Face the future with boldness and daring

Vanguard November 2013 p. 3

The end of this month and the first few days of December see the 159^th anniversary of the Eureka Rebellion.

The Rebellion preceded the emergence of the Communist movement in Australia but it has become inexorably linked with the modern Australian workers’ anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements.

Echoing contemporary newspaper reports from Australia, the leader of the international working class, Karl Marx, noted that the gold diggers had “raised the banner of independence”. 

Marx went on to note similarities between the issues that drove the revolutionary movement in Victoria and those which led to the Declaration of Independence of the United States, namely, the gold licence fee as a tax on direct labour, and agitation for the direct representation in the legislature of those who were subject to the tax.

However, there was a difference as well, and that was “that in Australia the opposition arises from the workers, against the monopolists tied up with the colonial bureaucracy.”

That defining characteristic of the Eureka rebellion forms a thread through which the struggles of the working class are linked across each of these 159 years.

 

Into that thread are knotted critical moments in those struggles: the armed shearers’ camp at Barcaldine in 1891, the WWI anti-conscription movement,  the 1938 Pt Kembla wharfies’ struggle against shipping pig-iron to militarist Japan, the organisation of youth aligned to the Communist Party into the Eureka Youth League, the defeat of the anti-Communist referendum in 1951, and the re-emergence of the flag as a symbol of working class struggle and anti-imperialist struggle for independence and socialism in the 1970s.

 

In each critical moment of the working class history of Australia, the capitalist state has been revealed as the instrument through which force and violence or the threat of force and violence are visited upon workers by the ruling class.

The spirit of Eureka is the spirit of daring to defy the force and violence of the capitalist state, it is the spirit of declaring that it is right to rebel against reactionaries, that defiance of injustice is a good thing.

 

It is for this reason that we celebrate each year the anniversary of the armed clash that took place at the Ballarat gold fields in 1854.

Commemorating that momentous event helps steel our resolve to stand up to whatever the ruling class can throw against us.

It helps us to face the future with boldness and daring.