For Working-Class Protest Against State Repression!

Australia: Drop the Charges Against Leftist Anti-APEC Protesters!

The following leaflet was issued on September 11 by the Spartacist League of Australia, section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist).

The Spartacist League of Australia condemns the state repression meted out during the recent Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Sydney. We protest the arrest and beating of leftist anti-APEC demonstrators and others who found themselves in the cross hairs of state repression such as journalists and photographers. Drop the charges now! Over the two-week period leading up to and including the summit, some 88 people were reportedly arrested and many are now facing charges.

For more than a week during APEC, Sydneysiders got a close-up view of the arrogant and brutal state forces that daily target Aborigines, immigrants, anti-racist youth and militant unionists in capitalist Australia. At a cost of $170 million, the city was transformed into a fortress in which virtually the entire population was treated as enemy suspects. Such was the experience of accountant Greg McLeay, who was savagely tackled to the ground by police and then imprisoned for 22 hours after simply trying to cross the road!

A five-kilometre long, 2.8-metre high, concrete-reinforced steel fence was erected to seal off areas hosting the summit. Designated “restricted zones” were viciously enforced by gun-toting cops as snipers took aim from rooftops and helicopters buzzed overhead. Some 5,000 police and army were mobilised, backed by 1,800 private security guards, rapid response 4WD riot trucks and water cannon. Building on legislation enacted before the 2000 police state Olympics and subsequent draconian “anti-terror” laws, the military were ready with extraordinary domestic powers to interrogate civilians and seize documents. The special force killers of the SAS [Special Air Service] were on standby with “shoot to kill” powers.

This vast military force was combined with an hysterical government-led campaign to demonise protesters as potentially violent or terrorists. Police used the pretext of drug searches and vehicle inspections to stop, search and harass a convoy organised by the Socialist Party which was making its way from Melbourne to Sydney for the protests. Outrageously the government assembled a “restricted persons” list that threatened many activists with immediate arrest if they joined anti-APEC protest actions. This repression, enforced by the NSW [New South Wales premier Morris] Iemma state Labor government along with the federal Liberal/National coalition government, was designed to intimidate and stymie all protest against APEC—a confab of bloody imperialist statesmen, their victims and intended victims. Through summits such as APEC, the imperialists seek to further their exploitation of oppressed dependent countries and foment capitalist counterrevolution in the Chinese, North Korean, Vietnamese and Cuban bureaucratically deformed workers states.

Despite extreme intimidation, up to ten thousand people turned out for the main protest on 8 September. This included contingents from the maritime and fire brigade unions. Some of those on the “restricted persons” list, like Solidarity supporter Paddy Gibson, courageously defied government orders to stay away. The brutality of the state forces was clearly displayed on the day as they sporadically provoked and attacked protesters. After numbers at the rally significantly dwindled, police moved in and assaulted Gibson and others before hauling them away. Up to 18 people were arrested and a number have been charged. After the rally, Spartacist supporters joined protesters gathered outside the Surry Hills police headquarters in solidarity with the detained leftists.

In a provocation against the demonstration, a fascist group calling itself “New Right AUS/NZ” mobilised at the start of the rally, likely with the state’s go-ahead. Later the cops shielded the vile fascists from angry protesters, including Spartacist supporters who sought to mobilise unionists and others to drive them out of the rally. In contrast, rally organisers including supporters of the Democratic Socialist Perspective (DSP) called on protesters to ignore the fascists—ultimately a suicidal course. A revolutionary leadership of the rally would have made clear the deadly threat and tried to mobilise appropriate action. Our program to stop the fascists is centred on the independent mobilisation of the working class and its allies.

The DSP, along with Socialist Alternative (SAlt), are prominent in the class-collaborationist Stop Bush Coalition. A key organiser of the anti-APEC protests, the coalition’s main rally demands included “Stop Bush,” “Make [Australian prime minister] Howard History” and “Bring the troops home.” These demands amount to little more than an appeal for a kinder, gentler Australian imperialist state, preferably administered by a Labor government backed up by the bourgeois Greens. The reformists peddle the lie that imperialism is simply a policy rather than a system of capitalist exploitation and subjugation. Indeed, in the name of “human rights,” the DSP mobilised for Australian imperialist troops to occupy East Timor in 1999 while SAlt enthusiastically marched in the chauvinist “Troops in” rallies. To this day the DSP refuse to call for Australian troops out of East Timor!

In contrast, we Trotskyists fight for revolutionary opposition to racist Australian imperialism and demand not one person, not one cent for the Australian imperialist military! At the anti-APEC protests we called for racist Australian troops/cops to get out of Iraq, Afghanistan, the Solomons and East Timor; we protested the counterrevolutionary U.S./Australia alliance and demanded U.S. bases out; we called for the unconditional military defence of the Chinese, North Korean, Vietnamese and Cuban deformed workers states against imperialist attack and capitalist counterrevolution! While the reformists demanded “Bring the troops home,” our placard “Cops/Military Get Out of Aboriginal Communities Now!” pointed to the fact that the Australian military is already at “home,” carrying out a vicious racist occupation of Aboriginal communities while enforcing a naked land grab. They were also very much “at home” in Sydney this month, mobilised to help enforce the suppression of the anti-APEC protests!

The Australian capitalist rulers transparently used APEC to bolster their oppressive laws, refurbish their instruments of repression and perfect police/military measures. It highlighted yet again that the capitalist state—with the police, army, prisons and courts at its core—is not neutral. Its purpose is to maintain the power of the capitalist class and to suppress the working class and anyone else who might challenge the bosses’ exploitative rule. The police are not “workers in uniform,” as those like the Socialist Party contend, but the professional thugs of the bourgeoisie. They have no place in the workers movement! Cops, prison screws, security guards out of the unions now! For working-class actions to protest racist state repression!

As V.I. Lenin, leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution, wrote in State and Revolution, “The state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another.” The capitalist state cannot be cleaned up, reformed or pressured to act on behalf of the workers and oppressed; it must be shattered through victorious workers revolution. Such a course demands a proletarian internationalist program. We fight against the poisonous nationalism pushed by the Laborite trade-union bureaucracy, who preach the lie that workers have a common “national” interest with the capitalist class. As we declared at the rally: “Down With Racist Protectionism! Workers of the World Unite!”

In the context of the upcoming federal elections, the SL says: “No vote to the ALP [Australian Labor Party]!” We seek to break workers from illusions in the ALP, fighting to split the working-class base away from the pro-capitalist tops in the struggle to forge the indispensable instrument—a multiracial revolutionary workers party, a tribune of the people—to lead the fight to expropriate the capitalist class. Only then will it be possible to build a new, socialist society based on a centrally planned economy where production is for human need, not for the profits of a tiny minority. For a workers republic of Australia, part of a socialist Asia!