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	Australasian Spartacist No. 213	Winter 2011

On the Capitalist State

(Letter)

7 February

Dear Comrades,

I was glad to read the article in Australasian Spartacist no 211 (Summer 2010/2011) entitled “For A Workers and Peasants Government in Thailand!” It is an important Southeast Asian country with a substantial population and a significant (as you note) working class. Despite the deification of the current monarch, he cannot live forever and the country is probably heading into a period of some kind of instability, so the article is both important and timely.

I wanted to note two points. First, in polemicising against Giles Ji Ungpakorn on the nature of the capitalist state, you say: “Consisting at its core of armed bodies of men—the police, military and their auxiliaries—this state exists to defend the private property and rule of the bourgeoisie.” When Lenin wrote State and Revolution, the police, the army and the personnel who ran the prisons and what Engels called “coercive institutions of all kinds” were effectively all male. Today that is no longer the case. One only has to note the composition of the local police forces and military at all levels. Or the fact that about 15% of US Air Force combat pilots are women. And in spite of feminist ravings, if the B-52 pilot who is bombing your village in Afghanistan or the local cop aiming a 9mm Glock at you is a woman, the weaponry is no less lethal.

I just think you should adjust the way you present the concept to reflect reality. Workers Vanguard (no 972, 21 January 2011) in the article “Support the Puerto Rico Student Strike!” has what seems a better formulation when they refer to “a machinery of organized violence.”

Second, it was good to see you explicitly characterise Laos as a deformed workers state and call for its defence against the imperialists. Laos was perhaps the most bombed country on earth and is still fighting a low-level counter-revolutionary insurgency inside the country. The long consignment of Laos to oblivion was no credit to the ICL. The fact that the organisation has been able to rectify this is powerful testimony to the strength and viability of the program of revolutionary communism. I look forward to a future article of some depth on the history and character of the Laotian Revolution.

Fraternal Regards,

John S

ASp replies: We thank John for his letter and agree with his point on the need to reflect current reality when presenting a Marxist understanding of the capitalist state. As John suggests, the fact that today women serve in the state apparatus in no way changes its repressive bourgeois class character. We take this opportunity to also make a few broader points, particularly about the Australian imperialist military.

As has been evident by recent grotesque incidents reported in the bourgeois media, the misogyny and racist piggery so typical of Australian capitalist society is replicated in concentrated form within the armed forces. The recent disciplining of a young female defence force trainee by the Australian Defence Force Academy brass because she complained that a sexual encounter she had with a fellow student had been broadcast, without her knowledge, to his friends over Skype, triggered an avalanche of other reports of sexist and homophobic abuse within the military. This included death threats against an openly gay army officer.

Allegations by former army men and women of rape and bashing were recently aired on ABC’s Four Corners program. Such “hazing” or “bastardisation” serves to inculcate complete subservience to the “chain of command.” The state’s armed forces are also shot through at all levels with racist scum and fascists. In September 2000, white soldiers of the 1RAR regiment in Townsville dressed as Ku Klux Klan and humiliated Aboriginal and other non-white soldiers on the eve of that regiment’s deployment to East Timor to participate in Australian imperialism’s subjugation of the East Timorese masses. The military is a microcosm of capitalist society as a whole. Just as we fight against homophobic, racist and sexist discrimination and atrocities in “civilian” society, so we oppose it in the military. At the same time, we carry on the tradition of Marxist opposition to imperialist militarism and say: Not a person, not a cent to the Australian imperialist military! This is part of our struggle to shatter the capitalist state through workers revolution and sweep away the system of capitalist exploitation.

The minority Labor government, which today administers the capitalist state, responded to the “Skype” scandal by declaring that women will no longer be barred from frontline combat positions. Promoting women’s “equal right to fight and die for their country,” the prime minister, Julia Gillard, is addressing, in part, the capitalist rulers’ long-standing concern that the army needs more personnel. At the same time she is whipping up patriotism while attempting to generate support for the military as a supposedly egalitarian-minded institution. Meanwhile bourgeois feminists who promote women joining the armed forces may want a kinder, gentler military but at bottom, loyal to their class, they support the military, whose purpose includes savagely enforcing imperialist oppression, not least that of women in subjugated countries. From terrorising the brothel precinct in Cairo in 1915 to their occupation of East Timor in 1999, Australian troops are notorious for brutality toward women. Australian, U.S. and NATO troops get out of Afghanistan, the Middle East, North Africa, East Timor and the Pacific!

The genocidal wars and dispossession of the Aboriginal population laid the foundations of White Australia capitalism. Australia acted as an adjunct to the British in numerous military adventures from the Anglo-Maori Wars and the Sudan in the 19th century, to the Boer War at the turn of the 20th century, and participated in both imperialist world wars. Subsequently the Australian imperialists became local military agents for, and lackeys of, the U.S. imperialists. As a key regional cop for the U.S. during Cold War I, directed against the Soviet degenerated workers state, and following the 1949 Chinese Revolution, they rushed troops to fight against social revolutions in Asia, beginning with Korea. They perpetrated anti-Communist butchery in Malaya, and, in the 1960s, as a jackal ally of U.S. imperialism, sought to crush Soviet-backed North Vietnam and prevent the spread of social revolution to the whole of Vietnam. The victory of the Vietnamese Revolution in 1975 resulted in the formation of deformed workers states in Vietnam and Laos. The Australian working class owes a special debt to the heroic Vietnamese workers and peasants, including women, who at great sacrifice defeated U.S./Australian imperialism on the battlefield. Their struggle inspired important acts of working-class solidarity against the Australian military, and their victory punctured a hole in this country’s “culture” of racist white supremacy. When the multiracial proletariat, under the leadership of a Leninist-Trotskyist party, has swept away capitalist rule and established a workers state, our proletarian army will be in the forefront of eliminating bigotry and oppression.

Regarding John’s comments on Laos, we refer our readers to the new “Preface to ICL Declaration of Principles” (Spartacist [English edition] No. 62, Spring 2011), and the exchange reprinted above.