances.

Finally, the stirring events in Venezuela and Latin America will penetrate people's consciousness. In several countries there, with strong popular support, the state is resuming key entities and sectors of the economy. (Recently, for instance, the Chávez government announced it would nationalise the wholesale petrol distribution sector, saying it was making profits at the country's expense.)

3. In regard to nationalisation, in Australia we sometimes hear the cry that it is against the constitution. This is simply not true. There is no absolute prohibition, either on a federal or state level. (I'll say a little more about this later in relation to the bank nationalisation struggle of 1947-49.) But as Marxists we know that fundamentally it is not a question of what is written on a bit of paper — it is a question of the class struggle. With sufficient public support and mobilisation and sufficient political will and determination, a government can do just about anything. New laws can be passed, the composition of courts can be changed, etc., etc.

4. Another argument we may hear is that it won't or can't happen under capitalism. Again, this is ill-founded. The truth is that in the advanced capitalist countries, at particular times in particular circumstances, nationalisations have taken place. In Britain, for example, the iron and steel industry was nationalised in 1949 by the reforming postwar Labour government, the Tories denationalised it in 1951 and Labour re-nationalised it in 1967. Today, it is in private hands again. And as a result of the financial crisis the UK and US governments find themselves owning a number of key financial entities.

A lot of things we call for won't happen or are extremely unlikely to happen under capitalism. Alternatively, they might happen. But so what? The key thing is consciousness and the struggle. Fighting — and winning — on the question of public ownership can help to educate people about what is required and drive the struggle forward.

Chifley's effort to nationalise the banks

I would like now to look briefly at the struggle around bank nationalisation in Australia in 1947-49. We can learn a lot from a study of this largely forgotten episode.

Nationalisation of banking had been in the ALP platform since 1919 and it was one of the clearly stated “methods” of implementing the party's 1921 objective of "the socialisation of industry, production, distribution and exchange". During World War II, the banking sector had been stringently regulated. Chifley wanted to maintain a high level of control of the financial sector in the postwar period in order to underwrite the peacetime reconstruction effort.

Two federal bills passed in 1945 effectively continued the wartime banking regulations. Among other things they directed state and local governments and semi-government bodies to do all their business with the Commonwealth Bank. (This was then the state-owned central bank, there being no Reserve Bank.) In August 1947 the Melbourne City Council secured a High Court judgement ruling this provision invalid. Chifley concluded that other aspects of his regime of financial controls were at risk of being overturned in the courts and that nationalisation of the private banks was the only way to guarantee his program.

Robin Gollan, in his 1975 book Revolutionaries and Reformists (Allen and Unwin: Sydney, 1975), explains the significance of this chapter in Australian history:

The attempt [by the Chifley federal ALP government] to nationalise the trading banks was the strongest attempt ever made by an Australian government to control directly an important area of the capitalist economy. The issue, connected though it was with many others, dominated politics for more than two years, from August 1947 to the general elections late in 1949. In the course of the battle the conservative forces were more effectively organised for political action than they had ever been before or have ever been, or needed to be, since. [p. 222]

The government's announcement (in August 1947) touched off a veritable firestorm of opposition from the banks and the Menzies-led Liberal Party. They went all-out to kill the legislation. A.L. May, in his 1968 study, The Battle for the Banks (Sydney University Press: Sydney, 1968), gives a feel for this:

Some idea of the language used to describe the proposal by its opponents in comments, resolutions, letters, and editorials is gained from a published "sample" of adjectives used in the Sydney Morning Herald between 18-23 August [i.e., in the week immediately following the government’s announcement] …

Sensational, radical, unprecedented, spleenful, Red, revolutionary, dishonest, communistic, ill-considered, terrible, irresponsible, ruthless, authoritarian, totalitarian, unauthorised, insidious, subversive, disturbing, drastic, stupid, astonishing, tragic, iniquitous, impudent, arbitrary, violent, destructive, contemptible, mad, ominous, calamitous, audacious, illegal, sinister, servile, predatory, venomous, extremist, unwarranted, scandalous, unscrupulous, unjustified, undemocratic, unsound, doctrinaire, unconstitutional, putrid, appalling, tyrannical, anti-democratic, unnecessary, provocative, ill-conceived, dangerous, vindictive, shocking, deplorable, cynical, savage, wanton, petty. [pp. 35-36]

The banks organised on a truly tremendous scale. As Robin Gollan explains:

For two years Australians were subjected to the most intense, highly organised, highly financed, and unscrupulous propaganda campaign they had ever experienced. At first it was against nationalisation of the banks, but this by easy stages became an all-out attack on the government. It was a struggle, as they put it, in defence of freedom, against a government determined to regiment and dictate. The parliamentary opposition took the lead in public, but numerous citizens' organisations lent their support and helped with propaganda and money. The banks themselves appointed a general staff of senior officers and a small army of bank officials who became full-time political activists, supported by a larger contingent who gave part-time service. [Gollan, p. 228]

It is worth pointing out that the bank workers — "bank officers", as they were called — were overwhelmingly onside with the bank bosses and opposed to nationalisation. Being a bank employee was seen as a secure lifelong career path. In Sydney in September 1947 a bank officers meeting in the Domain protesting nationalisation attracted 10,000 people.

Against this right-wing barrage there was a only a very weak response by the ALP and the trade union movement. There were a number of reasons for this. Firstly, Chifley seems to have had no idea of what he was entering into. He did not want to challenge capitalism. He actually had quite modest objectives and blundered into nationalisation which the capitalists saw as a fundamental attack on all they held sacred. He was totally incapable of responding to what he had unwittingly unleashed.

Secondly, the Cold War was beginning and anticommunism was growing rapidly. The ALP-led trade unions were reluctant to campaign in a full-blooded way on an issue widely seen as a key Communist Party demand. Likewise, the growing Catholic Action "Industrial Groups" section in the trade unions, although nominally in favour of nationalisation, would have nothing to do with communists on any basis.

The issue was tested in the High Court in 1948 and before the London-based Privy Council in 1949, with the government suffering defeat in both cases. However, even in strictly legal terms, it is by no means clear that these judgements mean that any future nationalisation attempt will be automatically ruled out of order.

In the event, these setbacks plus the decisive victory of the Menzies-led Coalition in the 1949 elections buried the idea of bank nationalisation.

Then and now

Looking over the bank nationalisation struggle of the late 1940s from today's vantage point is very instructive. If there were a full-blooded attempt by a radical-minded government to nationalise the banks and the financial sector today, the bosses would be politically in a qualitatively weaker position. It would be impossible for them to simply replicate their 1947-49 Red-scare campaign. Conversely, any campaign for public ownership that was reasonably and resolutely led would seem to have a good chance of success or at least of winning substantial popular support.

For instance, would bank workers rally behind their employers as they did in 1947-49? It seems highly unlikely. Today they are a casualised, insecure, badly paid workforce. The prospect of permanent, secure, well-paid jobs with decent conditions in a universal state-owned bank would surely be very attractive to them.

Just look at the banks' anti-nationalisation advertisement from 1949 (reproduced here). How things have changed in 60 years! Today they simply couldn’t run this crap without being laughed out of town. Today banks mean casualised staff, queues, branch closures, being forced to transact your business at a hole in the wall out in the street and outrageous fees and charges, forever increasing. In some small rural towns there is no bank and people have to travel for 50km to find one. The big banks are widely hated.

Imagine — in today’s conditions — a massive all-out campaign for folding all the banks (and other financial institutions) into a single state bank, backed by a pledge to open branches in every locality and town, enable customers to interact with real people, cut the outrageous fees, provide cheap housing finance for ordinary people and provide permanent jobs for all finance sector workers — surely such a push would win overwhelming public support. The banks, we can be sure, would resist bitterly but amongst ordinary people they don’t have many friends.

Nationalise the entire energy sector

In New South Wales 2008 has seen a big campaign against the state ALP government's push to privatise the power industry. Polls have repeatedly shown over 80% of the public are opposed to the sell-off. The workers in the industry are opposed and the consuming public is opposed. ALP conferences have overwhelmingly opposed the privatisation. People understand that privatisation will mean higher electricity charges, a worse service and even less action on climate change. But a narrow clique of Labor cabinet ministers, responding to the insistent demands of their ruling-class masters, are determined to have their way on the issue, come what may.

In Victoria, the electricity sector used to be run by the State Electricity Commission. The SEC had many faults but at least the state's electricity system was an integrated whole — embracing generation, distribution and supply. The sell-off, it is important to note, did not begin with Kennett and the Coalition but with the ALP. In 1991 the Kirner Labor government sold 49% of the huge Loy Yang B power station. It also corporatised the SEC, preparing it for privatisation. After coming to power at the end of 1992, Kennett sold off the rest of the state's electricity assets.

Privatisation of the power industry in Victoria has long been a bipartisan policy. Campaigning for re-election, Labor refused to make any promise to renationalise the electricity sector (or indeed to reverse any of Kennett’s cuts in any fundamental way). Then, in 2005 the Bracks ALP government re-licensed the decrepit, heavily polluting — but privately owned — Hazelwood power station for a further 25 emission-spewing years.

Grappling with climate change (trying to halt and reverse it, coping with the inescapable consequences) is the number-one issue facing humanity in the 21st century. (There are other issues but this is the absolutely decisive one. If we don't solve it most of the human race will perish.) Making the "big switch" to renewable energy necessitates a radical plan and a complete restructuring of our economy. This cannot be done with the bulk of the economy in the hands of the profit-mad capitalist corporations.

At an absolute minimum, the whole energy sector must be placed in public hands. Its foundation charter must be to achieve a rapid phasing out of the fossil fuel-fired power stations; build up the renewable energy sector; and achieve a radical improvement in energy efficiency across the whole economy. Furthermore, all this has to be done on an all-out emergency basis. Only a strong public sector can possibly achieve this and achieve the redistribution of the workforce, preserving jobs and living standards and thus securing strong public backing for the necessary changes.

Public ownership key to job protection &: creation

The recent wave of factory closures, especially in Victoria, has led to significant job losses in the manufacturing sector. The looming recession will also lead to significant downsizing across the whole economy.

Decent redundancy agreements, protection of entitlements, retraining packages and special assistance in finding new work — these are all vitally important things to fight for. But what about protecting jobs in the first place and charting a course to create large numbers of new jobs?

Government handouts to big business won't save workers. The bosses will happily take the money but they have no commitment to their employees — only to themselves and their big shareholders.

In our opinion, calls to raise tariffs to protect workers' jobs are also misplaced. Such taxes on imported goods increase their cost to consumers but offer no guarantees to workers who remain vulnerable to losing their jobs due to new technology or the company relocating offshore where labor is cheaper. Corporations recognise only one imperative — to make profits for their big shareholders.

In the face of the escalating jobs losses, the Victorian ALP government has been accused by the union movement of not having an industry plan. However, although they won't be admitting to it in public any time soon, the Labor Party state government — and the Liberal opposition, for that matter — does have an industry plan. It's a very clear and simple one. Premier John Brumby and his gang intend to keep shovelling taxpayers' money to the big end of town, no matter what — through outright handouts, tax breaks and a host of concessions. This won't do anything to save workers’ jobs but it will keep the bosses happy.

Workers and trade unions need a totally different approach. Working people are not responsible for the problems of the capitalist economy. We want decent jobs, security, health and safety, and the futures of ourselves and our families protected — no matter what. The so-called "free market" can't and won't do this — irrespective of how many handouts the corporations are given.

Only a revitalised and massively expanded public sector can create the hundreds of thousands of permanent, well-paid, secure jobs that are needed to give work to all who need it. If the bosses want to close a factory or if it's really going broke, it should be taken into public ownership, reorganised and put to producing socially necessary things.

Conclusion

The nationalisation demand is not a panacea. It is one element in our transitional program, but an extremely important one for the times in which we live. Used intelligently, it can play an important role in the struggle. It is impossible to put forward effective solutions to the many problems we face without incorporating this demand into our program of struggle.

Are livable cities just a dream?

2008-04-12T12:53:00.000-07:00

[The following talk was presented at the Climate Change | Social Change Conference in Sydney, April 2008.]

When one sees a modern city from the air, especially at night, it is a truly awe-inspiring spectacle. What always strikes me is the immensity of the project, a testimony to the power and creativity of human beings. However, on the ground and actually living and working in this wonder, things are quite different and the social and ecological problems crowd in and fill one's view.

The truth is that our cities have always been dominated by the rich and powerful and built and operated to serve their needs — not those of the mass of working people who live and toil in them.

Problems of urban life

And today the destructive effect on the quality of urban life of the capitalist pursuit of profits before anything else is growing alarmingly. Here is a short and far-from-complete list:

1. Modern capitalist cities are absolutely dominated by cars and the trucks. This leads to massive, life-threatening pollution and a vast network of roads and car parks which scars the urban landscape. People live on islands surrounded by seas of asphalt and concrete — 40% or more of the city surface is asphalt and concrete. The city creates its own, warmer climate.

2. Motor vehicles also directly kill and maim large numbers of people each year; still greater numbers die from the pollution. Vehicle emissions are also a major contributor to greenhouse gases and the climate change which threatens the human race with utter catastrophe.

3. The corollary of this is that public transport systems are weak and take second place to the motor car. Similarly, the great bulk of freight is carried by trucks not rail.

4. Developers aided by governments have created the appalling urban sprawl with all its ecological and social consequences (erosion of farmland, huge distances between home and work, etc., etc.). The word "developers", of course, is an appalling euphemism — capitalist sharks would be a more accurate description.

And now, in the name of urban consolidation, these same developers are being encouraged to build their often crappy blocks of units anywhere and everywhere. In Melbourne this has led to a great deal of angst in the suburbs. And one result is no better than the other.

5. Then let's look at what the developers actually construct. Modern houses and buildings are generally not only hard to maintain but ecologically wasteful and often extremely unhealthy (emissions from building materials, plastics and cleaning agents). They could be designed differently — we could easily have ecologically sensible houses instead of the current extremely wasteful "McMansions" favoured by the building industry.

6. In the cities, public land — modest though it is — is constantly being alienated by greedy developers in league with councils and city and state governments.

7. Not only are house prices soaring beyond the reach of most workers, but homelessness is growing sharply (estimated to be over 100,000 nationally) as governments refuse to build public housing and rely on the market to solve everything (preferring to give subsidies to people to rent from private landlords).

8. Shopping centres (malls and supermarkets) dominate much of city life. They kill most of the neighbourhood shops and force people to rely on cars to do their shopping. But these juggernauts are purely the result of the capitalist thirst for profit — they appear before us as facts of life; people never get to discuss what is really needed. Moreover, the ubiquitous shopping mall represents a serious privatisation of social space — we all have to use them and they thus fulfil a social function but access and control is wholly in the hands of the private owners.

9. And as the supermarkets and malls kill off many of the neighbourhood shops, their place is taken by chain outlets (7-11, Coles Express, petrol station shops) all offering emergency supplies — at much higher prices.

10. Within the city we have the hypertrophy — a monstrous swelling — of the city centre (full of truly ugly buildings all jostling for position) and the bleak wasteland of the sprawling suburbs.

11. In the sixties, "decentralisation" was a buzzword. Governments encouraged a modest movement of services and industry to regional centres. But today country towns and villages are dying as governments cut services and jobs and banks close branches. This has a multiplier effect. People move to the city (or at least to the big regional centres) and the rural crisis intensifies.

12. There is a movement back to some regional centres but — under the wonderful capitalist system we have — it becomes ghastly caricature of what is really needed. The rich and middle classes build holiday homes in coastal towns forcing up prices and making life impossible for ordinary people (working-class pensioners and renters) who have to move elsewhere.

Peak oil and climate change

On top of the all the above, as the concept of peak oil and the eventual end of this finite resource laid down over millions of years gains currency, the fragility of the modern city is suddenly laid bare. The movie The End of Suburbia demonstrates very well how the American suburbs have been built on the automobile. If the motor vehicle as we know it goes — i.e., can no longer serve as mode of mass transport — then the urban sprawl becomes even more untenable and an alternative way of living becomes desperately urgent.

Similarly, climate change has put a big question mark over the modern city. Effecting a drastic and rapid reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is a life-and-death question.

In Australia, perhaps the most dramatic manifestation of climate change for the cities is the question mark over water supplies. Achieving water security and sustainability is a burning issue. To date, the main response of state and federal governments has been to go for big-budget projects (in Victoria, a desalination plant and a diversion pipeline to take scarce water from the equally drought-affected Murray-Goulburn irrigation area in the north).

Arguably, such responses do not address the real problem and will actually make it worse. (For instance, Victoria’s projected desalination plant will be a major emitter of greenhouse gases.)

All in all, climate change calls into question so many aspects of our current urban existence.

1. The motor vehicle culture which big business has foisted on us is no longer viable (if it ever was). If declining fuel supplies and ever-more-expensive petrol costs don't kill it off, surely climate change will. Public transport systems will have to be developed to replace it.

2. The urban sprawl especially characteristic of Australian capital cities — which compels people to travel vast distances to get to work — will have to give way to some form of consolidation. The hypertrophy of the city centre and the bleakness of much of the suburbs needs to be overcome. A much better spread of jobs would mean that people didn't have to travel vast differences to work.

In my opinion, over time the fetish of the ¼-acre block — the equivalent of every family owning its own car — would start to ease and eventually disappear as people realised that denser living with radically improved public amenities (parks, transport, services) had a lot to offer (c.f. some European cities).

3. As currently constructed, our houses and buildings embody huge amounts of water and energy and considerable greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, their actual operation is characterised by a high and unsustainable energy and water consumption.

4. Climate change will put our food supply under extreme pressure. What foods we eat, how they are transported and distributed will become burning questions. As well as finding ways to guarantee our food security, reducing the water and energy consumed in the whole process will be vitally important.

5. We need a much more uniform distribution of the population over the countryside. At the very least, the cities must get smaller and the country towns grow. But, unlike what is happening today, this needs to be done in such a way that jobs and services move out also, transport access is maintained and actual living communities are created. In time, the traditional isolation of the countryside would disappear along with the swollen capital city with its bloated centre.

In this regard socialists reject the current developer-driven model whereby greenfields housing estates gobble up precious farmland and create McMansions-style ghettos on the fringes of the city, isolated and with few amenities, a trap for housewives and the elderly and a terrific burden for those who have travel vast distances to work. We can surely work out something much better.

Abandon affluence?

As an aside, Ted Trainer, in his noted 1985 book Abandon Affluence, had a lot to say on the modern city. But his non-Marxist, radical green framework marred a lot of the useful points he made.

He saw "overconsumption" by the West as the source of the global ecological crisis. In his book he bases everything on reducing consumption.

Marxists, of course, see the fundamental problem not as "overconsumption" but the capitalist drive for profits ahead of all else; achieving a relative material abundance is essential if humanity is to leave class conflict behind and achieve full communism. With modern technology, it would be quite possible to achieve relative material abundance and — by improving production processes and eliminating the wastefulness of capitalist production and society — at the same time actually reduce our ecological footprint massively.

One can say generally that the West consumes too many resources but this obscures the reality that these are class-divided societies and a large proportion of the population doesn't consume very much at all. For example, in the United States there is a huge internal Third World which radically underconsumes the necessities of life. They are not responsible in any way for the profligacy of the US — that should be sheeted home squarely to the ruling capitalist plutocracy.

While we oppose the wasteful use of resources and while we too are opposed to capitalist consumerism, posing the problem in terms of reducing consumption as such is wrong and would be political suicide for the socialist movement. For instance, supermarkets, for all their capitalistic form, are actually a tremendous labour- and time-saving convenience. The liberation of women and the whole working class has many aspects; a key one is reducing drudgery to the minimum. We want to go forwards from capitalism, not backwards.

Ted Trainer’s city of the future has a very definite reactionary, feudal, labor-intensive feel to it, but even allowing for this rather basic weakness, he does paint a thought-provoking picture of the new city, with the old freeways and roads dug up, with vegetable gardens where the factories once stood, etc.

Monstrous beast in the room

Making our cities livable and grappling with peak oil, climate change and sustainability are really one and the same thing.

Ideally, we would have a big discussion, develop a rational plan and then organise ourselves to implement it. If we were, say, a small community living in ancient times before the development of class society, that is exactly what we would have done.

But today, the problem is not that the population has grown but that the economy on which we all depend — the productive apparatus and everything associated with it — is not owned collectively by society but by a tiny handful of capitalists. Working people’s labour operates the means of production — in that sense it is social — but a few per cent of the population privately own it.

This is the monstrous, slavering beast in the room. At every turn of the wheel it has to be fed. Its ravenous appetite must be satisfied ahead of any human need. What it wants — profits and ever more profits — is not what the rest of us want — i.e., meaningful action on climate change and other social problems.

For example, look at what is happening in Victoria right now. The big-business-oriented Brumby ALP government is moving at high speed in the opposite direction to what is needed to confront peak oil and climate change:

1. Rather than a massive program of fitting all dwellings with water tanks and recycling systems, imposing conservation targets on industry and agribusiness, and establishing the infrastructure for large-scale stormwater capture, it has signed off on the desalination plant and the northern pipeline — bonanzas for big business but a disaster for the rest of us. Water bills for ordinary households are projected to double within five years.

2. Rather than a program to phase out our disastrous dependence on brown coal and make the switch to renewable energy, the ALP government is intent on pursuing the mirage of "clean coal" technology. (As someone said, this will turn the Earth into a giant soda fountain.) Power prices are also set to double for ordinary users over the next few years.

3. It refuses to put the necessary resources into public transport which exists in absolutely infuriating and permanent crisis; instead its program is roads, more roads and still more roads. Now it is inching towards a truly insane monster road tunnel under Melbourne's general cemetery. Not even the dead are to be left to rest in peace!

4. It is going ahead with a radical dredging of Port Phillip Bay which, among other things, threatens to lead to the flooding of low-lying suburbs at high tide. And all this is so that bigger ships — laden with yet more consumerist crap — can transit the bay.

5. It has given the go-ahead to GM canola. Brumby's utterly ludicrous comment was that this was giving the consumer "choice"! The consumers don’t want this sort of fake "choice" — they want safe foods. GM was given the green light to give a profit bonanza to Monsanto and a few big exporters; the rest of us will pay the price (an increase in allergies and who knows what other long-term health damage).

Public ownership and planning

In order to grapple with the crisis of climate change we need a total mobilisation of society and a drastic and rapid reorientation of our entire economy. But to imagine that anything can compel a horde of profit-crazed corporations to be "responsible" is utterly fanciful. The commanding heights of the economy must be in public hands.

1. Socialists call for the nationalisation of the entire energy sector (coal, oil, gas, the power stations and distribution systems, wind farms, etc.). This vital infrastructure must belong to the community — whether it is in federal, state or municipal hands. The charter of this sector must be to phase out the fossil fuel power plants and make the "big switch" to renewable energy as quickly as possible.

2. The public transport and freight systems must also be in public hands. The aim must be to achieve a drastic and rapid reduction in the use of motor vehicles. The roads should be kept safe; apart from that, massive investments must be poured into rail, trams and feeder bus systems.

3. The automobile industry should likewise be nationalised. The car plants should be retooled to produce public transport stock and renewable power equipment.

4. As the crisis of climate change bites deeper, food security will become a big issue for society. We can't leave the bulk of the distribution system in the hands of profit-gouging supermarket chains like Coles and Woolworths, that exploit small suppliers and consumers alike. They too should be brought under public ownership.

5. The banks, which underpin the capitalist economy, should be nationalised and a single state bank created. This would guarantee bank workers jobs, provide services and generate funds for the reconstruction of the economy.

Economic planning based on public ownership of the means of production has tremendous power. Here is just one example.

In 1967 Isaac Deutscher, the renowned biographer of Trotsky, published The Unfinished Revolution, his well-known study of the Soviet Union. He pointed out that if you allowed for all the years the USSR took to simply get back to pre-war levels of production (following the World War I and the Civil War and then World War II), then in the equivalent of a mere 25 peaceful years — from a very low base — it had created the second most powerful industrial economy in the world.

Put aside Stalinist bureaucratism and repression, the deliberate neglect of consumer needs in favour of heavy industry, and the damage to the environment — this example nevertheless shows the enormous power of collective labour, once it is freed from the shackles of capitalism and allocated according to a conscious plan.

Fight for the future

Of course, the capitalist class has immense power and wealth and will not give it up without a tremendous struggle. Only the growth of a vast popular movement, solidly based on the great working-class majority, can succeed here. The development of a movement to fight for meaningful action on climate change will at the same time prepare the political conditions for a workers government which will finally bring the economy under collective ownership and control.

This — and only this — will enable us to begin to construct a society based on the fulfilment of human needs and living sustainably in harmony with nature.

Victorian Labor's water plan: business as usual

2007-08-03T17:59:00.000-07:00

[Green Left Weekly, #720, August 3, 2007]

In Australia, as in other major capitalist countries, the official response to global warming is to deny or gloss over the utter catastrophe confronting human society and try to carry on with business as usual, making only a few relatively minor adjustments here and there.

The Victorian Labor government's water plan is a clear case in point. The initiatives announced in June, together with those made earlier, are designed precisely to avoid grappling with the necessity of fundamental changes to the way we collect and distribute water, what we produce with it and how.

Juicy contracts in the pipeline

One of the key elements in the government plan to "droughtproof" Melbourne and the main regional cities is a $3 billion, 150 gigalitre (GL = 1 billion litres) desalination plant to be built at Wonthaggi by the end of 2011.

The plant will consume prodigious amounts of coal-based energy, thereby producing large amounts of greenhouse gas emissions which will make a significant contribution to global warming. The government's response is to say that the plant's energy usage will be "offset" by building an equivalent amount of renewable energy capacity. This may or may not happen but in any case it won't help reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.

The proposed plant has also aroused furious local opposition. On July 12, 500 residents, concerned over its massive environmental impact and the complete lack of public consultation, packed Wonthaggi's town hall to denounce the project.

The other major element of the state water plan is a large-scale effort to cut waste in the Goulburn-Murray irrigation area, with annual savings estimated at 225 GL. A pipeline from the Goulburn River will carry 75 GL — one-third of the mooted savings — over the Great Dividing Range to Melbourne’s water system.

Local residents in Shepparton staged a public protest, saying that their water was being taken to flush Melbourne's toilets. As things stand, it is hard to disagree with this claim. Moreover, it is by no means clear that in the future the water will be there to take. Currently the huge Goulburn-Murray dam system is only about 18% full.

Water bills for ordinary consumers are expected to double over the next five years in order to pay for the estimated $5 billion water plan.

The only positive element in the government plan is the commitment to cutting waste in the northern irrigation system. But even this is an attempt to continue along the same road as before. And big business is already salivating as it contemplates a bonanza of juicy contracts for building the Wonthaggi plant and the pipeline from the north.

Alternatives

A far more rational and sustainable alternative plan would include the following elements.

1. An April 2007 study commissioned by Environment Victoria and two other conservation organisations estimated that installing rainwater tanks on all suitable houses in Melbourne could save up to 84 GL annually. When we consider that Melbourne's current total water consumption is about 500 GL annually, of which 60% (300 GL) is used by residents, we can appreciate how significant such a measure would be.

2. Melbourne has two main sewage treatment plants. The Carrum Downs plant processes 135 GL annually but of this only 15 GL is recycled. The remaining partially treated effluent is pumped out of an ocean outfall at Gunamatta surf beach, thereby ruining it. The Werribee complex treats 177 GL of sewage per year, of which only 32 GL is recycled. When we are running short of water this sort of waste is completely crazy.

3. For some time the government has talked about sending recycled water from the Carrum Downs plant to Hazelwood and other Latrobe Valley power stations. In addition to spewing out stupendous amounts of greenhouse gas emissions, together they consume about 100 GL of water each year. Any rational water and energy plan in the face of global warming would focus on working to phase out these dinosaurs as rapidly as possible. Radical energy conservation measures together with energy from renewable sources would replace them.

4. According to the website of the National Water Commission, in 2004-05 16% of Victoria's total water consumption (almost 800 GL) was wasted (through evaporation, seepage and leaks). Big projects in the Mallee-Wimmera and in the Goulburn-Murray area are tackling some of this but there would seem to be a lot more scope for big savings.

5. The NWC website table shows that agriculture accounts for 66% of the state’s water consumption. Looking over the detailed breakdown one can’t help but wonder how much is absolutely necessary or sustainable given the crisis we face.

For instance, grape production consumes 320 GL of water. Even a staunch wine-lover might question the necessity of much of this. How much of the grape crop is used to make wine which is exported to Europe which can perfectly well produce its own wine?

One might ask similar questions about dairy farming (consuming 1710 GL of water), livestock production (156 GL) and non-dairy pasture (622 GL).

The truth is that everything we produce embodies a certain amount of energy and water. Some things are essential to our society, others are not. One doesn't have to be an advocate of feudal localism or a deep green opponent of world trade to suggest that the exporting of particular water or energy intensive products is probably not sustainable in today’s conditions.

Stormwater harvesting

Large-scale harvesting of stormwater should be an important element in any rational water plan.

Recently SBS-TV screened a three-part series on the Roman empire. One segment focused on the Roman city of Timgad, built in 100 AD to settle army veterans in what is now desert south of the Algerian city of Constantine. The wonderful ruins are the most extensive and best preserved in North Africa.

One thing which first puzzled archeologists was the large number of public baths. Where did the water come from in this quite dry area? There were two sources. An amazing (and still partially surviving) aqueduct carried water a considerable distance from the Atlas mountains in the south to the city. Timgad also had a comprehensive system for harvesting storm water. Under every street were drains to collect rainwater and carry it to cisterns for storage.

The Roman occupation of Egypt also left marvellous engineering works designed to trap the occasional downpours that would produce shortlived raging torrents in the dry desert riverbeds and gullies. The water was diverted into large cisterns hacked out of the rock walls of hillsides; it could be stored in these underground caverns for years. There are hundreds of such installations in the Egyptian desert.

Some 2000 years ago Roman engineers developed a sophisticated system for trapping stormwater but despite all the scientific and technological wonders of modern society such a vision appears to be beyond the horizon of Victoria's corporate-oriented ALP government.

End corporate secrecy

The other big element in any rational water plan for the state must be a forced march to water efficiency by industry. There are reports aplenty of quite dramatic water savings by particular companies. For instance, Melbourne Linen Services, a large commercial laundry in Altona, installed new recycling equipment which resulted in an annual reduction of water consumption of 70 megalitres (ML = 1 million litres) and a reduction of waste discharges by 30 ML.

However, at this point we come up against the notorious "commercial in confidence" — that is, business secrecy. The state government has so far refused to publish a list of Victoria’s top 200 water users. Under pressure it has now agreed to reveal the list later this year — but won’t tell us how much water each entity uses!

Recently the government has launched a program — the Top 2100 — whereby water users who consume more than 10 ML of water each year must develop plans to save water by December. The penalty for noncompliance? Wait for it — it's a fine of … $100. That's right — a $100 fine!! And cynics might have thought our government wasn't serious!

In Victoria we are facing an unprecedented water shortage and all projections point to it getting much worse. Residents are expected to make significant cuts in their consumption but we are not allowed to know how much water the principal economic players are using.

We need some real glasnost here. All water usage by industry and agriculture should be publicly available and easily accessible on an official government website.

We need a central plan under which every sector and enterprise would have a mandatory water efficiency target. Persistent failure by a company to meet performance targets would result in nationalisation and reorganisation.

Global warming represents the most fundamental challenge ever faced by humanity. Our very existence is at stake. This crisis cannot be successfully confronted without the community subordinating powerful capitalist interests to the imperative needs of our survival. Private ownership of the means of production cannot be off limits to public scrutiny and control. On the contrary, the public sector must be revitalised and massively expanded, especially in a number of key sectors.

The choice is clear: people's lives or big business profits?

Two roads for our healthcare system

2007-07-20T00:27:00.000-07:00

[Green Left Weekly, #718, July 20, 2007]

The media hysteria over a possible Australian link to the recent British terror attacks serves to highlight a basic reality. The Australian healthcare system is critically dependent on overseas-trained doctors and it wouldn’t work without them.

Andrew Schwartz, president of the Australian Doctors Trained Overseas Association, was reported in the July 4 Melbourne Age as estimating that 40% of about 50,000 doctors practising in Australia had been trained overseas. And about 5000 overseas-trained doctors are working here on temporary 457 visas — 1200 being admitted in the past 12 months alone.

Some basic figures

Reading this short piece in the Age prompted some reflections on healthcare in Australia, a major capitalist country. I couldn't help but think of socialist Cuba, a Third World country subjected to a ruthless blockade by the United States for almost half a century. The World Health Organisation website provides some basic data.

In 2001 Australia had almost 48,000 doctors to service its 20.2 million people — a ratio of 2.47 per 1000 of population. Yet Cuba's 11.3 million people had some 67,000 doctors giving it a ratio of 5.91 — that is, one doctor per 170 people.

Furthermore, infant mortality per 1000 live births in Cuba stands at 5.0, the same as in Australia. Life expectancy for females is not so different in both countries — 84 in Australia and 79 in Cuba. Looking at hospital beds per 10,000 of population, the Australian figure is 40 compared to 49 in Cuba.

And, we might add, because Cuba is a much more egalitarian society, its health indices are much more reflective of the real situation of the whole population. By contrast, Australia’s health statistics conveniently hide the situation of so many Aboriginal communities, who constitute an internal Third World. Moreover, our general averages also cover up the reality that rich and poor in general have very different health and life prospects in class-divided capitalist Australia.

'Flooding the region with doctors'

Cuba not only has more than twice as many doctors per head of population as Australia but it also trains large numbers of students from other countries, almost all in the Third World. Established in 1999, Cuba's Latin American Medical School (ELAM) has graduated 2910 doctors and is training a further 10,222. Of these some 1600 will graduate this August. Tuition is free; the students' only obligation is to promise that when they graduate they will work in poor communities in their own countries.

In addition to ELAM, some 30,000 Cuban health professionals — 20,000 of them doctors — work in 68 poor countries around the globe.

An article in the October 28, 2006 Sydney Morning Herald reported on the growing Cuban medical presence in the Pacific. There is a tinge of hysteria here but the facts are striking.

"Cuba has been flooding some poorer parts of the region with doctors and humanitarian workers since the tsunami tragedy in Indonesia on Boxing Day, 2004. Swathes of the Pacific, from Kiribati to East Timor, are becoming dependent on Cuban medical aid, and the Cubans appear to be winning hearts and minds. Following the Java earthquake in May, teams of doctors were quickly flown to affected areas.

"Indonesia’s regional health coordinator, Ronny Rockito, said the two Cuban field hospitals and 135 workers made a bigger impact on the humanitarian crisis than the work of any other country."

An East Timor government media release on November 15 reported that 302 Cuban doctors were working throughout the impoverished country. Furthermore, 498 East Timorese were being trained in Cuba to be doctors and a further 200 were expected to join them in coming months. Australia's largesse is miserable by comparison. While its "aid" is big on training police and military and imbuing public servants with a neoliberal mindset, it has provided a mere handful of medical scholarships.

Sicko

If there were the political interest and will, a rich country like Australia could easily afford a system of universal high-quality, free healthcare. And bringing our doctor/population ratio up to the Cuban level should likewise not be difficult. But the fundamental obstacle to realising such an attractive vision is the capitalist "free market" system we live under, which perversely puts the enrichment of a handful of magnates and their hangers-on ahead of the welfare of millions of ordinary people. And with neoliberalism in full ascendancy, things are getting worse, not better.

The healthcare system as a whole is inexorably being privatised. The quality and availability of healthcare is more and more dependent on the means of the patient. If you have money — no problem — but if you are poor, you wait and get what you can. It's not yet as bad as in the United States (the subject of Michael Moore's new movie Sicko) but that's the direction in which things are heading.

And for all the dedication of so many doctors, the profession as a whole is compromised by the commercial ethic. Training intakes for doctors are restricted, not by the medical needs of the population, but to avoid an "oversupply" of doctors. In addition, with university courses moving over to a fee-paying basis, few students not from rich or middle-class backgrounds are able to contemplate becoming doctors. For many, a career in medicine is seen as the pathway to a comfortable, privileged existence.

Targeting the Third World

This is the background to the crisis of healthcare in Australia. Not only is there chronic underfunding, but there are absolutely too few doctors. If we had Cuba's doctor/population ratio, we would have more than twice as many doctors as we do now — an extra 70,000! Think what could be done here and abroad with such tremendous extra resources!

In rural areas there is a permanent doctor shortage. To overcome this situation Australia (along with many other Western countries) has aggressive recruitment programs targeting doctors in other countries, especially in the Third World. A large number of the overseas-trained doctors who come to Australia work in Queensland, particularly in regional areas.

Not only does predatory western capitalism exploit the labour and resources of the Third World, more and more today it plunders its precious trained human resources. A May 2005 article on the website of the NSW Nurses Association gives a truly dramatic example:

The Philippines is exporting more nurses than it is producing, leading to a severe drop in the quality of hospital care and even forcing some hospitals to close.
Almost 90,000 nurses left the Philippines in the last 10 years, according to the National Institute of Health.
So great is the lure of a foreign nursing salary that experienced Filipino doctors are studying nursing with the aim of working abroad.
In the last four years, 3500 Filipino doctors left the country to take on nursing jobs overseas, the institute reported.
The Philippines supplies an estimated 25% of all overseas nurses worldwide.
More than half are in Saudi Arabia, 14% in the USA and 12% in the UK.
About 10% of the country's 2500 hospitals have shut down in the past three years, mainly because of the loss of doctors and nurses to jobs overseas, according to a study by the Philippine Centre for Investigative Journalism.
In 2002, 11,911 nurses chose to work abroad compared to the 4228 students who graduated as nurses.

To round out this dismal picture, it should be pointed out that the remittances of Filipinos working abroad (whether as labourers, domestics or healthcare professionals) are a major factor in the economy of the country and it could hardly survive without them.

The problems besetting the healthcare systems in First World Australia and Third World Philippines stem from the same capitalist system. The fundamental solution is the same: change the system; get rid of heartless capitalism and its neoliberal servants which put corporate profit ahead of all human needs. Then we could follow the Cuban example which, all qualifications made, is the basic alternative model of a people-centred healthcare system.