Australian Wildfires Toll

Product of Capitalist Greed and Neglect

We reprint below the second part of an article from Australasian Spartacist No. 240 (Autumn 2020), publication of the Australian section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist). Part One appeared in WV No. 1172 (20 March).

Among those severely hit by the fires were deeply oppressed Aboriginal communities. The South Coast town of Mogo was devastated, destroying the local land council office, an important social and cultural centre for Aboriginal people. The small Aboriginal community at Lake Tyers in Victoria’s East Gippsland region had only one small water tank on the back of a ute [utility vehicle] to fight the fires. One Aboriginal man who went to the relief centre in Bairnsdale in East Gippsland was turned away. He was told they had “helped enough of your people today.” Given the racist terror and neglect that Aboriginal people have been subject to since the beginning of white colonisation, it takes some chutzpah for that aggressive guardian of “White Australia,” the Murdoch press, to now espouse the efficacy of traditional Aboriginal use of fire to manage the landscape.

Outrageously, some people caught in fire zones reportedly had their welfare payments suspended. In one of his earliest speeches, [Prime Minister Scott] Morrison, a Pentecostal devotee and believer in miracles, condemned welfare recipients as the “taxed nots.” According to Pentecostal “prosperity gospel,” material and financial success is a measure of one’s Christian faith and a recognition of God’s favour. Sanctifying wealth and privilege, this mumbo jumbo preaches that the poor and dispossessed are responsible for their own misfortune. These views align perfectly with the interests of the profit-gouging capitalist rulers, who accrue fabulous wealth from the plunder of resources and exploitation of workers’ labour power.

In this capitalist society, giant resource companies are gifted billions in government subsidies, and the wealthy exploiters are considered to be deserving of massive tax breaks while welfare recipients are treated like criminals. Under successive Liberal and Labor governments, Newstart [unemployment] payments have not seen any real increase in 25 years. Those trying to eke out an existence on these payments are cruelly punished, forced onto cashless welfare cards and subjected to drug testing. Many welfare recipients have had their unemployment payments arbitrarily suspended. Tens of thousands have had false debts imposed against them by the government, impacting the mental health of many and driving some to suicide.

Following decades of Liberal and Labor government cuts, a significant minority of the population are spiralling into chronic unemployment, homelessness, poverty and misery, forced to depend on charities to survive. This, along with the ongoing systemic racist abuse of the Indigenous population, the torture of refugees in hellhole offshore camps, and relentless attacks on workers, illustrate the barbarism of Australian capitalism.

“We Are One” Bourgeois Lies

With apocalyptic scenes of thousands of terrified holiday-makers stranded on smoke-filled beaches, images of charred kangaroos and koalas and blackened bushland, and facing widespread criticism including from overseas, the government seized the opportunity to mobilise the military at the start of January. The deployment of the troops was heralded with much rally-around-the-flag hoopla as the bourgeois media cynically lauded the great “Aussie” spirit of the unpaid volunteer firefighters and grooved on stories of horrible suffering to “bring us together.” ALP [Australian Labor Party] leader Anthony Albanese’s singular contribution at this time was to reproach the government for not calling out the troops much earlier.

Ominously, Morrison later foreshadowed moves to ensure that in future “national emergencies,” the defence forces would be quickly mobilised without waiting for a request from state governments. While the government seeks to accustom the population to the intervention of the military into civil society, the bourgeois media endlessly propagates the lie that the capitalist state is a force for good. In truth, the capitalist state is an armed repressive apparatus, consisting at its core of the military, police, prisons and courts, that exists to defend the interests of the capitalist rulers against the struggles of the working class and oppressed.

In the devastating aftermath of the fires, and with the tourism industry in a tailspin, the bosses fret that the impact of the fires (now combined with the effects of the COVID-19 epidemic) will plunge the economy into recession. The bosses and government spruik [blather about] the need for a business-led recovery, with the government offering fire-affected businesses half-a-million-dollar loans. As for poor and working families, they might be able to access a piddling $1,280 from the government to supposedly rebuild their lives. At the same time, following the fires the government is already preparing for a royal commission to amnesty themselves and steer the anger of workers and oppressed into safe channels. Meanwhile they are preparing to make workers and the poor pay for their economic malaise, not least by revving up to get their union-busting Ensuring Integrity bill passed in the Senate.

Whether it is Liberal or Labor governments that administer this decrepit capitalist system, they serve the class interests of the tiny layer of filthy rich capitalist rulers and not the needs of working people and the oppressed. Thus, to the extent they can get away with it, they slash all manner of services, deceive and degrade an increasingly impoverished population, while spending hand-over-fist on prisons, police and military to clamp down on any resistance at home and prosecute Australian capitalism’s reactionary and exploitative imperialist interests abroad.

Today, while refusing to spend the funds to lease, let alone buy, the necessary large firefighting aircraft, the federal government lavishes tens of billions each year on the military as part of a U.S.-led military build-up targeting the Chinese deformed workers state, with the aim of overturning the gains of the 1949 Revolution in order to open up that country once more to untrammelled imperialist exploitation.

Eco-Socialists and “Clean Green” Capitalism

Throughout the bushfire ordeal, a reactionary cabal including from the Murdoch media and the Liberal/National Coalition peddled anti-science garbage to cover for the fact that the bourgeoisie refused to prepare for the extreme fire conditions. We were variously told that carbon dioxide emissions were not the main factor in climate change, global warming is “good for us” and the fires were mainly caused by arsonists or environmentalists, the latter blamed for the build-up of fuel in bushland areas. The deputy prime minister, and National Party leader, Michael McCormack, even attributed the increased incidence of fires to exploding horse manure!

On the other hand, the small-time capitalist Greens party and a growing section of the bourgeoisie lay the blame for the destruction wrought by the fires almost exclusively on climate change. Today, along with the likes of former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, the Greens are promoting a Green New Deal (GND). Under this rubric the Greens push the fraud of a reformed “clean energy” capitalism, with a “fairer economy and a more equal society,” gibbering that a GND is a “massive opportunity to solve the climate crisis and to ensure everyone has a good life.” What a crock.

In thrall to the bourgeois ideology of environmentalism, the whole gamut of reformist groups from Socialist Alliance (SA) to Socialist Alternative (SAlt), the Communist Party (CPA), Solidarity and Socialist Action (formerly the Socialist Party) try to outdo each other in their clamour to ban coal and gas, shut down the fossil fuel industries, fund renewables and so forth. Their embrace of environmentalism reached new levels during the fires, albeit sometimes with a wafer-thin veneer of “anti-capitalist” rhetoric. For example, SAlt’s scribbling that “nothing short of revolution will suffice” is grafted onto their “climate activist” agenda that includes direct collaboration with the capitalist Greens.

The entire purpose of the climate activist movement is to advise/pressure the bourgeoisie on how best to fuel its economy. The meaning of this is made explicit by Solidarity who are gaga for a reformed “clean energy” GND-style capitalism. They declare, “[h]undreds of thousands of good jobs can be created right now through a public works program in renewable energy, public transport, housing, land management and reforestation.” The bill for this “transition” will be footed by the “rich and their corporations,” in other words by the very capitalist rulers who have looted industry, eroded health and education services, run down public infrastructure, and who refused to take preventative measures against the fires. The reality is the bourgeoisie and its government will build industry and employ people where it is profitable for them to do so.

The GND is a manoeuvre to give environmentalism a worker-friendly spin by looking for converts in the union bureaucracy and trying to veil its aim of slashing entire industries like natural gas and coal mining. This would result in the complete destruction of strategically placed unionised workforces, to be replaced by “green jobs.” Under capitalism, the reformists’ calls for a “just transition” for fossil fuel workers into “green jobs” is utopian idealism, but more importantly, it shows indifference to the destruction of centres of union power. Already, workers in the “green economy” suffer from low wages and no unions, posing the need for a class-struggle fight to organise the unorganised. Furthermore, Australia exports 75 percent of its coal, much of it to China and India. The immediate termination of fossil fuels would have a devastating impact on the living conditions of working people through out the world, not least those in the Chinese deformed workers state and in neocolonial countries oppressed by imperialist powers such as Australia.

For Marxists, addressing the human-derived aspect of global warming is fundamentally not a technical but a social problem. We oppose environmentalism because it accepts the inviolability of capitalism, in which production is profit driven and society’s wealth is monopolised by a tiny fabulously wealthy bourgeois ruling class. While some eco-socialists lecture workers on the evils of “limitless” consumption, we fight for a society that will provide more, not less, for the working people and the impoverished masses of the world. Our goal is to eliminate material scarcity and qualitatively advance the living standards of all. To this end we fight for workers revolutions in the capitalist countries to expropriate the bourgeoisies and proletarian political revolution in China and the other bureaucratically deformed workers states, laying the basis for the construction of a planned, collectivised world economy. An international federation of workers states would marshal world productive resources to immensely raise the living standards of the impoverished masses of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, who today under imperialist subjugation are deprived of such necessities as decent housing, quality health care, clean water and education.

However, for the left-wing eco forces, it is carbon not their own capitalist rulers that poses the biggest threat to working people. Thus, it is hardly surprising that numerous reformist groups regularly call on workers to vote for the bourgeois Greens. In October 2018, SAlt even featured NSW [New South Wales] Greens MP [Member of Parliament] David Shoebridge as the keynote speaker in their own public forum, “Police State—Confronting the Law and Order Agenda.” Along with the CPA and SA, SAlt echoed Anthony Albanese in chastising the Morrison government for not mobilising the repressive force of the state more quickly during the fires. This line is in lieu of fighting for a fully unionised professional firefighting service.

These reformists prettify the imperialist armed forces, peddling illusions that they can be repurposed to play a progressive role. This is a crystallised expression of the age-old reformist pipedream that the imperialists can be pressured to change their priorities in the interests of working people and the oppressed. The job of the Australian military is to enforce the predatory interests of Australian imperialism abroad. It is also deployed “at home” against any significant threat to capitalist profit-making, such as when the Chifley Labor government used the military to break the great coal miners’ strike in 1949.

The reformism of these left groups was on full display at 10 January protests they helped to build in Sydney and Melbourne. The main protest demands, including “Fund the Firies” and “Sack Scomo,” were framed to appeal to the broadest number of people on the lowest common denominator. The pro-capitalist ALP leadership and the bourgeois Greens could readily support these demands. “Fund the Firies” concedes to the Australian national ethos of volunteerism and deliberately deep-sixes the fight for a fully-funded and unionised professional firefighting service. As for “Sack Scomo” and SAlt’s infantile “Fuck ScoMo,” these demands are equivalent to “put the Liberals last” and/or elect the ALP or Greens. And there’s the rub. What these “left” swindlers are actually engaged in is not a fight to sweep away the capitalist system through workers revolution but for a “cleaner, greener” capitalism.

Fight For Socialism!

As the International Communist League has noted many times before, we are far from indifferent to climate change. But our primary concern is human civilization, and the main threat to that is the continued rule of the capitalists. Nothing good will come from advising these plunderers of the world on how to best generate energy.

Our answer to the eco-socialists’ demands to “leave it in the ground” is to expropriate all energy companies, of whatever technology, without compensation and run them in the interests of society, not for profit. A workers government would strive to generate and use energy in the most rational, efficient and safe manner possible, including by developing nuclear, solar, wind and other non-carbon sources. Even then, it will be likely necessary to harness fossil fuels for a period of time in order to lift everyone out of misery and to massively increase the production of things people need, as part of the struggle for a genuinely communist future of abundance where each will be able to work to his or her abilities and take from society according to their needs.

The devastating fires proved yet again that the capitalist rulers are a deadly danger to us all. Driven by competition for profit, the ruling classes of the richest capitalist countries are compelled, through capitalism’s inner workings, into an unrelenting drive for new markets and ever-greater sources of cheap labour. Imperialist powers wage wars against their rivals for the division and re-division of the world, subjugating whole countries and regions in the process. It is the mission of the proletariat to overthrow this barbaric system.

The capitalist exploiters are incapable of maintaining this society, much less tackling global climate change. It will take successful socialist revolutions, collectivising the economies in Australia and around the world, to enable the international planning necessary to mitigate climate change and its effects, laying the basis for a global society of full equality for all based on abundance, not generalised want, poverty and war. For that to be achieved, the proletariats of different countries throughout the world need revolutionary vanguard parties modelled on Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party, which led the great Russian Revolution of 1917. We in the Spartacist League are dedicated to building a world party of socialist revolution that fights for international socialist revolution. Join us!