En Passant

This article and video from the Guardian show the truth about the Manus Island attack on asylum seekers, a truth Scott Morrison must have known when he lied to the Australian people, blaming the refugees for the attacks.

Morrison did however speak the truth when he referred to Australia’s asylum seeker treatment as Operation Sovereign Murders.

A recent survey of Australian business suggests that investment will be 17 percent lower next year. This will increase unemployment over time, and shows the bosses are losing faith in their own system. Their demands for wage cuts, job cuts, attacks on conditions and less spending on public services to fund tax cuts for capital will become shriller and shriller. So too will their rhetoric against asylum seekers, those on Newstart, unions and unionists, indigenous Australians, Muslims. The bosses will try to shift blame for economic problems from the system to scapegoats and if the problems worsen their rhetoric against these ‘outsiders’ will become louder and more outrageous.

The jobs massacre is gathering pace. Holden, Toyota, Alcoa, QANTAS are just the beginning. Instead of talking to the bosses as they slash job after job when will unions and workers respond to the bosses’ 30 year class war with a bit of industrial biff? It will need more than a few punches. Our side must begin preparations for our own war in response to theirs.

The bosses are being ably abetted in their war by class traitors like Martin Ferguson, former left wing trade union leader, Parliamentarian and Minister. His support for Workchoices-like changes to industrial relations are not some aberration. They are the logic of Labor and neoliberalism reflecting itself in individuals such as Ferguson adopting all the ideology of the market and trickle down ideas.

Tony Abbott and Bill Shorten were in Darwin welcoming the last of the Australian troops from Afghanistan. The parade disguised the enormity of the defeat – up to 30000 Australian troops over 12 years in the country, 40 dead hundreds injured, hated by Afghans as invaders, and with the Taliban poised to re-take power in the next year or so when the US withdraws fully.

Billions wasted and what for?

Australia’s invasion wasn’t about combatting terrorism, or liberating women, or restoring democracy or all the other lies the bourgeoisie cloak their wars in. For Australia’s ruling class it was about the ANZUS treaty, keeping the US on side, allowing Australia to continue with US support to be the top dog in the region and part of the US agenda to contain China.

Many of the reactionary forces in Venezuela have mobilised against the democratically elected left wing capitalist government. Socialists must support the government but recognise, like the Bolsheviks defending Kerensky against Kornilov, that the resolution of the crisis is socialist revolution. If workers were to mobilise in defence of Maduro as the working class it would open up that possibility.

In the Ukraine one section of the plutocracy, some with links to the fascists, has come to power in many but not all parts of the country. The Crimea may succede, the Russians may invade, the country may split, there could be civil war. The seeds of workers’ revolution may also lie in the uprising and ongoing turmoil.

US imperialism has been warning Russian imperialism not to intervene. Of course the Munro doctrine doesn’t exist either. The solution is not one branch of plutocracy supported by one imperialism but a working class government.

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