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Comrades,
Welcome to the 14th Congress of the Communist
Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist).
We meet on the lands of the Kaurna people and pay
respects to their elders, past and present, to their resilience and successful
survival in the face of colonialist unsettlement and dispossession. We extend
to all First Nations peoples in Australia our recognition that force and
violence, and the threat of force and violence, were the chief means by which
the unsettlers illegally disrupted the stable and enduring lifestyles that span
some 60,000 years on this continent. We
pledge our support for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land rights and
rights to self-determination and sovereignty.
Delegates and observers from five states are with us
today and will take part in the discussion of our current situation and
tasks. On behalf of the Central
Committee I have outlined and reported on a number of matters below.
They are not exhaustive and our agenda for today will
have opportunities for comrades to raise other matters as they see fit.
This report deals with the Australian people’s need to
deal with US imperialism as our main enemy and to have a clearer understanding
of China’s emergence and role within the region and in its relation with this
country. It revisits the issue of our
two-stage theory of revolutionary struggle in order to deal with criticisms
that are sometimes directed at us, and it looks at a matter that is of concern
to many, and that is terrorism and the erosion of civil liberties. The report also looks at what we might
loosely call the “people’s movement” and our work within it, at unions and the
ALP, and finally at some of our key tasks.
US
imperialism is the main enemy
For Australian Communists, US imperialism is the main
enemy. It constitutes the core of big
capital in Australia. When we talk about the ruling class in Australia we are
primarily talking about giant US industrial and financial corporations and
their Australian managers and senior executives. As the most strongly organised and most
powerful elements of the capitalist class, they have willing partners and
servants in the political, military, legal, diplomatic, cultural, scientific
and educational institutions of our country.
Fellowships to and scholarships at key US institutions are made
available to secure the loyalty and embed the ideology of opinion makers and
community leaders. US cultural products saturate our radio, cinema, television
and online streaming. The values of arrogant individualism, of aggressive put-downs,
of cut-throat competitiveness sit side-by-side with professions of liberty,
freedom and democracy and together assist US imperialism to maintain
ideological hegemony.
Cheerleading on behalf of US imperialism permeates both
major political parties. Key personnel
in both the Coalition and Labor parties report to their masters in the US
embassy. The Murdoch media based and
biased in the US makes and breaks federal and state governments. Of course, it
occasionally backs a loser, as it did with Tony Abbott, leading to a campaign
by the Business Council of Australia (comprising the 100 largest corporations
in Australia, mostly multinationals) which successfully saw the more “popular”
Malcolm Turnbull elevated to the Prime Ministership.
Pine Gap plays a role in the US war of terror, new US bases are opened and existing ones expanded. The Australian armed forces are deployed in
lapdog obedience to the requirements of the US empire. The so-called
US-Australia Alliance deprives our nation of the capacity for independent
decision-making in foreign policy and sets us against the tide of history and
the interests of the people of the world.
To meet the needs of its own imperialist finance capital,
US imperialism has attempted to create the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)
Agreement. But this has aroused
opposition from people in each of the participating countries, including the US,
with the result that progress towards its adoption has been considerably
slowed. Within Australia, we have helped
shape and direct this movement of opposition with its underlying
anti-imperialism and its objective of defending Australian independence and
national sovereignty. The Trade In
Services Agreement (TISA) is also being pushed by US imperialism to privilege
the profits of the richest corporations and countries in the world over those
who have the greatest needs. It seeks to
place the so-called reforms of the neo-liberal agenda beyond the capacity of
signatory governments to change.
Internationally, US imperialism seeks full spectrum
domination, meaning either the elimination of rivals or their coercion into
agreeing to play by rules set by the US for the “international community”.
However, the US is an historically declining superpower. That decline is subject to the law of uneven
development and will not take the form of a rapid one-way slide to oblivion.
Its decline will make US imperialism a more dangerous and more menacing enemy
of the world’s people and will push it to reckless confrontation with emerging
rivals. This poses a great threat to our
regional peace and stability, as it has done to the Middle East and the
Ukraine.
In the so-called “tilt to Asia”, US imperialism looks to
be taking initiatives to make itself stronger as it builds to a confrontation
with China. At the same time, it reveals something of its strategic weakness in
the requirements that it is placing on Japan, the Philippines, Australia and
other regional “allies” to finance more of the infrastructure on which its tilt
depends and to provide more of the personnel and equipment to bring about the
tilt. It wants Japan to emerge from its
pacifist post-War constitution and provide more of the military strength for
its containment of and confrontation with China. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s
compliance with this directive of US imperialism is arousing great concern and
opposition within Japan and within the region, indicating that the tilt is not
immune from the playing out of contradictions that will make it somewhat
unstable as a cornerstone of US strategy.
The growing inability of the US to fully fund its own
aggressive measures to shape and control the future is starting to be seen in
the Middle East where it now tries to avoid having its own “boots on the
ground”. Its reliance on the armed
forces of the weak regimes it props up in Afghanistan and Iraq is not something
it would have entered into by choice, just as its inability to bring about
regime change in Syria by its own armed intervention is hugely embarrassing and
frustrating for it. Gaddafi might be
gone, but Libya is hardly safe for the US, and it has had to drag Saudi troops
from their lair to try and crush the anti-US Houthi rebels in Yemen. Embarrassingly for it, it has failed to stop
the entry of Russian warplanes into the conflict on the side of Assad’s
government. US imperialism no longer holds all the cards in international
conflicts. Finally, and to the extreme consternation of reactionary circles in
the US, an accommodation of sorts has been reached with Iran (and, closer to
home, with Cuba).
The danger of war will exist so long as imperialism
exists. Despite all the talk of globalisation and the erosion of the nation
state or its absorption into some form of ultra-imperialism that transcends
national bases for capital accumulation and expansion, the reality is very much
that imperialism has national expression and that US imperialism is the highest
form of the national expression of a home base for the major sources of
industrial and finance capital. It both
leads and has rivalry with other imperialisms.
It has no friends, but only allies, and it treats those allies with
great suspicion, conducting espionage against their leaders and seeking to outmanoeuvre
them diplomatically, politically and militarily. Inter-imperialist rivalry and
contradiction will never quietly dissipate but will, on the contrary, intensify
and create instability and conflict.
We must continue to put opposition to US imperialism at
the centre of our struggle for anti-imperialist independence. Other imperialist powers, whether older or
newer, will also seek to curtail Australian independence for their own
advantage and must have their influence over our country removed in the course
of revolutionary struggle against US imperialism.
On
China
Our 13th Congress in 2012 declared that “previous
certainties about socialism in China are now obsolete. Our view is that forces
working for the further entrenchment of capitalism in China have the upper hand
in the Communist Party of China.” The
question is whether that characterisation of China remains adequate. To that end we have encouraged study of an
overseas document Is China imperialist?
We have also recommended to a number of comrades other publications and
commentaries from the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), the
Communist Party of the Philippines, the International League of People’s
Struggles and China’s own White Paper on
Defence Strategy.
In upholding the interests of the Australian working
class, we first raised our concerns about China’s heading down the capitalist
road with the Chinese in the early 1990s following China’s first investment in
Australia, its1986 acquisition of shares in the Portland Alcoa smelters. We told the Chinese that any Chinese capital
used to appropriate surplus value from the labour power of Australian workers
would be viewed by us as indistinguishable from other capital, and that if
workers came into conflict with employers backed by Chinese capital then we
would be duty bound to support those workers.
The Chinese were somewhat bemused by our approach: they viewed their
investment in Portland as good for Chinese workers and wondered why we would
not want to support the interests of Chinese workers.
Twenty years later and China is not only Australia’s
largest trading partner; it is also a major source of foreign direct investment
(FDI) in this country. As a socialist
society China pursued trade relations on the basis of equality, mutual benefit and
the exchange of needed goods. The
Chinese Embassy in Australia has argued that the flow of capital between our
two countries is the same as the flow of commodities, and is mutually beneficial:
Chinese capital is invested in Australia and Australian capital is invested in
China. However, there is a difference between capital and commodities. Capital is utilised for the purpose of
exploiting labour power and appropriating surplus value. Commodities are the product of labour power
and their sale is the means through which surplus value is realised.
Commodities can be traded between countries without adding to or intensifying
the exploitation of labour power in their country of origin; capital must seek
the intensification and exploitation of labour power wherever it is invested.
The China-Australia Free Trade Agreement (ChAFTA) was signed
by negotiators from the respective sides in November 2014, although the text
was only released in June 2015, and at the time of writing, has still to be
ratified by the Australian parliament. Like the TPP created by US imperialism, it
is not so much a trade agreement as an investment guarantee. It contains provisions which are unacceptable
to the Australian working class, such as the right of Chinese companies
investing more than $150 million to import temporary workers from China without
testing whether Australian workers are available, and for those temporary
workers to be paid at Australian minimum wage standards which can be below
those negotiated in enterprise agreements.
It also includes Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) clauses which
cancel national sovereignty by providing corporations with the right to sue
governments over legislation which harms the investor’s interests. China is the
more powerful partner in the ChAFTA and the provisions it contains amount to
interference in our internal affairs, undermining of our sovereign right to
enact legislation to protect the people and the environment, and an attack on
the rights and conditions of Australian workers.
Australia has been the single biggest destination for
Chinese outward FDI. Excluding Hong
Kong, Chinese FDI in 2013 amounted to $4.7 billion or 12.15% of the total. Compared to the US ($17.54 billion) and the
UK ($7.79 billion) this is still small, however, the rate of investment, coming
off a smaller and comparatively recent base, far outstrips that of other
sources of FDI. The quantum of Chinese
FDI represents only 3.31% of the total, compared to 23.73% for the US, 13.76%
for the UK and 10.04% for Japan (the latter having recorded annual declines in
investment here for several years).
The figures I am using here are already two years out of
date and will understate current Chinese FDI.
Most of the Chinese FDI has been in the resources sector with smaller
amounts flowing to agriculture, financial services, infrastructure and housing.
It is one thing for a socialist nation to trade
extensively with the capitalist world.
It is an entirely different thing for a socialist country to export
capital. We have already characterised
China as a country which has departed from the socialist road, a country being
taken further and further down the capitalist road by a Communist Party which,
particularly since Jiang Zemin’s “Three Represents” policy, no longer claims to
represent the working class exclusively, and is in fact the Party of the
millionaires and billionaires who, as “productive forces”, are entitled to its
membership.
We have previously said that there are some centres of
ideological contestation in China. China
still pays full respect to Mao Zedong as the founder of the PRC but maintains
the Deng Xiaoping line of Mao “having committed serious errors in his later
life”. In the weeks leading up to this
Congress, Tsinghua University offered an online course, free of charge,
internationally, on An Introduction to
Mao Zedong Thought. It is based on a course that is compulsory for
university students in China. Parts of
it are excellent, but its revisionist orientation emerges in some of the
multiple choice questions used for assessment, such as “Which one is not
included in the main content of Mao Zedong Thought? a) theory on new democratic
revolution; b) theory on socialist revolution and construction; c) theory on
the building of the revolutionary army and military; d) theory on continued
revolution under proletarian dictatorship”.
You don’t need to be a Rogues Scholar to pick d) as the item to be
omitted, because d) goes to the heart of whether or not China would develop
along the collective, socialist road or degenerate along the private,
capitalist road.
The capitalist orientation of China’s modern reforms
coupled with its push to export capital to world markets invariably means that
it is not just on the capitalist road but on the highway to imperialism. A country cannot export capital to the extent
that China has without transforming itself into an imperialist power, into a
partner with and opponent of already existing imperialisms.
The Chinese now speak of their need to project power
abroad, to defend their overseas interests.
The 2015 White Paper on China’s Military Strategy begins well: “China
will unswervingly follow the path of peaceful development, pursue an
independent foreign policy of peace and a national defense policy that is
defensive in nature, oppose hegemonism and power politics in all forms, and
will never seek hegemony or expansion”.
However, there are many references to “resolutely safeguarding
development interests” and these are defined in terms of “the security of
overseas interests concerning energy and resources, strategic sea lines of
communication (SLOCs), as well as institutions, personnel and assets
abroad.”
In 1974 Deng Xiaoping addressed the United Nations. Ironically, this architect of China’s embrace
of capitalist “reforms” delivered an excellent Marxist-Leninist analysis, the
whole of which is worthy of a re-reading here: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/deng-xiaoping/1974/04/10.htm . There
is one passage in particular which is relevant to our current discussion of
China. It follows:
China
is not a superpower, nor will she ever seek to be one. What is a superpower? A
superpower is an imperialist country which everywhere subjects other countries
to its aggression, interference, control, subversion or plunder and strives for
world hegemony. If capitalism is restored in a big socialist country, it will
inevitably become a superpower. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,
which has been carried out in China in recent years, and the campaign of
criticizing Lin Piao and Confucius now under way throughout China, are both
aimed at preventing capitalist restoration and ensuring that socialist China
will never change her colour and will always stand by the oppressed peoples and
oppressed nations. If one day China should change her colour and turn into a
superpower, if she too should play the tyrant in the world, and everywhere
subject others to her bullying, aggression and exploitation, the people of the
world should identify her as social-imperialism, expose it, oppose it and work
together with the Chinese people to overthrow it.
China is not, at this stage, a fully-fledged superpower,
but there are elements of interference, control and even plunder in the role it
is starting to play internationally. To the extent that it departs from its pledge
to “never seek hegemony and expansion”, to the extent that its trade and
investment practices undermine the interests of the Australian working class,
we will certainly uphold our proletarian revolutionary and internationalist
duties in exposing it, opposing it and working together with the Chinese people
to overthrow it.
In taking a stand against any emerging imperialist
practices by China we should not get caught up in current xenophobic and racist
anti-Chinese sentiment. There are right-wing fascist elements that seek to
utilise fears about Chinese influence on real estate prices, Chinese purchase
of Australian farmland and Chinese investment in environmentally and socially
controversial projects to advance their class collaborationist and nationalist
reactionary agendas.
We must take a principled stand against racism when we
involve ourselves in campaigns involving the Chinese. We should oppose attempts
to blacken the reputation of Mao Zedong and other leaders of the Chinese
revolution and continue to popularise the Chinese
Communist Party’s history of revolutionary struggle to end feudalism,
imperialism and bureaucratic capitalism, and to lift these burdens from the
backs of the Chinese people. We should uphold the example of China’s socialist
construction during the period which saw the emergence of the theory of
continuing the revolution under the conditions of the dictatorship of the
proletariat. We should repudiate cynicism and defeatism associated with China’s
current embrace of capitalism. In terms
of the dangers and provocations presented by a declining US imperialism
attempting to oppose and contain China as a rival, we should support the
national sovereignty and territorial integrity of China determined at the time
of Comrade Mao Zedong’s revolutionary leadership.
The principal contradiction for us remains that between
the Australian people and US imperialism which is the main source of FDI, the
overlord controlling our economic, political, military, diplomatic, and
cultural activities. We must keep to the
course we have chartered in our two-stage revolutionary program: fighting to
free Australia from the clutches of US imperialism and then deepening the fight
for socialism.
The
lessons from Greece
The situation in Greece has put the malevolence of
imperialist finance capital on display for all to see. Greece is a part of Europe, a part of the
privileged world that generally remains exempt from the barbarity and violence
imposed on Third World countries by imperialism. NATO has not bombed Athens, but the Troika
(the IMF, the European Commission and the European Central Bank) has demanded
that Greece cut a pound of flesh and more from its own body to repay the
imperialist loan sharks of Europe and the IMF.
The original Shylock deserved some sympathy or understanding as a Jew
persecuted and mistreated by Christians, but the Shylocks of the Troika have no
such excuses. They are businesspeople
with no motive other than to accumulate capital through usury.
Because Greece falls into the category of developed
capitalist democracies the strategies and tactics of the working class and its
revolutionary leadership are bound to have lessons for Australian
revolutionaries. Although we have not
lived the daily experience of the Greek people we do have the theoretical
weapon of Marxism with which to try and make sense of the internal developments
of countries other than our own. That
said, we stand to be corrected by Greek comrades if our use of Marxist theory
has shortcomings or errors.
Greece is a nation that occupies just over half the land
area of the Australian state of Victoria and has just under half the population
of Australia. It has three main
Communist organisations, all of which have contest parliamentary
elections. The Greek Communist Party
(KKE) has not participated in SYRIZA.
The Communist Party of Greece (M-L) and the Marxist-Leninist Communist
Party of Greece form their own coalition, People’s Resistance, and supported
SYRIZA in its early stages without formally joining it. The Communist Organisation of Greece (KOE)
joined SYRIZA and has four members of parliament.
For the purposes of this report, I am not dealing with
other left social-democratic, Trotskyite or anarchist groupings. The three Communist organisations have
different strategies and tactics.
Comrades and parties which we respect and which are in general agreement
on fundamental theoretical and ideological matters have differed over what they
believe to be the correct path forward for Communists in Greece. Comrade Harpal Brar and the Communist Party
of Great Britain (M-L) support the KKE’s position; Comrade Jose Maria Sison and
the Communist Party of the Philippines support the position of the KOE.
Our position has always been one of rejecting the
revisionist view that there can be a peaceful transition through parliamentary
processes to a fundamental change in the relations of production and of the
class structures that accompany those relations. It is entirely illusory to believe that
Greece could extricate itself from the web of imperialist domination through
elections and negotiations. When the
revolutionary forces are not yet strong enough to command support from the
people, participations in elections serve only to broadcast the electoral
weakness of the revolutionaries and their isolation from the broad ranks of the
people.
However, situations can arise when a broad mass movement
comes into with the potential for it to entrench and deepen an anti-imperialist
stand adopted by a parliamentary majority.
Political parties leading such a mass movement may also have the
potential to develop the focus of people’s struggles away from parliamentary
manoeuvres to a self-conscious need to develop extra-parliamentary mass
struggle. This may require some representation in the parliament by those
parties precisely to assist in exposing its subservience to imperialism and to
capitalism.
For a brief time in 1927, the Guomindang (Kuomintang) had
two governments in China. One was led by
Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) at Nanjing and had just massacred the Communists
of Shanghai to bring to an end a period of GMD-CCP cooperation against the
Northern Warlords. Another group of the GMD established its capital at Wuhan
under Wang Jingwei and continued to pursue cooperation with the CCP.
In reply to a position being put by Trotsky and Zinoviev,
Stalin posed the question of whether or not the Communists should participate
in the Wuhan government. He said:
“Since China is passing through an
agrarian revolution, since the victory of the agrarian revolution will mean the
victory of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, the victory of a revolutionary
dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry, and since Nanking is the centre
of national counter-revolution and Wuhan the centre of the revolutionary
movement in China, the Wuhan Kuomintang must be supported and the Communists
must participate in this Kuomintang and in its revolutionary government,
provided that the leading role of the proletariat and its party is ensured both
inside and outside the Kuomintang.
“Is
the present Wuhan government the organ of a revolutionary-democratic
dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry? No, it is not such an organ as
yet, and will not soon become one. But it has every chance of developing into
such an organ, given the further development of the revolution and the success
of this revolution.”
The
first lesson to be drawn from this is that a Communist party must always be in
a position to exercise both unity and independence within any coalition or front
that it enters, and that the exercise of independence is for the purpose of
developing and strengthening the leading role of the working class. The second is to base its participation on
the potential for the further development of the revolutionary situation, for
its development to a newer and qualitatively higher level.
The
Greece of today is not the China of yesterday.
However, it seems reasonable that Communists in Greece participated in
the creation of SYRIZA in 2004 and attempted to strengthen its anti-imperialist
policies within parliamentary confines, on the one hand, and the leadership of
the working class in protecting those policies through mass organisations and
extra-parliamentary actions on the other.
SYRIZA
gradually emerged as the main opposition to the traditional social democratic
PASOK government through the 2004, 2007 and 2012 elections. It was supported by Greeks opposed to
imperialist austerity measures. It seems
reasonable that Marxist-Leninist Communists worked alongside SYRIZA to support
what could be supported and to criticise and oppose its tendencies towards
vacillation and diversion of struggle into the parliamentary arena. The years 2010-11 were years of intense
popular and workers’ struggles against an unprecedented capitalist-imperialist
attack, but what followed, in a classic case of the law of uneven development,
was a protracted phase of setback of the popular movement. Electoral illusions persisted and were
strengthened and gave SYRIZA the opportunity to form government.
Ten
days prior to SYRIZA’s First Congress in July 2013, the Communist Organisation
of Greece (KOE) decided, as a “necessary step for the strengthening of SYRIZA
and of its unified expression, to suspend its autonomous public presence”. The KOE was the second-biggest group in
SYRIZA at the time and was making its gesture to show support for the
transformation of SYRIZA from a movement to a party. This was not, from our limited knowledge of
the situation, in keeping with the principle of Communist participation in a
broad party formation.
When
SYRIZA emerged as the largest party in the January 2015 election, it still fell
short of a clear majority of seats and thus entered a coalition with the right
wing Independent Greeks (ANEL). Despite
the anti-imperialist rhetoric directed at the Troika’s austerity demands,
SYRIZA-ANEL kept Greece inside the framework of NATO, EU and the Eurozone. The
potential for it to develop to a newer and higher stage of resistance to
imperialism was diminished, culminating in a referendum where the choices were
between the austerity demanded by imperialism and the austerity proposed by
SRYZA-ANEL’s Memorandum. It seems
reasonable that the Communists denounced the referendum as a farce and
organised boycotts by their supporters.
Despite
the Communists’ calls to boycott the referendum, many Greeks felt compelled to
vote “No” in order to once again reject anything coming from the Troika. The
result was an explosion of euphoria at the strength of the No vote (just over
60%) and anger and disillusion after Tsipras agreed to negotiate with the
Troika a Memorandum that was worse than what had been rejected in the
referendum. This led to the resignation
of Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis and the withdrawal of 25 members to form a
new party called Popular Unity. The five
KOE MPs in SYRIZA abstained from voting on the Third Memorandum in July[1] and announced on September
10 that they would not be running in the September 20 snap election and would
encourage their members and supporters to abstain from voting.
Whether
they were responding to the calls from Marxist-Leninists to abstain, or were
simply weary of and cynical about the September election, a record 45% of
eligible voters did not cast a ballot in the “compulsory” – but unenforced –
general election. The SYRIZA-ANEL
coalition was returned with a slightly reduced number of seats, KKE maintained
its previous 5.5% vote and the ML coalition remained steady on about .16% of
the vote, substantially less than the 3% threshold required to obtain a seat.
So
do these developments show that a policy of non-participation in SYRIZA, of
non-cooperation with SYRIZA at the time of its formation and growth into the
main opposition party was wrong? In my
opinion, it does not. A balance needed to be found between unity and struggle within
the anti-imperialist movement. Its
participants included on the right those whose preference was for legislative
measures and reliance on the authority of the Greek parliamentary structure,
and those on the left whose preference was for mass work and the development of
struggles by the working class in workplaces and community settings.
With
the benefit of hindsight, the advocates of a sectarian “all struggle and no
unity” position will proclaim themselves “correct” because of the Tsipris
betrayal. But did the very short life of
the Wuhan government and the emergence, ten years later, of Wang Jingwei as a
puppet of Japanese imperialism make CCP participation in the Wuhan government
wrong? No, because conditions existed to create a potential for the Wuhan
government to play a positive role, just as conditions existed in Greece in the
late 2000s to create a potential for SYRIZA to play a positive role.
Whether
our analysis of the Greek situation was right or wrong, the importance of this
discussion for us lies in the need to be able to assess, at the right moment
and in the right circumstances, our ongoing rejection of parliamentary
participation. There are no
circumstances at the present time in which pursuit of influence in
parliamentary struggles will be to the advantage of the Communist Party.
Since
our inception we have rejected any diversion of peoples’ struggles into
parliamentary channels. This must
continue to be our stance for the foreseeable future. But it might not always be the correct
position to adopt. Persevering with this
position under different and more politically mature circumstances could lead
us to a sectarian deviation. We will
need to be able to correctly apply Marxist theoretical reasoning to currently
unforeseen circumstances as they arise and mature. It is timely to remind ourselves through the
prism of the Greek political crisis that principled adherence to the
fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism must not become dogmatism and that the
exercise of flexibility in the application of Marxism-Leninism must not become
opportunism.
The
war of terror
In the final analysis, the war of terror is the means by
which imperialist finance capital maintains its domination over the people and
nations of the world. The reactionary classes deploy terror to maintain their
rule. The standing armed forces of the imperialists routinely adopt tactics
which lead to overwhelming “collateral damage” amongst innocent civilians. They
also have a long history of deploying death squads and other irregular and
mercenary forces to take out what a new Pentagon manual identifies as
“unprivileged belligerents”. In relation to peace activists and progressive
forces in their own imperialist and developed capitalist heartlands, they use
fear of terror by real or imaginary opponents to control the people with
draconian “anti-terror” legislation.
For more than a decade, the imperialists have inverted
logic and tried to claim leadership of the “war on terror”. The whole history of colonial expansion and
imperialist division of the world has been one of the employment of terror
against people fighting for freedom from enslavement, for national liberation
and for independence and socialism.
Whether it is the plunder and pillage of standing armies or the
disappearances and assassinations of clandestine death squads, terror has been
the way countless people throughout the world have experienced capitalism and
imperialism.
The terror imperialism now claims to be fighting had its origins
in the Soviet social-imperialist invasion of Afghanistan. British and US training
of religious zealots to fight the Soviets quickly extended to training and
equipping similar groups for the purpose of achieving regime change in targeted
countries including Iraq, Libya and Syria.
That zealotry has seen the trainees outgrow the role assigned to them by
imperialism; it has seen them with their own religio-fascist agenda turn around
to bite the hand that fed them.
Groups like ISIS have emerged as a type of international
lumpen-proletariat. In advanced
capitalist countries the lumpen-proletariat consists of people who cannot or
will not live as members of the working class, people broken in spirit by
poverty, lack of education and opportunity, health failure, and drugs. Their
escape route from all of this is criminal activity and criminal violence
through which they seek to empower and enrich themselves. They aspire to live like the idle rich they
see at the top of society.
ISIS recruits come from all strata of society and include
educated and articulate youths. They hate imperialism for its wanton random
violence against the communities from which they come and for its failure to
embrace the Prophet, but they are not conscious anti-imperialists. They aspire to have an empire of their own,
the Caliphate and murder and terrorise any who stand in their way. Their open fighting is directed at armed
opponents, including genuine anti-imperialists, but their terrorism is directed
at non-combatants, at innocent civilians, including in the imperialist and
developed capitalist countries. Ultimately
terrorism is a political response to injustice that fails to understand that
only the masses create positive change. ISIS terrorism is the personally brutal
mirror image of the impersonal brutality of imperialist drone attacks and the
rain of Zionist phosphorous bombs over Gaza.
Whether you behead the person next to you or simply feed coordinates to
a drone from the safe distance of Pine Gap, you are equally a terrorist as far
as your victims are concerned.
ISIS-inspired terrorist attacks in Australia, France,
Britain and elsewhere give the ruling classes of those countries the excuse to
intensify surveillance of all progressive politically active people. We have
already seen a vast expansion of police and security powers in this regard. We
are also seeing the roll-out of a campaign encouraging teachers to identify
potentially “radicalised” youths. A
number of case studies are presented including a young girl who leaves her
supportive family to become an environmental activist. Of course, there is the obligatory case study
of a Muslim youth, but the lumping together of people exercising legitimate
democratic rights with those coming under the influence of ISIS shows how
terrorism enables the ruling class to spread its repressive net ever more
widely. The goal of “deradicalising” ISIS followers can never succeed so long
as it denies the existence of imperialist violence and terror.
Marxists eschew terrorism. The terrorism of imperialism
is the much greater and the more dangerous and perfidious of the two terrorisms
we have discussed. It will be directed
at the revolutionary anti-imperialist movement when it develops to a particular
level of influence in Australia. It will
come from the authorised state agencies of violence and it will come from
fascist thugs to whom the state will turn a blind eye and encourage. We will only be able to defend the advances
we make in the development of the movement for independence from imperialism by
countering the violence of the state with the organised resistance of the
revolutionary movement. Our activity
will arise as a defensive measure and gradually assume an offensive capacity,
but it will always be organised against identified agencies of the capitalist
state and will never take the form of indiscriminate and random violence in
which members of our own class become victims.
We will never practice terrorism or endorse terrorist activity.
The
two-stage Australian strategy for independence and socialism
The realisation that a two-stage theory of revolution
accorded with the characteristics of Australia as a developed capitalist
country dominated by US imperialism emerged and was accepted by us in the early
1970s. Comrade E.F. Hill led theoretical
development of this strategy and our younger comrades enthusiastically
implemented it both within the Party and in a number of mass organisations
influenced by us.
In developing and implementing this policy, two erroneous
lines emerged. The first was a rightist
tendency to deny the socialist content of the theory, to over-emphasise
patriotism and the maintenance of a national bourgeois economy during the first
stage of the revolution. In effect, this
line accepted some form of intermediate stage between the anti-imperialist
revolution and the socialist revolution. Its adherents discouraged mention of
socialism for fear of alienating allies in the struggle against US imperialism.
This line was publicly criticised in February 1978 in “For independence and
socialism”. This document clearly stated
that the struggle for independence must not weaken the sentiment for socialism.
From the left came a movement led by some previously
influential younger members of the Party. This group started to organise a
faction within the Party in 1977. By then their erroneous position on the
two-stage revolution (over-emphasising the socialist objective and dismissing
the patriotic non-socialist elements within the united front) was caught up in
their support of the “Gang of Four” in China.
They tried to establish a group in opposition to the Australian
Independence Movement led by Party activists.
Their influence quickly waned.
The legacy of our development of the two-stage theory of
revolution is that a number of people and organisations on the Left still
mistakenly ascribe to us a position that is similar to the rightist line
mentioned above. For three decades or
more we have been maligned as “patriots” and “nationalists”. They essentially continue to criticise us for
believing in some form of intermediate stage between capitalism and socialism.
Mainly Trotskyite in their own ideological commitment, they reject the
two-stage theory of revolution, shouting loudly against imperialism in the
context of international arenas of struggle, but denying that it is the main
enemy of the Australian people and main target of an initial stage of
revolutionary struggle in this country.
In opposing the first, anti-imperialist stage of the Australian
revolution they portray Australia as an imperialist country in its own right, a
situation which, if it was correct, would place an exclusively working class
revolution on the agenda. It is true
that some Australian capitalists engage in imperialist activity in their own
right, but they do not constitute the majority of the Australian bourgeoisie
and their activities are not so representative of that bourgeoisie or so
independent of US imperialism as to be able to characterise the Australian
state as an independent imperialist entity.
There is no intermediate stage between capitalism and
socialism embedded in our two-stage theory of the Australian revolution. During
the first stage, assets belonging to the imperialists and their local
compradors will be expropriated by new organs of state power and pressed into
service for the benefit of the majority of Australia’s working class and its
allies. The first stage, the anti-imperialist stage, is defined by the socialist
character of that expropriation which can only occur under working class
leadership exercised through working class organs of state power.
Giant foreign multinational corporations have killed off
many Australian capitalist firms. Some Australian capitalists see potential for
growth in working for and with imperialist corporations and financiers;
however, imperialism is predatory and cares nothing for the capitalists of
other countries who will always be threatened by it. Sooner or later all will
face ruin from imperialist competition. It may be that some of them will see
the sense of allowing the anti-imperialist movement to develop. Some may contribute financially or in other
ways to that movement. Is it impossible
that as the anti-imperialist movement develops and grows, that a section of the
Australian capitalists will permit their workers to engage in paid time and
without penalty in anti-imperialist demonstrations and rallies? Is it impossible that they might not
cooperate with the revolutionary movement in ensuring supplies of food and
other necessities to suburban areas under the control of an anti-imperialist
front? Is it impossible that some might provide needed services to an
anti-imperialist state power in exchange for a guarantee of continued existence
within a private sector enclave of a socialist economy? The division of the
Australian revolution by stages means that some sectors of the economy owned by
national bourgeois elements who are either supportive of, or neutral towards,
the anti-imperialist stage will still operate as capitalist businesses into the
period of the second stage, necessitating the deepening of the socialist
revolution and its embrace of all economic functions throughout the second
stage. This will be a period during which
the proletarian organs of state power license the operations of cooperative
Australian capitalists whilst directing them towards activities which
strengthen the socialist orientation of the economy, eventually resulting in
their absorption into that economy as socialist concerns with appropriate
compensation to their former owners. Thus there is an overlap with the first
stage melding into the second stage, both having predominantly socialist
content, and certainly no intermediate national bourgeois economic stage
between capitalism and socialism.
The
people’s movement and work within the Left
There are various interpretations of the Left. It is part
of our Marxist-Leninist training and culture to identify a genuinely
revolutionary Left which is based on confidence in the working class, practises
the mass line, promotes communist ethics based on service to the people and
adheres to fundamental beliefs about the nature of the state, the danger of
imperialist war and the great unlikelihood of a peaceful, parliamentary
transition to socialism. It is important
that we uphold the ideology of genuine Marxism-Leninism against revisionism,
which seeks to take the revolutionary content from Marxism, and deviations of
both an ultra-Left and Rightist nature.
It is also important that we are able to work effectively within the
people’s movement which will invariably bring us into contact with those with
whom we have ideological, political and organisational differences.
This is not to avoid openly acknowledging the differences
we have with other organisations and groups for the sake of being accepted
within the movement. It means that we
should judge other organisations in the mass movement on the basis of their
actions, on whether what they are doing is helping to unite the movement and
assisting it to raise the level of understanding of its participants and to
raise the level of struggle. Without
prejudging people and labelling them, we should work with others where we can
while any who attempt to control, split and weaken the movement should be identified
and isolated.
We look to work with other individuals and organisations
who are genuine in their support for the movement, who do not want to advance
their own factional interests at the expense of the unity of the movement, who
will not continually try to put a dampener on struggle or subordinate the
movement to a mainstream social democratic party and to bourgeois
parliamentarism. So long as they can be
seen by their actions to be interested in uniting, interested in strengthening
the movement and interested in raising the level of struggle then we should
unite with them, work with them, talk with them and not ourselves divert the
mass movement into self-defeating sectarianism and factionalism.
Our hopes for the future of the people’s movement are
firmly based around Australian youth. Young people should make more political mischief. They should definitely trouble the rich. They should enact the great truth of Marxism
that it is right to rebel against reactionaries, that defiance of arbitrary and
oppressive authority is a good thing.
They should repudiate the values of capitalism and imperialism and
rediscover the communist virtues of fighting self and serving the people.
And yet, young people are not easily drawn to disciplined
and demanding commitments such as characterise Communist organisation. We will
struggle for some time to win more than a few supporters among the youth. In the absence of a genuinely revolutionary
situation, the revolutionary movement has few practical opportunities to
attract young people to its side. They
are more inclined to be caught up in movementism and spontaneity. Thus, from time to time, phenomena such as
the Occupy movement capture their imagination and arouse excitement and
passion. Or they drift towards seemingly
revolutionary groups which, in the absence of patient nurturing in the science
of Marxism-Leninism, place on their shoulders unrealistic demands to “sell the
paper” and “get to the meeting”; as a result they all too quickly burn out and
fall away from the movement. Our
responsibility is to facilitate the involvement of young people with our Party
to the extent that it is now possible to do so, whilst preparing ourselves for
future growth in this area as the contradictions of capitalism and imperialism
intensify in the direction of an actual revolutionary situation.
Unions,
the working class and the ALP
Our standing amongst the more advanced sections of the
workers is reasonably good. We have some
good comrades very active in their union or involved in campaigns supported by
the union movement. Partly this derives
from our long-standing Marxist-Leninist attitude towards trade unionism as a
bourgeois ideology and towards the Labor Party as a party of capitalism.
At the same time, we have been at the forefront of the
work towards an independent working class agenda and we have had some success
in winning support for a position of pressuring and placing demands on the
Labor Party rather than supporting it and relying on it. Certainly the ACTU has gone further than it
has in the past in stating in its Campaign
Operational Plan 2014-2015 that in respect of the next federal election,
“We will not be campaigning for the election of an ALP Government, we will be
campaigning for an independent agenda or vision for our country.” There will be vacillation and backsliding in
relation to this but it gives us a platform for advancing our minimum demands
and a useful reference point for further mass work aimed at preventing people’s
struggles from being diverted into the quicksand of parliamentarism.
Trade unions are the basic organisations for the defence
of the interests of the working class, but they are also bound in a thousand
and one ways to capitalism through the institutions they work in, the rules by
which they are bound, the properties they own and the investments they
have. Some are affiliated to the ALP,
others are not. Some have leaderships
more committed to the class struggle than others; indeed, some are now so corporatized
that any concept of struggle is completely alien to them. And then there are the many workers now
sitting outside trade union organisation, either as long-term unemployed, or as
so precariously employed that contact with the relevant union is near
impossible to make, or employed under shonky sub-contracting arrangements that
encourage them to see themselves as their own boss and therefore in no need of
trade union protection.
No matter how small a proportion of workers there are now
covered by and members of unions, the mere fact of union representation in the
workplace is anathema to the big corporations seeking to squeeze the last drop
from the workers. Unions are under
all-round attack from peak employer bodies and from the two main parliamentary
parties. The reality is that unions have
lost massive ground over the last three decades and are now bound and
circumscribed by rules and regulations that would not be out of place in the
most repressive regimes around the world.
The right to strike has essentially been lost, the threat of individual
work contracts is re-emerging and it is now illegal to identify a scab as a
scab!
We must be in the front ranks of the defence of rights at
work, and in defence of the right to have and belong to a union. We must not let the unions, for all the
shortcomings we see in them, be further carved up by the multinationals and
their agents. That means preparing
workers for real struggle and not just courtroom struggle, for endurance of
real suffering and sacrifice and not just running down the union
cheque-book. It means identifying and
nurturing leaders of the John Cummins variety who will accept that “…it is an
occupational hazard for union officials to be arrested and perhaps go to
gaol”. It means promoting leaders who
will embody the spirit of the O’Sheas and Gallaghers, who will embody the
spirit John expressed when he said “Jailing could have left me suitably
chastened to grovel…but I am convinced I’ve done nothing wrong. How can it be a
crime for a union official to serve his members?” If a rank-and-file worker like Ark Tribe can
embody that spirit then so too should a larger number of paid union
officials. And they will. Come the times, come the comrades.
Our
key tasks
In the following section we identify some of the key
tasks around which members will need to unite and carry forward.
Party
building: We
have continually striven to position ourselves as the vanguard organisation of
the Australian proletariat. That is a
huge task made harder by the fact that our membership has seen no substantial
growth for quite a few years. If we don’t have members in each of the major
industries capable of influencing the content of the demands put forward by
workers in those industries, capable of influencing the course of struggles
that arise within those industries, capable of lifting the ideological and
political awareness of workers in those industries, then we cannot be the
vanguard we aspire to be.
The Party must never hide its face. It can have a public face through a small
group of identified leaders, and through its publications and website but it
also needs a face through individual members revealing their connection to the
Party when the time is right and with the right people. All comrades must exercise initiative in
being the face of the Party at the level of the workplace and the community
when and where conditions permit. We
need to develop confidence in approaching people to join the Party.
Merely having a website and placing our wisdom on the platform
of an assortment of internet search engines is not a development in the
direction of practical leadership of the class struggle. We must have a membership that grows within
the working class. This means that our existing members must be active recruiters
of new members. We must absolutely not
be held back by a general practice of non-disclosure of membership. The reasons for the adoption of our
organisational principle of general non-disclosure of membership are to protect
our members from surveillance by the state and harassment and threat by its
agents, and to ensure that there are no barriers to the effectiveness of the
mass work conducted by members, barriers that can arise if one prematurely and
inappropriately declares oneself to be a Communist.
We must also work to build the Party as a genuinely
national organisation and have representation not only in the capital cities
but in regional centres as well. The
strength and cohesion of the centre is a return on investments made in the
responsibilities given to the parts. This requires the centre to have
confidence in the sections and the parts; it means encouraging initiatives to
be taken in the writing and dissemination of agitational materials relevant to
particular states, territories and regions.
Building the Party also requires adherence by all to the
principle of democratic centralism.
Democracy and centralism are a unity of opposites. Centralism can only provide unity of purpose
to the Party if it is based on genuine democracy within the Party.
Under democratic centralism, the minority is subordinate
to the majority. This does not mean that
the majority is always right, that a majority opinion determines the
correctness of a policy or line. But it
does provide for the orderly conduct of discussions and acts to prevent the
degeneration of the Party into a debating society that does nothing but endless
navel-gazing. It is incumbent on the
majority to respect the right of the minority to criticise the line or policy
with which they disagree and for both to allow practice to reveal what is right
and what is wrong with a policy or line.
Under democratic centralism, the lower level of
organisation is subordinate to the higher level. This does not mean that a higher level of
organisation can act arbitrarily or without accountability to the
membership. Lower levels of Party organisation
have the right to supervise the work of those with higher levels of
responsibility up to and including the recall of elected delegates to higher
levels of organisation if they act contrary to the wishes of those who elected
them.
Under democratic centralism, the individual is
subordinate to the organisation. This
does not mean that comrades lose the capacity to act and think independently,
that they should passively wait for someone to tell them what to do, that they
should fear taking the initiative and deciding for themselves how to work in a
particular place of employment or community group. Quite the contrary. But neither does it give individual comrades
the right to divorce their actions from the organisation, to fail to report on
initiatives they have taken and the results that come from these, to fail to
observe Party discipline while acting only on their own behalf, doing what they
like and pulling away from the organisation and its centralised guidance. Such comrades need to take note of what
Comrade Mao Zedong wrote in Combat
Liberalism.
Promoting
an independent working class agenda: This has been a cornerstone of our
mass work for the past ten years and has certainly resonated with the more
class conscious and militant sections of the working class. It reflects a
weariness with the cycle of hope-betrayal-despair that attaches to the Labor
Party and a determination to define the interests of workers against the
parliamentary opportunism of social-democracy.
We said in 2012 that such an independent agenda need not be a “formal
document to which various organisations must commit, but there should be a
central core of demands that are put forward in various ways”. In November 2013 we said it was time for
progressive-minded people to “give that agenda something of a more concrete
shape, so that when we talk of our agenda there is a common understanding of
basic principles and shared objectives”.
It should be noted that following Turnbull’s accession to
the Prime Ministership, the ACTU wrote him a congratulatory letter and asked to
meet with him to discuss a number of issues.
This was significant in two ways:
firstly it served as a public declaration of the ACTU’s having its own
voice and of its capacity to act independently of the ALP; and secondly it put
out as a public agenda those issues which we have by-and-large been championing
through our mass work in our respective unions and community
organisations. Now we all know that the
ACTU has a long history of betrayal of the workers’ movement and names like
Monk, Hawke, Crean, Kelty and Ferguson point to the essentially bourgeois
ideology of trade unionism, but at the present time we can see the reflection
of what we would call an independent working class agenda[2] in those matters raised
for discussion with Turnbull (even where some are couched in reformist,
social-democratic terms). Those items
were:
- Protecting and creating local jobs for all Australians through investing in local industries, such as ship building and manufacturing;
- Protecting our rights at work and moving to stop attacks on penalty rates, the minimum wage and other rights such as paid parental leave;
- Halting the passage of free trade agreements that clearly trade away the interests of Australian workers and our sovereign rights;
- Supporting universal access to health care by maintaining the integrity of Medicare;
- Investing in our children’s future by protecting access to and the quality of education, in particular reversing your government’s position on $100,000 university fees and promising to fully fund Gonski reforms;
- Halting further cuts to public services and public sector jobs, and ensuring there are enough public sector workers to deliver the services our communities need and rely on;
- Ensuring all Australians have a decent retirement;
- Ensuring we have a tax system that is fair; and
- Ending the wasteful and politically motivated Trade Union Royal Commission.
One of our tasks should be to ensure that in our unions
and community organisations we give these items a more specifically
anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist ideological perspective, that we take them
as a basis for discussions and mass work and as a springboard for raising the
level of political understanding in the working class and the community.
Another task is to identify opportunities for the
involvement of the workers themselves in the raising of these demands; that is,
opportunities for practical political activity by workers and community
activists. Only in the context of practical struggles can the leading role of
the working class be unleashed; leadership by the the diversion of struggle into the quicksand
of parliamentarism.
A third task is to expand the agenda, to link these
essentially economist, living standards-based demands to wider issues of doing
away with financial and jail-time penalties for exercising the right to strike,
of smashing the coercive Fair Work Building and Construction (FWBC), of opposition
to imperialist war, of calls for the removal of all US bases on Australian soil,
of support for Aboriginal peoples’ rights to self-determination and land
rights, of calls for nationalisation of key industries, of opposing fascist
state measures and state repression…the list goes on.
Opposing
subservience to US imperialism:
This
needs to be identified separately as a key task because it is the bridge
between the immediate demands of an independent working class agenda and the
realisation of the first stage of the Australian revolutionary movement. Our focus must be on placing the question of
opposing US imperialism before the people at every opportunity. If US imperialism dominates every aspect of
our lives, then opposition to US imperialism must be our focus everywhere. Over
time we should ensure that our influence extends beyond our own party and the
couple of mass organisations in which we work, and which do have an
anti-imperialist focus, into other mass organisations where there is potential
to develop a much more sharply anti-imperialist perspective. There are a range of republican, cultural,
ethnic, women’s and farmers’ organisations in which we have little current
involvement.
An important task for a Communist party is to enhance its
responsibilities in the field of proletarian internationalism. If US imperialism is a world-wide phenomenon,
then opposition to US imperialism must be developed through appropriate links
to organisations and movements and persons outside our own country who are also
struggling against US imperialism. To a
certain extent, our ability to develop such ties has been constrained by the
absence of paid public leaders who can attend international conferences and
speak on our behalf or maintain personal ties with leading international
figures. We will make slow progress in
developing those ties as we are unlikely to have public full-time operatives
anytime soon; nevertheless, all members must rise to the occasion and have a
firm internationalist outlook and know-how and on what issues to engage
workmates and friends in discussions about the world-wide crimes of US
imperialism and how the struggles of peoples of various countries and regions
interact with and support our own. At
the same time, we do not want to encourage revolution-by-tourism whereby
comrades try to involve themselves in everybody’s struggles but their own. This afflicts some people and some
organisations on the Left where the low level of struggle in one’s own country
makes more intense struggles elsewhere seem rather romantic and attractive. Ho Chi Minh’s advice remains absolutely true:
if you want to help people such as the Vietnamese at the height of their
struggle against US imperialism, then make revolution in your own country. We must remain grounded in our own
circumstances and lift the level of struggle here as an expression of real
internationalism.
Applying
Marxism-Leninism through conscientious study and investigation: All people have their
own approaches to learning and their own preferred ways of finding out about
things. Many are coloured by their own
past exposures to different types of learning at school, at university, as an
apprentice and so on. Some develop an
aversion to reading or have been conditioned to think that “study” is beyond
them. Workers in particular are sometimes
resistant to reading (and writing): schools that have failed to develop them as
readers leave them feeling inadequate and ashamed; one of the legacies of
schooling is that reading never seemed relevant - it was tedious and a waste of
time.
For a revolutionary, reading is a discipline like having
a job, and getting up early every morning to get to the job. It’s just
something that time has to be found for.
Workers are skilled at hands-on tasks, but workers’ leaders need to
develop theoretical understanding of the way capitalism works and of the way
socialism can be achieved. All Party
members need to put time aside to read the classic works of Marx, Engels,
Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong and our own Ted Hill to see how these people
approached the problems of their day and applied a theoretical perspective to
them. In that respect, study for a
Communist goes beyond familiarity with a text and aims at developing the
ability to use the methods of successful past revolutionaries to deal with the
current situation. It aims to give each
of us the skill to develop a correct line in relation to unforeseen,
unpredictable and unprecedented developments.
Studying for us is not for the sake of intimidating others with a bunch
of useless quotes but of developing a quiet confidence about our work, of
knowing the teachings so as to use the method.
In order to apply what we learn from Marxist-Leninist
theory we need to know the circumstances and situation in which we will seek to
use it. All current phenomena grow out
of the past, but take on their own peculiar characteristics and many-sided
attributes in the present. We can’t make
assumptions about social phenomena without properly investigating them, without
finding out what caused them, without knowing how workers and others are
responding to them and what they want done about them.
We should strive to be first-rate experts, not so much in
the teachings of Marxist authors as in the areas of daily life to which we aim
to apply the methods of Marxism that we refine through our study. That means struggling against left-bloc
lifestyles by having wide social connections and being receptive to information
and arguments from a wide range of sources, hardly any of which will be
presented from a proletarian Marxist perspective.
Effective Party activists must have interpersonal
communication skills of a high order. Perhaps
the most important skill as a communicator is the ability to listen to others.
Listening is not a passive activity, but an essential foundation for engaging
with others in meaningful ways. Listening is an essential component of
investigating people’s concerns, problems, ideas and visions. A good listener
has enough personal assurance, based on knowledge of Marxist theory and
investigation of circumstances, not to need to hear his or her own voice nor
seek the limelight, but rather, to give others the chance to develop and grow
politically and ideologically.
Conclusion
Comrades, in the coming three years, we can expect to see
more of financial instability and crisis; more of the concentration of wealth
in fewer and fewer hands while the majority experience precarious work,
under-employment and unemployment, and the bankruptcy and ruin of small
businesses; more privatisation and the theft of services from the people; more
evidence of stress in people’s lives (drugs, petty crime, domestic violence,
suicide and self-harm, psychological disorder and mental sicknesses); more
damage to the environment and its eco-systems; more violent conflicts
instigated or manipulated by imperialism and reactionary forces; and more
attempt to restrict our freedoms and erode our rights and liberties.
We are communists because we do not have confidence that
these problems can be resolved by parliamentary reforms; because we don’t believe
in dealing with each problem in isolation; because we see the
inter-connectedness of all social, political, economic and ideological problems
with the economic base of capitalism characterised by private ownership of the
means of production and the private appropriation of the fruits of social
labour power. We are communists because
we look outside the square of the capitalist mode of production and see not
just a preferable alternative, but an alternative that is an objective
necessity given the operation of the economic laws of motion embedded in class
society.
Our ideology is a correct reflection of social being, but
its correctness alone is insufficient for the tasks that lay ahead. We need to increase our numbers, to build the
party, to find ways of relating our politics, organisation and ideology to the
experiences of our more advanced workers, and through them to the people of our
suburbs and regional centres.
Let us hope that we can discuss some successes in
relation to this at our next Congress!
[1]
Within hours of the Greek government accepting the humiliating and disgraceful
Third Memorandum, the KOE released a 13-point statement which included the
following self-criticism: “…the Communist Organization of Greece feels the need
to apologize to the Greek People for failing to estimate how low could the
Greek government and the leadership of SYRIZA fall. The lack of such estimation
did not allow us to dissolve completely and timely the last remaining illusions
about a possible dignified stand of the government against the Troika, even at
the eleventh hour. This self-criticism cannot and must not be sidestepped,
despite the fact that we wrote and said many times during the last months that
the total surrender was inevitable because of the obsessive line of the
leadership for an “agreement at any expense”.”
[2]
The ACTU leadership subsequently maintained its opposition to the ChAFTA
despite the ALP agreeing to support it, thus again, showing a certain
independence of the Labor Party.
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