Nick G.
The 1917 Great October Socialist Revolution was the result
of the Bolshevik Party’s outlining for the Russian working class, its own independent
class agenda, and doing patient mass work so that the Bolsheviks, as the
vanguard of the working class, moved from a minority within the Petrograd
Soviet to the majority.
Unlike the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, who
held a majority on the Petrograd Soviet throughout most of 1917, the Bolsheviks absolutely refused to
surrender the initiative to the parties of the capitalists and landlords (the
Cadets and Octobrists) in the Provisional Government.
Australia in 2017 is obviously not Russia of 1917. We are
not engulfed in the midst of a war between rival imperialist blocs; we do not
have a semi-feudal landlord class and overwhelming numbers of impoverished and
uneducated peasants; we have unpopular politicians, but not an autocratic Tsar;
there is no unity between our workers and huge segments of the armed forces,
with the latter sick of war and openly fraternising with “enemy” troops across
the trenches; our workers do not have representative organs set to rival, and
ultimately replace, the government of the capitalists.
In short, we are not in a revolutionary situation and the
revolutionary movement is tiny.
But a revolutionary movement there is, and it exists to
position the best elements of the working class within the unions and community
organisations to offer conscious direction and purpose to otherwise spontaneous
and fragmented groups engaged in struggles that ultimately share the common
thread of anti-imperialist independence and socialism.
In Australia today, the independent working class agenda
draws connections between workers’ immediate struggles for wages, conditions
and the right to organise and strike, and capitalist class relations, the
capitalist state, imperialism and imperialist wars. The independent working
class agenda promotes the interests of the entire working class.
The legal basis for class struggle in Australia is severely
circumscribed. It is illegal in all but the circumstance of enterprise
bargaining, and then the right to utilise the strike weapon is blunted by a
cumbersome process, and the “matters pertaining” to such industrial action is very
limited.
Workers are no longer able to hold “sympathy” strikes - those expressions of class consciousness
through which workers in industries not directly involved in a strike,
nevertheless walked off the job to support their class brothers and sisters
elsewhere.
Even the simple expedient of a picket line is under attack:
we have to go through the pretence of a “community picket” to protect the union
and its members from hefty fines and jail.
Most of the significant stoppages in recent times have been
“breakout” strikes – defensive fightbacks against attempts by employers to
lower wages and conditions. There are
very few examples of aggressive attempts by workers to win newer and better
conditions, or to smash through what has been, for several years now, an
effective wage freeze.
It is true that some union leaders are prepared to push the
envelope, but this rarely involves the patient education and long-term
mobilisation of the membership; rather, there is the large-scale drawing down
of union funds instead of the drawing in of members in struggle.
When union legal action over some issue is defeated (eg the
recent decision by the Federal Court on penalty rates), there is no unleashing
of the workers. Instead, union leaders vow to “continue the fight”, “continue
to challenge”, “continue to speak out”. In other words, to continue to avoid
direct action by the workers, and to keep on with the same old same old.
It is the less well-organised sections of the working class
such as the hospitality industry with high turnover of labour and high casualisation
that have been purposely targeted first by the ruling class to reduce wages
through cuts to penalty rates. Combined with the anti-worker labour laws,
organising and mobilizing of these workers in collective action in the
workplaces against cuts to weekend rates involves slow patient mass work, not
dissimilar to the decades-long struggle to organize non-trades production
workers in the manufacturing industries in the 1940s and 1950s
We know that the correct approach is mass work with workers
to patiently educate them in the necessity for their own independent class
agenda, and their own struggle in support of that agenda. Lenin had no idea at
the beginning of 1917, sitting in exile in Switzerland, that he would soon be
back in Russia writing the April Theses and directing a revolutionary struggle
for Soviet power. Nor is it given to us to know when and where, and in what
form, a single spark might lead to a qualitative change in the consciousness of
Australian workers and to their breaking through the legal restrictions on
their ability to fight as a class against imperialism and its local hangers-on.
All we can say is that the time will come. Sooner or later, and preferably sooner, some
event or incident or issue will cause such an upsurge of anger that the workers
will not be able to be held back. Our task is to win their trust and assist
them to put spontaneity on a firm, purposeful and conscious footing.
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