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	Australasian Spartacist No. 239	Summer 2019/2020

Widodo Regime Enforces Bloody State Repression

For Workers Revolution in Indonesia!

Independence for West Papua!

From mid-August to early October Indonesia was wracked by mass protests against the Widodo government. Demonstrations first erupted across West Papua against endemic racism and state brutality targeting the indigenous Melanesian people. The largest Papuan protests in years, they called for independence in the face of severe state repression. Many Papuans were injured and killed. As security forces were gunning down protesters in Papua’s central highlands, on 23 September massive student-centred demonstrations exploded in Jakarta and other Indonesian cities, triggered by legislation curtailing the popular Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) and planned draconian changes to the country’s criminal code. The largest student protests since the fall of the Suharto dictatorship in 1998, tens of thousands mobilised on the streets, repeatedly clashing with police armed with tear gas and water cannon. Hundreds were arrested and injured, and at least two students killed.

The wave of mass protests in West Papua was sparked by a racist attack on Papuan students in Surabaya, East Java. On the eve of Indonesia’s Independence Day (17 August), a vigilante mob, including members of the military, lay siege to the students’ hostel, accusing them of damaging an Indonesian flag. After many hours, police stormed the hostel, firing tear gas and shouting the racist slur “monkeys” at the students. Five students were injured and 43 taken into custody and held for up to nine hours.

Protests exploded in Jayapura and Manokwari, the respective capitals of Papua and West Papua provinces. In Manokwari, the local parliament building was set alight. In Sorong, West Papua, the prison was torched. Indonesian security forces responded to the protests by firing on protesters and carrying out mass arrests. By mid-September, over 200 people had been arrested and 88 charged. The government banned protests and sent in thousands of extra security forces. Mobile phone services were interrupted and the internet blocked. Chauvinist vigilantes of the Red White Front and Kelompok Nusantara mobilised alongside government forces to attack Papuans. In Wamena, the largest town in Papua’s central highlands, during a 23 September protest ignited by a teacher’s racial taunts of a student, eyewitnesses reported Indonesian police gunning down Papuan students in the street as they fought back with rocks and arrows. Government buildings, a power plant, shops, houses and vehicles were torched. As many as 40 Papuans and non-Papuans were killed and over 70 injured.

Jakarta’s suppression of recent protests is the latest episode in its ongoing bloody military occupation of West Papua. Harassment, beatings, torture and killings increased under the Widodo regime while U.S. and Australian imperialism continue to staunchly back Indonesia’s rule over the region. Forcibly incorporated into Indonesia in the 1960s, the indigenous Melanesians have defiantly struggled for independence for over 50 years at a cost of tens of thousands of lives and under conditions of severe deprivation. This struggle includes a low-level guerrilla insurgency by the armed wing of the Free Papua Movement (OPM). We stand for the military defence of the independence fighters against the Indonesian military, while giving no political support to bourgeois nationalist forces. We demand: Release the arrested protesters, drop all charges! Indonesian troops out! Australia hands off! Independence for West Papua!

We fight for a workers and peasants government of West Papua centred on the Papuan people. As part of the struggle to break the hold of the Indonesian ruling class, Marxists would seek to mobilise the combative Indonesian workers, including those in West Papua, to champion the struggle of the indigenous population for independence. Following successive waves of settlers from Java and elsewhere to West Papua, fostered by Jakarta in order to dilute the indigenous Melanesian population, by 2010 the population had grown to 3.6 million and was fairly evenly divided between Papuans and non-Papuans. In an independent West Papua, revolutionaries would recognise the right of those settlers who accept a Papuan-centred government to remain in the land they have made home. Over 96,000 settlers signed a petition calling for a referendum on Papuan independence last year.

One of the demands raised by Indonesian students protesting against changes to the KPK and criminal code was for “an end to militarism in Papua.” This is a striking development given how closely the possession of West Papua is woven into the fabric of post-colonial Indonesian nationalism. An SBS Dateline article (12 September) observed that there is “an ever-expanding group of young, educated Indonesians who are supporting West Papuans’ rights for self-determination.” In 2016, a coalition of several groups formed the Indonesian People’s Front for West Papua, reported to be one of the first non-Papuan groups in Indonesia to organise campaigning for West Papuan independence. In late August, its spokesperson, Surya Anta, and five Papuans were arrested and charged with treason over a pro-West Papuan demonstration in Jakarta.

Another courageous supporter of West Papuan independence and defender of Papuan activists is Indonesian human rights lawyer Veronica Koman. For her stand she is branded a traitor and regularly receives rape and death threats. She fled to Australia after being threatened with prison for sharing videos of police brutality on social media. We demand: Drop the charges against Koman, Surya Anta and the Papuan demonstrators.

Post-Suharto “Reform Era” Fraud

Joko Widodo is the first Indonesian president to be elected from outside the oligarchy or political elite. Assuming the presidency in 2014, he posed as being for the orang kecil (little people) and was elected with the expectation of social reforms and improved conditions for millions of Indonesia’s poor. However, predictably, he has not delivered on most of his promises. After two decades of an alleged “reformasi” era ushered in with the downfall of the Suharto military dictatorship, Indonesians have become increasingly bitter as successive parliaments fail to fulfil the expectations of the post-Suharto era. Joining the recent student protests were farmers, women’s groups as well as unions protesting against anti-labour laws.

Widodo has pursued what has been described as “the most repressive approach to organised labour…since the fall of Soeharto.” Workers confront the erosion of wages and attacks that restrict strikes, increase labour outsourcing through labour hire companies, “simplify” layoffs, reduce severance pay and maternity leave, while health insurance premiums have almost doubled. In response to labour unrest, Widodo’s regime has given the military wider powers to repress demonstrations and strikes. These anti-labour attacks serve Widodo’s attempt to attract imperialist investment and prop up a flagging economy.

Re-elected president this year, Widodo’s new cabinet includes representatives from numerous political parties as he seeks to balance contending forces while giving patronage to various corrupt politicians, including blood-drenched former generals. All along the line Widodo has bent to more reactionary elements. He selected Ma’ruf Amin, an intolerant, homophobic and powerful Islamic cleric as his vice-president. He appointed Prabowo Subianto, his bitter election rival, as defence minister. Prabowo, a former Suharto military general, is widely known for kidnapping protesters during the fall of Suharto’s regime as well as for the slaughter of East Timorese. Prabowo’s appointment portends a freer hand for the Kopassus special force killers and heightened bloody repression in West Papua and across the archipelago.

Within Indonesian society, the legislation curbing the KPK is widely seen as undermining the fight against “corruption, collusion and nepotism,” a driving force behind the protests that signalled the end of Suharto’s New Order regime in 1998. While the KPK has massive public approval, its conviction of hundreds of high-ranking political and government figures has earned it powerful enemies, including Widodo’s Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle. A rallying cry of the recent student protests was the hashtag “#reformasiDikorupsi” (reform corrupted). As one student leader put it, “We want the government to restore the principles of reformation and democracy…safeguard our freedom of speech, our rights and to eradicate corruption, collusion and nepotism” (Australian, 25 September).

As we warned at the time of student demands for “reformasi” in 1998, in an economically backward, dependent country saddled by imperialist exploitation and grinding poverty such as Indonesia, the fulfilment of the masses’ aspirations for basic democratic rights is a pipedream. In 1998, when the Suharto military dictatorship began to crumble amid great social turmoil following the devastating Asian financial crisis, the bourgeoisie, desperate to stabilise capitalist rule and under pressure from their imperialist overlords, steered the anger of the plebeian masses into support for a thin veneer of parliamentary democracy. Imperialist subjugation, the corrupt, repressive bourgeoisie and their military thugs remained. The capitalist state apparatus cannot be reformed. Consisting at its core of the police, military and prisons, this machinery of coercion exists to defend the power and profits of the capitalist rulers against the working class and oppressed. Whoever resides in Merdeka Palace, the government will continue to be the servant of the forces of capitalist-imperialist exploitation, religious reaction, national chauvinism and anti-Chinese racism.

Indonesia and Permanent Revolution

Brought together under centuries of harsh Dutch colonial rule, Indonesia is riven by religious, national and class divisions. In this prison house of peoples consisting of some 17,000 islands, oppressed national minorities across the archipelago have long struggled against the stranglehold of the Javanese-based bourgeoisie and its military machine. Reflecting its late arrival to capitalist development, Indonesia is stamped by enormous social contradictions between a modern industrial sector and a countryside steeped in pre-capitalist times. Its small, narrowly-based bourgeoisie is so dependent on imperialism and fearful of the impoverished masses that they can only maintain their rule by upholding imperialist domination and social reaction, often through sheer terror.

Seeking to thwart the Chinese deformed workers state’s growing influence in Indonesia and the region, the U.S. announced expanded defence aid and military cooperation with Indonesia during a recent meeting of ASEAN defence ministers (for more on China, see article page 1). U.S. imperialism and its Australian junior partner have helped prop up successive murderous Jakarta regimes against Indonesian, East Timorese and West Papuan dissidents to ensure the smooth flow of profits derived from their exploitation of the masses and plunder of resources in the region. Australia’s police and military have helped train Kopassus and other forces engaged in widespread torture and extra-judicial killings.

Resource-rich West Papua is a particularly lucrative prize for the imperialists as well as the Jakarta government. While West Papua’s per capita GDP is over 40 percent above the Indonesian average, poverty rates among the indigenous population are triple the average and infant, child and maternal mortality rates are the highest. The dire existence and brutal oppression of the Papuans stands in stark contrast to the vast wealth plundered by the imperialists, such as from the giant Grasberg mine run by the U.S.’s Freeport-McMoRan, one of the world’s largest gold and copper mines. This mine has also provided Jakarta with massive tax receipts. Backing the Indonesian regime’s oppression in West Papua also serves the Australian capitalist rulers’ interests in preventing unrest spilling over the border into its poverty-stricken and highly unstable Papua New Guinea neocolony, which is facing its own Bougainville independence referendum. In early September, thousands of Papua New Guineans marched through Port Moresby in support of West Papuan independence.

The brutal oppression of national minorities in Indonesia highlights the impossibility of satisfying the deeply felt needs of the masses within the framework of capitalist rule and imperialist subjugation. Indeed, the recent protests in West Papua and Indonesia underscore that the masses throughout the archipelago have a common enemy—the Indonesian ruling class. Recognising that the struggle for the rights of oppressed nations can be a motor force for revolution, our stand for West Papuan independence is part of our perspective for socialist revolution in Indonesia.

Capitalism has created its potential gravedigger in the large and powerful proletariat, which includes many women. The multiethnic working class of Indonesia has the social power and historic interest in overcoming national and communal animosities to champion the myriad oppressed nationalities, minorities, women, peasantry and poor. What’s needed is a revolutionary Marxist party like V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky’s Bolsheviks, whose fight against Great Russian chauvinism won to its banner workers and peasants of all nationalities. The International Communist League seeks to forge such a party, based on the Trotskyist program of permanent revolution.

Indonesia is a case of “combined and uneven development,” where modern industry like oil and gas extraction coexists alongside rural backwardness. In the age of imperialism only the proletariat standing at the head of the oppressed masses can achieve the tasks historically associated with the bourgeois revolutions of Europe—national emancipation, agrarian revolution, formal equality for women and all-round modernisation. This perspective of permanent revolution was laid out by Trotsky and found confirmation in the Russian Revolution of October 1917. As Trotsky explained, in countries of belated capitalist development “the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses.” If the revolution is not to be militarily or economically strangled, it must be extended internationally, above all to the imperialist centres, such as the U.S., Japan and Australia.

Religious Fundamentalism on the Rise

In the absence of the multinational proletariat mobilising as a pole of independent class-struggle opposition, the masses in their disillusionment will turn elsewhere to seek solace. Thus religious fundamentalism is on the rise. Widodo’s controversial choice of cleric Ma’ruf Amin as his vice-presidential running mate in April’s presidential election helped gain Widodo the support of some 45 million followers of Nahdlatul Ulama (Indonesia’s largest Muslim organisation which Amin then led) and a second term in office. Chair of the powerful Indonesian Council of Ulama, Amin was a key figure behind the widely hated and currently suspended bill amending the criminal code. The bill includes over 600 revisions and makes the code, inherited from the brutal Dutch colonial regime, even more repressive. It further discriminates against women as well as religious and other minorities while attacking basic freedoms.

Amendments outlaw adultery, extramarital and homosexual sex, expand the anti-abortion codes and the 1965 blasphemy laws, and restore a Suharto-era law making it an offence to insult the president, parliamentarians and government institutions. Articles uphold the ban on communism, imposing heavy prison sentences for anyone spreading Marxist-Leninist teachings and for associating with Marxist organisations. The revisions also recognise “any living law” in Indonesia, which could mean local customary and Islamic laws, hundreds of which have been passed across the country in the last 20 years.

Beginning with the bloody ascension of Khomeini in Iran in 1979, there has been a rise of religious fundamentalism as a mass movement in much of the neo-colonial Muslim world. Across Indonesia, the growth of Islamic “radicalism” has sharply increased over the last two decades. With a shift to more overt religiosity, puritanical Saudi-inspired Salafism has been attracting followers. This includes among civil servants—a 2017 survey reported that one in five favoured an Islamic state. Flagging concern at this development, Widodo tasked his new religious affairs minister, an ex-general, with spearheading efforts to contain “radicalism and intolerance.” The government is happy to use Islam to repress dissent while keeping more extreme elements on a leash lest they jeopardise imperialist investment. The nationalism pushed by the Java-centred bourgeoisie is heavily intertwined with Islamic reaction. Both have long targeted the small ethnic Chinese community as scapegoats for the misery of the masses. The horrific anti-Chinese pogroms that swept the country in 1998 in the wake of the economic crisis were often instigated by military forces and fuelled by the rising tide of political Islam.

The growth of political Islam, in all its variants, poses a deadly threat to the multiethnic proletariat, to the deeply oppressed women, to the besieged Chinese minority and all the many national and religious minorities in Indonesia. As of late last year, almost 150 people had been imprisoned under blasphemy or related laws since 2004. This includes a civil servant for declaring himself an atheist on Facebook and a Chinese Buddhist woman who complained about the volume of the neighbourhood mosque loudspeaker. The 2017 blasphemy case against the popular governor of Jakarta, Christian-Chinese Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, was a flashpoint, highlighting the growing power and confidence of the Islamic fundamentalists. He was sentenced to two years jail over comments seized on by his political opponents. Ma’ruf Amin was a key prosecution witness and a catalyst for the reactionary Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) mobilising a witchhunting million-strong protest on the streets against Purnama.

The FPI have carried out vigilante raids on nightclubs and bars, including targeting gays and transgender people. In 2010 it threatened a gay and lesbian film festival in Jakarta. The FPI reactionaries seek to impose Sharia law such as is practised in the autonomous region of Aceh, where those who transgress Islamic laws are publicly caned. Already hundreds of local regulations target women, including making it compulsory in places to wear the hijab in schools, government offices and public spaces. Domestic violence against women is epidemic. Islamists opposed a recent anti-sexual violence bill that included the criminalisation of rape in marriage. The bill was supported by many student protesters. The fight for women’s emancipation will be a key force for proletarian class struggle to overthrow the system of capitalist exploitation. Communists fight to end patriarchal practices oppressive to women, like the polygamy system and bride price—legacies of social backwardness today upheld by religious reactionaries in league with the capitalist rulers. We fight for full equality for women, for free abortion on demand and for the separation of mosque and state. For women’s liberation through socialist revolution!

1965-66 Bloodbath and PKI Popular-Front Betrayal

At a ceremony marking the 73rd anniversary of the Indonesian military (TNI) last year, Widodo told the assembled military leaders that, as Commander-in-Chief, he would join with the military “fighting against other ideologies outside Pancasila [the state ideology], eradicating communism and the legacy of the PKI [Indonesian Communist Party].” Pandering to the politically powerful military, he signalled his willingness to derail any moves toward holding to account those responsible for the 1965-66 bloodbath that paved the way for the Suharto dictatorship. This was one of the most savage massacres in modern history. Over a million Communists, workers, peasants and ethnic Chinese were slaughtered in an atrocity perpetrated by the army and Islamic fanatics. It was directly aided and abetted by the U.S. and Australian imperialists, who consciously promoted religious fundamentalism as an anti-Communist bulwark. Suharto’s crushing of the PKI served to “stabilise” southeast Asia under the heel of the imperialist powers. (See “Lessons of Indonesia 1965,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 55, Autumn 1999.)

In 1965-66 a generation of proletarian and militant fighters was wiped out and the venal bourgeoisie has sought to sear this defeat into the consciousness of every generation since. It is vital that the Indonesian workers movement learns the class lessons of this defeat so that when next it rises up, it has a chance of winning. Key is rejecting the PKI’s program of class collaboration, which throughout history has repeatedly led to the betrayal and bloody defeat of the masses. Founded in the years following the 1917 Russian Revolution, the early PKI immersed itself in Sarekat Islam (SI) as a bridge to the masses. SI was the first mass-based party in Indonesia, growing out of an Islamic trading association. After being expelled from SI in 1921, the PKI even established its own “Red Sarekat Islam.”

The PKI’s strategy not only encouraged the growth of religious forces that were the deadly enemies of social progress, but ran directly counter to the Theses on the National and Colonial Question adopted by the Second Congress of the Communist International (CI) in 1920. In the Theses, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin stressed the need to “under all circumstances uphold the independence of the proletarian movement, even if it is in its most embryonic form” and underlined “the need to combat Pan-Islamism and similar trends, which strive to combine the liberation movement against European and American imperialism with an attempt to strengthen the positions of the khans, landowners and mullahs, etc.”

At the CI’s Fourth Congress in 1922, PKI leader Tan Malaka criticised Lenin’s earlier sharp statement against Pan-Islamism and defended the PKI’s entry into Sarekat Islam, declaring that Pan-Islamism “is a nationalist liberation struggle.” The PKI’s futile strategy was conditioned by the absence of any sizeable indigenous proletariat in Indonesia at the time. Its political accommodation to Islamic nationalism was profoundly disorienting for those struggling to implant communism in the colonial and semicolonial world.

The early PKI was largely decimated in the wake of two abortive uprisings in 1926-27, savagely put down by the Dutch colonial regime. During the fierce struggle for independence following its declaration in 1945, a PKI-led revolt in the city of Madiun in 1948 was crushed by President Sukarno’s forces, with over 35,000 PKI members and supporters imprisoned. By the early 1950s, the PKI had re-established itself as a political force by repudiating the uprising and grovelling before the bourgeois-nationalist government of Sukarno, including embracing his chauvinist claim over West Papua. By the late 1950s, the PKI had become the largest Communist party in the capitalist world. However, far from seeking to mobilise the Indonesian masses behind the growing working class in proletarian revolution, the PKI helped to channel deep bitterness at colonialism into support for bourgeois-nationalism.

Preaching that the workers and oppressed must support a fictitious “progressive” wing of the domestic capitalist class, i.e., the bourgeois government of Sukarno, the leadership of the millions-strong PKI suppressed workers strikes and militant peasant struggles, and lulled the masses with the illusion that Sukarno would protect them. This fatal program of “two-stage” revolution, pushed by the PKI and their Stalinist mentors in Moscow and Beijing, politically disarmed and demoralised the working class, leading directly to their slaughter when the generals decided to strike. The PKI’s treacherous class-collaborationist program stands in stark contrast to the revolutionary internationalism of Lenin and Trotsky’s victorious Bolshevik Party in Russia.

Atomised and bereft of a class-struggle leadership, Indonesian workers are still paying for the bloody defeat of 1965-66 today. The small organised labour movement is divided between three main competing union confederations. The Confederation of Indonesian Trade Unions (KSPI), led by Said Iqbal, actively supported the butcher Prabowo in both the 2014 and 2019 presidential elections. The leaders of the other confederations backed Widodo in 2014 and, with Widodo’s reward of lucrative positions in state-owned enterprises, gave support again in 2019, despite his vicious attacks on their worker base.

UN and the Fraud of “Human Rights” Imperialism

In response to the months of protests in West Papua, the Widodo government has mooted dividing its two provinces of West Papua and Papua into at least three in a blatant attempt to weaken the independence struggle through “divide and rule” tactics. With the Papuan independence movement gaining regional allies such as Vanuatu, SBS Dateline observed that “Indonesia is worried enough to go on a PR exercise in the Pacific, promising aid money in return for support for their sovereignty.”

The Papuan independence groups allied under the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) all look to the UN to recognise West Papua’s right to self-determination and to sponsor a referendum on the question. They are urged on by supporters such as International Parliamentarians for West Papua, co-founded by British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. As we noted in “Independence for West Papua!” (ASp No. 236, Summer 2018/19), West Papua is a cause célèbre for bourgeois liberals, including the capitalist Greens in this country. These “friends of West Papua” would keep Papuans begging to the same United Nations, a den of imperialist thieves, their victims and intended victims, that rubber-stamped Indonesia’s takeover of West Papua in the first place! Its interests lie in upholding the grinding oppression of the West Papuans under the heel of the Indonesian regime and their imperialist masters.

With the recent savage state repression and widespread death from disease and starvation as a result of military actions in Nduga, exiled independence leader Benny Wenda urged Australia to act quickly, warning of a repeat of the 1999 violence in East Timor. This call for Australian and UN action was front and centre at a 7 September West Papua demo in Sydney. Reformist groups in Australia such as Socialist Alliance (SA), who are prominent in these protests, seek to reprise their grotesque role in championing Australia’s military occupation of East Timor 20 years ago. Then known as the Democratic Socialist Party, SA screamed the loudest for Australian “troops in” while the Cliffite International Socialist Organisation (ISO), now renamed Solidarity, and other reformists including the Cliffite offshoot Socialist Alternative (SAlt), marched in the “Troops in” rallies which cheered on imperialist intervention. Both the ISO and SAlt backed the trade-union bans against Indonesia that were designed to achieve the same outcome. In the tow of the pro-imperialist Labor Party and union bureaucracy, these charlatans aided the strengthening of imperialist domination in the region.

Against the chauvinist hysteria, the SL/A championed independence for East Timor while forthrightly opposing the imperialist intervention, demanding all Australian/UN imperialist troops get out. As proletarian internationalists, we called for the Australian workers movement to black ban arms and supplies to the Australian-led military forces. We looked to the genuine allies of the East Timorese masses, the international working class including in Australia as well as the multi-millioned working class of Indonesia. We exposed the fraud of “human rights” imperialism. (See “Australian/UN Imperialist Troops Out of East Timor!” ASp No. 170, Autumn 2000.) Now known as Timor-Leste, the country remains one of the most impoverished in Asia under the boot of imperialism.

Today, the reformist left in this country politically tail West Papuan nationalist leaders and their futile search for a UN solution. Leading the charge, the Freedom Socialist Party declares there is “No time to waste” in getting behind the ULMWP petition pushing for an Australian UN vote in support of a West Papuan independence referendum. Meanwhile a Socialist Alliance National Council resolution on West Papua, quoted in Green Left Weekly (22 October), is centrally an appeal for the Australian capitalist government to act in defence of West Papuans. As for Solidarity, in a journalistic article outlining Australia’s complicity in the repression in West Papua, they can only bleat, “Australian support for the repression must end. The struggle for self-determination and freedom in West Papua needs our solidarity.” Like Socialist Alliance, these reformists look to Australian capitalism to “do the right thing.” No wonder Solidarity leaders excluded the Trotskyist Spartacist League from their recent meeting on West Papua in Sydney. These anti-communists consider the SL’s program of revolutionary struggle a “disruption.”

For Proletarian Revolutionary Internationalism

As the intractable contradictions of imperialist-capitalism impel new generations of workers, youth and minorities into struggle, the burning necessity to cohere these layers into the nucleus of a revolutionary internationalist workers party is key to the future of the Indonesian masses. As the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 showed, this is the indispensable instrument in the fight to successfully sweep away capitalist rule. In the course of class and social struggles and through the intervention of a Leninist vanguard party that stands as a tribune of the people, the workers of Indonesia can be broken from the nationalism and other backwardness that currently tie them to their exploiters. The fight against national, ethnic and religious oppression and to liberate women is essential to the struggle for proletarian revolution to sweep away capitalist rule and break the chains of imperialist subjugation. As we concluded our article reasserting independence for West Papua (ASp No. 236, Summer 2018/19):

“Workers in Australia also have a role to play, not simply by standing in class solidarity with the struggles of their Indonesian class brothers and sisters but by forging a Trotskyist party in this country to lead the necessary fight to sweep away the racist Australian ruling class through socialist revolution and establish a workers republic of Australia, part of a socialist Asia.”