Spartacists Intervene at Aboriginal National Day of Action

Fighting for a Revolutionary Perspective

On 14 July Spartacist League and Spartacus Youth Club supporters joined national protests against the whitewash acquittal of the Queensland cop Chris Hurley for the brutal killing of Aboriginal Mulrunji Doomadgee in the Palm Island lockup in November 2004. Many at the rallies also voiced their opposition to the outrageous federal government police/military takeover of Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory, rightly recognised as an open grab for Aboriginal land. Our leaflet condemning this racist occupation (see page 1) was well received by protesters in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne.

Spartacist supporters addressed both the Brisbane and Melbourne rallies. Our teams raised defence of Palm Island Indigenous man Lex Wotton who is facing state prosecution following angry protests on the island sparked by the killing of Mulrunji. We demand: Drop the charges now! We uniquely called for union/black/minority mobilisations against escalating racist terror. The working class must unleash its social power in order to defend not only itself but all those targeted by capitalist injustice including the deeply oppressed Aboriginal people!

The daily racist terror suffered by Aborigines was highlighted by many speakers at the rallies. In Melbourne, an Aboriginal woman gave the crowd a chilling account of being bashed semi-conscious by cops, who picked her up as she was about to attend an “after-show” party in a wealthy Melbourne suburb. They claimed she was a thief. Only when her student ID fell out, as they were removing her clothing, did the police stop bashing her and toss her into a cell. When she later refused to sign a statement saying she had been well-treated, they locked her up again for a few more hours.

While there was plenty of anger among protesters against such raw racist terror, rally organisers worked to channel this into appeals to the same capitalist state that promotes and carries out the terror! Thus, key demands of the Melbourne demonstration—endorsed by the Freedom Socialist Party, Socialist Alliance, Resistance and Socialist Alternative among others—sought to pressure the state to change its priorities by funding “community controlled services not troops, cops and martial law!” The demands were crowned by a call to “Implement the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody!” referring to the 1991 findings of the “inquiry” established by the federal Hawke/Keating Labor government. These demands were replicated in one way or another at the Sydney and Brisbane demos.

This reliance on the state through royal commissions is also pushed by many Aboriginal activists across the country including prominent Brisbane-based Socialist Alliance supporter Sam Watson. Indeed the Brisbane rally put forward the demand to “open a new Royal Commission into all deaths since—including Mulrunji’s death in the Palm Island watchhouse.”

The very idea of a royal commission ought to be repellent to anyone fighting for the rights of workers and the oppressed. For more than 200 years the truth of police terror against Aborigines has been repeatedly written in blood and covered over! The 1991 Royal Commission findings endorsed the police and coroner verdicts in all 99 cases of Aboriginal deaths it reviewed. Not one cop was ever prosecuted and since then hundreds more have died at the hands of the state! More recently, in 2001, the federal Howard government established the Cole Royal Commission into the building industry as part of its union-busting drive. This spearheaded the current government witchhunt against the CFMEU construction union, including the formation of the widely-hated Australian Building and Construction Commission.

In a powerful speech to the Melbourne rally, Spartacist supporter, Neil Florrimell, polemicised against the reformist political leadership of the demonstration, explaining that those who call for implementing the recommendations of royal commissions, or to make cops accountable, are selling a lie that the state can serve the interests of the working class and oppressed. He pointed out that the job of royal commissions and similar government inquiries into black deaths is to whitewash systematic racist killings at the hands of the state and that the killing of Mulrunji is the implementation of the findings of the royal commission! Using the examples of the acquittal of Hurley and the frame-up of black political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal in the U.S., he stated the basic truth that there is no justice in the capitalist courts!

Any appeal for the state to investigate itself serves only to sow illusions in the very enforcer of Aboriginal oppression. The capitalist state, consisting at its core of the army, cops, courts and prisons, exists and is refurbished in order to defend the interests of the tiny layer of capitalist rulers. The state cannot be pressured to serve the interests of the working class and oppressed. It must be shattered through workers revolution.

We fight for independent working-class defence of the besieged Aboriginal people. This class-struggle perspective is no pipe-dream. There are powerful, albeit far too few, examples of such struggles against White Australia capitalism. The famous 1966 Gurindji Aboriginal stockmen’s strike at Wave Hill in the Northern Territory, which followed the land claim by the Yolngu people, got significant backing and material support from unions. During this struggle Aboriginal leaders from the Northern Territory were warmly welcomed by construction workers on many building sites in New South Wales.

Today Aborigines, immigrants, leftist protesters and unionists are targeted by increased state repression. It is the working class with their hands on the levers of production who can, by withdrawing their labour, bring the capitalist profit system to a grinding halt. Based on our communist program, we fight to unite the social power of the proletariat at the head of all the oppressed to beat back the attacks by the bosses and their machinery of repression. The proletariat can only free itself from capitalist slavery when it fights for all the oppressed and exploited under capitalism.

As our Melbourne speaker concluded, we need a workers revolution to rip the power out of the hands of the capitalist rulers and establish a workers state which puts society’s resources at the disposal of the working people. This perspective requires a fight within the unions to break the working class from the nationalism and reliance on the capitalist state fostered by the union bureaucracy and the ALP, itself founded on defence of White Australia capitalism. It is in the process of this struggle against the program of Laborism within the workers movement that the multiracial revolutionary workers party, vital to liberating the exploited and oppressed, will be built.