Reject class collaboration! No new Accords!

Vanguard July 2013 p. 3
Editorial

Talk about flogging a dead horse!

Former Labor Prime Minister and ACTU President Bob Hawke was reported on June 1 as having called for a revival of the Prices and Income Accord.

He was speaking at a Sydney seminar to mark the Accord’s 30^th anniversary.

The Accord was notorious then amongst politically advanced workers for imposing a wage freeze and preventing industrial action.

That is not to make a fetish of industrial action or wages struggles.  In themselves, they do not challenge capitalism or place demands for independence and socialism on the agenda.

But they do reflect the reality that classes exist and that class struggle occurs.

They do reflect the reality that organisation on the job and unity in the workplace is a prerequisite for any advances in the social circumstances of people who are employed by other people.

The Accord that is now a dead horse didn’t even have legs.  It was incapable of advancing the workers in any direction.  It should not be forgotten that one of the leading critics of Gillard’s and Swan’s “class warfare rhetoric” (sic!!!) is Simon Crean, and that Crean was a collaborator with Hawke in the class collaboration that was the Accord.

Current ACTU President Ged Kearney issued a diplomatically worded response which went a little bit too far in its praise of the Accord, presenting the “internationalisation of the Australian economy that took place in the 1980s (as) a lasting product of that partnership”.

This is true, but it was not a good thing.  The wave of financial deregulation, competition policy and privatisation that came with “internationalisation of the Australian economy” has only served to further enmesh us in the web of imperialist control and manipulation.

But Kearney did then go on to say that a new Accord was not part of the agenda.

“Since the Accord, the way unions achieve reform has changed,” she said. “We have mobilised into an independent campaigning force, capable of multiple campaigns at the same time.”

This indicates the direction that we must take. Our own agenda is coming into being and it is being realised by not relying on Labor or parliament or by seeking to build alliances between the trade unions and Capital, but by building alliances between unions and community organisations.

We must ensure that the ACTU leadership contributes to our having an independent capacity to fight regardless of which political party of capitalism holds office for the rich.

When working people develop awareness of their own class interests they can then be helped to understand the irreconcilability of those interests and the class interests of foreign and local monopoly capitalism.

The development of such an understanding will facilitate the speedier acceptance of the crucial need for anti-imperialist independence and socialism.