Organisation is the key

Every evening the TV news bulletins tell us how the share prices have reacted to the latest speculative trading deals or new mergers and takeovers by international and local monopolies. It is a necessary function of the monopoly media to monitor their masters’ profit-making and pick out current opportunities and pitfalls. 

No such concerted effort is made to inform the working class of matters which might impact on their livelihoods, or perhaps reveal the extent of workers’ exploitation, poverty, debt and unemployment, let alone the cause of it. You have to dig it out of Bureau of Statistics data and business reports and academic papers. 

For instance, by the end of last year there was a 12% increase in people receiving long term unemployment benefits - more than 527,000 people. In Victoria, hit hard by the export of manufacturing jobs, 9.5% of the workforce is now classed as ‘under-employed’, more than 290,000 workers with only part-time jobs. 

For instance, a recent report by Barclays Bank stated that household debt in Australia (mortgages, credit cards, overdrafts and personal loans) was greater than all other developed countries, running at a record high of 130% GDP. 

For instance, the Committee for Economic Development of Australia report titled Addressing Entrenched Disadvantage in Australia reveals that 1-1.5 million people are in poverty, which is defined as “… whether households have access to goods and services that are deemed necessary, such as a substantial meal at least once a day, access to medical treatment if needed and a separate bed for each child. Another method looks at people’s social exclusion across seven areas, including employment, material resources and health.” 

These raw figures don’t reveal the anguish and misery that many working families suffer as imperialist globalisation restructures Australia’s economy into a ‘service hub’ with a small core of professional and skilled jobs and a large periphery of part-time, casual and transient jobs. 

This is all made worse with vicious government austerity cut-backs to social services, healthcare and education. 

This is capitalism – a small boom, a bigger bust! Wealth created by workers is increasingly transferred to a small minority of filthy rich while poor and middle income workers work harder and harder and get poorer and poorer. 

Workers know this in their bones. They know the system is stacked against them. They want to change things, but whatever small gains they make soon get gobbled up by the bosses in the next round of ‘bargaining’ or the next federal budget. The parliamentary musical chair game makes little difference as the procession of betrayals and back-downs destroys their hopes for a decent life, and spreads cynicism and despair.

A serious task for communists is to break through the cynicism and fatalism, to promote empowerment of workers, and to build confidence in their capacity to organise together to win a new socialist future. Organisation is the key - trade unions, community groups and single issue groups bring people together in struggle, but it not enough without the direction of revolutionary political consciousness and revolutionary organisation. 

The Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist) is building revolutionary organisation in the service of the working class. Our comrades are honest, courageous and dedicated. Our Party is not without its faults, but if you want to make a difference, get in touch - email: info@cpaml.org

The people themselves develop the struggle

Vanguard June 2014 p. 12
Nick G.

(Above: March in May, Perth)

After the great outpouring of anti-Abbott sentiment at the March in March rallies, the people again turned out in thousands to protest the Budget cuts and make their stand on other issues close to their hearts at the huge March in May rallies.

This is a great tribute to the capacity of Australians from many walks of life to engage in expressions of anger and outrage at the agenda of the rich and powerful.

It is a great tribute to the capacity of users of social media to circumvent monopoly media censorship and the indifference or opposition of established organisations and parties, to mobilise mass displays of rejection of unpopular budgetary and other measures.

(Above: March in May, Brisbane)

People want to keep the action going

In Melbourne, in the space of a few days, the decision was made to organise the 18 March rally against the savage budget, and in only three or four days some 25,000 people took again to the streets.

This should make certain people who ridiculed and dismissed the earlier March in March national rallies sit up and take stock of themselves.

(Above: March in May, Melbourne)

A senior ACTU figure spoke well to union representatives in Adelaide about the all-encompassing attack on unions being developed by big business and its political enforcers.

However, when asked what the ACTU’s relationship was to the coming March in May rallies he made a fairly indifferent reference to “the sort of people who go to those things… there were even people against vaccinations at the last one”.

The ALP refused to support the March in March rally and directed its rank and file members planning to attend not to display any ALP signs.

That is why the eventual support for March in May by some unions who were reluctant to support the March in March was so important.

That is why ACTU President Ged Kearney’s appearance at the Melbourne rally was very important.

That is why the speeches by union leaders at other rallies around the country were very important.

A movement beyond the control of apologists for capitalism

This is not a movement that can now be brought back under the ownership and control of people who want it to be restricted to demands for the return of Labor to office.

(Above: March in May, Sydney)

This is not a movement that needs endorsements from on high.

The March Australia movement and other spontaneous people’s movements independent of parliamentary parties have their own momentum and mass base.

It is a broad church with a single enemy - Tony Abbott and his government.

That is both a strength and a weakness.

It succeeds for the moment in uniting the many.

It succeeds because people are responding to its genuine broad grass roots initiative, not the tightly controlled political party affair from above. They sense that it is put on by people just like themselves with no agenda beyond having a go at Abbott and collectively voicing their anger with the socil and economic injustices.

(Above: March in May, Adelaide)

But this was also the strength and the weakness of the Occupy movement.

In the end, and it took a long while to peter out, but in the end it could not be sustained simply because it was a movement that remained spontaneous and disorganised.

The post Occupy movement’s successes are those where its participants did go out into workplaces and communities to consciously learn from the people and assist in organising the people’s movement for the long term.

Mass line is key to lifting struggle

If the March movement is to succeed, it needs the active participation of people who understand the need to go beyond the spontaneous demands of its broad congregation of supporters.

It needs active class consciousness to develop as a people’s movement similar to the first stage of the Your Rights at Work movement, prior to its nobbling by the ALP and its diversion from a workplace and community fight for rights to an exercise in voting for the same old parliamentary misleaders of the working class.

At the moment the movement has a healthy commitment to staying away from the quicksand of parliament.

Even when the demand is raised to “Block Supply before July” – an action that can only occur within parliament – it reflects people’s eagerness for lifting the struggle, for bringing on a crisis rather than for calming things down and taking the heat out of the immediate struggle.

That is why circumstances favour, in very careful and appropriate ways, the task of raising the understanding of people about the nature of capitalism and of raising the level of struggle against it.

This is why circumstances favour the continuing development of an independent agenda for the working class, an agenda around which other sections of the people can be rallied as the attacks by imperialism and conservative reaction take away even more of the people’s rights.

Those who are familiar with Mao Zedong’s explanation of the mass line will know that they cannot be content with echoing the spontaneity of the movement, but must listen to it, contextualise its causes, and reformulate its demands at a higher and more precise level of targeting the main enemy.

Every support must be given to the spontaneous movement of the people, and every effort must be made to lift it to ever higher levels.

Some thoughts on organising

Vanguard February 2013
Jack D.

The ability to organise ourselves is our greatest function as humans.

This year, 2013, is a year where struggles of all kinds will intensify greatly as the capitalist system more desperately tries to dig itself out of the mire of its own making. The need to organise against the current and the coming attacks on workers and our living standards is crucial.

Like different levels of struggle, there are many different levels of organising. We have seen workers in massive struggle, like the MUA struggle of 1998, where we could say there were very high levels of organising appropriate to the high level of struggle. At other times there are smaller struggles which require less organising effort.

There are also other levels of organising among people where one or two are in discussion, or a small group perhaps; maybe in a café, a kiosk, in the lunchroom at work, on the train or any other such place where people gather.

To organise in such places the subject matter can be gently swung from topics like the weather, sport or suchlike to more important matters of social interest. Topics like housing, education, health care, family issues, the aged care or lack of it and so on. This will often lead to the opportunity to raise the political awareness of those in the discussion, including ourselves. Where possible we should follow up on the conversations with people most likely to become future activists.

This deliberate and calculated act of leading discussion to such subjects for the express purpose of trying to raise people’s political consciousness is organising in its basic form. It is people to people, in small groups. It is an extremely powerful tool, a tool we should use much more often than we do by taking every opportunity that we can. We will learn from experience, to use this tool more effectively.