En Passant

Solidarity magazine has a good article on the AWU and Shorten deals with the bosses and the failure of many unions to fight the bosses. It finishes off with this: ‘Rather than a “modern” class collaborationist model of unionism, which has failed workers and just lays the basis for the Liberals to attack further, we need to get back to the politics of class struggle, by mobilising rank-and-file members, who have no interest in cosy deals.’ To read the whole article click here.

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.’

If mass strikes to defend jobs, wages and conditions were to happen Tony the liberator could become Tony the liberated.

Abbott’s instability, his thought bubble approach to policy, his climate denialist base within the extreme right of the Liberal Party and the looming economic crisis in Australia all make for a possible tumultuous period of rule for the current leader of the Opposition and his by and large unremarkable front bench if they win, as they will, the next election.

The key will be class struggle. How much longer can Australian workers not fight?

Tom O’Lincoln has just republished his wonderful book Years of Rage: Social Conflict in the Fraser Era. This is a Monet of a book in which the daub of detail creates a canvas of class conflict, stretching from Kerr’s coup through the 7 years of the Fraser Governments to the election of the Hawke Labor Government in 1983.

The way to fight Abbott is to strike against Gillard Labor and its rotten anti-working class policies.

If Labor wants 8000 new members it could reject neoliberalism. It could tax big business and the rich. It could pay public servants, teachers, nurses and community workers much more. It could abolish the Australian Building and Construction Commission. It could process refugees on shore, legislate for gay marriage, give self-determination to aborigines and pay the rent, end the invasion of the Northern Territory… It could, it could, it could…

It won’t. It can’t address its open embrace of the market for the last 30 years. The key to that has been the class collaboration of the trade union leadership. The consequence is a party trapped in ongoing decline. We are witnessing the final death rattles of Labor as the party of social democracy in Australia. Who better to lead it than a woman with no social democratic vision?