Corrupt behaviour has no place in the ranks of the people.

Vanguard June 2012 p. 6
Nick G.

“In class society everyone lives as a member of a particular class, and every kind of thinking, without exception, is stamped with the brand of a class.”

Mao Zedong, On Practice, July 1937.

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The allegations against former Labor MP Craig Thomson raise serious questions about social ethics and personal values.

It is alleged that during his time as National Secretary of the Health Services Union he used his union credit card to spend $6,000 on prostitutes, that $103,000 was withdrawn as cash advances from union credit cards, and that $270,000 of union funds was spent on his 2007 election campaign.

Thomson is not the only member of the HSU leadership to be accused of rorting members’ funds for personal gain.

Before making any further comment on Thomson, two things need to be acknowledged.

Precursor to further attacks on the people

Firstly, the allegedly corrupt activities in the HSU are an open invitation for the ruling class to further interfere with and control all unions.

In addition to anything the Liberals may be contemplating if they are returned to office, the incumbent Labor government has said it will give Fair Work Australia new powers to investigate unions, will increase penalties against unions, and will require public disclosure of the wages of union officials.

Secondly, corrupt practices infest the business world.

Before Thomson there were high profile cases including:

·         Reg Williams, founder of HIH Insurance who was jailed for 4 years 6 months with a non-parole period of 2 years 9 months on 15 April 2005 for filing false financial statements and failing his duty as a director.

·         Rodney Adler, a director of HIH Insurance (sentenced to 4 ½ years with a 2 ½ year non-parole period.

·         Alan Bond who was declared bankrupt in 1991 with personal debts totalling A$1.8 billion. He was subsequently convicted of fraud and served four years in prison.

·         Harold Shand, convicted last year of making corrupt payments worth $60,000 to Queensland Labor politician Gordon Nuttall.  Shand got 15 months.  Nuttall is serving 12 years for corruption and perjury.

·         Queensland coal tycoon Ken Talbot who was facing charges of making corrupt payments of $300,000 to Nuttall.  Talbot died in a plane crash inspecting his African investments and so escaped justice.

Placing self first is the foundation for corrupt behaviour

What links Thomson, Williams and others is their outlook on life, which is to place their own interests before those of others. 

Although nominally head of a working class organization, Thomson is typical of many who take up employment for a union not via the workforce they purport to represent, by via tertiary credentials that mark them as belonging to a class above the ordinary working people.  Thomson has both a Bachelor of Commerce and a law degree.

In 1844 Marx described the ethics of capitalism as “acquisition, work, thrift, sobriety”, italicising the first to indicate that placing the interests of the self came above all other so-called virtues of the capitalist ethic (Marx, Human Requirements and the Division of Labour Under the Rule of Private Property).

In Anti-Duhring, Engels wrote: “…we can only draw the one conclusion: that men, consciously or unconsciously, derive their ethical ideas in the last resort from the practical relations on which their class position is based -- from the economic relations in which they carry on production and exchange.”

He added: “...morality has always been class morality; it has either justified the domination and the interests of the ruling class, or ever since the oppressed class became powerful enough, it has represented its indignation against this domination and the future interests of the oppressed. “

Bolshevik values in the Soviet state

Lenin and Stalin defined Bolshevik ethics largely in the light of their experiences in winning and consolidating the state power of the working class.

Able lieutenants such as Mikhail Kalinin promoted education and schooling as the means whereby to nurture the youth of the newly emerging Soviet Union in whole-hearted dedication to the cause of socialism, and popularised the concept of the “new Soviet man” (and woman).  Lenin stressed the moral goal of education, declaring after the Bolshevik Revolution: "The entire purpose of training, educating, and teaching the youth . . . should be to imbue them with communist ethics."

Nevertheless, the ethics of duty took precedence over the ethics of virtue.   The former ethic found expression in the Subbotniks - the voluntary use of Saturdays for the donation of labour time in the public interest.  Lenin set the example, removing building rubble from the Kremlin on May 1, 1920.

The ethics of duty to the public interest received a boost with the promotion of the example of coal miner Aleksei Stakhanov (left) who broke all existing records for extracting coal in 1935.  Socialist emulation campaigns saw the entire country gripped in a fervour of Stakhanovism.

Mao Zedong: Serve the People

As leader of the Chinese revolution, Mao Zedong also selected labour heroes such as the Daqing Oilfield’s “Iron-Man” Wang Jinxi (left, below), but he elevated the ethics of virtue to prime position in the defining of Communist ethics.

Mao was raised within a culture of Confucianism which, perhaps more than the religions of the West, relied upon virtue or de （得）as the line separating the “superior man” from the hoi polloi.

Even his earliest writings contain calls for virtuous ethical behaviour befitting those who seek to right the ills of society.

In 1937, he penned Combat Liberalism, saying that “A Communist should have largeness of mind...looking upon the interests of the revolution as his very life and subordinating his personal interests to those of the revolution... (he should be) more concerned about others than about himself.  Only thus can he be considered a Communist.”

In 1938, he wrote; “At no time and in no circumstances should a Communist place his personal interests first; he should subordinate them to the interests of the nation and the masses. Hence selfishness, slacking, corruption, seeking the limelight and so on, are most contemptible, while selflessness, working with all one’s energy, wholehearted devotion to public duty, and quiet hard work, will command respect” (The Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War).

In 1939 Mao eulogised the Canadian doctor and communist, Norman Bethune (left), who had died after working along the anti-Japanese front lines.

Mao praised Bethune’s  “utter devotion to others without any thought of self... We must all learn the spirit of absolute selflessness from him.”

In 1944 he eulogised Zhang Side, a Long March veteran who was killed by the sudden collapse of a kiln on September 5, 1944, when making charcoal in the mountains of Ansai County, northern Shensi.

He published his eulogy under the title Serve the People, praising those like Zhang who “work entirely in the people's interests”. 

“Our cadres must show concern for every soldier, and all people in the revolutionary ranks must care for each other, must love and help each other”, he wrote.

(Above: a poster of Zhang Side emblazoned with the words Serve the People in Mao Zedong's calligraphy).

These articles were revived during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Mao’s most obvious attempt to instil in his people the thinking that really was stamped with a proletarian brand.

“Serve the People” was one of two phrases on everyone’s lips.  The other was “Fight self, repudiate revisionism”.  The latter encapsulated Mao’s belief that without a conscious rejection of self-interest, self-promotion, and self-cultivation there would be an ideological soil for the cultivation of revisionism, for betrayal of the revolution and for the restoration of the old capitalist society.

It is beyond the scope of this article to examine why the considerable gains in building a proletarian socialist consciousness under Lenin and Stalin, and Mao Zedong, were ultimately unsuccessful.

However, the line of demarcation between the thinking of their class with its endemic corruption and hypocrisy, and the thinking of our class lies precisely in a commitment to putting self last and putting service to the people first.

We enjoin all readers of this paper to fight self, to work wholeheartedly for our common cause and quietly and patiently build the respect of the people for the Party and its objectives.
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Further reading:  Marxist historian Humphrey McQueen takes the fight against corruption up to the real culprits, the capitalist class in Capitalism: a crock of crooks.

The Mayne Report names business persons gaoled by ASIC between 1991 and 2010 here:
http://www.maynereport.com/articles/2007/07/17-2354-2207.html