En Passant

The Greens’ push for reforms imagines that in a time of global economic crisis, a crisis of low profit rates arising out of the way production is organised under capitalism, capital will willingly divert some of the surplus value we workers create back to us or the poor. That is fairy land stuff.

The dominant forces in the Greens are driven by electoralism and an attachment to neoliberalism (or fiscal responsibility, as they prefer to call it). Regardless of the odd press release tacking left, the Greens have just legitimised the neoliberal agenda Gillard is implementing. And as they have done so, they have further accommodated to the establishment.

The vote in Federal Parliament against marriage equality shows not that the movement has failed but that it has not yet won the final battle. The fact that equal love is only on the agenda because of grass roots activism shows the way forward. Build the campaign. Make it stronger and bigger and louder.

The real way to win progressive change in society is through industrial action and street struggles and then through building a socialist workers’ party that reflects and fights for workers’ interests and leads the class forward, not backward.

That means putting class and struggle on the agenda as the driving force of progressive change. It means we workers taking into our own hands our own futures through our own actions, not relying on the ALP or the Greens to deliver neoliberal policies dressed up as progress.

Victory to teachers. Victory to building workers. Victory to Queensland public servants.

This debate has erupted because the Greens do not accept every single neoliberal policy Labor puts forward as part of the ALP’s agenda to shift more of the wealth we create to the rich and powerful.

Labor has been spectacularly successful in achieving that, but because of the pressure of declining profit rates globally, the ALP’s ruling class masters want more, and more, and more…

The one sided class war continues in Australia and the Labor Party leadership and governments are on the, to date, successful bosses’ side. It is time for our side to fight back.

Perhaps, just perhaps, it is Labor’s anti-worker policies that sees workers deserting it and some (though not that many) swinging to the Greens? Perhaps, just perhaps, it is Labor’s anti-worker policies that sees or will see many workers holding their noses and voting for the Liberal or National Parties or even Bob Katter’s Australian Party?

Far better to blame a bogey man party like the Greens than to actually analyse why Labor is on the nose with workers.

The Greens have not become a left wing alternative in Australian politics. A genuine left wing alternative has to be built by building fighting movements in the workplaces, on campuses and on the streets.

Such an alternative has to reject all the “common sense” ideas of capitalist politics to which all the major parties, the Greens included, are committed and must argue instead for socialist solutions to the problems of the working class and the oppressed.

Such a perspective is a world away from the likes of Peter Whish-Wilson.

Bob Brown has left a party that is, despite appearances and proclamations to the contrary, in a crisis of sorts writes Ben Hillier in Socialist Alternative. The crisis of the Greens relates to their own vision and their capacity to go anywhere but backwards. The party Brown now leaves behind (not withstanding the notable exceptions of some left wing Greens who still attempt to provide some alternative vision to the mainstream) is a party thoroughly integrated into mainstream political life. This is the crux of the issue. And arguably, it relies primarily not on its own capacities, but on the failings of the ALP, and on the perception that Labor is, historically, finished.

http://www.marxistleftreview.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=46%3Aa-marxist-critique-of-the-australian-greens&catid=34%3Aissue-1-spring-2010&Itemid=77

Maybe it is time the Greens threatened to join Wilkie unless Labor begins to seriously address issues like refugees, gay marriage, Australia’s participation in the war in Afghanistan, the wealth shift to the rich, jobs and the need for real action on climate change, such as taking over the car plants to produce buses, solar farms and wind turbines. They won’t.

The task to win progressive reform is too important to be left to politicians. Only pressure from below – mass campaigns and strikes – can force the paid popinjays of profit to implement a program that benefits the 99%, not the 1%.