Young Spartacus

What We Fight For

Join the SYC!

The Spartacus Youth Club (SYC) intervenes into social struggles as the student/youth auxiliary of the Spartacist League, armed with a working-class program based on the politics of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We look to the example of the Russian Revolution of October 1917 that smashed capitalism through workers revolution and established the world’s first workers state. Today we fight for new October Revolutions!

The SYC struggles to break the pro-capitalist ALP’s political hold over the working class, in opposition to the fake socialists who paint the ALP as a “lesser evil” rather than the betrayer of the interests of workers. Against the illusion that a better life for workers and the oppressed can be won through parliamentary measures and the reform of aspects of capitalism, the SYC fights to win youth to the program of international workers revolution.

We have consistently defended the Chinese, North Korean, Cuban and Vietnamese deformed workers states and forthrightly opposed Australian imperialism’s predatory military forays. At demonstrations and meetings the SYC has fought for Australian imperialist troops and cops to get out of East Timor, the Asia-Pacific, Iraq and Afghanistan. We have been in the forefront in Australia in fighting for the freedom of American black political prisoner and eloquent journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, and for the abolition of the racist U.S. death penalty. We have consistently opposed the racist Australian capitalists’ vicious attacks on immigrants, refugees and all minorities including the besieged Aboriginal people and today call for the dropping of the charges against Palm Island Aboriginal leader Lex Wotton, and for union/black/minority action against racist terror! We defend all class-war political prisoners regardless of our political differences with them. We have prominently defended the anti-G20 protesters charged by the Bracks and Iemma state Labor governments. An injury to one is an injury to all!

This is all part of our Marxist program to mobilise the working class in defence of all the oppressed. We fight to win youth to the perspective of building a multiethnic, revolutionary vanguard workers party essential for the victory of socialist revolution. If you agree with our program below and want to fight for a socialist future, free from capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter, join the SYC!

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1 Mobilise students behind the social power of the working class! Picket lines mean don’t cross! One out—all out! For industrial unions, not the treacherous division of unions by craft! For union hiring halls! For the closed shop, where every worker is in the union! For union-run job recruitment and training programs to recruit those historically discriminated against—Aborigines, immigrants, women. Organise the unorganised! Down with slave-labour “work for the dole”! Down with “junior rates” of pay and multi-tier wages which pit younger and older workers against each other! Down with all anti-union laws! Government, courts out of the unions—labour must clean its own house! Cops, prison guards, security guards out of the unions! Down with Arbitration and the Industrial Relations Courts! Down with racist protectionism—whether in anti-“globalisation” or “fair trade” guise or otherwise—which pits workers in Australia against workers in other countries! Workers of the world unite!

2 Australia is a jackal imperialist power which attempts to lord it over Southeast Asia both as “deputy sheriff” for U.S. imperialism and to pursue the interests of the Australian capitalist class in the superexploitation of the oppressed masses in Asia. Down with the counterrevolutionary U.S./Australia alliance! U.S. bases out now! Down with the Japan/Australia military pact and all of Australia’s regional military agreements! U.S./Australia get out of the Philippines, Afghanistan and Iraq! Hands off Iran! We stand opposed, first and foremost, to our “own” imperialist rulers—the main enemy is at home! Not a person, not a cent for the imperialist military! All Australian imperialist troops get out of East Timor, the Solomon Islands! Hands off the South Pacific! Beware the fraud of “humanitarian” imperialism! No illusions in the UN—a den of imperialist thieves, their lackeys and victims! Defeat Australian imperialism through workers revolution!

3 Down with anti-communist China-bashing! Defend the gains of the 1949 Chinese Revolution, which smashed the rule of the landlords and capitalists, throwing off the yoke of imperialist exploitation, and collectivising property! For unconditional military defence of the deformed workers states—China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba—against imperialist attack and attempts at internal capitalist counterrevolution! Close the U.S./Australia spy station at Pine Gap—dagger against China, North Korea and Vietnam! For workers political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracies and establish regimes of workers democracy based on the power of workers councils and revolutionary internationalism!

4 For women’s liberation through socialist revolution! For free, quality 24-hour childcare! For free abortion on demand! For mass labour-backed mobilisations to defend abortion clinics against attack by religious bigots! Down with parental consent laws! Down with attacks on Medicare, public health services! For free, quality health care for all! Equal pay for equal work! Down with reactionary “age of consent” laws! Down with anti-gay laws! Full democratic rights for gays including the right to marry and divorce! State out of the bedroom! Down with all laws against consensual activity called “crimes without victims” such as prostitution, pornography, and drugs!

5 Full citizenship rights for all immigrants! Close the hell-hole “detention centres”! No deportations! Immigrant workers are key to class struggle—organise so-called “illegal” workers! For full union wages and conditions for all workers! Down with the racist “war on drugs” targeting in particular immigrant youth! Down with the “war on terror” which particularly targets immigrants, workers and the left! Free all the detainees! Down with anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic and all racist bigotry! Fascist terror is not a matter of free speech! No reliance on the capitalist state! For mass labour/minority mobilisations to stop the fascists and race-terrorists!

6 The capitalist state—at its core the cops, courts, prisons and standing army—is an instrument of organised violence wielded by the capitalist class against the working class and oppressed. The state is not neutral and cannot be reformed—it must be smashed through workers revolution! No illusions in police “reform” or royal commission whitewashes! No to “community control” of the police, which sows illusions in the racist state! Defend the victims of racist cop terror and police frame-up! For mass labour protests against cop terror! Free all class-war prisoners! There is no justice in the capitalist courts! No to gun control! For the right of armed self-defence! Abolish the Senate and reactionary relics like the monarchy and governor-general! Down with anti-democratic compulsory voting and mandatory preferences! No support to the racist bourgeois “republicans”! For a workers republic, the dictatorship of the proletariat!

7 Australian capitalism was founded on the dispossession and attempted genocide of the Aboriginal peoples. We support any attempts by Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders to claw back some of the land which has been stolen from them, and to get whatever financial compensation they can from the tight-fisted, racist ruling class. Racist Australian military/cops out of Aboriginal communities! We fight for complete legal equality; for jobs for all; and for massive health and education programs to address the oppression of Aboriginal people on the reserves, in the wretched “fringes” and inner cities. Down with racist state terror! “Reconciliation” is a racist hoax—for a class-struggle fight for Aboriginal rights! Only socialist revolution can end the deep-going oppression of the Aboriginal peoples, laying the material basis for a society not based on brutal exploitation and all-sided racism.

8 For free, quality education for all, including overseas students! No fees! Abolish HECS! For open admissions and a full, state-paid living allowance for all! Abolish the campus administration! For worker/staff/student control of the universities! Down with government and administration interference in student organisations! Cops off campus! Security guards, hands off the left! Drive army and ASIS/ASIO recruiters off campus!

9 For separation of church and state! Defend science against superstition and mysticism! Down with state funding for private and religious schools! For a single, secular school system! Down with “religious education” in state schools!

10 The ALP is the historic party of “White Australia.” Proudly pro-imperialist, it has been trusted by the ruling class to run Australia during both interimperialist world wars. A bourgeois workers party, it upholds the rule of racist capitalism. Organically tied to the ALP, the trade-union bureaucracy acts as the agent of the capitalist class in the workers movement, spreading the lie of a common “national interest” between workers and their exploiters. Split the working-class base from the pro-capitalist leadership of the ALP—break with Laborism! For a class-struggle leadership of the unions! For a multiracial, revolutionary workers party which opposes every manifestation of capitalist injustice and oppression in the fight for socialist revolution! Look to the heroic, Bolshevik-led workers of 1917 tsarist Russia! For new October Revolutions! For an international centrally planned economy, under the rule of the working class! For a workers republic of Australia, part of a socialist Asia!