En Passant

The way to avoid total defeat is to go on the attack now. Sitting around the campfire chanting Kumbaya and holding hands with the bosses and Abbott won’t stop them knifing us in our sleep. Massive discord holds the key to the possibility of success and of beating back the bosses. Or as the BLF says in much plainer English: ‘If you don’t fight you lose.’

The ramifications of the collapse in class struggle are clear for all to see – growing inequality, more wealth being shovelled to the wealthy, long working hours, high levels of disguised unemployment and politically a cowered trade union movement meek in its mildness and terrifying in its timidity, with a Labor Party whose raison d’etre appears almost indistinguishable from the Tories.

Instead of attacking Chinese and other ‘foreign’ workers we should welcome them and fight for them. In doing that can we begin rebuilding our capacity as a movement to defend all jobs and help keep at bay the nationalist flag of racism.

The Labor Party has attracted to it free market spivs, hacks and petit bourgeois careerists whose only conception of working class life is from television or the pages of The Australian. Julia Gillard is as divorced from the life of working class Australians as Hosni Mubarak was from ordinary Egyptians.

The first task of unionists is to rebuild rank and file organisation and win back control of their unions from conservatives like Howes. As one Egyptian socialist put it, it’s time to take Tahrir Square into the workplace.