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The National Crisis of Aged Care In Australia

This article was first published by Anarchist Communists Meanjin, and appeared in their Notes From Below newsletter.

Lost in the myriad of the news cycle of scandals, government mismanagement, blockbuster budgets, moral panic-driven misinformation campaigns and legislative battles, was the findings of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety. The full report was released in March; the findings contained within made for embarrassing reading for all federal governments since the nineties, if one were to actually read them.

Australia’s aged care system is in crisis. The Royal Commission found what plenty of previous inquiries by parliaments have found — difficult means of accessing subsidised care; over 100,000 people waiting up to three years for a care package; inadequate services for older people who have a package; concerns from older people accessing services about overworked and underpaid staff who cannot spend the requisite time on each person, especially in residential aged care; rampant assaults go unreported against older people and staff; funding shortfalls of $50 billion over the next five years; elements of care like arbitrary restriction of older people in care and infection control remain unaddressed. State government-run care facilities consistently outperform private care providers, which is true for both for-profit and not-for-profit providers.

Some of the statistics around the experience of living and working in aged care settings are disturbing. The rate of people experiencing assaults (workers and residents) is estimated to be between 13-18%; this is a major issue of workplace safety for aged care workers, especially female nurses and personal care workers. In residential aged care, 47% of people accessing care had concerns about understaffing, unanswered call bells, high rates of staff turnover, and agency staff not knowing the residents and their needs; in home care, this number is 1 in 3. Standards in aged care are so low that people expect substandard care in some services.

One root of these problems lie in the aged care reforms of the Howard government in 1997. Staffing requirements that were tied to funding were removed under the Aged Care Act 1997, allowing providers to decide what staffing levels and skill levels were appropriate. This change saw the wide-scale reconstitution of the aged care workforce — while the number of higher-paid nurses and allied health workers declined as a proportion of the workforce, the proportion of lower-paid and casualised personal care workers rose, especially in residential aged care settings. This change to funding restrictions, as well as the changes that required older people to pay more for their own care according to their wealth, has led to a two-tiered care system — the more you pay, the better staffing and services you get. Despite this, state government-funded residential care outperforms not-for-profit and for-profit private residential care. More incredibly, even with the transition to a lower-skilled and cheaper workforce, 31% of home care and 42% of residential aged care providers reported an operating loss in 2018-19; the effects of the coronavirus pandemic are not known yet. What the hell is going on?

The aged care sector has been a lesser concern for governments who fund the subsidised beds and home care packages. Of the identified shortfall in federal government funding, $17.7 billion over the next five years (short of the $50 billion identified) has been found in the most recent budget. This will mean continuing substandard care, aged care providers continuing to cut corners, more workers remaining casualised and backed up by agency workers, who walk into workplaces without a clue about who is who, and what is going on.

Because of the sector’s cultural position as one of love for the job and an altruistic calling for those working with older people — a reflection of the job of caring for older people as traditionally one done for free by women at home — workers are subjected to lower wages and lower value than other healthcare jobs. Even registered nurses in aged care who have the same level of qualifications as nurses in hospital and medical healthcare settings, can expect gaps of over $100 a week in take-home pay, compared to their comrades. In addition to the lack of career progression available, and onerous working conditions that burn out workers — only management beckons for registered nurses in the sector — there is high staff turnover at all levels of the workforce. Low unionisation levels of the workforce, especially amongst personal care workers, means that workers have little power to push back against providers cutting corners, refusing wage rises, not following best practices, and not keeping their workforce skilled. The only relief on the horizon for underpaid workers is an HSU case before the Fair Work Commission for a 25% rise in the base rate of the industry award, which is being backed by the Australian Labor Party [update Nov 2021 — the case will not be decided until the second half of 2022].

Just as supporting teachers and childcare workers in their workplaces helps our children and young adults realise their full potential in life, for those workers to be fairly rewarded and to be listened to when it comes to operating their institutions, aged care workers can bring dignity to the final years of older Australians’ lives by organising themselves into unions, and putting pressure on aged care providers and governments to stop putting older peoples’ needs on the backburner. Even workers in residential and home aged care can disrupt the capitalist system, and begin to create a culture of bottom-up management of their workplace settings, instead of CEOs and upper management starving older people and shortchanging workers to pad their salaries out.

Support the personal care workers, enrolled nurses, registered nurses and other aged care workers in organising their workplaces. They work just as hard, maybe even harder, to care for some of the most vulnerable people in society; they deserve a good life and a good wage just like the rest of us. Older Australians deserve to have their needs provided for, to keep their dignity, and live in peace and comfort until they are gone. Agitate against the governments and companies who refuse to give the good life to them.

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Vale David Graeber (1961-2020)

This first appeared on Red & Black Notes on September 4, 2020, and can be found here. Please follow Red & Black Notes on WordPress, Telegram, Facebook and Twitter.

“It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working.”

So said Dr David Graeber, the esteemed American anthropologist who passed away on Wednesday 2 September, aged just 59.

Graeber was born in New York on February 12, 1961, to working-class Jewish parents. His mother was a garment worker and performed the lead role in the labour comedy musical Pins and Needles, produced by the International Ladies’ Garment Worker’s Union; his father Kenneth had been affiliated with the Youth Communist League (he had left well before the Stalin-Hitler pact), participated in the Spanish Revolution in Barcelona, and had fought in the Spanish Civil War. Growing up in co-operative apartments described by Business Weekly as “suffused with radical politics”, Graeber identified his views as anarchist by the age of 16.

His academic career began with attaining a B.A. at State University of New York at Purchase in 1984, and he gained his Masters degree and Doctorate from the University of Chicago. His thesis was on magic, slavery and politics from his time spent in Madagascar, on a Fulbright scholarship, and was supervised by Marshall Sahlins. In 1998, two years after attaining his Ph.D, Graeber became an assistant professor, then an associate professor at Yale University.

During this time, Graeber was attracted to the anti-globalisation movement gripping the United States. He joined groups like the Direct Action Network, and was an organiser and spokesperson at the World Economic Forum protests in New York in 2002. Graeber was arrested along with other activists during a protest at an International Monetary Fund event in 2002. He said of his involvement in the movements at the time:

“I tried to get involved in radical politics in the ’80s and ’90s but the mainstream groups were extremely hierarchical, and the anarchists insufferable… I call it the “Bob Black” period of anarchism: everyone was a political sect of one, yelling and condemning each other. But then the movement I’d always wanted—one where people worked together with respect—finally materialized, and I had to be part of it.”

Controversy erupted around Dr Graeber in 2005, when Yale University decided not to renew his contract, when he would be able to get tenure. Over 4,500 people signed petitions in support of him, and esteemed anthropologists such as Sahlins, Laura Nader, Michael Taussig and Maurice Bloch called on Yale to rescind their decision. Bloch, who had also spent much time researching Madagascar, said of his work:

“His writings on anthropological theory are outstanding. I consider him the best anthropological theorist of his generation from anywhere in the world.”

He agreed to leave the university after a year-long paid sabbatical; he taught two final classes before leaving, one of which was called “Direct Action and Radical Social Theory”. Following his Malinowski Lecture at the London School of Economics in May 2006, Graeber was a lecturer and reader at Goldsmith’s College of the University of London from 2007 until 2013, at which point he accepted a professorship at the London School of Economics.

Graeber’s work was known in anthropological circles for his contributions to theories of value — how different societies determine value — and social theory. His book Debt: The First 5000 Years, a deep dive into the history of economic relationships going back to Ancient Sumeria in 3500 BC, posited the idea that debt, rather than currency or barter, was the oldest form of trade, in contradiction to the theories about the history of money. Graeber also asserted in the book that the imprecise, informal indebtedness of “human economies” was replaced by precise, enforced forms of debt through the establishment of violence, usually in the form of state-sponsored military or police. The Utopia of Rules was written to explain the relationship of people to, and the influence of bureaucracies, and how they introduce violence into nearly every aspect of daily lives in wealthy countries.

His most famous work was Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, which examined the range of jobs in capitalist societies which appeared to have no productive function whatsoever, to the point where the workers themselves cannot ignore the pointlessness of their labour. Inspired by an article he had written for Strike! in 2013 on the same subject, Graeber stated that the phenomenon of work as a virtue, which was a recent idea introduced by philosophers such as John Locke, led to the process whereby advances in productivity did not realise themselves in reduced working hours as John Maynard Keynes had asserted. Rather, the Puritan-capitalist work ethic and technological advancement became the basis for an ever-increasing services sector and “managerial feudalism”, creating more and more pointless jobs that fuelled consumerism, the reward for suffering in unfulfilling or alienating work.

The Occupy movement was a high point for Graeber in his activism; he considered Occupy to be based on anarchist principles, with non-hierarchical decision-making and its refusal to accept the legitimacy of existing social institutions and the legal order. Graeber was credited with giving the movement its “we are the 99%” slogan, although he later said that he was merely a part of the collective who came up with it. As an organiser of the Occupy Wall Street encampment during its initial stages, he was one of its most prominent advocates, and wrote The Democracy Project to tell his story of being involved in OWS, as well as many articles in subsequent years relating to different aspects of the experience. In 2014, he claimed that he had been evicted from his family home of 50 years for his involvement with OWS, and that many fellow participants had faced harassment for the same reason.

Graeber continued to appear at demonstrations and actions, giving a speech at an Extinction Rebellion protest in Trafalgar Square about the relationship between “bullshit jobs” and the environmental impacts of such jobs. He pushed the plight of the Kurdish revolutionaries in Syria, writing articles attempting to draw popular attention to them. He maintained membership of the Industrial Workers of the World and gave his time to promoting the union.
He continued to remain active politically, posting a YouTube video of himself on August 28, before his death in Venice. His wife Nika Dubrovsky posted the news on Twitter on Thursday, and his agent announced his passing officially soon after.

David Graeber made enormous contributions to the field of anthropology, and contemporary anarchist understandings of capitalist economic relations, anarchist organising, and modern state power and violence. He was an activist as much as an academic, and stood as a figurehead of a world-changing movement that sprung from an illegal encampment at Zucotti Park in New York, under the blood-soaked ramparts of Wall Street and its rapacious inhabitants.

Rest in power, comrade.

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The Coronavirus Pandemic is a Critical Juncture in History — Not Necessarily a Revolutionary One

We’re all staying home where possible now, afraid to go out and catch COVID-19 or a fine for being too close to your car passenger. The last month has been a whirlwind of government intervention in the social sphere, shutting down businesses and destroying jobs where people congregate and socialise, while innocent victims are losing their lives to a new virus that is ten times deadlier than the flu. The idea of the state banning public gatherings and compulsorily shutting down businesses was a theoretical one only months ago — yet now, it seems that we have accepted it as the necessary price for survival with barely a murmur.

Indeed, it seems that any agitation against the decisions of the Morrison and state governments in Australia has been where they have failed to close down potential super spreader sites, such as schools or shopping centres. Teachers’ unions have threatened wildcat strikes if schools are not closed to students; retail chains have shut their doors as business has nosedived anyway. Groups like Workers Organising Resistance have shared stories and advice on how to organise colleagues to protect themselves from unscrupulous bosses, dangerous work practices and the precariousness that comes with losing your hours and job when it’s closed by decree. Mutual aid groups have helped willing people do things like “adopt a healthcare worker” to aid workers on the front lines dealing with COVID-19 patients and in other stretched areas. A new togetherness, a consciousness of the debilitating effect of the crumbling of the processes of capitalism, is emerging — however, it does not seem to be one rooted in class consciousness.

In Australia, this effect reflects itself in the lack of politicised conversation around the measures taken to limit the spread of the virus. The pain that the lockdowns have caused to people across the country is not being discussed in the mainstream as systemic failures inherent to capitalism or our economic system specifically. The contradictions that have heightened during the crisis, like the unequal and irrational allocation of resources in a market system, have been dismissed as individualistic problems in demonising scared people as panic buyers, while underplaying the role of predatory profiteers by using stories of parasitic behaviour as quick hits to rile up viewers and readers. The dominant ideological position of the mainstream discussion of this pandemic’s effects has been one of a mere fall in economic activity and abundance, to be corrected quickly and without many negative effects to the general population — no worries, the governments are trying to save us.

Some sections of the revolutionary left worldwide have seen this moment as a potential moment for spontaneous revolutionary activity, while many others have questioned if it is. Others have used it as a triumphant vindication of supporting Sanders in the USA, or to rehabilitate Corbyn’s legacy in the UK (I might be stretching things to include them as revolutionaries). The calls for rent strikes and walkouts where the strength of the left is insufficient seems to be overreach, and in all probability, will merely pit the left against the rest of the population working hard, trying to survive while looking out for their own interests. Those trying to cheerlead for their favourite left figureheads would do well to think about how their responses to this crisis would have been any different, with the same contradictions of capital accumulation and the deadly spread of coronavirus piggybacking off social interaction acting against the best interests of people at risk of contracting the virus.

The need for social isolation has revealed the narrow avenue of building a strong left wing — an inability to raise consciousness past protests, small scale charitable activities and mutual aid, and electioneering. This weakness may further distance revolutionaries from the rest of society, and leave them unable to raise any class consciousness during this historical juncture.

We need to build social networks that allow people to easily participate and understand from their homes; we need to reach them online, through their mailboxes, on the TV and radio. We need to demonstrate the real reasons for the incredibly fast spread of this pandemic; the churn of human capitalists and workers in and out of countries along with capital, the globalised nature of human travel, the choice of uninterrupted capital accumulation over the health of workers and consumers who will die as a result of exposure. We need to get through to people that business as usual does not mean the same world will exist on the other side of this crisis.

We do this by getting people’s attention, building personal and collective relationships, offering material mutual aid and discussions of both personal and analytical accounts of their experiences in this moment. This is a time for helping people avoid eviction and starvation, and for showing people what has been the case all along — we are exploited so that all capital may continue to generate profits for the parasites unimpeded, and we don’t need them for the wants and needs of life.

This is not a time for revolution — it’s a time for building the left up and tearing the dominant social hegemony down.

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The Challenge In Defining Where The Class Struggle Exists Today

I’m reading The Ecology of Freedom by Murray Bookchin at the moment, after reading Listen, Marxist! and Post-Scarcity Anarchism recently. The texts are rooted in Bookchin’s anarchist views that he espoused throughout the sixties, seventies and eighties. So far, I have taken from his writings that thinking about social hierarchy is important to understanding the nature of the modern Western class struggle, and how it protects Westminster and American-style democracy from proletarian interests.

In the introduction of The Ecology of Freedom — which I am only up to page 26 on — Bookchin explains the way in which human societies evolved. It appears that hierarchies were instituted as humans changed the way in which they related to their means of survival, and that earlier hierarchies did not contain the oft-thought patriarchal supremacy over the rest of the clan — in fact, they appeared to be codependent with the collective efforts of different groups within the society. For example, Bookchin notes that despite the concept of elders (a gerontocracy, as he calls it) being the earliest “seeds” of social hierarchy, they exerted little real influence and appeared to be a development along the way of human history.

The evolution of hierarchy can be traced through the civilisation of humans. The chiefs and warrior classes are hierarchical constructs, monarchies and the aristocrats are as well, the caste system in India is an enduring example. Today, in Australia, our social hierarchy is complex and non-linear, which can make it hard to understand — however, we need to understand how it reinforces the interests of the capitalist class.

The parliament is an institution which rules through popular support. It is assembled with popularly elected representatives — they are gathered in a chamber, and they legislate the laws of the land. Those laws are influenced by the members, their advisers, and the relationship between the member, their electors and people and businesses who can affect their material interests.

Those people who can affect their material interests are fairly broad. Donations play a part. as well as lobbyists who interact directly with the political class. Party officials who control preselection, branch members, other members with shared material interests all have powerful influences upon members. Media coverage, which all of the aforementioned groups interact with, affects electability. When the full range of relationships are examined, one can see that hierarchy is not linear, but it does exist, and it does stratify people according to their place in the social order.

With the capitalist class exerting influence through the political class in the form of advice, lobbying, material power and media influence, and upon the working class through the parliament, the media and economic power, class struggle is tilted in their favour. Only a mass of the population rising up and destroying or seizing that power can free the working class from the hierarchical yoke.

Despite the alienation from work and life experienced by a large swathe of Australians, class consciousness remains dampened. I hypothesise that the rise of social mobility and the adherence to our social order, in tandem with the economic tendency of specialisation in our massive, intensely productive nation serves to mollify the revolutionary tendency of the working class, along with the ideas of technocrats reinforcing the notions of individualism and a just world that ensures the stability of the hierarchy, and the oppressive nature of our relationship to the means of production as realised in our bourgeois democracy.

Workers who are elected to parliament tend to lose their class identity, once they become politicians and assume their new place in the political hierarchy. We’ve seen time and time again, Labor MPs and leaders change from passionate union officials and activists into pro-business technocrats, trying to minimise the unfairness workers and the precariat face every day instead of acting in their interests. Tradespeople who free themselves from wage labour have become mini-capitalists, their interests aligned with the capitalist class that continue to exploit them anyway. The Hawke-Keating years destroyed the Builders Labourers Federation, and the last radical union with political influence, to serve the interests of developers and Labor politicians.

We can see then, that while people in modern society can move more easily than ever between the capitalist class, political and technocratic class, the media and the working class, the hierarchy of Australian society preserves the supremacy of the capitalist class above the rest. A person’s lot may change, however the unequal and exploitative nature of capitalist society remains.

Class reinforces hierarchy, and the hierarchy reinforces class. Liberal societies with high levels of development and social mobility are not immune.

What hierarchy also does, which our social hierarchy demonstrates, is that it can act as a mollifying or destabilising force within and against resistance. Hearing about the interactions between the students and workers who participated in the Chinese uprisings in 1989 before the Tiananmen Square massacre. Despite the spontaneous swelling of revolutionary fervour in the Beijing Workers’ Autonomous Federation, the deferral of the union to student hunger strikers, and the inability to convince the students of the need for active resistance against advancing PLA troops put the movement at a disadvantage. What was put as the “moral superiority” of student demonstrators doomed those in Tiananmen Square.

Revolutionary movements need to adapt to the material conditions that they face and act accordingly. Hierarchies that slow down decision making and promote deference to narrow ideas which are disconnected from the revolutionary moment can imperil the movement. Those hierarchies have also tended to carry over to the transitional periods following successful revolutions, where those parties have seized power and attempted to use it for their own ends, good or bad. These hierarchies merely create a new class stratification — cutting out the capitalist class on its own cannot destroy that.

There is a more complex hierarchy at play in modern Australia, that stratifies people by gender and race, which also feeds into the political hierarchy. That requires more thinking about for me.

The main thrust of my thoughts are this — we cannot merely conduct ourselves in the classical Marxist kind of class struggle. We must reflect on how they interact with our hierarchies, where we can break down the social power of those hierarchies and change the perception of their necessity, so as to tear away the shields protecting the primacy of the capitalist class — the bourgeoisie. Hierarchies are not natural and good, like Dr Lobster says; they are social constructs that developed as human’s relationship with the means of survival changed. Social constructs can be broken.

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So, the federal election happened

Saturday night, I watched the entire live count of the votes for the federal election on the ABC. At the beginning, exit polls had Labor winning 52-48 on the two-party preferred, which had Penny Wong looking quietly confident and Arthur Sinodinos preparing for a night of analysing six years of turmoil. As the count went on, and Sinodinos’ phone kept beeping with good news for Coalition supporters, the dynamic flipped — the Zali Steggall victory only providing a small cathartic effect for anti-Coalition viewers. Wong became visibly dejected, Sinodinos began digging into the Labor campaign and Bill Shorten, Leigh Sales moved on from grilling Sinodinos to grilling Wong, and the jubilant celebrations at the Liberal Party reception contrasted with the sombre pain of Shorten’s concession speech at the Labor event.

The media began spinning the result as the “unloseable election” on the night. Many criticisms have been levelled at polling companies, Bill Shorten and the Labor campaign, Queenslanders, Liberal voters in Victoria, Stop Adani and Bob Brown, the Greens, racists, Clive Palmer, Pauline Hanson, fake news, the coal mining industry and its workers, even the Victorian state election. Because the polls were wrong, no-one in the mainstream media can point to one reason why Labor lost, as if there is one easy fix they can make to destroy the Liberals once and for all. Unfortunately, there is no easy fix for the issues that bedevil the ALP.

Voting tallies as of Thursday have the national two-party preferred swing to the Coalition at 0.91%, which is piddling. The ALP had a 3% swing towards it in 2016, the Coalition gained 3.6% in 2013 and 2.5% in 2010, the ALP swept to power with a swing over 5% in 2007. The electi0n, and three years leading up to Saturday, resulted in the needle wobbling. So, with all the turmoil, angst and polarisation that has occurred since 2016, and arguably since Malcolm Turnbull knifed Tony Abbott, what did change?

Nationally, the Coalition and Labor first preference votes both went down. People are still deserting the major parties. The United Australia Party gained 3.57% of the House of Representatives vote, and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation increased theirs by over 1% despite not running everywhere. The Greens dropped some HoR votes nationwide, but ran close in some inner-city Melbourne seats despite a 1.89% swing against it in Victoria, and increased their Senate first preference votes nationally. Fraser Anning’s party hoovered up some hardline racist votes. Micro parties did as micro parties do, with Help End Marijuana Prohibition doing well in Senate races — something there for the majors to think about.

This indicates that people were just as unhappy with the government and opposition as last time. More votes came for non-Labor and non-Coalition parties because people are disengaging further from the team sport and voting for parties which connect more closely with them.

Preferences from the UAP and One Nation delivered a big swing to the Coalition in Queensland. George Christensen’s big win in Dawson came off a 0.77% increase in his own vote, a 12.9% increase in the One Nation vote, 4.9% to the UAP and 1.9% for Fraser Anning’s CNP. Michelle Landry recorded a big swing in Capricornia on the back of a 20% increase in votes for One Nation, UAP and CNP. while she only increased her vote by 0.5%. Cathy O’Toole lost her seat on a swing where preferences from the UAP and Katter’s Australian Party gave Phillip Thompson the seat — although his own swing of 1.44% would have given him the seat. Peter Dutton kept Dickson on the back of a small swing to himself, with previous Family First votes going to One Nation as well. Ken O’Dowd lost votes in Flynn, yet gained a 6% swing on increased One Nation and UAP votes.

The relentless campaign by Clive Palmer, which switched to an anti-Labor campaign once it was clear he wasn’t getting a Senate seat, and the increasing support for One Nation gave Scott Morrison the election, off the back of a protest vote that ate into the Labor vote and defied the increase in Senate votes for the Greens. It played much better in Queensland than the “hope and change and fiscal responsibility” campaign Labor employed, which had mixed results in other states.

The truth of why the ALP campaign fell flat was well-covered by Ben Hillier in Red Flag. Their tax revenue policies weren’t ostensibly aimed the “top end of town” as they stated — their tax cut cancellations, franking credits reform and negative gearing changes were aimed at middle class workers and retirees living off super and residual income. They failed to frame their campaign as an attack on big capital, as it really wasn’t. Following that, their plans for low and middle income workers would have left them worse off than they are now, in real terms, according to Australian National University modelling. No wonder the Liberal scare campaign about Labor taxing everything more came off.

What is mostly overlooked though, is that social media discussions about politics change more minds than the TV and radio campaigns today. One pollster who thought that Morrison would win, Professor Bela Stantic from Griffith University, said in a piece on ABC News:

“I am able to assess the opinions of people through their social media … other polling has a much smaller sample. I must [just] be careful of fake news.”

Social media is the new doorknocking. Facebook ads and comment battles influence the people who read them, and the platforms, including Twitter, Youtube and Instagram, encourage reactionary behaviour. From my own anecdotal evidence looking at Facebook, Bill Shortonbrains and Bull Shitten was never a chance to win, yet Pauline Hanson was a real person (Mum, you’re very wrong) and Fraser Anning wasn’t racist, just a real Australian who cared about the country. The death tax that the Labor Party was bringing in was going to steal all your wealth — this kind of discourse on the feeds of the most popular platform for Australians to engage with politics on was everywhere. In Queensland especially, the ALP has little foothold on social media — lots of pro-One Nation and anti-left material is shared around. US and UK conservative political material cross-pollinates debate. Algorithms on Youtube and Facebook are known to push conservative posts over progressive and socialist content because it gets more clicks, longer views, more engagement. This favours the Coalition.

The results in the wake of these transformative forces on political discourse in Australia, shows that the ALP has lost its connection with Queensland workers. The union movement is a shadow of itself. Its Change The Rules campaign did jack all. Labor’s state and local swings came in areas that could be linked to higher education and incomes, although some of the poorest electorates swung to them as well — the trend went towards the Coalition in 2PP terms. The neoliberal-social democratic platform Hawke and Keating embedded in the federal party has created a fatal schism with the people who want it to act in their class interests, who decided to go with the parties that promised a patriotic realignment of economic interests in their favour — One Nation, Clive Palmer, Fraser Anning, Bob Katter.

The most emblematic issue of that schism is the climate action debate. The Stop Adani convoy would hardly have made a difference at the polls, indicated in the stability of the Greens vote in non-southeast Queensland, because the emptiness of the climate change policies Labor put out had already been laid bare. Central and North Queensland have high unemployment alongside big earnings in mining, yet Shorten and Labor failed to talk about the benefits of a just transition that would benefit those voters in any way. The state Labor government amplified that disillusionment over the last couple of years with the war on farmers through the land clearing laws, and their dithering on Adani. I touched on the failure of political discourse in coal mining communities relating to the Hunter Valley in my last blog, and lo and behold — One Nation got their best result in Hunter!

If Labor want to take back the regions where mining and manufacturing reigns over farming, and the Greens want to get in these places, there is a space for them to sell aspiration and a green, abundant future. They need to drop their anti-worker ideologies around small government, private industry over the public good and their focus on neoliberal orthodoxy melded with social democratic sensibility — the Hawke-Keating legacy. The outer suburbs and regional towns will come back to the left when they can walk or ride to work instead of driving for an hour, when they reconnect with wider society, instead of being stuck in our atomised modernity. The material reality of modern Australia is that improving your life only lies in being the winner, not in acting collectively to improve society as a whole, and the conservative parties have connected better to people on that basis.

The opening is there for the socialist left movements too. We should harness the disillusionment, and work hard to raise class consciousness in struggling areas. These movements need to be brave, in talking to people that hold polar opposite views to what we espouse, and link our ideas to their concerns. Immigrants moving here aren’t threatening us, big capital and offshoring is. We aren’t destroying the environment, rich capitalists are and they’re denying responsibility. There isn’t a shortage of electricity, renewable energy or public transport investment — big capital is holding our salvation back from us for their own financial interests. Socialist movements need to take direct action to ally the material conditions we can observe, to the solutions that will allay the fears of Australians who have lost out and will continue to lose out under the status quo.

I’ve come around to the view that electoralism is not the way for a socialist movement to take power. It will merely serve as a platform for the demands and views of the movement to be broadcast to people who may never hear its agenda, which is what the Victorian Socialists are focussed on doing. The results of relentless campaigning in northern Melbourne by the VicSocs is reflected in the healthy vote totals in Calwell, Wills and Cooper, where they gained 4-5% of the vote without a supporting Senate campaign. A huge doorknocking effort gave them this result, which shows that getting into one-on-one conversations with people about socialism can change minds and win supporters, despite the dirty connotations of the word.

Somehow, Ipswich is still a Labor seat. I’ll be spending the next three years talking to people and building a movement out here to try and reverse the trend of reactionary politics that has existed here since Pauline Hanson’s first victory in Oxley back in 1996. I hope we can follow the example of the Victorian Socialists and Socialist Alternative in building a new socialist force in Australia, that begins a swell of revolutionary fervour against the neoliberal consensus that atomises and commodifies all of us.

Australian Election Season 2022 — The Dag vs The Other Dag vs Main Character Syndrome Sufferers

We have made it to 2022, and in Australia, that means a federal election is due; we have finally been put out of our misery, with an election being called for May 21.

The most popular choices are like having fingernails pulled out. In the blue corner, Scott Morrison of the Sydney Liberal Party and a motley of hangers-on, the cold fish with lecherous grabby-hands; a man more concerned with campaign photos, breaching WHS guidelines and relentless slogans than raging bushfires, devastating floods and an increasingly impoverished working class that bears the brunt of the coronavirus pandemic. In the red corner, Anthony Albanese of the Australian So-Called Labor Party, the newly slimmed-down man with a slimmed-down election platform, a boring party apparatchik with an annoying drawl and an inability to answer basic questions most savvy operators bat away five times an hour. Both teams are relying on personality politics to see them through, which is a disaster — they would need to possess personalities to pull it off. As Katharine Murphy of The Guardian Australia said, “…there’s a fundamental content deficiency. In this election, the Morrison government has zero long-term plan to discuss and Albanese is determined not to put policy out there that can be weaponised against him.”

On the sidelines are a huge field of minor parties and independents, hoping to make their mark on the most powerful institution of so-called Australia, a nation formed from the theft, genocide and enslavement of the First Nations people. Because of the compulsory preferential voting system in the House of Representatives and the optional preferential voting system for Senators, it’s good to know what the party of the rando who’s getting your number 3 and 4 over your most hated bourgeois-bootlicking candidate, stands for in reality. As we anarchists are coerced into playing this game of Don’t Elect The Racist/Religious Nut/Murray Rothbard Clone (or another descriptor you can think of for a Labor Right bagman), we might as well do some of that harm reduction the “self-professed anarchists” among us like to bang on about. Might as well, we’re not all good at drawing veins on the shaft.

So, since I am horribly uncreative, here are a bunch of summaries of each party registered with the Australian Electoral Commission to run in the 2022 Australian federal parliament election.

Disclaimer — this is meant to be a bit of fun. If you want to know more about these parties, do your own research.

ANIMAL JUSTICE PARTY: Fuck vegans

AUSTRALIAN CHRISTIANS: Splitters from the Christian Democratic Party. Their main policies appear to be supporting the Religious Discrimination Bill, being pro-business, anti-vaccine mandates, scaremongering about Safe Schools, and bothering Twitter about God every day. A nice veneer with prosperity gospel fangs hiding in their mouths, and a suspicious amount of white South Africans. They are running two Senate candidates in Western Australia, and in nine WA divisions.

AUSTRALIAN CITIZENS PARTY: Lyndon LaRouche? More like Lyndon LaDouche. Avoid the CIA op.

AUSTRALIAN DEMOCRATS: The enlightened centrists still have a Don Chipp on their shoulder, apparently. The Democrats being reborn is proof that the marketplace of ideas is not efficient, nor does it bring the best ideas to the surface. For the same reasons, forget agorism.
Now fighting fit and raring to go, the Democrats are running Senate candidate lists in New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria and Western Australia, as well as a pointless run in Eden-Monaro. The Teal Greens are probably not too worried about these intruders upon their political turf.

AUSTRALIAN FEDERATION PARTY: The ongoing mass line front of four Victorian dudes who I hope are still armed and dangerous, waging a People’s War against… something. Having denounced 1975 as the year things started to go wrong (seriously, their website has a Before 1975 and After 1975 diagram), candidates make six pacts to talk a lot, listen a lot, use their smartphones to call people, and do what the people say they need to do. Meanwhile, they’re anti-lockdowns, anti-mandates, pro-horse paste, and defence bootlickers, with a strange side of animal welfare concern. No candidates yet, but you can write off the AusFeds as another right-wing waste of space.

AUSTRALIAN GREENS: Ah, where the environmental movement went to die. Formed out of the struggles of activists in Tasmania which culminated in the Franklin Dam blockade and its success, the Tasmanian branch of The Greens can lay claim to being the first “green” party anywhere in the world, as the United Tasmanian Group in 1972. Founded on the four pillars of ecological sustainability, grassroots democracy, social justice, and non-violence, the Australian Greens have tended to ignore the grassroots democracy ideal, exemplified by the Lee Rhiannon suspension over schools funding votes and the deal with the Coalition to shut out the minor parties from Senate races while fixing the Group Ticket Voting problem. As the German and Austrian Green parties have shown, it won’t be long until the Greens smash the other three once a sniff of power rolls along; the miners of northern Queensland nearly did it for them when their Stop Adani convoy rolled into town.
Despite that, they are usually the most centre-left politicians around, with a special mention to the Brisbane Greens for getting Johnno Sri elected — his strategist and Floodcast regular Max Chandler-Mather gave Terri Butler a scare in Griffith last time around. If you want social justice warriors, social democratic policies and environmental hardliners as your local MPs and Senators, chuck a 1 on them, in the absence of an actual socialist. Ugh.

AUSTRALIAN LABOR PARTY: Formed under a nice tree in Queensland during the 19th century, the Australian Labor Party has broken more strikes and killed the trade union movement in a way that the Coalition never could. Paul Keating was a funny arsehole though, wasn’t he, as he sold the farm, passed the Accord poison pill, and made sure native title would be controlled by the state. Now the preserve of party apparatchiks who have never touched a tool, other than themselves, in their life, they continue to make doe eyes at big capital and try to reassure their new friends at the craft whiskey bar that they are the sensible party of government for all businesses. Meanwhile, the downtrodden who continue to cry out for their help as the reformist vanguard of the trade unions receive nothing. The corpse of the workers movement, the ACTU, have decided to tie their mast to the sinking ship, and will not be moved, so let’s accept that Australians will continue to be fucked in the workplace until something substantial changes. Rank above your local fash with a shake of the head.

AUSTRALIAN PROGRESSIVES: ded

AUSTRALIAN VALUES PARTY: Their tagline on their website is ~~POLITICS~~ LEADERSHIP so I assume Pol Pot is gearing up for a run with these overfunded goons. Every candidate I bothered to read about is a former soldier in the ADF, and the policy list reads as the most enlightened of camo-clad centrist nonsense. Heston Russell, the lead Senate candidate for AVP in Queensland, appears to be the platoon leader, and is a regular on 2GB, Channel 7, Sky News, Steve Price’s “show” and the Daily Telegraph, so do a hard avoid on these future coup instigators.

CENTRE ALLIANCE: South Australia’s answer to Better Call Saul before Nick Xenophon left the Senate in an ill-fated run at a state seat, now a mess of flaky independents and a rapidly calamitous campaign to preserve the seats Xenophon, Rebekah Sharkie and Stirling Griff won in 2016 as the Nick Xenophon Team. They’re not nutters or weirdoes, so that’s nice. Preference above the crucifix fetishists in South Australia, please.

DAVID POCOCK: Much like his rugby career at the Western Force and as one of the best Wallabies I’ve seen play, Pocock is an incredible one-man team trying to snaffle an ACT Senate spot. Unlike his incredibly strong and abrasive play on the field, his platform is middling and milquetoast neolib drivel, in line with the independents thing I read about for two seconds the other day. Damn it. Do whatever you want with him, use his party to get to the six or twelve preferences on the ticket if you need to.

DERRYN HINCH’S JUSTICE PARTY: Imagine donating your liver and having it help Derryn Hinch get elected. At least he has gone to jail a few times for throwing the middle finger at the courts. No candidates confirmed yet, so Victorians may be free of his rubbish this time around.

DREW PAVLOU DEMOCRATIC ALLIANCE: He describes himself as an anarchist, so this is very funny. His electoral platform is a mish-mash of socialist reformism and the anti-Chinese belligerence that had him suspended from the University of Queensland for two years, and has five candidates in total running for Senate and House seats. Of course, Hong Kong-Australian Democratic Alliance candidate Max Mok will be running against fellow Hong Kong-Australian Liberal MP Gladys Liu in Chisholm, who is usually embroiled in an ASIO-investigated funding or influence scandal. Makes sense. Use them as a preference filler in the Senate races for Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia. I detest the idea of someone getting to parliament and calling themselves an anarchist when they’re there, so get Drew in to troll me if you like.

FUSION: Greenies with better web design and horrendous policy writing. They are an amalgamation of the Science, Pirate, and Secular Parties, Vote Planet, and the Climate Change Justice Party. I will sigh very deeply if XR people are in this and glue themselves to the road for a FUSION campaign stunt. Preference filler, wherever they run.

FEDERAL ICAC NOW: Single-issue party, what it says on the tin. Running in NSW, Queensland, Victoria and WA Senate races.

INDIGENOUS – ABORIGINAL PARTY OF AUSTRALIA: A First Nations-focused party, by First Nations people for First Nations people. Running on a platform to demand help for long-ignored communities, they are running candidates in the Queensland and NSW Senate race, and in Parkes, Robertson and Page in the House. Preference high and put the Greens next, show solidarity.

INFORMED MEDICAL OPINIONS PARTY: The cookers just left Canberra, don’t send them back you dolt!

JACQUI LAMBIE NETWORK: Lambie is running Tammy Tyrrell as her Tasmanian Senate candidate with the tagline “Two Heads Are Better Than One”, that’s gold. When she’s not being horrendously racist, Jacqui Lambie is awesome. JLN are also running in all five Tasmanian House seats, so look forward to a safe Lambie spending five weeks being a loose unit.

KATTER’S AUSTRALIAN PARTY: I saw him rev up a CFMEU march once with a speech so energetic and captivating, it was magical; I stopped walking down the road and watched the whole thing. Fuck him though.

KIM FOR CANBERRA: Another boring ACT “non-partisan” independent running for the Senate, who at least has more qualifications than “Legendary openside flanker”.

LEGALISE CANNABIS AUSTRALIA: nice

LIBERAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY: These IPA stooges should be wiped off the face of the earth, but they keep coming back. Their Campbell Newman slogan is hilariously bad: “He’s Back! New Party, Same Man”. Enjoy your record loss in a Queensland election! These pro-business hacks can get in the bin and the committed ones can crawl back to the Liberal Party to get owned by factional brawls.

LIBERAL PARTY, LIBERAL NATIONAL PARTY, NATIONAL PARTY, COUNTRY LIBERAL PARTY (COALITION): Engadine Maccas, 1997, Scott Morrison shit his pants.

PAULINE HANSON’S ONE NATION: Always put this germ and her candidates last and never preference them in the Senate. The faster Hanson is wiped out, the better.

REASON AUSTRALIA: Please, have some more enlightened centre-left milquetoast independents, now with a side of Jane Caro. Preference filler at best.

REX PATRICK TEAM: Hey, you’re not Nick Xenoph-

SENIORS UNITED PARTY OF AUSTRALIA: I’m not sure that this isn’t a superannuation industry front, but they are a party for retirees, run by retirees. Of course, they are racist boomers so they had to add a bit to their platform about immigration. You’ve had their chance in life already, sorry Grandma.

SHOOTERS, FISHERS AND FARMERS PARTY: They are friendlyjordies-adjacent which instantly send alarm bells ringing, but they piss off the National Party when they win; rural and remote comrades in New South Wales, here is a vote kind of well spent I guess. No candidates yet, and they are pretty shit policy-wise; centre-right boomerism vibes.

SOCIALIST ALLIANCE: Hahah really? Socialists managed to get AEC registration? Well, the Alliance managed to beat their former bedfellows, Victorian Socialists, to the magic 1500 members number, and they have two Victorian councillors to VS’s one now, so all power to them as they steer towards a predictably dismal campaign result. They have snagged a star candidate in former magistrate Pat O’Shane for the division of Leichhardt in far north Queensland, but that division is being bombarded by the major parties looking to win a marginal contest. They are also running Moreland councillor Sue Bolton against VS candidate Emma Black in Wills, which seems pointless but is probably more about retaining Bolton’s local profile. The Alliance has been the best of the electoralist socialist efforts up to 2019, and despite a relatively passive membership they do a lot to advance the cause. Vote 1 when they’re there, and do whatever you want in Wills.

SUSTAINABLE AUSTRALIA PARTY: Please do not feed the population control ducks.

TNL: The New Liberals, which are a new wave of fresh hell demons from the bowels of the neoliberal unreality we are subjected to every day. Treat them like shit independents or the weird party on the Senate ticket when you need a 6 or 12 to get out of the booth and back to the barbecue lineup.

THE GREAT AUSTRALIAN PARTY: Not a great Australian party. Former Senator, bankruptcy victim and bane of tea cup stacks Rod Culleton leads the charge here, with a ton of conspiracy theories, sovcit gibberish and lust for the 1901 Constitution. King Cooker Pete Evans was going to run for them, but pulled out once the COVID grifting hit a bear market. AVOID!

THE LOCAL PARTY OF AUSTRALIA: Tasmanians for government by sortition, that’s a novel idea. WondeXR where that came from. Hyper-focused Tasmanian independents with Jacqui Lambie’s former media adviser running under the banner. Preference filler for Tassie comrades.

UNITED AUSTRALIA PARTY: FREEDOM FREEDOM FREEDOM, FREEDOM IN FIVE WEEKS FROM CLIVE PALMER AND CRAIG KELLY

VICTORIAN SOCIALISTS: Now an intermediate group involving Socialist Alternative and a mass of Melbourne independent socialists, the comrades in black have made inroads in council elections, although they only have one alderman to show for it. Since the first campaign in 2018 for the Victorian state election, VS have achieved decent vote totals in the electorates of Wills, Cooper and Calwell, without much to show for it; 2022 is likely to be no different, another round of doorknocking and campaigning for “propaganda”. Despite a milquetoast social democratic platform, and another VS-SAll clash in Wills with former candidate Sue Bolton, VS are the good kind of socialists and this time, there’s a Senate candidate in Victoria! Give them a 1 or 2, depending on your preference.

WESTERN AUSTRALIA PARTY: The candidates largely look like divorced FIFO miners and their policies went straight to the Family Court’s existence, which doesn’t exist any more, so my Western comrades — give them a big raspberry.

Various independents: Who cares, they can lose their deposit for being silly enough to run for 50 votes.

This exercise has reminded me why electoralist politics and reformism sucks, because only three of these parties will be guaranteed to get candidates in, and so many of these parties and people suck; by going into a contest against the GAPs and PHONs and UAPs, we are degrading ourselves to try and get respect and middling support. Let’s do an anarchism instead. Draw a dick on the ballot.

Thoughts on “The Corruption of Complacency”

I recently read an opinion piece written by the Australian Communist Party, titled “The Corruption of Complacency“. The subject matter was a topical and prescient one, especially in respect of the re-emergence of discourse and action around the looming global heating disaster, once forgotten during the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, as we huddled inside, hoping to keep ourselves and those around us safe — Extinction Rebellion was the figure for derision, being the touchstone of environmental direct action right before the world locked down, the group conducting the most prominent direct action before and during the pandemic.

Of course, the essay itself is typical of many leftist content published by parties and collectives — selling its political program as the only way forward, everyone else is wrong, if only everyone was better at doing revolution and resisting the Australian state apparatus — but what was most interesting about it was its call to what amounted to a new program of uncompromising violent resistance and illegalist tactics, in the face of the police and the various state and federal justice systems.

Coming from the party most well-known for its soup kitchens and lawn mowing services, this may seem like a rapid turn in outlook, strategy and tactics; of course, many may have never seen an ACP banner or shirt at popular actions, nor would they associate the work of Community Union Defence League with direct confrontations with police; fetishising the famous efforts of the Black Panthers to integrate within communities through service provision like breakfasts for school kids has been more their go since their split from the Communist Party of Australia. However, as nominally scientific socialists who use the immortal science of Marx to analyse the material conditions of the world they find themselves inhabiting, perhaps their critiques of Australian social movements bear some thought.

Their initial contention is that lack of central unity in social movements is to blame for the constant failure of social movements to achieve change. Every social movement in Australia has to deal with a plethora of activists from major and minor political parties, NGOs, unaffiliated and passionate people looking to help change their world, and the dreaded “swamp” — all participants who water down objectives, messaging, strategy and tactics. Maintaining a revolutionary line and militant tactics can feel impossible, when subjected to the onslaught of liberalised debate and discussion of organisers obsessed with nonviolence, collaboration with politicians and police, and maintaining an appearance of being willing to work with the system to change the system. My take on this contention, is that the writer thinks that these social movements need to maintain central unity through leadership by the vanguard party — in this case, it would be a cadre of Australian Communist Party members leading a movement under the party banner, or as organisers within popular social movements.

Considering this as the point trying to be made, it is one that has been proven to be false, even in the Australian context. The reformist left is quite capable of militancy and radical action — forn example, the green movement that first formed in the Lake Pedder and Franklin Dam disputes became the Wilderness Society and nucleus of the modern Australian Greens, party founders Bob Brown and Christine Milne became long-time federal senators, and popular roadblocks for the spread of socialist activity within the Greens. However, those blockades won through getting popular support, they utilised a well-organised and harmonious public message and strategy, engaged in a militant direct action tactics to stop construction of the dams, and eventually made the Tasmanian state government end plans to dam the Franklin River.

The article actually cites a great example of the swamp intervening to lessen the impact of a movement right at the edge of going over into a truly radical and militant moment of conflict with the state, at the KP120 blockade in Brisbane. The forces there were unable to take the next step in disabling police cars and equipment there; I remember someone telling me that Johnathon Sri, the local Greens councillor for the area and often an ally for social movements in Brisbane, intervened to bring down the temperature and ostensibly protect people from police violence. What isn’t mentioned or talked about, is how dangerous it would have been to interfere with the police vehicles — sounds like the fastest way to get shot or arrested. Rather than a lack of desire to interfere with property, I think this reflects a realistic notion by the majority of activists that dying trying to sabotage a police vehicle would not do much for the movement, other than get themselves killed as a martyr.

The strategy, tactics and radical nature of a social movement are not determined by the leadership of that movement, if they are to be a mass movement with popular support — revolutionaries can integrate themselves into social movements and drive them towards revolutionary goals. The task of revolutionaries within social movements is to develop a revolutionary consciousness within the masses, that realises a united, militant and radical vision for change, that inspires mass movements to demand the new world we know can be made. This has never required a centrally united cadre to guide them; in fact, inserting ourselves into these movements and helping to drive them forward brings those reformists and liberals around to our politics when we help people win gains and victories. More to the point, what we are trying to do is make the masses revolutionary, so that they desire the social revolution we desire — the movements themselves are the vehicle to develop the class consciousness we endlessly rabbit on about.

The same argument applies to working within the reformist unions — the point is to make revolutionary rank and file members act in their own interests, rather than transforming the union bureaucracy into a radical organisation. Trying to make the trade union bureaucracy, institutions closely linked to the centre of capitalist production and power, cannot in turn create a revolutionary rank and file — although it could help. The history of the old Communist Party of Australia and its various splits is a history of small bright spots alongside a litany of failures, infighting, betrayal and repression by the ALP-aligned labour movement and political wings, as well as the state itself under both Coalition and Labor governments.

Calling out Extinction Rebellion as an example of lacking in central planning is actually hilarious. I guess the pretence of decentralisation, autonomous decision-making and radical politics has done a number on the ACP members; it is well-known that the XR network depends on activists that were trained by the founders in the UK, that all member groups and affiliates cannot go outside the bounds of the strategy and tactics set out by the central leadership group, and the organisers in the regional groups that are linked to the international organising networks have been able to reject the intervention of socialist and revolutionary politics, maintaining their obsession with nonviolence, performative politics and collaboration with the state and its police forces. The incoherent politics of XR stem from the incoherence of the central command, which still organises international rebellion weeks and the rest of the alienating direct action they undertake. I would go so far as to say that the inherently top-down and centralised unity of ideology and strategy of Extinction Rebellion is precisely their weakness.

The more egregious part of the opinion piece is the scolding of XR and the more liberal left for sticking closely to nonviolence, and implying that there needs to be more direct and dangerous direct action, right now. Apparently, this is based on the clear-headed analysis of the ACP, steeped in the illustrious political ideology of Marxist-Leninism, a school of thought synonymous with senseless violence.

To quote from the article:

However, the fetishizing of the non-violent path often chips away at the power and impact of movements over time. Whilst people condemn overtly violent tactics such as those that harm humans, the liberal mindset has extended the same shock and horror at ‘violent’ acts on property and machinery that should fundamentally be the target of their campaigns. In the privileged liberal mindset, even the acts of destruction, blockading, and harming of inanimate objects that harm both people and the earth is considered to be an unjustified violent outburst. Such mindsets push these groups into the realm of uselessness; unable and unwilling to change what is needed.

These notions are fine and dandy, if you completely ignore the state of the Australian revolutionary left. A rag tag assembly of Marxist and anarchist groups that are largely made up of poor marginalised people, resourced with petrol fumes and burned-out individuals, in an environment of immediate state repression of direct action protests, is enabling the failure of social movements by failing to orient them to dropping nonviolence and respect of private property? Read some Mark Fisher, please. Any turns to truly disruptive actions in our current position would be easy meat for the Australian state, with no sympathy and no support from the Australian populace.

Blockade Australia’s efforts in Newcastle is a very recent example of organising specifically to try and counter these problems; however they now face the real prospect of decades in jail as the NSW government find any way they can to stop the ongoing interruptions to coal exports from the largest coal port in the world.

A fellow traveller noted the example of the French New Left Trotskyists in 1968, who tried to inspire the protest movement in its dying days by attacking shopfronts and government offices — they were shortly rounded up, banned and the new government recovered control of the country. They are so obscure, I couldn’t find anything about them to elaborate on in this article — lost to history, only remembered in terms of senseless failure.

We are too small, too under-resourced and outgunned to make the fantasies of the writer happen, who does hedge their bets in saying that endorsing violent protest as a tactical idea is not the panacea they imply it is. However, even entertaining the idea at this point is asking for the slowly redeveloping revolutionary movement in Australia to a quick and silent death. The 2019 actions by various vegan activists were met with huge fines, arrests and new legislation at state level to raise the fines and jail time for those who directly stop the workings of businesses to communicate political opinions. Only the generosity of some lawyers and activists in a position to help, keep our members and allies out of jail for periods of time — without more support and care for those of us who might end up on the wrong side of a jail cell door, we cannot hope to even make a dent upon the capitalist churn.

No amount of Marxist-Leninist analysis of the current material conditions of our capitalist hellscape will allow us to win now. There is only two things that can help from this point — more revolutionaries and more resources. These two things are the preconditions to making real headway with the working classes, the unemployed and disabled movements, First Nations resistance fighters, the LGBT movement, the climate action movement and the political bodies that lord over us. Being biased, I would say that the real way forward is to form platformist groups that practise the ideas of social insertion in existing social movements, creating intermediate groups where they do not exist, and understanding where the centres and peripheries of capitalist power are in our society, so that we may proceed with more clear-headed and prescient critiques and analysis of our current material conditions; but I would say that, wouldn’t I? Find like-minded comrades, start reading groups, attend the meetings and organising committees of the social movements you know about, and keep talking to your friends and family about why capitalism and the state is bad, convince them that we are right, and that they can help. We need the support, badly.

Capitalism Cannot Eliminate COVID-19

CW: Death, difficult themes. If you are struggling to cope with the effects of this pandemic upon your mental health, please seek help from mental health professionals or prevention services closest to you.

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The origins of modern viral pandemics often have a common cause — the transmission of pathogens from animals to humans, in environments where increased human activity or industrial animal farming causes viruses to mutate and jump across to humans. SARS, the swine flu, MERS, ebola and COVID-19 — probably the Spanish flu as well — all jumped across from bats or domestic animal populations. The reasons for this have been well-documented, distilled down to a common factor; increased human interaction with the animals that hosted the viruses.

As COVID-19 spread from Hubei Province in early January, the world has undergone the greatest upheavals seen since the Second World War. National borders have shut, entire nations have put its inhabitants into lockdown and mandated face masks, businesses shuttered to stop community transmission of the virus, and huge emergency fiscal spending to mitigate the effects of economic disaster. Global gross domestic product is estimated to contract by 5% over 2020, according to the IMF. According to Ayhan Kose and Naotaka Sugawara at the World Bank Data Blogs, the impact to global economic activity will be twice as deep as the 2008-09 global financial crisis, and only outdone by the world wars and the Great Depression since 1870. The fallout from the COVID-19 crisis will be the most severe that almost anyone alive has ever seen.

The reason for this slump in economic activity is due to the preventative measures instituted by each national, regional and local government required to stop millions of people dying as inadequate healthcare systems collapsed under the weight of cases. This has happened in some places to date.

In Italy, at the peak of the crisis in March, doctors were prioritising care for people without pre-existing comorbidities or people under a certain age; Spain had stories of the elderly tragically dying en masse in care homes, and the sight of military hospitals being erected and coffins being buried in New York’s Central Park brought home the fact to Western nations that this wasn’t an abstract or mild threat, like previous pandemics during this century. The virus spreads so easily and silently, through droplets expelled by affected people, with asymptomatic carriers and its similarity to the usual sniffles and coughs we regularly experience, that populations quickly become overwhelmed by its deadliness. People over 60 are especially susceptible to its ravaging of the respiratory system and the rest of the body; the death rate of COVID-19 cases in the elderly rises exponentially with age and secondary illnesses.

What has become apparent as the virus has spread, and as authorities have moved to shut down possible sources of infection, is that each decision from government is made as a balancing act between economic activity and risk to life. In the conception of each measure, as many people must be kept at work as possible; businesses must be allowed to work as much as is possible; the incentives to businesses to work like they did before, with social distancing measures in place like customer limits and hand sanitiser everywhere. Emergency welfare measures are made to be temporary, and sectors of the economy known to be susceptible to spreading the virus through contact of customers or staff are allowed to reopen with minimal changes to their mode of operation.

This balancing act, in concert with an overall strategy of suppression of COVID-19 instead of elimination, is reflective of two things.

Firstly, it is indicative of capitalism’s tendency to dictate to its participants the need for constant churn of capital accumulation, above all else. A related point repeatedly brought up among economists is the hit to productivity that the pandemic has caused. Of course, combined with the restriction of capitalist activity impacting the aforementioned accumulation, the investment required to meet new regulations that protect customers and staff, usually combined with a decrease in consumptive activity at the microeconomic and aggregate levels, results in a decrease in the mass of profit accumulated by those businesses, perhaps even though the rate of profit might increase.

Secondly, it reflects the macroeconomic consensus among the world’s governments that any fiscal expenditure to mitigate the effects of lockdowns upon economic activity and personal incomes should be done as prudently as possible. We’ve seen this in Australia, with the nickel-and-diming approach to income guarantee payments and the taxing of those guaranteed income payments; tax breaks for businesses and incredibly narrow spending on grants, rather than broad payments regardless of business sector; and the early end to free childcare and income guarantees to workers in centres, which had only been instituted to ensure people still went to work.

This balancing act, and its clear weaknesses, have been exposed in a dramatic and tragic fashion in Victoria over the past six weeks. Once COVID-19 began spreading throughout Melbourne and surrounds from infected security guards working in hotel quarantine in late June, 8000 cases of COVID-19 have been detected in the month of July, and a doubling of the national death toll from the virus. Prior to this, practically all businesses had been reopened — all were meant to have COVID-safe plans for operating — and all sports were starting back up again. However, a few sources of infection managed to kick off a second wave of the virus; so how safe was it to go back to the near-full restart of business as usual activity?

The evidence would suggest that the only way to eliminate the virus right now is to cease all possible instances of interacting with multiple people in public, keep people from moving around and potentially coming into contact with multiple other people over a broad geographical area, staying apart from coworkers in the workplace, and maintain bubbles of interaction where those within your bubble are free from the virus, or you all isolate from wider society if one is infected. This is impossible under any level of restrictions above the stage 4 restrictions Victoria is now under, and New Zealand has managed to virtually eliminate the virus through a similar set of restrictions, allied with wage subsidies and paid leave schemes to keep sick people at home. Yet these restrictions have not come into place in Australia until now, when community transmission had caused the R0 rate to climb as high as 1.75 in early July. Why?

It is clear that the deadliness of COVID-19 is only an economic issue to capitalism. People dying and causing healthcare systems to collapse en masse is worse for growth, productivity and profits than life-saving lockdowns which only target certain sectors of the economy. Depressed fiscal expenditure is unleashed on affected sectors to ensure their survival through lockdown — and the way wage subsidies have been administered here and abroad, the revenue and cashflow of businesses appeared to be more important than the incomes of workers — and once the country is out of the woods, the money dries up as we are largely forced back to work with some hand sanitiser, a store customer limit in most places, no ability to stay away from your coworkers behind the counters and in the back offices, and no leave provisions for precariously-employed people who need to self-isolate, and need to go to work to keep their bellies full.

Perversely, the life-saving measures instituted on us all have their reasoning in a very dehumanised, calculated logic. The preservation of capitalism and profits are the highest priority. Any Australian could see this as the first measures for maintaining economic activity were company tax deferrals, tax cuts for business coming forward, and extensions of asset tax write-offs. If governments were truly serious about eliminating the scourge of COVID-19 from their nations, they would do what is necessary — a months-long shutdown of society, only provisioning the truly essential services through completely contact-free services, while making sure those without somewhere to shelter are put into accommodation.

Anarchists like myself would like for us all to do this ourselves, to unleash the great networks of mutual aid and support for the most vulnerable while everyone voluntarily stays at home, keeping themselves and others safe while the best weapon we have against the virus — our own immune systems — kills the virus where it resides, for the price of the tragic loss of those unable to fight it off. Of course, this reality doesn’t exist, and we are all painfully aware. Moreover, the “selfishness” of the very people we trust to act according to anarchist principles and in the interests of the collective in our imagined post-revolutionary societies, has continued unabated in Victoria — and other countries, most obviously in the USA and Brazil where COVID-19 is out of control — which has made this second wave of infections worse.

This supposed inability of people to do the right thing is largely driven by the necessity of the precariat — the casuals, part-timers and those with no paid leave — to go to work to avoid unemployment, loss of shifts, and their lack of savings or emergency funds. This is why the source of the majority of Victorian infections is in the workplace. Meat processing facilities, retail stores, fast food restaurants and aged care facilities have been devastated by COVID-19 across the world. As mentioned before, emergency payments are hard to access; the switch of administration of $1500 hardship payments cleared a big backlog of claims in Victoria, and you have to wonder how many of the missing people from self-isolation there were waiting for a $300 or $1500 payment from the state government to survive.

The inertia of governmental action has fed into this. Things like the six weeks for businesses to get back JobKeeper payments from the federal government, or the delay in getting essentials to the vulnerable people in the public housing tower lockdowns in Melbourne — and the botched, inadequate provisions from the Andrews government in undertaking that — have pushed destitute people into desperation and law-breaking. The actions of people skipping out on self-isolation or hotel quarantine are hardly moral failings; they are the result of systemic coercive forces of the capitalist paradigm. Sell your wage labour or enjoy poverty, if you’re eligible for JobSeeker.

Having no ability in its bureaucratic institutions to quickly act to mitigate the impacts of their interventions, the state governments, most notably Victoria and New South Wales, unleash their only institution able to respond to any decision immediately — the police. We have seen the way police have taken to their jobs in enforcing the lockdown laws, with predictably varied levels of zeal and force; brutalising innocent black people trying to serve food to locked-down public housing tenants in Victoria, and a First Nations teenager doing nothing but standing on the footpath in Sydney, to helping white people lie on their declaration forms at the Queensland border in a well-publicised stunt aired on A Current Affair.

Even though we believe in the ability of any person to execute their own social power in the interests of themselves, and in the interests of their collective, we expect these apparently selfish behaviours to occur when people have invested their social power and liberty in the State. We have grown up with it; we do not broadly have the consciousness, nor the mass ability to resist the coercive relations with capitalism and the State. The medical experts advising government are as alienated from us as the representatives they advise; we are alienated from collective decision making and we are atomised from one another. In this individualised, alienated state of relations with others, the conditioned response from each person is the individualised response to the tensions of neoliberal moral righteousness and the coercion of the necessity of selling wage labour. In this state of internal turmoil, we can only expect the results to reflect the ability of each person to battle these tensions in the interests of others, at the cost to themselves. In saying this, the supposed disaster of a quarter of people meant to be self-isolating at home not being there when the ADF turned up to check in Melbourne ignored the reality that the vast majority of people were home, and many who weren’t were merely getting their allowed exercise; something very positive for us to remember.

These reasons do not excuse the very small part of the population who have taken the most reactionary responses to the crisis. Conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers and ‘sovereign citizens’ who have consciously committed dangerous and insane actions, spouted hateful and deadly bile and endangered others have done so out of the depths of their pitiful ideologies; a reflection of the way alienation and atomisation can develop into a reactionary, anti-social consciousness.

However, this much is clear — the way that the capitalist nations have handled the lockdown, has been to balance the loss of profits and capital under the unabated spread of COVID-19 against the impacts of lockdowns to suppress or eliminate the virus. This dehumanised, calculated manner of deciding on how to manage the economy of affected countries have facilitated the failures of a minority of individuals to adhere to the necessary precautions, through coercive tensions that have created a war inside the mind that can only be won if one is morally willing to act in others’ interests. Combined with the unwillingness of businesses to undertake truly safe activities that ensure the virus is not transmitted in their workplaces, we cannot hope to eliminate, nor safely repress the virus, and people will continue to die. Capitalism caused COVID-19; capitalism cannot kill it.

The Industrial Relations War Is Coming, Look Busy

Last Thursday, Treasurer Josh Frydenburg said to Sky News that emergency industrial relations reforms extended to JobKeeper-eligible businesses should be extended to them past September, when many of those companies will lose eligibility. He said:

“I can tell you the first cab off the rank will be labour market flexibility and a continuation of the industrial relations reforms that accompanied the jobkeeper introduction. Now, our view is that those flexibilities that apply … should be continued, not just for those firms that meet the reapplied eligibility test, but should apply to those firms who are on jobkeeper right now.“

Those changes included the ability for firms to change hours, staff duties and the location of recipients’ work without mutual agreement. Combined with other proposed changes, such as reducing the time required for a notification in a variation to enterprise agreements, the wedge tactic of the IR working groups involving unions and employer groups, and the statement today by Frydenburg that such flexibility is “an important feature of the economic recovery” points to a looming battle over the rights and wages of workers across the country, receiving a government payment or not.

The reinforcing factor that the Coalition will use for this attack is the federal fiscal operating deficit for last financial year, and this year as well — $85.8 billion for 2019-20, and $184.5 billion for 2020-21. This is due to a 3.75% fall in GDP for the 2020 calendar year, and it will be worse for Australia if immigration does not resume in 2021. The unemployment rate is expected to peak near 10% — the current real unemployment rate is over 11% and rising — and private business activity has stalled, despite being underpinned by a raft of emergency tax breaks and JobKeeper payments. As an aside, this means that the Coalition still have not delivered a budget operating surplus for their entire stretch in power, despite crowing about the coming one as if it was a done deal last year, but this is merely a talking point for the ruling class at election time.

In light of the long-manufactured “debt and deficit disaster” that the government has run since it was in opposition twelve years ago under Tony Abbott, JobKeeper has been reduced and turned into a two-tier payment from the end of September through to March. Workers with subsidised wages will see the government component of the payment fall from $1500 per fortnight for everyone, to $1200 per fortnight for those working more than 20 hours a week and $750 for part-time workers, from September to December, and a further reduction to $1000 and $650 per fortnight respectively from January to March. JobSeeker recipients, of whom hundreds of thousands have been forced on to as businesses shuttered or saw large cuts in revenue, will see the $550 per fortnight supplement reduced to $250 per fortnight, although the reduction-free zone for other income will increase to $300 per fortnight. This represents large cuts to the incomes of millions of Australians, to mitigate the political pain of large fiscal deficits in Canberra; ideological and tactical decisions to shore up the legitimacy of the Coalition as fiscally prudent micromanagers and demonisers of those out of work, or in low-paid jobs.

As has been previously highlighted, the trade union movement has been falling over itself to avoid bringing the Australian Labor Party into a political fight. They have not fought back against IR changes, and have facilitated attacks on precarious workers, such as in the tertiary education sector. Labor itself has tried to play the sensible ally in a “war-time” setting, picking and choosing which workers it will throw its weight behind. State Labor governments have put pay freezes on public sector workers to preserve fiscal positions, leaving unionised workers out in the cold on safety in the workplace, especially teachers trying to avoid COVID-19 infections in all schools.

These are all consequences of the incredibly weak state of organised labour. The last gasp of worker power in resisting attacks on wages and conditions on a large scale was 2006-7, when the Your Rights At Work campaign helped bring down the John Howard government and elevate Kevin Rudd’s Labor to victory in the federal election. Unfortunately, that campaign devolved into a “Vote for Labor” movement which brought about the Fair Work Act, a reheated version of Keating-era industrial relations laws combined with some aspects of Howard’s WorkChoices. The lack of any substantial militant workplace action, due to the large absence of any radical rank-and-file action or militant leadership in the face of a dominant Coalition government quite used to union-busting, allowed the conservative and bureaucratic trade union leadership to go about its class collaborationist agenda, in the interests of bolstering Rudd’s chances at the polls, ostensibly in the name of returning to what the workplace looked like before 1996, when the Coalition booted out Keating.

The lack of workers’ power in the workplace is ever more stark now. We know that there will be no resistance to attacks on our pay and conditions over the next couple of years, because the vast majority of workers are not in a union, nor do they believe they can resist whatever the boss tells them to do. The struggle is at a nadir, with the helplessness of the Australian population permeating into the cautiousness of the working class’s representatives in parliaments across the country. The long march to the defanging of the proletariat has successfully delegated all political power to the majorities of legislative assemblies, and this is very obviously leading to the material suffering of millions of Australians in this new normal as the so-called party of workers refuses to stand up in any substantial way for those whose power it holds.

I can only hope that anarchists and other left radicals can reach into the shop floors and offices of businesses living off JobKeeper and help fight against bosses messing with their hours, job duties and location changes. The changes are unfair and put the burden of economic recovery on the most vulnerable people in the country, by forcing them into sometimes-impossible situations where they must move heaven and earth just to get to work on time, or take on so much work they could never complete it. The effectiveness of mass marches and popular movements have proven largely ineffective against the capitalist and political classes, apart from lifting the mask off the repressive forces of capital that the police and politicians wear to hide their true agendas, the agenda of preservation of private property, the management of ever-growing circulation of capital and the cultural and ideological hegemony of the bourgeoisie.

At the point of struggle in the workplace, these are the issues that we immediately face. To organise and bring other people to the cause of anti-capitalism and anarchist communism, these are the material issues we must address right now, alongside the continuing systemic racist assault upon the lives of people of colour at home and worldwide and the still-present looming climate change catastrophe. Emphasising that our success in fighting our governments can only come when we link workplace struggles to these social movements, highlighting how political power must be reclaimed and used together with collective struggles on the shop floor and against the weak, conservative trade union bureaucracy, and its parliamentary expression in the Labor party as well as the capitalist vanguard in the Coalition, is a key strategy in resisting the immediate threats to our material interests, and in building the organisations we want to build.

The struggle does not need to be just striking. We have seen that using laws and regulations against government institutions and companies forcing us to do what we don’t want to do for fear of our lives, can have an impact — teachers using OH&S policies to resist the full opening of schools in Melbourne is one avenue of resistance. Any foothold will do.

This can only be accomplished through bringing together our workplace colleagues. It is so hard to resist the atomisation of neoliberal society, the separation of the workplace and the personal lives from each other; the individualisation of each person from each other to the point where we don’t even know our neighbours. The capitalist class still form networks and socialise amongst themselves, opening up their own collaborative networks which benefit themselves — workers need to reclaim this kind of social interaction and use it.

As long as we remain a cultural oddity, an easily-dismissed fringe movement with no clout whatsoever, this kind of impunity will continue, only tempered by the anger of the ballot box. We have an idea of where to go, and by doing the work to re-establish workplace militancy and active hostility to the capitalist class, we can begin to challenge the elites and get to where we really want to go, because millions of Australians will suffer unless the working class rediscovers its fight and its latent power. As has been demonstrated, nothing will change and the neoliberal hegemony will continue its historical process unchecked, unless we agitate for this rediscovery of class struggle to happen.

Labor and the COVID-19 pandemic

A crisis can reveal a lot about people. Heightened tensions, the pushing-and-pulling effect of ever-changing temporality, the constant consuming of the self in each moment without the ability to look further, can bring out the true nature of the subject.

The sharpened contradictions of Australian society in the COVID-19 pandemic have shaped the political discourse at every level, from the home, to the workplace, the dialogue between politicians and citizens, between politicians themselves. A manufactured sense of “wartime” co-operation has been adopted by the political classes, evoking the rhetoric of war and the need for following the united front leading us — in the case of Australia, it has manifested in the Morrison Coalition government’s assembly of the National Cabinet, including the state and territory premiers, and a newfound willingness to temporarily construct a welfare state for preserving jobs and incomes.

Of course, since I started writing this is May, the curve has flattened and normal discourse has reappeared. The Liberal conversion to Keynesian fiscal management is already being wound back like a fishing line with no bait; promises of dramatically shrinking the JobKeeper scheme eligibility — which only ended up spending half of what was budgeted — and winding back free childcare and welfare boosts remind us of how ideologically committed this current Coalition is to neoliberal orthodoxy.

The Albanese Labor opposition has appeared to buy into the Coalition framing, retreating to a position of technocratic, mild disagreement with a dose of ‘not letting perfect be the enemy of good’, while they focus on constructing a political narrative for the 2022 election. Being the head of the trade union hydra, this strategy has been echoed in the messaging of the ACTU and other trade union bureaucracies.

Following the Prime Minister’s speech to the National Press Club, in which Morrison announced the impending establishment of working groups including employer and employee representatives to discuss industrial relations reform, the Labor party and the ACTU have responded with cautious acceptance. Sally McManus, after standing proudly beside IR Minister Christian Porter as JobKeeper was announced, alluded to militant worker action that will not play out in reality, as the NTEU saga with the universities has demonstrated.

The exclusion of universities from the JobKeeper scheme in the wake of higher education’s revenue crisis due to the pandemic, led to a three-way war between university vice-chancellors trying to cut jobs, wages and hours to make up shortfalls; the NTEU trying to mediate the level of wage cuts and job losses in the university workforce; and staff who are resisting any job or wage losses. Despite the revolt of rank and file members through the public NTEU Fightback! campaign, the union crowed about a deal (the Jobs Protection Framework) with Universities Australia and the Australian Higher Education Industrial Association, the tertiary sector’s peak bodies, that would see 10-15% wage cuts for permanent workers and no guaranteed hours or job security for casuals and fixed-term workers. Dr Alison Barnes, NTEU national president, said;

“There are no perfect options in a crisis… In the absence of a properly funded federal crisis package our Union has intervened to put income security and fairness at the centre of a national response… Without this agreement, we faced mass sackings which would have seen careers derailed and livelihoods destroyed.”

Following this, which could be termed as a complete fucking sell out, NTEU Fightback! kicked into action. The NTEU pulled back from a national vote on accepting the JPF after 17 universities backed out, destroying the legitimacy of the deal. Activists at different universities rallied staff to vote no to enterprise agreement variations, with the University of Melbourne failing to push through their changes. Union leadership was spotted taking down vote no advertising and replacing it with their own at the University of Western Australia. Multiple branches of the union passed motions against the JPF at meetings. The attempts of the NTEU to act as the representatives of members while completely disregarding their members’ actual wishes has laid bare this lurch to class collaboration, siding with university vice chancellors against university staff.

Of course, in this saga are the echoes of the Hawke/Keating government’s Accord era. The difference this time is that trade unions are no longer willing to contravene the party line — the Mudginberri dispute and the BLF’s deregistration in the 1980s sounded the death knell for rogue unions standing up for members over political interests. The refusal of the new Labor party to back any union action regardless of its origins, in favour of leaving the Arbitration Commission to sort out disputes and keeping organisations like the National Farmers’ Federation onside so as to boost its economic management credentials, left militant workers out in the cold without support. The SEQEB dispute saw conservative parts of the labour movement pressure power operators into discontinuing their secondary actions in support of striking linemen who had been sacked by the Bjelke-Petersen government in Queensland. Class collaboration and political considerations became the force de jure in stopping workers fighting the will of the capitalist class — one that continues today.

Now, an open class collaborator from Labor Left leads the way in continuing this tradition for the federal ALP. In a recent speech to the National Press Club, Anthony Albanese had near-zero to say in support of workers standing up for themselves — in fact, he seemed concerned that workers might do too well out of their “victories”:

“We have continued to raise concerns about the structure of the JobKeeper scheme, including the decision that some people would receive many times more than their ordinary earnings. Better design could have reduced the economic burden now and the debt burden into the future”.

Penny-pinching in a crisis? It is obvious than in a crisis of capitalism, austerity will be the ALP cry once it has been resolved, hurting the working class and the precariat Australians they claim to represent. We remember the callous decision of the Gillard government in cutting parenting payments to single mothers with primary school age children in the wake of the GFC.

Other choice quotes:

“Governments should be working with the private sector and superannuation funds to deliver significant investment in social and affordable housing.”

“We need to point the country towards growth, because only inclusive economic growth can raise our living standards.”

“…the crucial role of unions in our society has been on constant display throughout this pandemic, demanding that the protection of workers’ rights – and their very jobs – be at the heart of the economic response.“

“We are not just an economy, we are a society.” (jokerfied)

“A constrained fiscal position does mean difficult choices.”

“Here in Parliament, Labor has not and will not be obstructionist.”

“Together we can build a more resilient Australia. We know the benefits of engagement with the world and the Hawke/Keating reforms which delivered three decades of economic growth.”

“We are, after all, as Ben Lee sang, “all in this together”.”

This was on May 11. The doublespeak and dissonance between the messaging and the reality — and the occasional slipping of the mask, in an attempt to catch the ear of the swinging middle-class voter — is on full show now. While normal combative service may have resumed over the last couple of weeks, it is clear that we can expect the ruling class in its entirety to look down on us if we dare to make a stand. Inclusive growth, fiscal conservatism, collaborating with private industry, agreeing to industrial relations reform once the Morrison government announced it after this speech: Third Way liberalism and appeals to the centre remain the clarion call of the ALP.

What does that mean for us?

It means that we cannot wait for the ALP and the trade union movement to agitate and organise against the Coalition and the capitalist class. Only through fighting against collaboration by the union bureaucracies, reforming a unionised working class that resists collectively against our own exploitation by convincing our coworkers that it is in our best interests. NTEU Fightback! is the kind of movement we should be supporting, and emulating its effective parts. The work of Socialist Alternative and other militant members to push back against their national executive has been inspiring and instructional. We have the power, as a collective, to fight for the rights in the workplace that others before us won through their own militant actions.

The Australian Labor Party has not been reborn as the left militant fantasy people supposed it would under Albanese, with a left-wing leadership at the ACTU; what has been revealed is the bankruptcy of Albanese and the Left faction in its actions, when leading the ALP. Through retaking our political power, and standing up to the ruling class in its entirety, we can either shift it to the place Australians need it to be as the voice of militant workers and the precarious people who depend on the state for sustenance, and/or supplant it entirely. Whether we are inside or outside the trade union movement, standing up to class collaboration and weak bureaucracy in our own material interests in the workplace, is a crucial and necessary point of resistance and agitation for the working class.

In the fires of a crisis, the trade union movement’s leadership has proven itself to not care a jot about our interests, blindly pursuing their own, leaving us to the mercies of the enemy we know. It is time to spread the message — we have to resist together, ourselves.

Our Current State Of Politics Are About What We Expected

No-one can be surprised about how the first few months of the Morrison government have gone. Any notions of compromise with the centre and left of politics have been dispensed with — it’s the ScoMo way or the highway. The new Senate has left a crossbench of reactionaries and two Centre Alliance “sensible centrists” to guard against the excesses of the Coalition, and so far they’ve shown the resistance of wet paper. The new Progressive Labor Party Under Anthony Albanese’s Leadership has shown us less opposition than the Senate crossbench, caving in repeatedly with the concessions to corporate Australia that Albanese had been talking about pre-election. It goes to show how far the so-called left wing of the ALP have strayed from the flock.

News Corporation has re-energised itself on the back of the election victory, slandering all that challenge the many flaws, lies and hypocritical acts produced by the Coalition and its supporters. Extinction Rebellion is the latest target of their brutal invective, with full-page splashes in The Courier Mail shouting about “feral” protestors holding up traffic and likely putting an unbearable strain on the Newstart purse. Never mind the message, News Corp papers have played the man with nary a discussion on what Stop Adani and Extinction Rebellion have been trying to start a conversation about.

This process of de-legitimisation has worked fairly well, and married up nicely to the new Coalition policy of pretending that climate change action is under control and will definitely not destroy the economy, despite having done zip to stop greenhouse gas emissions rising. It has also been aided by the years of Labor trying to talk out both sides of their mouth on the issue, couching all talk of necessary action within the status quo of capitalist economy and modern society. Having fallen into the trap of making climate action a trade-off, most people who struggle with the costs of day-to-day living certainly don’t wish to amplify the risk to them, if they’re merely getting more of what the current government is doing. The rest who have abandoned Labor have gone full climate denial or to the Greens, who have co-opted the green capitalism and NGO line of solar powered unicorn cars alongside the kind of targets which are an absolute minimum for averting climate catastrophe.

There is no radical program to be found in Stop Adani, and it’s clear there is no mass appeal for it. The pro-coal political forces have effectively neutralised it, to the point where CFMEU members were down at Clermont hurling insults at Bob Brown’s ill-advised caravan, and the mining branch of the Queensland CFMEU spent the entire election campaign trying to get Labor to unequivocally support the Carmichael Adani mine. No-one outside of the urban progressives, environmentalists in regional areas and assorted socialists, anarchists and anti-Indian racists oppose the mine in principle, and the campaign has had a desperate air about it.

A large fault of Stop Adani, as put by a good person in a Facebook post the other day, is its undeniable liberal character. As it was put by this person, the campaign seeks to shut down one coal mine project; it has land rights for the Wangan and Jagalingou people, and land rights as a principle, as an addendum instead of a front-and-centre issue; and it organises small action groups with a central leadership core, with no links to organised labour in the Galilee Basin, central Queensland and Townsville (as demonstrated by the Clermont incident). Its role within the Stop Adani Alliance, a collective effort of NGOs trying to influence climate change policy, cements it as a dead-end for the revolutionary fervour required to smash our current modes of production that perpetuate ecological destruction. People on the streets in Brisbane cannot stop politicians signing off on an application, especially when that campaign will never convince anyone whose mind needs changing, that would threaten their hold on power.

The anticapitalist left must begin anew, restoring class consciousness and
thinking more clearly about which capitalist movements to lead, co-opt and
reject. Co-opting liberal movements that fail to address the real concerns of
workers and their families — and miners on six figures are still workers —
disconnects us from those who care more about concrete realities than abstract
moralising.

The neglected space of allying with First Nations people to fight for actual
land rights is an indictment upon our ability to synthesise settler Australian
class struggle with the First Nations’ struggle against the enduring colonial
state resting upon it. The dogged determination of the Andrews Labor government
to impose its will over Djab Wurrung peoples trying to protect their sacred
birthing trees is a perfect example of that inability to build consciousness
and support outside the urban setting — I have hardly heard of any socialist action
there, apart from anarchists supporting the Djab Wurrung campers protecting the
lands. Red Flag has nothing on the embassy, and Green Left Weekly has two
reports on it, buried deep beneath plenty of Extinction Rebellion articles. The
various NGOs have failed to step in and help W & J people fighting Adani in
the courts over native title rights, including the contentious Indigenous Land
Use Agreement shrouded in murky backhanded tactics by Adani to get the numbers,
preferring to fight the environmental approvals.

Similarly, we cannot fight
climate catastrophe by focusing our efforts towards politicians. It is
necessary to go to where the visible, concrete struggles are, and support them.
In the Galilee, the Djab Wurrung lands, Deebing Creek, and other sites of struggle
against rampant capitalist destruction, there lies an opportunity to build real
and enduring solidarity with First Nations people, seize the political
narrative on changing our relations with production to stop climate
catastrophe, and demonstrate the futility of left liberal pandering to the
status quo. It only remains to take it, or we will continue to live in the
world of ScoMo — how good are jobs!