Socialism or Barbarism?

 

Written by: Simon G. on 23 March 2022

German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg famously declared that there were only two possible outcomes of post capitalist human social development – either socialism or barbarism.

Observing events in the US, Canada, parts of Latin America, in Europe, in Australia (far right neo-fascist movements, Q anon believers, anti-vaccination adherents, “freedom” marchers etc) is clear evidence of the truth of Luxemburg’s statement.

How did this situation come about? How can it be understood and analysed correctly? What can be done to tilt the pivot away from barbarism?

The cause of the current domestic and international chaos lies entrenched in the nature and development of capitalism, particularly in the most pre-eminent capitalist country, the United States.

The US emerged from WW2 as the most advanced and powerful capitalist country on Earth. The American people were sold the myth of the “American Dream”, where ordinary people could achieve success through motor car ownership, free-standing privately owned houses full of gleaming white goods and televisions, and the occasional vacation to Disneyland or, for the better-off, to the gambling dens and cabarets of Cuba.

Due to post-war reconstruction, this was a time of mainly full secure employment and high unionisation of workplaces.

Organised and unionised American labour is of course anathema to the US ruling class and the owners of the factories, manufacturing plants and mills and the corporate-owned farming sector. To combat this, American workers were, from the 1950’s to the 1970’s, faced with an onslaught of anti-union legislation and thuggery designed to weaken their bargaining power and thereby increase corporate profits.

Made in the USA: Globalisation
The 1980’s saw the US capitalist ruling class fully embrace the concept of globalisation. Manufacturing was moved out of the US and into so-called “developing” countries like India, Pakistan, Vietnam, China, Mexico and the like. These countries could supply labour for US corporate interests at a fraction of the cost in the US with no practical unionisation, appalling working conditions and work hours and usually single party governments armed to the teeth with brute military force in case there was any worker unrest.

The effect of “globalisation” on the work force in the US and in other developed countries dominated by US commercial interests (like Australia) has been devastating.

Whereas formerly, workers in blue-collar cities like Detroit could enjoy secure long-term employment and reasonably safe working conditions, post-globalisation these cities were turned into rust-belts. Gone was the “American Dream” with private home ownership, employer sponsored health care benefits, aspirations of socialised and successful families and college education for workers’ children.

antiThe hopes and visions of the future for these communities were smashed. Temporary or contract employment (where it existed) became the norm and the standard of living both in financial and social terms was drastically reduced. Union membership fell from the early 1950s to the 1980s from 39% to 20%.

As a result of all of this, any unified pro-worker movements effectively ceased to exist.

It is a truism that most people will take a political or social position for what they see as good reasons in their circumstances. The key to this is “their circumstances”. 

Learn from history
One only needs to look back at the rise of Nazism in Germany in the 1930’s to understand this.

As a result of Germany’s loss in WW1, the punitive provisions of the Versailles treaty and the 1930’s depression, German manufacturing was virtually destroyed, inflation was rampant, unemployment soared and an all abiding atmosphere of hopelessness and despair prevailed. In 1933 the Reichstag parliament building was burnt down covertly by the Nazis and with the backing of the mass media, Bulgarian communists were blamed. Socialists and communists were rounded up and either executed or sent to concentration camps. The Nazis then established arms manufacturing industries and the Brownshirts were used to restore “law and order”. Employment grew, the streets were safe again and through a campaign of outright lies and ultra-patriotism, the Nazi party came to power (with the support of almost 50% of German voters).

We might now look back at this time and wonder how on earth an advanced, culturally sophisticated and well-educated populace could be so gullible. How could they believe such absurdities and fictions like the widely held belief that Jewish Europeans were to blame, were sub-human and should be exterminated?

The Nazis gave the hopeless and alienated German populace hope, a vision of the future and someone to hate.

In exactly the same way, the alienated and hopeless victims of globalisation are attracted to right wing fanatics and fantasists who purport to give them hope and someone to hate (even to the extent of believing that paedophiles and children’s blood drinkers are in control of their lives).

It is a mistake to believe that the majority of anti-vax and “freedom march” crowds are fascists. They, like the German people in the 1930’s, are being seduced and manipulated by anti-science, anti-working class and divisive forces ranging from neo-nazis, fairies at the bottom of the garden fantasists, rank political opportunists, multi-millionaire fossil fuel barons and the like, frequently with the backing and support of the monopoly media.

Every Australian, European and American worker knows from their life experience how difficult things are for themselves and their families. They do not believe the nonsense spouted by their governments about record high employment rates or the “capitalist dream”.

With no unified pro-worker forces in existence, the attraction of the “barbarians” will only increase, pivoting toward real barbarism.

The points outlined above must be clearly understood, talked about with our friends and families and publicised widely. Hand in hand with this, great efforts must be made to build unified pro-working class forces.

Will it be socialism or barbarism? We must be able to explain to our children and grandchildren that we learned from the tragic mistakes made in Europe in the 1930’s and did all that we could to prevent and defeat capitalist barbarism.

It is trite to say that a society administered solely for the common good and benefit of the vast majority of its members is infinitely more desirable than one where a tiny minority obscenely benefit from the work and at the cost of the majority.

Since the establishment of capitalism in Europe and North America, we have witnessed unspeakable barbarity as it has sought to carve up the Earth and increase its profits. As this moribund and decadent economic system becomes more desperate to prolong its existence, without strong and unified workers’ movements, capitalism’s insatiable greed for profit will inevitably lead to what Rosa Luxemburg termed “barbarism”.

For the vast majority of human beings on this planet, to ask the question “Socialism or Barbarism?” is in fact to answer it. 

Economic Crisis Shows Need For Planned Economy

Written by: Ned K. on 17 May 2020

The economic crisis in Australia and indeed the whole capitalist world, magnified by the shutdown of industries due to the Corona Virus, has been a big shock to millions of people.

Millions of people thrown out of work, millions more on reduced hours. This situation forced the Morrison Government in Australia to introduce Job Keeper. Thousands of businesses applied for it and hundreds of thousands of workers received $1500 gross a fortnight under the scheme. An inadequate relief measure for most, but the Government hoped it was enough until it was time "to get people back to work again", code for a return to the free market economy of capitalism so employers could resume chasing maximization of profits again.

A return to the chaos of the free market of capitalism is all the capitalist class rulers can envisage. However, the masses of people in Australia are learning through their own experience just how fragile this market economy is and how quickly it can destroy their living standards and way of life.

People also saw how reliant the capitalist economy in Australia is on the decisions of multinational corporations and the governments who serve them. Whole industries shut down and many more stagnated due to their reliance on overseas markets to sell their services or products.

The media commentators and some politicians of various persuasions cried out that the solution to this problem was for business in Australia to become less reliant on one country or a couple of countries for their export markets. "Diversification" is to be the saving grace for the Australian people!

The Australian people are questioning the whole system as well they might. They hear a lot from individual captains of industries and from politicians about planning. Ah yes, "planning'"! Ask any CEO how important planning is for their company.

They are right but they never say that planning of the whole economy of production and services for people is needed.

Why not? Surely if planning is good enough for their own business it is good enough for a society wide value?

The problem is, their planning is in order to maximize profit whereas the planning the people want and need is planning that drives an economy serving the people and not profit maximization.

Imagine if all the wealth created by working people that was in excess of daily needs was held in common for social needs instead of disappearing in to the bank accounts of multinational corporations. Imagine also if the means of production could be converted (as occurred in wartime) to produce what was needed for the people in times of crisis such as the Corona Virus?

A planned economy with production and services for the needs of the people is something that people sense is needed and also possible. That possibility requires private, competitive ownership of the means of production to cease. It has to be replaced by public, cooperative ownership vested in a new form of people’s state power.

The only problem is that the ruling minority class and their state apparatus are standing in the way.

In the course of time the people will find a way to overcome this historically obsolete class with experiences like the Corona Virus pandemic providing rich lessons of why this is needed.

The crisis proves public ownership is needed

Written by: John S. on 12 May 2020

The COVID-19 crisis has exposed, yet again, the complete failure of the capitalist economic system to meet the needs of the Australian people.

• Virgin Airlines has collapsed. Politicians whine about the potential lack of competition, and about how regional centres will be serviced, because the transport system only services profitable routes.

• World oil prices have temporarily collapsed, but petrol prices still fluctuate wildly, and the full savings have not been passed on to consumers. The multinational oil companies forever price-gouge.

• Globalisation has meant that multinational companies export capital and jobs to the lowest wage countries in the chase for maximum profit. Countries like Australia are left with an emasculated manufacturing industry, and are at the mercy of international supply chains. We can't get what we need, especially in a crisis, when, in reality, we could easily produce things here if people's welfare, not profit, were the motivation.

 • The transport of needed goods is at risk in any crisis, because 98% of the shipping to and from Australia is foreign-owned. We don't even control our international transport system.

• For years, the multinational natural gas producers have sold our gas overseas

to the highest bidders, leaving Australia short of gas, even though we are one of the world's biggest suppliers.

• For years, Australians have been ripped off by big companies price-gouging our power and water supplies. Privately-owned power companies continue to use polluting coal and drag their feet in investing in renewable energy. The world needs to use less energy and use it more efficiently, yet our system is run by companies that want to sell as much power as possible, as expensively as they can get away with.

• Australia’s banking system is privately-owned, run solely for profit, and at the mercy of intentional financial capital and its prices.

We clearly need these fundamental services

• under Australian control, and
• run for the public good, not for profit

In the past, there were many state-owned enterprises providing power, water, banking, rail and airline services. While their main purpose was to oil the capitalist system, they did enable governments to provide some better basic services to the people.

In the recent decades, these have been steadily privatised to give private capital the opportunity to make more and more money.

The upshot is worse and more expensive services for Australians.

These basic services should be nationalised – run by the public, for the public. This could happen now if governments were willing. And they could be very efficient and effective if run by the workers rather than just by bureaucrats.

However, we know that capitalists will not accept their cash-cows being taken away and brought under public ownership. Their mouthpieces in the media will scream about 'big government', “inefficiency”, “the sanctity of private property”, “the superiority of private enterprise” etc etc.

And, while some publicly-owned services would be an improvement, the rest of the capitalist system would continue to operate purely in pursuit of profit. Workers would still be exploited; jobs would be insufficient and insecure; capital would be invested in the most profitable speculation rather than productive endeavours; the planet would continue be exploited beyond its sustainability.

In the end, we need a total change of system – an economic system based on meeting the needs of the people and the planet, not based on the pursuit of profit.

Social ownership – Socialism is imperative. Not capitalism – the dominance of private capital.

For Communism, for Socialism, but why for Independence?

Written by: Lindy Nolan on May 5 2020

Just above Warrane, Sydney Cove, in the colony of NSW’s earliest days, a young Gadigal or Cammeraygal woman, Patyegarang, exchanged language with a British lieutenant, William Dawes.

In the priceless dictionary they created together, the word car-rah-mah means ‘to steal’.

Invasion, the greatest theft of all, and the most brutal.

First Peoples have no trouble understanding that Australia is occupied by a foreign invader.  They live with its consequences every day.

Yet, their Lore, their language, and culture, their lives, come from sovereign Country never ceded. 

Marx and Engels lived at a time when “civilisation” was accepted as the opposite of “savagery”. The word “primitive” was then an acceptable description of pre-machine age societies. These concepts regrettably run through some of the works of Marx and Engels. The unfortunate term “primitive communism” was coined as a description of pre-invasion Aboriginal society.

The term nevertheless contains a truth, namely that private ownership of the means of production did not exist at that time. Land was not “owned”. Individuals and groups belonged to land in a form not recognised under British rule. 

Consequently, for the British invaders, First People were a double threat.  Their lifestyles were based on values long since discarded by people who had entered, and passed through, various forms of class society. Values of obligation, kinship, caring for Country predated the slave revolts, the peasant rebellions, ruling classes, capitalism or the working class.

Long before classes arose on immensely fertile lands beside the rivers of Egypt, Mesopotamia and China, First Peoples lived collectively in classless societies, sharing the lands’ wealth, “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.”  Distribution of food was determined only on obligations based on seniority and gender. No-one profited from the labour of another.

When First Peoples encountered those who were unsettling their collective and sharing lifestyle and destroying the creatures and the vegetation from which they obtained their subsistence, a second threat – that of resistance – faced the unsettlers.

For the double crime of “communism”, as yet unnamed but instinctively and existentially threatening to the invaders, everything about First Peoples’ ways of being and living had to be utterly destroyed. 

The irreconcilable contradiction between the values of the First Peoples and the values of the invaders saw the latter imposing both cultural and physical genocide on the former. This approach continues to this day. So does resistance.

Imperialist bloodbath
In the invader’s Australian constitution, its peoples are an afterthought, or even less. The British sovereign is the head of state and parliamentarians pledge allegiance to her, not just a colonial relic, a feudal one.

By World War Ⅰ, Britain had morphed from an old-style capitalist colonial power to an imperialist one. But useful colonial relics remained, not least in the subservience of Australia’s so-called independent governments. 

In 1914, then Labor Opposition Leader Andrew Fisher, famously pledged Australia to Britain “to our last man and our last shilling” in that first ever world bloodbath to protect British imperialist domination of the world’s peoples, resources and markets against its German rival. 

Australians fought under British command and British flag, a flag in which symbols representing the Irish and Scottish are impaled under St George’s Cross. It embodies domination by both English sovereign and English god. 

There it sits, in “our” flag. 

Great Depression to Iraq
Not enough that Australians paid with their lives. They must repay loans incurred fighting that “Great” War. 
During the 1930s’ Depression, Bank of England head Sir Otto Niemeyer came, demanding a nationwide ten per cent pay-cut by workers, the savings to pay the debt. NSW Premier Jack Lang refused and the British Governor sacked him.

Prime Minister Bob Menzies praised Hitler and Nazism before World War Two. In 1939, he declared Great Britain was at war with Germany “and that, as a result, Australia is also at war”. 

Off he trotted to England, dragging our young soldiers to defend its influence in Africa and the Middle East, leaving Australia undefended as Japan practised war-making and massacre in China, and armed itself for Pacific invasion.

Is any of this the hallmark of an independent country?

Wartime Labor PM John Curtin’s ‘turn to America’ speech, rejecting ties to Britain, marked a necessary alliance that soon became subservience. From Australian soldiers in New Guinea, the Japanese tasted their first defeat on land, while the U.S. inflicted the first significant damage to Japan’s air and naval forces, in the Battle of the Coral Sea. 

From war’s end, the “alliance” was only downhill. Vietnam War. Whitlam’s sacking by the Governor General in a coup engineered by the CIA, to protect U.S interests. Invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, opposed by over 90 per cent of Australians.

The right to exploit
It’s not a question of ethics or bourgeois nationalism. An Australian born ruling class would be no better than a foreign imperialist one. But the fact is, the current ruling class of this continent and its islands represents U.S. imperialism. 

What Lenin called the commanding heights of the economy is overwhelmingly foreign owned. Even Gina and Twiggy get their finance from U.S. bank, Blackrock. 

State borders mirror the original British colonies. For over a century they have undermined even a unified capitalist response, as state administrators of imperialist rule fall over each other to give foreign corporations the right to exploit Australia’s people and lands for their profit.

Our military is now a wing of the U.S. armed forces, particularly since its tilt to contain its Chinese rival in our region.

Now Covid-19 exposes an economy totally reliant on foreign controlled supply chains for basic needs.   

The imprint of thousands of years of class rule
People often think socialism is a soft alternative to communism. But nothing could be further from the truth.
Although led by communist parties, what arose in the 20th century was not communism. 

Surrounded by immensely hostile capitalist powers bent on its destruction, it was a stage on the path to communism, called socialism, where classes exist and class struggle is fierce. It was born from capitalism and feudalism in hunger, desperation and war, bearing the deep imprint of thousands of years of class rule.  

Under socialism, the ruling class is the vast majority of the people, led by the working class – which suppress the capitalists and the tendency of capitalism to arise again in the forces of small production and from ingrained individualism, cowardice and other capitalist traits. Exploitation is ended because capitalists cannot extract profit from workers. 

Stories from ages past
Both sobering and inspiring lessons must be learned from the decades of socialism, in the USSR till the mid-1950s and China till Mao Zedong’s death.
Here in Australia, anti-imperialist independence will break the back of the ruling class. It forms the base from which socialism unfolds. 

But communism is what we aim for! A classless society, where the needs of all human beings are met, their creative powers unleashed for collective benefit, when war and hunger and exploitation and struggle are sad stories of injustice from ages past. 

The 150-year guerrilla warfare by First Peoples is this land’s unfinished war of independence. So is Eureka. So is the outpouring of action when yet another young Warlpiri man was murdered by police in Yuendumu, and the tens of thousands of struggles big and small that collectively educate our Peoples to end class rule forever.

So, we greet this May Day with words that herald the establishment of communism in this land of many Peoples, languages and cultures, “For Independence! For Socialism! For Communism!”