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	Australasian Spartacist No. 215	Summer 2011-12

For Workers Revolution to Expropriate the Capitalist Class!

Down With Bloody Police Attack on "Occupy" Protesters! Drop the Charges!

We reprint below a Spartacist League leaflet which has been distributed at “Occupy” rallies and protests in Sydney and Melbourne. In Melbourne vicious police attacks, arrests and harassment of protesters continue. In Sydney, 58 protesters have been arrested and 28 face charges since police evicted protesters from Martin Place on 23 October. Thirteen protesters are due to appear in Downing Centre Local Court on 3 February.

NOVEMBER 2—The Spartacist League of Australia protests the state repression meted out against the “Occupy” Melbourne and Sydney protesters on 21 and 23 October respectively. In scenes reminiscent of the vicious crackdown on anti-“globalisation” protesters in Melbourne in 2000 and on anti-APEC demonstrators in Sydney in 2007, cops, mounted police and riot squads bloodily evicted protesters, arresting around 140 across both cities. Outrageously a number of people are now facing charges. In Melbourne, demonstrators were repeatedly pepper-sprayed and beaten by the cops as they were evicted from City Square. Two days later, in the early hours of Sunday morning, riot and Tactical Response Group police violently attacked a small encampment of protesters in Sydney’s Martin Place. We demand: Drop all the charges now!

Some “Occupy” supporters who thought the police could be their allies got a close-up view of the arrogant and brutal state forces that target leftists, militant unionists, Aborigines and refugees for repression in capitalist Australia. Even after the attack there are those who push the illusion that police violence is not systemic but primarily the work of a few bad apples. For example, an anonymous poster distributed in Melbourne singles out one cop as particularly violent. However, the cops as a whole are an integral part of the repressive state apparatus. As the hired thugs of the bourgeoisie, they serve to protect the property and profits of the capitalist rulers through breaking workers’ strikes, and intimidating and suppressing the inevitable social struggles that break out against capitalist oppression.

As in other countries around the world, the “Occupy” protesters in Australia have taken to city centres in vague imitation of the ongoing “Occupy Wall Street” protests in New York. The protesters have cause to be angry. In the context of the deepest international economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, capitalist rulers across the globe are enforcing savage measures to bust unions, drive down wages, slash social services and scapegoat minorities, including desperate refugees trying to escape the imperialists’ bloody depredations from Libya to Afghanistan. In Australia, as elsewhere, the bosses’ attacks and ever more draconian anti-union laws are in the service of ratcheting up the rate of exploitation and expanding profit margins. While the banks and mining giants rake in record profits, and CEOs like Qantas’ Alan Joyce make out like bandits, workers and the poor, from disabled pensioners, to unemployed youth, to single mothers, are getting it in the neck.

Bourgeois Democracy: Veil For Brutal Capitalist Exploitation

Many have embraced the “Occupy” protests seeking a way to act against what is happening to them and what they perceive to be the problems in the world. With organisers claiming “commonality within our diversity,” a 22 October Occupy Sydney Rally Statement declared that they are part of a movement that “is creating a new path towards a society based on the needs and the democratic participation of all.” But with slogans like “we are the 99 percent,” “End Corporate Greed” and “Put Bankers on Trial,” the movement’s political perspective amounts to liberal reformist schemas to pressure capitalist governments to act in the interests of the “little man.” As our comrades in the U.S. wrote in Workers Vanguard (No. 989, 28 October):

“It is false that ‘99 percent’ of the population share common interests. There is a fundamental class divide in society between the capitalists—the tiny group of families that own industry and the banks—and the working class, whose labor is the source of the capitalists’ profits. The working class is not just one more victim of capitalist austerity within the ‘99 percent.’”

Capitalist oppression is rooted in exploitative property relations and no protest movement will convince the capitalist rulers and their government to act in the interests of the working class and oppressed against their own class interests. For the bourgeoisie, “democracy” serves to mask their brutal class dictatorship, which they enforce through their repressive state apparatus in the form of courts, cops, prisons and military. This state cannot be reformed to serve the interests of workers and the poor but rather, as leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution, V.I. Lenin, explained in his seminal work State and Revolution, it must be smashed. To fundamentally alter the lot of the overwhelming majority of humanity requires socialist revolutions to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat and abolish private ownership of the means of production. The working class must become the ruling class!

Such a perspective is a far cry from the various fake-socialist groups, such as Socialist Alliance, the Communist Party (CP) and Socialist Alternative (SAlt), who have opportunistically liquidated into the amorphous “Occupy” protests. While these reformist opponents of revolutionary Marxism rightly condemn the vicious cop assault on protesters, with SAlt even announcing “The police are a tool of state repression” (24 October), only a few weeks earlier they were all tailing the Laborite trade-union bureaucracy and sowing illusions in the police by uncritically reporting on the large contingents of cops and prison guards in the 8 September NSW public sector union rally. As Marxist revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky wrote, “The worker who becomes a policeman in the service of the capitalist state, is a bourgeois cop, not a worker” (What Next?, January 1932). In Australasian Spartacist (No. 214, Spring 2011), we point out: cops, prison screws and their auxiliaries such as security guards have no place in the workers movement and must be ousted from the trade unions!

“Death of communism” ideology has been all-pervasive since capitalist counterrevolution in the former Soviet Union, a bureaucratically degenerated workers state. This ideology defines the politics behind the “Occupy” protests. Post-modernist arguments that “grand narratives” (read: victorious world socialist revolution) and “party politics” are dead are common among protesters, as are attacks on the remaining deformed workers states, especially China. For us Trotskyists, it is axiomatic that anyone claiming to stand in opposition to capitalism must defend those countries where capitalism has been overthrown—today, the deformed workers states of Laos, Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea and China—against capitalist counterrevolution and imperialist attack. At the same time, we fight for proletarian political revolutions to oust the Stalinist misrulers, whose bureaucratic mismanagement and appeasement of imperialism paves the way for capitalist restoration. Such proletarian internationalism is anathema to the likes of SAlt and Solidarity, who have always lined up with their own “democratic” bourgeoisie against the degenerated and deformed workers states.

Break With Laborism—We Need a Revolutionary Party

Those who seriously want to end the capitalist system of exploitation, racism, sexism and war should look to the social power of the working class. The proletariat, with its hands on the levers of production, has the power to stop the wheels of profit turning. It is the only social class with the potential power and historic interest to take on the capitalist rulers and win. Recent worker struggles, from general strikes in Greece, to the strike in West Papua against the U.S. mining giant Freeport-McMoRan, to the recent mass NSW public sector workers protest, provide a glimpse of the social power of the proletariat. But everywhere workers are shackled by a pro-capitalist leadership. Bowing to the bosses’ courts and pushing nationalist protectionist poison, the Labor-loyal trade-union misleaders in this country have betrayed one struggle after the next. Earlier this week, when the union-busting Qantas management grounded the airline and threatened to lock out the workforce, the ACTU bureaucrats welcomed Fair Work Australia’s termination of all industrial action thus embracing the no-strike and compulsory arbitration provisions of the government’s anti-union laws. If the working class is to further its own class interests it must be mobilised independently against the bosses and their state.

In political struggle against these Laborite misleaders, a class-struggle leadership of the unions, linked to an internationalist revolutionary party, must be built. Such a party would fight to win the working class to the understanding that it is necessary to lead all the oppressed in the overthrow of the capitalist system. Abolishing the private ownership of the banks, factories, mines and industry, the proletariat in power would create a society based on collectivised property and a rational, planned economy. Ultimately it would take the international extension of revolution to pave the way to a classless communist society of abundance, a society free of all exploitation, social and national oppression and war.

The example of the 1917 Bolshevik-led Russian Revolution, when the workers took power, expropriating the bourgeoisie and establishing a workers state and collectivised economy, should serve as a beacon for today’s youth seeking to fight against the ravages of the capitalist system. We fight for new October Revolutions; for world socialist revolution, which will lay the material basis to end the exploitation and misery that the capitalist-imperialist system inflicts on millions around the world. Join us!