New "Australian Communist" provides food for thought

February 2014

A new edition of the CPA (M-L) Journal Australian Communist was released in December.

The new edition is dedicated to Sean Murtagh, a metal worker and leading Party member, who died last year.

The Journal provides working class activists with plenty of food for thought.

Intellectual food is as important for working class activists as real food on the table.

Many workers had bad experiences at school and find reading a bit of a hard slog.  It’s a whole lot easier to just veg out in front of the TV after coming home from work or to kill the time and boredom of being out of work.

There is no point beating around the bush – reading about and analysing the issues confronting us in pushing our own agenda and ridding ourselves of the rottenness of capitalism is something we just have to discipline ourselves to do.

Having said that, the first article in the AC is by no means difficult.  It is an edited version of a talk at a gathering of comrades and activists on how to identify and work appropriately with people of different levels of political understanding.  It is down-to-earth and common sense, but very useful in reflecting on one’s own workmates and friends and how to relate to them politically.
 

The second article addresses the question of productivity.  This is the issue that the ruling class carries slung over its shoulder like some giant bludgeon ready to attack the working class on issues that are central to us: wages, working conditions, intensity of work, housing, welfare, education and so on.  The reactionary bourgeoisie even has its own Productivity Commission to provide the arguments and the justification for these attacks.  We’ve got to know the enemy on its own terms and this article is the place to start.

Karl Marx was the pioneering critic of the way that capitalism worked.  He explained the economic laws of motion of modern capitalism.  Every man and his dog that wants a meal ticket out of capitalist academia makes a career of attacking and discrediting Marx’s analysis of capitalism, and the third article examines faults and shortcomings in one of those, namely Professor Steve Keen’s dismissal of much of Marx’s political economy.

Revealing the way in which both Labor and Liberal politicians have embraced neo-liberalism in the field of school education, and the role of the “business community” in setting much of the agenda for what happens in education, is the subject of the fourth article.

Two more articles examine aspects of finance capital, namely, the high Australian dollar and banking profits.  Both topics feature regularly in daily news reports and are matters on which worker activists need to have a handle.

Finally, there is a review of the WA branch of the CFMEU’s publication If You Don’t Fight, You Lose.  It argues that leading comrades in the construction industry such as Paddy Malone, Norm Gallagher and John Cummins must be evaluated as significant leaders of the CPA (M-L) if their true contribution to successes in the union movement is to be understood.

The December 2013 Australian Communist can be downloaded from the Party website: www.vanguard.net.au .