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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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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.

The Coal-Fired Power Bloc — How Do We Show Them The Way?

Over Easter, I went to the Upper Hunter Valley to visit my wife’s parents. At the moment, my father-in-law is working at a power station on a shutdown project, and one night the general conversation went to the dependence of the Hunter upon coal.

His view is simple — we don’t know what effect we’re really having on the climate, and everyone in the Hunter needs the jobs. To him, bowing to the “greenies” would ruin the livelihoods of people who depend upon coal and gas mining for a crust.

The Queensland CFMEU Mining and Energy division appears to be of the same persuasion, demanding Labor candidates to sign pledges of support for future coal projects like Adani’s Carmichael coal mine. The climate needs fixing, but not at the expense of our livelihoods, say the populations who depend on coal mines and power plants for jobs. The sentiment is echoed by many people off the street in Central Queensland, Western Australia and the Hunter Valley who are dragged in front of a TV camera for the nightly news take.

Who can blame them? Nothing they have heard from the major political parties would give them reassurance that there’ll be another job. Labor talks about renewable energy transition in one sentence and expanding coal and gas exports in another, the Coalition vacillates between outright climate change denial and token reforms, the Greens choose awareness promotion and rhetoric over outlining a detailed technical plan for energy revolution. There is either a complete failure of political vision in turning the conversation to how jobs would look in a renewable energy future, in the regions that would be affected, or there is an even bigger failure in political media in failing to take notice of it.

With those questions hanging around in my mind, I wanted to know — would there be less jobs for people in the Hunter Valley if the power stations and mines were closed, and energy generation was all renewable?

Turns out, the University of Newcastle and Greenpeace had looked at this exact question back in 2008, in a report which was submitted to an inquiry into the Renewable Energy (Electricity) Amendment Bill 2009. UofN’s Centre of Full Employment and Equity submitted a report that used input-output modelling to discern what impact a transition from coal to renewable energy electricity would have on employment in the region. Far from being a jobs armageddon, the modelling revealed that under two different scenarios, jobs would increase.

The first model looked at making the Hunter Valley a self-sufficient renewable energy centre. It would produce 23% of New South Wales’ electricity from solar, wind, geothermal and bioenergy (or gas co-generation), including enough power for the aluminium smelters at Tomago and Kurri Kurri. The net jobs gain under this scenario would have been 5,800 direct and indirect jobs.

The second model was a scenario where the Hunter Valley would become a renewable energy exporter to New South Wales, albeit on a smaller scale than at present — producing about 40% of New South Wales’ power needs. The modelling showed that 10,700 net jobs would be created.

The Australia Institute put out a report in 2017 modelling the employment numbers for the Australian Energy Market Operator’s Integrated System Plan for a transition to 53% renewable energy by 2030. They found that even under a low-employment scenario where most materials were manufactured overseas and imported, over 18,000 construction and installation jobs would be created. Ongoing maintenance and operations jobs would be in the order of 7,000–12,500 jobs. In the 2016 census, around 8,000 people employed were in the fossil fuel electricity generation sector, including gas generation. Can I emphasise, the TAI estimates for ongoing jobs is for half the sector, not the whole sector as news.com.au erroneously reported in 2017.

A further boon to the prospects of regional jobs is the prospect of pumped hydro power’s viability once renewable energy is at a point where energy storage is required. An ANU study completed in 2019 identified 530,000 off-river pumped hydro sites that could store well over the energy required for a 100% renewable energy powered world — so many, less than one percent of the best ones would be needed. In Australia, they found 22,000 sites, with only 3,000 that avoided national parks and urban areas being retained for their report. Off-river pumped hydro doesn’t require lithium, lasts far longer than a battery and can wind up in a few minutes, making them ideal for Australian demand management, while creating them off rivers avoids ecological destruction of sensitive river systems.

Following on from the rest of the academic work establishing the feasibility of a renewable energy world in a capitalist paradigm, why isn’t it happening? Politicians and business leader would be feted as working class heroes if they could bring these job-creating future industries to the regions that have been rotting, due to the massive impacts the neoliberal consensus has had on regional and rural communities through squeezing commodity prices and removing protections from imported food and fibres. A great new decentralised energy generation, transmission and distribution network would revitalise the regions with skilled, well-paid work. What is stopping everyone from seeing the benefits in an economic sense, let alone the ecological benefits that would allow their natural resources to avoid destruction from dangerous climate change?

The answer is the implications for the $4.65 trillion in fossil fuel assets across the globe, largely backed by huge finance corporations, feeding taxes and royalties to governments and profits to shareholders in an increasingly precarious market. As this portfolio of assets becomes persona non grata to the majority of the world’s markets, turning to renewable energy solutions for electricity generation, industrial production and transport, the popping of the carbon bubble promises armageddon for world financial markets. As one side of the market brings cheaper, stable prices and zero fuel costs, the other side containing overvalued stores of energy and stranded assets will explode. The result, if not managed carefully (in the interests of asset holders, of course) would be another global financial crisis, bigger than 2007-09.

The contradiction capital has to manage is the ecological destruction of business-as-usual versus the financial destruction wrought by the necessary rapid transition to a fossil fuel free global economy. However, the dialectic is not equal — the impacts of ecological destruction are not equally borne by all.

The masses of working class and poor peoples across the world, especially in the low-lying cities and towns of developing countries and small Pacific islands, will see their homes and livelihoods be swallowed by the sea and flattened by intensified storms, while fisheries are annihilated by heating oceans killing off breeding grounds and food sources. Farming and subsistence communities will see their climatic conditions change so that yields are hammered, rainfall reduced, and their lands become unable to regenerate as they are eroded by overstocking and intensified extreme weather. The rich who own enough resources, and can mitigate the impacts well enough, can build their walls — and borders — and keep out the poorest who will suffer the most.

However, even the BHP executives, Clive Palmers and Gina Rineharts can’t ignore the population of Australia that works to produce their wealth. Someone will bomb Clive Palmer’s exclusive bunker eventually in a climate change-induced Australian dystopia! (Watch the Tomorrow Tonight episode on climate change if you want to see what I’m joking about). If the majority of Australians, and the world citizenry for that matter, came to realise that not only would the end of fossil fuel reliance bring about more jobs, but it would revitalise moribund communities across the country, as well as possibly preventing the worst catastrophes hypothesized and currently observed by the international scientific community, politicians would be shouted down constantly in the streets whenever they defended the fossil fuel industry. Yet, people are convinced that jobs, the economy, and everyone’s livelihood relies on fossil fuel extraction, because that is the message that the bourgeoisie send as a united front, out into the wider population.

Looking at our lives, here in the comfortable and wealthy Australia, it’s true. Try and find a product in your house that didn’t require oil, gas or coal to produce or power. The onslaught of plastic waste our societies throw away is oil, sucked up and shaped into something to consume and dispose of, releasing carbon emissions into the atmosphere and causing environmental havoc from extraction onwards. All the metals, electronic devices, manufactured items, all contain fossil fuel input. Metallurgical coal is a vital component of steelmaking. Industrial machines require oil-based lubricants. It’s unavoidable.

The capitalist markets do not reward the ecological benefits of switching to renewable and sustainable sources. Extraction cost and productivity are prime. This is the fundamental reason as to why markets have comprehensively failed to account for sustainability and ecological damage in the costs of commodity production.

The implementation of the financial industry monopoly on production has further complicated capitalism’s attempts to untangle the climate change problem. Because the stock markets have bet on large unrealised wealth, by assigning trillions of dollars of value to unextracted fossil fuel deposits, the resulting losses would cripple the capital reserves of the world. Without the promise of future earnings from the now-useless claims to untapped fossil fuels, lenders will come to call and get as much back for their investment as possible. The ensuing withdrawal of capital from the economy, before that happens, would result in the mass withdrawal of opportunities for workers to sell their labour, causing destitution and deprivation.

This illustrates how the rules are always written to benefit those with, rather than without. We do not have the state on side to demand food and water — the businessman can call on the court to order the state to recover capital. Hence, as it ever was, revolution and expropriation is the necessary action to get what we need to survive.

On the flipside, in an anarchist communist society, none of that happens. Money is abolished, capital and resources belong to the communities that produce the necessities of life from them, people band together and build a zero emissions electricity network, and fossil fuels stay in the ground at no cost to anyone. There is more to it than that, however the contradictions that exist under Australian and global capitalism will not exist in a revolutionary society.

So, how do we convince the people at the power station and the smelter, that the way out of the coming crunch is a green (and red and black) path?

We have to directly address their concerns.

The immediate question must be answered — what about my livelihood? They must be convinced that it is possible for them to survive and thrive, even within a capitalist transition to zero emissions electricity, and that plans exist for it. There have been just transition plans put out into public for over a decade. In fact, their long term livelihood and their children’s livelihoods depend upon getting out of fossil fuels before everyone else does.

The issues with supporting the capitalist transition must also be spelled out. The carbon bubble is a problem that is being minimised, and for a reason — it threatens a massive wipeout of global capital. Moreover, it is the reason why business pushes as a united front against rapid transition, which is possible and benefits working people.

Finally, we must say why our solution of socialist revolution is better. The contradictions of global capitalism are eliminated by international socialist revolution, by abolishing currency, expropriating private property and turning it over to communal bodies for democratic management, within and between these communal groups in mutual actions. Obviously, more detail is required here, however I’ve prattled on enough for my first substantial post.

The people who we need to patiently explain these issues directly to, do not typically live in the inner cities, where most socialist organising currently happens. Where I live for example, in Ipswich (apparently Blair is the second-most left-leaning federal seat in Queensland according to the ABC Vote Compass), socialist organising appears to be a party of one. The outer suburbs, commuter towns, and regional towns are where disaffection is greatest in Australia. People who are currently looking for any outlet for their dissatisfaction that seems remotely working-class, need to be included in the discussion, the movement, the solution.

When the workers at the coal face realise their predicament, and that their company who employs them will not look after them when the chips are down, then we can help them to overturn the system that screws them.

I’ll let you know if this convinces my father-in-law.