Inside this issue:
- LSVs: all bets are off
- It’s “Department”, not “Service”
- Presumptive legislation: Department gives the thumbs down
- Drug and Alcohol petition
- Firefighter Alumni – free labour
- Mental Health Month
LSVs: all bets are off
With the Department’s hyenas displaying appalling conduct by threatening to sack numerous injured comrades (including members injured on the job) and citing a lack of available alternative duties positions as part of the excuse, the Union has called off any further negotiation over the LSV staffing arrangements that were agreed through the Waratah Fire Station settlement (see SITREP No. 8/2010).
So there is no confusion, the current, and only, agreed position for the staffing of the LSVs was set out in correspondence between the Union and Department last year whereby:
“the LSVs would in future be primarily staffed by permanent firefighters and officers on alternative duties. It was also understood that in the event of insufficient alternative duties permanents, other “spare” permanent firefighters could be used to staff the LSV and failing that, that the LSV in question would effectively be grounded until:
a) it could again be staffed by a permanent firefighter or officer on alternative duties; or
b) it could again be staffed by a “spare” permanent firefighter;
c) it was required immediately for urgent duties, in which case it could be staffed by a retained firefighter who would respond to the LSV station as he/she would respond to any other incident.”
It beggars belief that some of the members targeted for termination on 20 October are actually still driving the LSVs at the moment. More to follow.
It’s “Department”, not “Service”
We note that the Department recently started referring to itself in letters as “the Service”. Why? Who knows – it may even just be just sour grapes after the Union knocked off the Commissioner’s preferred name of NSW Fire and Rescue Service last year (see SITREP 50/2010, “New century, new name”). Either way, FRNSW is not a “service”. It was a government Department as the NSWFB, and it remains a government Department as FRNSW.
We agree that it’s not the year’s biggest issue, but members are nonetheless encouraged to continue referring to management as “the Department” because (1) it is accurate and (2) it annoys them.
Presumptive legislation:
Department gives thumbs down
SITREP 36/2011 reported on the Senate Inquiry’s report into presumptive legislation, which basically recommended that the list of deemed cancers be expanded to the 14 cancers proposed in the FBEU’s submission. We also reported that FBEU lobbying saw the Greens and the ALP Opposition now offering in-principle support for presumptive legislation in NSW. But what of the NSW Government?
In a letter to the Union last week, the Minister’s office informed us that “I am advised by Fire and Rescue NSW that, at present there is insufficient conclusive evidence of an association between the occupation of firefighter and some cancers, and a lack of high quality research studies on the matter.
So the O’Farrell Government, operating on the advice of our very own Department, knows better than the Commonwealth Parliament’s Senate Inquiry. Stay tuned.
Drug and Alcohol petition
An anonymous petition has been circulating this week calling for a General Meeting to ban random D&A testing and to ratify the existing policy based on the capacity to work rather than punishment.
The State Committee had already resolved to oppose the Department’s AOD Policy at its July 2011 meeting (see SITREP 29/2011), but yesterday also resolved to endorse the petition’s only direction that ‘this meeting bans random and targeted testing of alcohol and other drugs and ratify the existing policy based on the capacity to work rather than punishment” thereby making this Union policy, and a General Meeting unnecessary.
Members are reminded that the Union’s officials are all willing and available to speak with any member who wishes to have something considered by the State Committee at their monthly meeting. While it is not required under the Rules, members are encouraged to do this before they spark off unnecessary petitions and general meetings.
Firefighter Alumni – free labour
In another cost cutting exercise the Department recently launched a ‘Firefighter Alumni’ program for firefighters to field calls, without pay, from potential permanent firefighter applicants about the job and aspects of working at a fire station and referring them to FRNSW various policies and other information.
Members are always willing to share our knowledge of our industry to interested applicants who visit fire stations, but a systematic voluntary program of this kind has no place in our job. Why? Because this program is nothing more than a cynical attempt by the Department to offload paid work currently performed by the Department’s Human Resource and Recruitment staff on to FBEU members on an unpaid basis. At the very least, it’s a cost saving for management. If we wanted to be volunteers we would have joined the RFS!
Mental Health Month
For the month of October organisations across the country, including the FBEU, will be raising awareness of mental health as part of Mental Health Month. Organised by the Mental Health Association, Mental Health Month aims to promote social and emotional wellbeing to the population in this state by encouraging people to maximise their health and increasing mental health literacy. There are a number of events being held across NSW, details of which can be found at www.mentalhealth.asn.au along with other mental health resources.
Darin Sullivan
Acting State Secretary and President
Friday, September 30, 2011
FBEU SITREP 38/2011 - Update for NSW firefighters
Ambo's: Cost cuts 'caused death'
Ambulance vehicles outside Lismore Base Hospital. Jacklyn Wagner
Related links
A PARAMEDIC says a new "blanket rule" has come into place that "no off-duty ambulance officer was to be called out" for jobs. He spoke on condition of anonymity.
In one instance, he said, a Maclean ambulance was tasked to a man with chest pain in South Grafton because both Grafton day crews were already on jobs.
"He ended up having a cardiac arrest and dying," he said.
"If an off-duty Grafton crew was sent to that job, there's every chance that he would have received the right treatment and survived ... chest pains should always be deemed as serious, ask any doctor."
A Northern Rivers man who suffered a stroke this week is believed to have waited half an hour for paramedics because of the NSW Ambulance Service's new "business plan" to reduce overtime.
The Northern Star has learnt that a woman called 000 from her Tweed Heads West homeafter her husband suddenly collapsed.
It is understood the ambulance control centre chose to wait 20 minutes for an on-duty Murwillumbah ambulance to finish unloading another patient at Tweed Heads Hospital instead of immediately tasking an on-call Kingscliff ambulance to the job. This meant the man waited 30 minutes.When the paramedics arrived, they discovered his wife had tried to drag him several metres towards an inclinator to get him upstairs.
He survived and was transported to Tweed Heads Hospital.
Another source said paramedics were furious with the new guidelines.
"When you get to a pensioner who has been lying on the floor waiting an hour for an ambulance, it makes you angry," he said.
A spokesman for the NSW Ambulance Service confirmed new "on-call guidelines using duty crews from 24/7 stations for non-urgent cases had been implemented across NSW ... to strengthen existing procedures and policies within Ambulance to ensure the effective and efficient usage of valuable emergency resources".
He added that: "The Ambulance Service would like to reassure the community that the new guidelines will not impact on service delivery and we will continue to provide the best pre-hospital clinical care to all patients throughout the state."
'Sexist' Abbott blasted in new book #Auspol
Unflattering portrait ... Tony Abbott. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen
TONY Abbott is a sore loser, afflicted by ''innate and deeply embedded sexism and misogyny'', and would use a future prime ministership to impose his simplistic views on the country, according to a provocative new book to hit the shelves tomorrow.
The new polemic by academic Susan Mitchell paints an intensely unflattering portrait of the man who would be Australia's next prime minister, sketching Mr Abbott as a graceless, obsessively competitive ''man's man''; a ferocious partisan imbued with conservative Catholic social values.
The book was drawn from press reports, studies of the Opposition Leader, particularly Michael Duffy's 2004 biography, Mr Abbott's writings and the author's observed conclusions. Dr Mitchell deploys what her publisher describes as a ''blistering'' critique in narrating Mr Abbott's life from his childhood to his current period as Opposition Leader.
Advertisement: Story continues belowDr Mitchell told The Age yesterday she did not interview Mr Abbott for the project. ''That wasn't the sort of book I wanted to write. I wanted to do a more analytical piece than that.''
Mr Abbott's spokesman confirmed Dr Mitchell ''made no contact with Tony or his office in the preparation of her book. She has not sought to interview Tony as part of her research.''
Dr Mitchell said she was motivated to write the book because ''there's a narrative missing about Tony Abbott in the political discussion''.
Dr Mitchell said she saw no evidence that Mr Abbott's views had moderated with time, if anything ''he's become more right wing and fixed in his views''.
She said initiatives like Mr Abbott's paid parental leave scheme - mentioned only briefly in the book - and his decision to employ women as senior advisers, did not demonstrate an evolution in thinking.
Wharfie strikes at Patrick stevedores #Ausunions
DELIVERY of critical mining equipment, steel, cars and agricultural products will be delayed after the maritime union deepened its industrial dispute with Patrick stevedores and embarked on a series of waterfront rolling strikes.
Union members were scheduled to walk out for 24 hours at Patrick's Port Kembla bulk and general operations, which include BlueScope Steel, from midnight last night.
Strikes are planned at Brisbane and Melbourne's Webb Dock from tomorrow, and the company's Fremantle container terminal will be hit by a 24-hour stoppage from 7am tomorrow.
Strike action at Geelong is also expected, with a further 48-hour stoppage planned for next week at Port Kembla, south of Sydney.
In a move that could provoke further strike action, Patrick is considering trying to impose operational changes on employees at its troubled Port Botany terminal in Sydney, where it says productivity has slumped.
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Maritime Union of Australia officials last night hit back at the company, claiming Patrick was ignoring a series of concessions made by the union during the latest round of negotiations.
Ian Bray, an assistant national secretary with the union, said the concessions would substantially reduce the cost of the union's claim, but the company had not moved.
"It's almost akin to negotiating with corpses," he said.
The deepening of the dispute came as an estimated 8500 Qantas domestic and international passengers' faced disruption of their travel plans by an industrial action of baggage handlers and engineers.
The airline has been forced to delay 39 flights by up to an hour and cancel two flights on the eve of the AFL and NRL grand finals.
Customs staff at Sydney airport will also hold a series of one-hour stoppages tomorrow.
Patrick, a division of Asciano, said the strike action at its operations would disrupt importers and exporters and delay the movement of mining equipment, steel, automotive and agricultural products.
Patrick accused the union of continuing to pursue a wage claim that would cost its business an extra $92 million over the life of a proposed four-year agreement.
The company says agreeing to the claim "would result in significant employee salary increases without any productivity or efficiency measures to offset these increases".
"These levels of increase are unaffordable by any business in today's economic climate," it says.
In separate negotiations concerning the company's terminal operations, Patrick says the "union has become focused on reintroducing control and arbitration clauses that would see conditions of status quo and co-management re-established".
Productivity at the company's Port Botany container terminal in Sydney has become so poor that some shipping lines have transported freight by rail between Sydney and Melbourne to prevent further delays.
Patrick has offered annual 4.75 per cent wage rises to terminal employees offset by a 12 per cent improvement in productivity. Workers receive an extra annual 1 per cent payment contingent on safety and productivity benchmarks being reached. "The company believes the union is acting unreasonably in its pursuit of claims that are fundamentally out of step with other industries and unsustainable amid current economic and employment conditions," Patrick says.
"While many Australians are in a position of economic uncertainty and are experiencing a fall in job security levels, the Patrick offer provides competitive terms and conditions for employees and a fair and sustainable outcome for staff, business and customers."
But Mr Bray said workers were infuriated by the company's stand and had "had a gutful after more than a year of futile negotiations". He said the union had dropped its claim for pay parity across the different ports.
"Across the table, Patrick negotiators agree their costings are questionable and they fail to address key issues of safety, training and casualisation," he said. "After some positive discussions, the last offer put by the company went backwards and didn't reflect the position the MUA thought had been reached."
Given negotiations had run for 18 months, bulk and general cargo employees are seeking a backdated pay rise or sign-on bonus equivalent to a 5 per cent pay rise. They want a further three annual 5 per cent rises.
Thursday, September 29, 2011
What's The Point Of The Wall Street Protests? #occupywallstreet
nm wrap
28 Sep 2011
What's The Point Of The Wall Street Protests?
By Newmatilda.com
Protesters have been occupying Wall Street and dodging mace-wielding police for 11 days. Why are they there? Commentators looking for one single demand are missing the point
Young women being pepper-sprayed by cops on Wall Street? A protest movement claiming to represent 99 per cent of the population?
Missed it? Last week the #occupyWallStreet campaign kicked off, initially organised by the magazine Adbusters but now administered by a vertical cohort of groups and individuals on social media. It’s now day 11 of the protest and groups in more than 40 cities across the US and internationally have joined in. (There’s information about them here.)
The protests have been getting bigger and bigger, and they’ve been graced by progressive luminaries such as Susan Sarondon and Michael Moore, but unless you closely follow alternative media the protests might have escaped your attention.
They haven’t been widely reported in the mainstream media, and when they have, reports have turned on policy brutality rather than what the protest is all about. This isn’t altogether surprising. Read Jeanne Mansfield’s account of getting maced at the protests and the alarm about police responses makes sense.
One protester told the NY Daily News "I was shocked because it seemed like one person after another was being brutally tackled, and it wasn’t clear why". The many videos in circulation of protesters getting zapped with pepper spray provide clear evidence of police zealotry — but have also served to distract media outlets from why the protesters were there in the first place.
The New York Times has been criticised for missing the point in this article. Gina Bellafante wrote: "The group’s lack of cohesion and its apparent wish to pantomime progressivism rather than practice it knowledgably is unsettling in the face of the challenges so many of its generation face."
Some progressive media outlets have been less than enthused too. Lauren Ellis in Mother Jones says the campaign is "lacking traction" and lists four reasons why — including police brutality being in the spotlight rather than the protesters’ concerns, and for a "kitchen-sink" approach she summarises thusly: "First make noise, then decide what the noise is all about?"
NPR Ombudsman Edward Schumarcher-Matos explains why the radio network hadn’t given the protests any coverage in this post. He quotes NPR’s executive director for news, Dick Meyer: "The recent protests on Wall Street did not involve large numbers of people, prominent people, a great disruption or an especially clear objective."
Inadvertently, Bellafante and Meyer might have got it right. It’s very apparent that there is no one single reason drawing protesters to Wall Street and to other protests. One "clear objective" and group cohesion just isn’t the name of the game — so perhaps it’s not surprising that the media has taken a while to twig to what’s going on.
The protests started very small and not all the protesters who turned up have the same reasons for doing so. As Eli Schmitt in n + 1 wrote a few days after it all started: "We still don’t know exactly what the demands are. One of the members of our group, in discussing the criteria for a good demand, noted that Americans like to "get something" out of a political action. Repeal, enact, ban. We want visible, measurable outcomes."
The 99 per centers did get around to issuing a list of their "one demands" in response to the media’s desire for "one clear demand". It’s not one objective, but many — some of which are extremely abstract.
As Schmitt observes, the protests underway in Wall Street and across America don’t look much like the anti-globalisation protests of the early 2000s. The protest movement is changing and even though the original Adbusters call referenced Tahrir Square, the Occupy Wall Street movement gestures to a far more diffuse set of goals:
"Compared to other large-scale protests I’d attended in my life — the WTO protest in Washington D.C. in 2000, various antiwar protests throughout the early aughts — the aggravating causes here were less abstract. These were not Americans decrying foreign policy. They were Americans in debt, Americans out of work. This "day of rage" was inspired by personal injustices, best illustrated by anecdote rather than data. Along with all the familiar righteous ire at corporate sway in our supposedly democratic political system, there were tales of joblessness, debt, and desperation."
Ed Pilkington in The Guardian concurs, writing, "The protests were a lament for a nation in which, despite the 2008 meltdown, the financial system remains largely unregulated, where 46 million Americans live below the official poverty line, and where inequality is greater now than at any time since 1929."
David Weidner, writing in Market Watch, is in touch with the same rage and desperation; he just placed a slightly different emphasis.
"If you want to know how a nation supposedly by and for the people has become uprooted, one only needs to see how common young people, who are suffering so badly in this recession, were humiliated further by trying to exercise their given right to peacefully protest.
If this is justice, I’d rather break the law.
The bankers who brought us this mess not only walk free, they drive free in Bentleys paid for by money looted through toxic mortgages, trading debacles and derivative madness. Regulators, prosecutors and an administration patsy to big finance do nothing except hand out $1.3 trillion in bailout cash and guarantees."
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- compass1312
Posted Wednesday, 28 September 11 at 3:20PMThe people protesting on Wall Street are indicative of the feelings of the masses right around the World. The reason that there seems to be either no leaders or clear demands (particularly in the US) is quite simple.
Who would want to be seen as a leader (of a revolution or protest) in that Country when the omnipotent forces have the ability to destroy lives at will, fully protected by the laws that they have so unlawfully enacted themselves. The only way around this is to create an anonymous form of peaceful urban terrorism. When the forces push too hard, there will be violence.
It is impossible for all the smaller groups involved to formulate a coherent and comprehensive list of demands because the diversity of the root causes are too great. The one common denominator in the beefs and gripes of the groups is money. What is the symbol of money in the US? Wall Street.
Because the mainstream media presents those brave protesters as a rabble without a cause, make no mistake that beneath every one of those people is a simmering population loathing what Wall Street (as a symbol) has become.
- redact
Posted Wednesday, 28 September 11 at 5:07PMWhy isn’t David Grayling here with his usual rant about the evil empire. We miss you David
- JD
Posted Wednesday, 28 September 11 at 6:05PMConstant growth without regard for environment equals cancer.
The economic model of western capitalism, thanks to Milton Freedman and the Chicago School of Economics, is completely dependent on constant growth.
On a planet with finite resources we were always going to hit a point where the constant economic growth model could not be sustained by the resources we have.
For those in positions of power and control, this is actually great news! Scarcity of resources means prices go up, and if you are in control of the resources then why would you want abundance for all?
Once the cancer has eaten all the fat cells of our resources, it’s going to come for the muscle cells - us, the people.
It’s happening right now in the US.
We’ve all seen the IMF and the world bank loan money to third world countries that couldn’t possibly afford to pay. We’ve then seen those developing nations crumble under the weight of the very debt that was supposedly meant to help them.
It seems like the same thing has happened in the us, it’s just that in the case of subprime lending, the decision was made one household at a time.
I’m aware that we all love an enemy, a scapegoat to pin things on so we can feel like we understand. We love to boil things down to something simple, and perhaps that’s exactly what i’m doing now, because the truth is far more complex than I can cope with. I want to feel empowered, not completely overwhelmed.
My (probably over simplified) idea is that the banking industry is out of control and not answerable or accountable to anyone anymore. They seem to be moving from country to country, infecting them with debt, making entire economies kneel before them. Is it my imagination?
If it is, then it’s also just in my head that there is a correlation between our way of making new money and our environmental crisis. Perhaps this is the very root of the sickness embedded within consumer capitalism. A fiat / fractional reserve system, where there is no little or no correlation between physical reality (tangible assets like gold, or ANY physical resource) can only end badly on a planet with finite resources. How can the growth of money be detached from physical reality? In it’s current form it can keep going skywards, limitlessly, essentially being created out of thin air. When i consider this idea, i find it deeply disturbing how it simply doesn’t fit within the laws of how our physical reality works.
The reason why I’m in full support of non-violent protest at the Occupy Wallstreet campaign is because it finally feels like people are taking their protest to the core of where it needs to be.
I’m not an economist, and I’d love for someone to show me how i’m wrong about all of this.
I’m also not a pessimist, and always like to offer solutions as well as just problems:
The only true solution for us as a species is for each individual to do as many of the following as possible:
Replace take with give, fear with love, doubt with trust.
Increase personal responsibility, transparancy, integrity and respect.
Lead by example. Forgive. Receive with gratitude and without expectation.
Learn to observe without judgement. Judging something as good or bad is like reaching out and grabbing onto the experience. Observe and allow. Accept.
Have the courage to feel pain. Be with it and breathe. Feel it as it leaves you. Avoiding traps it. Accepting releases it. Once you’ve mastered this, revisit old pain that you didn’t have the courage to feel at the time. Feel your old pain and release it too. Help other do the same if they ask.
Get comfortable with all the darkest corners of yourself. How can you be comfortable showing all of yourself to another who wants to love you if you can’t even bare to see those parts of you yourself?
See the truth of the shadow aspects of the people and the world around you. See them with acceptance and without judgment. Become comfortable with the worst case scenario. Even extinction. Once you are without fear you will better be able to focus on creating the world you would like to see.
Focus on creating the world you would like to see, always.
Do something with your life that will be felt seven generations after you are gone.
And above all increase your ability to share love. This involves increasing sensitivity to all things as emotion only has one volume dial. This is difficult in a toxic world. This is why increased sensitivity needs to be tempered by increased strength.if you like my rantings, come make friends.
I’m currently called Jonathan Occupy Wallstreet Davis on facebook.oh, and crowdfund the shit out of this awesome publication.
we love you New Matilda.This user is a New Matilda supporter.
Perfidious Rex
Posted Wednesday, 28 September 11 at 11:40PMJD
Lots of good points although I couldn’t resist pointing out that markets and the capitalist system don’t facilitate loans to people who can’t afford to repay them - Governments do that.
As you say the global banking system is a shambles but again no-one is lending to countries that don’t wish to borrow, and the banks themselves can only raise funding by virtue of being defacto arms of Government. Of course Governments won’t cut them loose since to do so would be to admit that the fiat/fractional reserve system has failed and they would lose an important tool of economic manipulation in their quest for constant economic growth.
Western Governments morbidly fear a return to the gold standard since it will impose the fiscal discipline they feverishly try to avoid and will slow or reverse the growth they have tried so hard in recent decades to create. PR
compass1312
Posted Thursday, 29 September 11 at 6:08AMJD
Seems like you’re a Raelian Zeitgeister, good comments.
Perfidious Rex
(1st Paragraph) Not true when one takes into account Credit Cards & Mortgages.
David Skidmore
Posted Thursday, 29 September 11 at 8:17AMI ask what’s the point of Wall St? Basically, a place where parasites aka speculators feed off their carrion.
Perfidious Rex
Posted Thursday, 29 September 11 at 10:20AMCompass
You forget that credit cards and mortgages are largely provided by the Government sponsored and subsidized banking sector.
What proportion of this debt is provided by the unregulated? PR
LukeMR
Posted Thursday, 29 September 11 at 1:54PMProtest is a communication medium and like any other it has strengths and weaknesses.
It’s good for single issues like anti-war. It’s terrible for complex issues. Regarding the latter, it’s difficult to get your own house in order at the protest end and convey a clear message and even if you do, the mainstream media doesn’t have the nuance capability to report.
To those on Wall Street right now, get some better ideas than protest. They’re out there.
Olivier
Posted Thursday, 29 September 11 at 2:41PMNM -Good article.
I observe a lot of protester focus on economic inequality,
and Public subsidies for the rich Private,
so I guess these are the ‘points’ of the Wall St.
Good work Jonathon Davis.
Few claim leadership, when the leadership reward is punishment.
Melbourne may be preparing for such an event now.
For the billions, not the billionaires.
Marr sticks boot in, as Bolt hits back at guilty race verdict #Ausunions
News Limited columnist Andrew Bolt has struck back against a court judgement which found him guilty of breaching the Racial Discrimination Act, branding the finding an attack on free speech.
In a rebuke published on the front page of his hometown Herald Sun (the country's largest-selling newspaper), Bolt said there were now laws against anyone who publicly disagreed with the idea that people could freely express their identity.
"I am truly shocked. I cannot believe this is Australia, a land of free speech," he began.
In a 1611-word piece published in both the Herald Sun and Daily Telegraph, Bolt said he had felt like an outsider as the son of Dutch immigrants before embracing his own identity.
He believed the case could further ensconce racial and ethnic divisions in Australia. Bolt recently was named the most powerful identity in The Power Index's Media Megaphones Top Ten.
"[I believe] that many people now increasingly do insist on asserting racial and ethnic identities, and that we increasingly spend money and pass laws to entrench them."
"I think that a terrible pity, even a danger, because surely in a multi-ethnic community like ours it's important to stress what unites us, not what divides."
On numerous occasions Bolt also alluded to the potential consequences of him referring to what he wrote in the two columns which were the subject of the action brought by the nine fair-skinned members of the Aboriginal community.
"Two years ago, I would cheerfully have argued that this acknowledgment of a multiple ethnicity was healthier, and truer, in such cases than insisting on only being Aboriginal. But not today. I no longer dare."
"For expressing such views, in such language, I have lost my freedom to put my argument as I did. And be warned: use such phrases as those yourself, and you too may lose your right to speak."
But in a column published by rival Fairfax newspapers, long-time Bolt sparring partner David Marr backed up the decision of Justice Mordecai Bromberg. He said the finding was not about free speech but "lousy journalism" and predicted there would be some "spectacular rhetoric" from the "now martyred Andrew Bolt".
"Denials are one of Bolt's great talents: with a smile on his face and his hand on his heart he is happy to claim the purest motives even in the unhappiest circumstances. Usually it works like a charm. Not with Judge Bromberg," Marr wrote.
But Bolt's column found issue with Justice Bromberg's insistence that he was not limiting free speech and questioned whether that ruling still applied if "your adjectives are too sharp, your wit too pointed, your views too blunt, your observations not quite to the point, your teasing too ticklish and your facts not in every case exactly correct."
"Despite Justice Bromberg's assurances, I feel that writing frankly about multiculturalism, and especially Aboriginal identity, yesterday became too dangerous for any conservative. It's simply safer to stay silent, or write about fluffy puppies instead."
Bolt also said the court case had made him depressed and referred to his "misery" at having spent "two years of worry, two weeks in court, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal costs".
"And so the multiculturalists win. They win, because no one now dares object for fear of what it will cost them in court."
"Hope they're satisfied, to win a debate not by argument but fear."
Pro-free spech editorials were also published in The Australian, the Daily Telegraph and the Herald Sun.
CPSU MEDIA RELEASE: Nuclear agency staff launch industrial action #Ausunions
CPSU MEDIA RELEASE
Thursday 29 September 29, 2011
Nuclear agency staff launch industrial action
CPSU and AMWU members at the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA) will take industrial action Friday 30 September over significant delays with their new enterprise agreement.
Staff and management at the highly respected nuclear safety agency reached in-principle agreement on pay and conditions over three months ago. The deal featured an agreed pay offer of 10% over 3 years which was blocked by the Minister. Negotiating parties agreed a similar offer with a mix of pay rises and bonuses and it is still being blocked.
Alistair Waters CPSU Deputy National President said, “The Australian Public Service Commission (APSC) and the Special Minister of State, the Hon Gary Gray, are blocking the agreement despite ARPANSA, the unions and staff reaching an agreement in good faith.”
“The APSC and Minister are blocking the nuclear safety regulator from honouring the agreement it has reached in good faith. This is no way for a Government committed to good faith bargaining to be acting”.
ARPANSA staff now join other federal public servants taking industrial action to secure fair agreements.
The ARPANSA action by nuclear scientists, technicians and administrative staff will initially take the form of work bans but may escalate if the Government and APSC continue to delay the proposed agreement.
“ARPANSA employees’ patience has worn thin. They reached agreement with ARPANSA in good faith over three months ago,” said Mr Waters.
“The Government and the APSC are being bloody minded and it is time they started acting in good faith as well. Every day delayed means staff are worse off.”
For comment:
Matt Wood 0418 263 295
Liz Bower | Communications Officer| Campaign and Communications Unit | CPSU | ph 03 8620 6371 | mob 0408 254 317 | website www.cpsu.org.au | member service centre 1300 137 636
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A Bolt hole anyone? » En Passant #Ausmedia
A Bolt hole anyone?
Posted by John, September 28th, 2011 - under Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun, News Ltd.
It was fantastic to see that Andrew Bolt and his employer, the Herald and Weekly Times (as publisher of the Herald Sun)’ have been found to have breached the Racial Discrimination Act. As Federal Court Justice Mordecai Bromberg said about the two Bolt articles in question: ‘… they contained errors of fact, distortions of truth and inflammatory and provocative language.’
Errors? Distortion of truth? Inflammatory and provocative language? Well blow me down with a feather. Who would have thought Andrew Bolt and the Herald Sun would be capable of such things?
Me. It is par for the course for the papers of Murdoch reaction.
It was fantastic too to see the joy on the faces of the defendants as they celebrated their victory over the racism of the right. Their right to be themselves, to right to choose their own identities, was upheld against the slanders of the likes of Bolt.
So what’s it all about? Bolt wrote two Herald Sun columns which asserted that fair skinned Aboriginal people identified as Aboriginal to get the benefits of being Aboriginal. You know, advantages like dying a decade earlier than non-Aboriginal Australians and lower living standards.
He named 18 well known Australian Aboriginal people as doing this. Nine sued him for a breach of section 18C of the Commonwealth Racial Vilification Act. Subsection 18C(1) says:
(1) It is unlawful for a person to do an act, otherwise than in private, if:
(a) the act is reasonably likely, in all the circumstances, to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate another person or a group of people; and
(b) the act is done because of the race, colour or national or ethnic origin of the other person or of some or all of the people in the group.
According to Alison Cardwell at ABC News:
‘Justice Bromberg concluded the messages conveyed by the two articles included that the people were not genuinely Aboriginal; that instead, motivated by career opportunities available to Aboriginal people, they had chosen to falsely identify as Aboriginal.
‘Justice Bromberg said the messages included that fair skin colour indicates a person who is not sufficiently Aboriginal to be genuinely identified as an Aboriginal person.’
Andrew Bolt is a columnist of extreme reaction. He wears the cloak of common sense to babble right-wing nonsense.
There will be much discussion about free speech. Evidently the free speech of News Ltd, which owns 70 percent of the print media in Australia, and Andrew Bolt, who is paid enormous amounts of money to spew forth his filth, is being restricted. Writing the truth somehow conflicts with free speech whereas writing lies is the essence of free speech. Evidently.
In fact the case highlights that free speech is the preserve normally of the elite and rich, not ordinary working people.
It also shows the irrationality that has gripped sections of the population and ruling class. As Patrick Moynihan supposedly said: ‘You are entitled to your opinion; you are not entitled to your own facts.’
Unfortunately Australian politics has degenerated so that some politicians now echo the stubborn beliefs of the downwardly mobile middle class and sections of the working class to have opinions which blame everyone else, but not capitalism, for their plight. They have facts which are not facts.
Tony Abbott springs to mind, but so too to be frank does Julia Gillard with her attacks on refugees for example. Their appeals to the populism of reaction fuel the likes of Bolt and Piers Ackerman.
The material conditions of life under capitalism, and the lack of class struggle in Australia today, give support to this. The filth of racism, the denial of science, the homophobia, can breed like hardy weeds in a ground untouched by the water of class struggle.
It is in this context that legislative interventions to address racism, homophobia and other systemic hated filled aspects of capitalism spring forth. They are band-aids to treat cancer.
An alternative is to build the struggle on the ground against racism. In Australia the concrete and most visible manifestation of that is the campaign for refugees and against offshore processing. Another is against the Northern Territory invasion.
The real power to stop the ruling elites’ lie machines from producing racist filth lies at the point of production. Imagine a newspaper in which the journalists and production crew refused to allow racist filth into the paper? Of course, we are a long way from that. But I can still dream.
There is another problem. The paper and Bolt will appeal. They could well win, and that would be devastating for those involved and those sections of the Left who have descended into a gloat fest over this.
Second Bolt and the Herald and Weekly Times and other Murdoch papers will play the free speech card cynically and incessantly, all the while denying alternative voices an outlet in their own pages.
Third, the decision opens up some interesting possibilities for the reactionary Right.
For example, The Australian, deliberately I suspect in anticipation of the Bolt case decision, has been accusing opponents of Woodside’s proposed $30 billion gas hub in the Kimberley of racism for allegedly calling pro-development Aborigines coconuts – ‘black on the outside, white on the inside and full of the milk of white man’s money.’
Aborigines offended by that could perhaps lodge a complaint under section 18C against the writer, although it is in fact unclear who actually wrote it. Certainly the environmental groups deny doing it, not that the Murdoch lie machine, those great proponents of free speech, let minor details like that worry them.
As readers would also know I am a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against apartheid Israel. I could imagine Zionists using the decision to try to silence the legitimate BDS protest movement developing.
Worse, because the establishment has cynically accepted that anti-Zionism is anti-semitism for its own purposes, it is possible a judge could rule in favour of any Zionist action.The alternative is to build a movement in support of Palestine and BDS, to support refugees, to attend the demonstrations outside the ALP National Conference on 3 and 4 December in Sydney.
Finally, under the guise of defending free speech, a conservative government will amend the Act to allow all sorts of bile to issue forth under the guise of comment. Certainly Abbott will, and it is possible Gillard Labor could too although for crass political reasons on their part my guess is that such action is unlikely from them.
The short term embarrassment of racists like Bolt might turn into a longer term strategic disaster for the left. Certainly I will celebrate the Bolt’s loss, but the left needs to be careful. We might unleash the Right on their terrain – the bosses’ courts. Far better for us to fight on our ground – in the workplaces and the streets to stop racism.
Ultimately of course only a democratic working class revolution can sweep away the capitalist roots of racism. The struggles of today however can force the beast back into its lair for a while and help too to build the struggle for that new world of democracy and production to satisfy human need.
Comments
Comment from Jan Muller
Time September 29, 2011 at 12:18 amCapital A for Aboriginal please John. It’s a matter of respect and I am convinced that you would not wish to disrespect.
Comment from Jan Muller
Time September 29, 2011 at 12:21 amP.S. I do like your blogs and read them as often as I can.
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Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Andrew bolts damage: 'it's hip to be stupid' | Crikey #Ausmedia
I published my first piece of journalism in 1992. It was a story about the Aboriginal Housing Company in Redfern. In the last 20 years, I have used my skills across publishing mediums and literary genres to write positive stories about Aboriginal Australia with the aim of building bridges between black and white communities.
On April 15, 2009, with a flick of his pen, Andrew Bolt in his article ”It’s so hip to be black”, managed to burn down many of those bridges, by writing words about me (and others) that discredited me professionally, while also offending, insulting and humiliating me. People on his blog also made racist remarks, that also offended, insulted and humiliated me.
I have always identified and lived as an Aboriginal woman, I’m a Williams from Cowra, a proud member of the Wiradjuri nation.
Mr Bolt’s article suggests I made a “decision to be Aboriginal” which “was lucky, given how it’s helped her career” and that I had “won plum jobs reserved for Aborigines at Koori Radio, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Board and Macquarie University’s Warawara Department of Indigenous Studies”.
What Mr Bolt failed to mention is that I am an established writer and highly qualified with a PhD in Media and Communication, and that in fact none of the jobs he mentioned were actually “reserved” or identified Aboriginal positions, and the Koori Radio role was actually voluntary and unpaid.
In his witness statement to the court Mr Bolt claimed to have used a photo of my mother on her wedding day as evidence to determine she, therefore I was of mixed-heritage and could not or should not identify as Aboriginal. The photo Bolt submitted was taken directly from my blog and a post I made on February 7, 2011, almost two years after he wrote his article, so his misrepresentations about me continued.
As former Chair, Deputy Chair and Committee Member of the Australian Society of Authors, I have long advocated and been part of campaigns to protect the rights of Australian authors. At the same time, I have always advocated for responsibility in writing, and an ethical approach to publishing.
I am pleased (although not surprised) with the judgment handed down today by Justice Bromberg in the Federal Court of Australia. I believe the result means that Australia will have a higher quality and more responsible media, and that to some degree the persecution of Aboriginal people in the press will be lessened. And that was why I chose to be part of this case. Australian readers also deserve better.
I thank my legal team: barristers Ron Merkel QC, Herman Borenstein SC, Claire Harris, and Phoebe Knowles, my solicitors Joel Zyngier and Nathalie Dalpethado (Holding Redlich) and Aislinn Martin (Tarwirri). I’d like to express my heartfelt gratitude for their tireless efforts in seeking justice for not only the named applicants but all those Aboriginal people who were reasonably likely to have been offended, insulted, humiliated or intimidated by Mr Bolt’s writings.
I am continuing to focus on what I love doing most, working with young Aboriginal people around the country and teaching them how to write their own stories, in the hope they too will one day have the position of privilege to publish their own words.
Finally, in the words of Dr Rosie Scott, award-winning author, former Chair of the ASA and former Vice-President of PEN Sydney – an organisation who fights for the rights of imprisoned writers who don’t have the ‘free speech’ we so readily enjoy:
“Free speech is the cornerstone of genuine democracy, but when writers publish disinformation dressed up as fact, lies as truth, slander as objective evaluation and call it free speech, they are devaluing its very essence and betraying all those who’ve fought for it.”
*Dr Anita Heiss is the author of adult fiction, historical fiction, children’s fiction, non-fiction and social commentary. Her latest novel is Paris Dreaming.
Andrew Bolt found guilty of racial discrimination #EpicFail
Conservative columnist Andrew Bolt has today been found guilty of breaching the Racial Discrimination Act over a 2009 article in which he accused fair-skinned Aboriginal people of playing up being black for career advancement.
Federal Court Justice Mordecai Bromberg found that Bolt's article was likely to have "an intimidatory effect on some fair skinned Aboriginal people and in particular young Aboriginal persons or others with vulnerability in relation to their identity".
He also criticised Bolt for writing an article that contained "errors of fact, distortions of the truth and inflammatory and provocative language".
The Power Index last month named Bolt the most powerful Megaphone in Australia because of his talent as a provocateur and enormous reach across TV, print, radio and online.
Author Anita Heiss, one of the nine applicants in the case, today released a statement celebrating Justice Bromberg's decision. She writes that Bolt's article "discredited me professionally, while also offending, insulting and humiliating me. People on his blog also made racist remarks that also offended, insulted and humiliated me. I have always identified and lived as an Aboriginal woman..."
The other applicants included indigenous academic Larissa Behrendt, former ATSIC chief Geoff Clark and artist Bindi Cole. In the article – titled "White is the new Black" – Bolt claimed Behrendt "looks almost as German as her father". Her father was, in fact, the late Aboriginal oral historian Paul Behrendt.
Justice Blomberg ordered no settlement on the parties, who will negotiate between them what measures Bolt and the Herald Sun will take.
The nature and tasks of a socialist group in Australia today » En Passant
The aim of socialists is to build a mass revolutionary party that can cohere working class resistance to the attacks of the capitalist class and eventually lead a revolution that will bring workers to power. But the reality is that in every country socialists are a very long way from achieving that goal. There are today no mass revolutionary parties and a genuine revolutionary party is not going to be conjured from the air. There are no short cuts, no magic formulas. It is going to take determined effort by serious-minded socialists. But the previous history of the socialist movement does provide us with some important guidelines as to how to approach the task.
All the history of our movement shows that socialists can’t begin to build a mass revolutionary workers’ party until two essential preconditions are met. The first is a decisive radicalisation among a significant layer of workers that makes them receptive to socialist ideas. This is almost completely beyond the control of socialists; it will occur as workers are forced to rebel against the deprivations of world capitalism. The second precondition – one socialists do have some control over – is that we have cohered a reasonably sizeable body of committed revolutionaries, a cadre, that is capable of intervening in mass struggles with convincing arguments to win a layer of workers to socialism. The traditional mechanism by which that initial cadre is cohered is via a socialist propaganda group.
In the Marxist tradition there are three main types of organisation: discussion circles, propaganda groups and parties. These categories are not arbitrary, but are used to describe qualitatively different types of organisation. Discussion circles are tiny groups attempting to establish a Marxist tradition. Their main orientation is theoretical clarification. Political activity such as selling a magazine or intervening in strikes is a low priority. They recruit on the basis of a relatively high level of theory. Propaganda groups are involved in a broader range of activity, but because they are small and lack influence in the working class, they recruit on the basis of ideas. Socialists make a distinction between two kinds of propaganda: general (sometimes called abstract) and concrete. Discussion circles are mostly concerned with general propaganda arguing the core ides of Marxism or the distinctive ideas of a specific revolutionary current. But a propaganda group also engages in concrete propaganda. By this Marxists mean propaganda which might at times seem agitational, i.e. calling for action. For example, socialists call for the US to get out of Iraq. A small socialist group cannot organise the type of mass action needed to get the US out. But by raising the slogan, socialists attempt to find an audience among people who agree that the US should get out. Socialists use the specific facts about an issue like the occupation of Iraq to build up an argument to convince their audience of the need to oppose US imperialism across the board.
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In contrast, general propaganda begins from a general proposition of, say, Marxist internationalism and gives a more theorised argument about why someone should for example oppose Australian military intervention in the Solomons. It should be clear from these examples that there is not always a clear dividing line between concrete and general propaganda. A propaganda group uses both, and while involved in activity, it cannot recruit primarily by demonstrating its politics in action. A mass party is different again. Because of its weight of numbers and influence, it can have an impact on the class struggle and recruit on this basis. Propaganda is still vital for a party, but the balance of its work may be more agitational. It can, at least for some section of the working class, provide a real alternative to the betrayals of the Labor Party and the reformist trade union leaders and deliver action – it can take struggles forward. In Australia we are talking of a party of tens of thousands.
Discussion circles were important when revolutionaries had to lay down the basic ideas of Marxism. They are still necessary in countries where there is little tradition of Marxism. But once a core of people have settled on the ideas around which they organise, they can begin to think how they can recruit more systematically, while gaining some experience in applying these ideas to the concrete questions of the day. This entails producing and distributing a regular publication and holding meetings to which people who are not necessarily committed to the core ideas of socialism can come and discuss politics and theory. You then have the basics of a propaganda group.
It is very important to be clear on the distinction between a propaganda group and a mass party – in particular, that propaganda groups do not have the capacity to lead workers in major struggles and recruit on that basis. They must rely primarily on their general socialist ideas. Socialists want to change the world. We would much prefer to be leading mass strikes and demonstrations rather than patiently seeking individual sympathisers. However, we recognise that while we can play an important role in initiating some localised struggles and provide some of the key activists in a variety of campaign groups, we are, as yet, too small to have any serious impact on the major struggles that break out. We can only recruit handfuls of people, not move the masses.
Today Socialist Alternative is in the business of arguing general socialist ideas around a broad range of questions – the nature of imperialism, the need for mass action rather than reliance on parliament, the central role of the working class in fighting for a better world, the difference between genuine socialism and Stalinism - not organising mass action, taking over the leadership of the ACTU or offering an electoral alternative to the ALP and Greens. Indeed, if we were to attempt to do these things, we would be courting disaster. If we look at the history of the socialist movement, we can see that one of the key reasons why so many small revolutionary groups came to grief is that they overestimated their own capabilities and greatly exaggerated their ability to influence struggles or campaigns. All too often they attempted to leap over the stage of development dictated by the balance of forces between bosses and workers and the limitations imposed by their own small size. They were too impatient. They often spurned the conception of being a propaganda group and tried to act as “agitational groups”. They put out papers with heaps of strike reports, as though they had a mass working class readership. But headlines that don’t move workers into action are not agitational in any meaningful sense. They are make-believe. The only people fooled are the socialists themselves, who mistrain their members to believe they are genuinely engaged in agitation. Similarly, small groups of socialists who declare themselves to be “activist groups” or parties are deluding themselves. Because of their small size, they remain propaganda groups, whatever they think they are. But they are confused propaganda groups and therefore a lot less effective than they could be.
This does not mean that a propaganda group can’t do things, or that it sits around discussing obscure theoretical issues. Socialist Alternative is not a discussion circle, we try to reach people beyond our ranks, involve them in political activity and win them to socialism. But our activity is determined by a clear recognition of what it is possible to achieve today and what our limitations are. We are primarily arguing our ideas – selling our magazine, running information stalls, holding meetings, talking to individuals, organising study groups, selling books – not agitating for mass action or running for parliament.
Nor does this approach mean that a propaganda group ignores the debates, the campaigns and struggles that are taking place in society all the time. Socialist Alternative tries to respond to all the major issues of the day, from attacks on workers’ rights, the racist demonising of Muslims and refugees, gay bashing and anti-Aboriginal racism or the widening gulf between the super-rich and the rest of us and the threat of imperialist war. Socialist Alternative has been active in numerous campaigns, including the protests against Pauline Hanson, the defence of the Maritime Union, the demonstrations against the Iraq war, the anti-capitalist movement, the refugee movement, the union mobilisations against WorkChoices and innumerable student protests. Our members are active as militants in their trade unions and in student unions.
However we recognise that we were in no position to challenge for the leadership of the campaign against WorkChoices or the enormous protests against the war on Iraq in 2003. Instead we attempt to relate to people shaken up and radicalised by these movements and who are looking for political answers to explain why these attacks are happening and what can be done to change the world. But we can’t convince people to become active and useful socialists by preaching timeless truths about the nature of capitalism. We need to be able to confidently answer their concrete questions about the issues of the day and to refute the arguments of the right wing and the reformists. We participate in these movements to argue how they can win – for the need for mass action rather than relying on the ALP - and to explain how the drive to imperialist war and the attacks on workers’ living standards are all the product of a capitalist system in which a wealthy minority lives off the labour of the mass of workers. In other words, we intervene to argue ideas – to make concrete propaganda - to try to win people radicalised by these protests to a socialist standpoint. We also see intervening in these movements as vital training. It is a way to test our analysis and arguments about capitalism today. It is a way to hone the arguments of our existing members so that they can intervene more effectively and cohere a layer of people around us. It is a way to integrate new members recruited from these movements, as they have to go out and try to convince other people of our arguments about the road forward. It is a means to educate ourselves so that we can actually play a central leading role in the future, when we have accumulated more forces.
There is nothing unusual about Marxists being in a small minority in capitalist society. In fact, this has been the case for most of the century and a half since Marx and Engels founded the revolutionary socialist movement. There is a simple explanation for this fact: the ideas of this society are predominantly the ideas of the bosses. The owners of the means of production – the factories, the mines, the offices – also dominate the reproduction of ideas. The capitalists control the education system, the media, advertising, the courts, the government bureaucracy – all the institutions that mould ideas and values. But when the fabric of capitalist society is ruptured by revolt, socialist ideas can break the bosses’ hold over the way workers think about their lives. In other times, Marxists have to be prepared to be a minority, but not a passive minority. We form a nucleus that prepares for opportunities that unfold when radical outbursts occur. The classic example of this was the Emancipation of Labour Group, the first Russian Marxist group founded by Georgii Plekhanov in 1883, which I will examine in a subsequent chapter. It started as a tiny group in extremely unfavourable circumstances. Yet this isolated group gave birth to a movement that shook the whole of Russian society in two great waves of revolution in 1905 and 1917, and led workers to power in October 1917.
Political clarification
The Emancipation of Labour Group planted the flag. They carved out a distinct Marxist tradition that paved the way for future generations of Russian Marxists. They provided a clear ideological critique of rival political currents. The first task of a socialist propaganda group is ideological clarification, the sorting out of ideas, and the training of a group of dedicated revolutionaries in those ideas. Since groups like Socialist Alternative are primarily in the business of arguing ideas, we can only build on a secure foundation for the future if our ideas are as clear and precise as possible. The smaller the group, the greater the emphasis has to be on theory. Otherwise there is no way that it can survive. To borrow a metaphor from Leon Trotsky, a tiny axe can chop down the most gigantic tree, but only if the blade is sharp. Our ideas have to be finely honed.
But why is it so important to clarify our ideas now, when Marxism does not have a mass following? The answer is that an upsurge of revolt puts revolutionary politics to the most severe test. Any confusion, any major error can be disastrous for the whole working class movement. We only have to look at the range of theoretical and strategic questions that Lenin and the Bolsheviks had to master in order to lead the Russian revolution to victory in 1917. They had to come to grips with the imperialist nature of World War I, the need for workers to turn the war into a civil war against their own ruling class. Lenin had to rediscover one of Marx’s most important teachings: that the capitalist state had to be smashed for workers to come to power. In the period after the February revolution, Lenin had to break completely with his longstanding argument that a revolution that swept Tsarism aside would simply bring the bourgeoisie to power, that it would not flow over into a socialist revolution. And finally in order to lead the revolution to victory, Lenin needed to know when and how to launch an insurrection.
A large revolutionary party with strong working class roots, and with an established tradition and leadership, can survive for a period even if some of its ideas are confused or just plain wrong. However, a small organisation that does not have a clear political understanding is much more likely to go off the rails. At best it will stagnate and decay, at worst it will fragment. This is what happened to the Trotskyist movement in the 1940s. There can be no doubt that the Trotskyists were the genuine revolutionaries of the time. But they inherited from Trotsky a wrong analysis of Russia and an overblown expectation of the prospects for revolutionary upheaval after the Second World War.
Trotsky rejected the idea that the Russian revolution had been defeated by a Stalinist counter-revolution that had brought to power a bureaucratic state capitalist ruling class that exploited the Russian working class. He argued that Russia was still a workers’ state - albeit a degenerated one. He saw the Stalinist bureaucracy as an unstable layer balancing between the Russian working class and world imperialism. He predicted that the Stalinist regime would not survive the war. But instead of collapsing or being overthrown by workers, the Stalinist bureaucracy came out of the war as the second strongest power in the world and with half of Europe under its sway. New, supposedly Communist states were created in Eastern Europe without workers’ revolutions taking place. How could the Trotskyists explain this development? Their confusion and disorientation shattered them into fragments. The majority accommodated to Stalinism. Others dropped out in despair. Some refused to face up to reality and retreated into sectarian lunacy. Only a tiny minority, the founders of the International Socialist Tendency, came to terms with the fact that Russia was capitalist and imperialist.
Today, the need for clear, firm politics is just as great. Real opportunities exist to rebuild the socialist movement. In country after country over the last decade – from France to Latin America to Iraq to China to South Africa – we have seen concerted resistance to our rulers’ free market, neo-liberal agenda. But that resistance has thrown up question after question that it is vital to resolve if the movement is to be rebuilt on a sound basis – what should be the socialist approach to radical populist regimes like Chavez in Venezuela, how do we relate to Islamic radicalism, do we ever support Australian imperialism, what sort of socialist organisation do we need?
The process of ideological clarification has taken different forms throughout the history of our movement. Different political problems had to be confronted at different times. For Marx and Engels the central task was establishing the core theoretical base of the revolutionary movement. That meant writing lengthy theoretical works. These were huge books like the three volumes of Capital, three more volumes of Theories of Surplus Value and the Grundrisse. These volumes were not written to be sold on protest marches. They were not propaganda works – many of them were not even published during Marx’s lifetime. They were written to clarify Marx and Engels’ own ideas, to develop a basic analysis of capitalist society. For the pioneers of revolutionary socialism, it was necessary to establish the very foundations of the Marxist world-view, to discover and then to argue out in detail their theoretical conclusions. Of course, as I outline in a subsequent chapter, Marx and Engels did not devote all their energies to this pathbreaking theoretical work. They also played a central role in building revolutionary organisations, actively intervening in the 1848 revolutions that swept Europe and writing numerous articles and popular pamphlets aimed at a working class readership.
Pioneering theoretical work on the scale of Marx’s Capital is not the task of Socialist Alternative today. It is vital to develop Marxist theory to keep abreast of the complicated political and economic developments of world capitalism and new political and theoretical challenges are constantly being thrown up. However the core principles of Marxism are well established. We are building on the shoulders of the giants of the revolutionary tradition who have gone before us. The pathbreaking theoretical work has already been done by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and many others. The task of Socialist Alternative today is a more modest one: to critically study and absorb their conclusions, to update them to deal with a constantly changing world system and to train a cadre that can fight for these ideas.
There is a sense though in which we are pioneers. The genuine revolutionary tradition of Marxism was buried by decades of Stalinist domination of the left and by over a century of betrayals by the likes of the ALP. We have to re-establish the real Marxist tradition - that workers must emancipate themselves. The Stalinist system has collapsed but it has left a terrible legacy of confusion and cynicism about how fundamental social change can be achieved. This has been reinforced by the utter bankruptcy of social democratic parties, such as the ALP, which have repeatedly disillusioned their supporters. The challenge today is to rebuild the socialist movement from scratch and breathe life into the union movement and the broader left so that we can begin to turn the tide against our rulers. This is not simply an organisational task. Any revival of the left and the workers’ movement will throw up a mass of new questions and confusions. Marxists will have to wage a vigorous ideological struggle if we are to take the movement forward on a sound basis.
In the 1930s the Trotskyists had to fight to keep alive the most basic idea of Marxism – the centrality of the working class in the struggle for socialism – which was being buried by the triumph of Stalinism in Russia and throughout the world Communist movement. In the 1950s Tony Cliff and a small band of revolutionaries in the Socialist Review Group in Britain had to fight to maintain the real Marxist tradition when the Trotskyist movement itself started to capitulate to Stalinism. Cliff had to help update Marxist theory to account for the post-war economic boom – an event that ran counter to the Trotskyists’ predictions – and to explain the spread of Stalinism to Eastern Europe and China. He and his collaborators helped develop an analysis known as the Permanent Arms Economy to explain the boom and the theory of state capitalism to explain the nature of Russia and China. But they never retreated completely to being simply a study circle. They began to delineate the tasks of a propaganda group as they produced and sold a regular publication.
One of the consistent themes in their discussions about what to do next was an insistence on a realistic assessment of the insignificant impact they could have in the short term, the need for patience and to carry out the basic work of establishing a core of Marxists capable of carrying the ideological arguments with individuals they met in movements such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. In this way they trained a cadre who, when the breaks came in the late sixties, could recruit significant numbers. Against enormous odds they came out of the political downturn of the long boom and grew significantly during the upturn of the sixties and seventies.
Building cadre is key
If the first task of a propaganda group is ideological clarification - establishing a rock solid commitment to the theory and traditions of Marxism – then the second is to build a bigger group. By recruiting people to a propaganda group today, Socialist Alternative is laying the basis for a mass revolutionary party that can lead future workers’ struggles. But recruitment by itself is useless if the people recruited aren’t educated in Marxism, if they aren’t trained in revolutionary activity, and if they aren’t politically integrated into the organisation. What’s more, to build from a small revolutionary group into a mass party is no simple linear process, whereby the group grows by 20 per cent each year until it has tens of thousands of members. There are periods of great political advance and there are others of retreat. In the periods of advance a socialist organisation can grow extremely rapidly, indeed such growth is vital if we are to build a mass party. But if we do draw large numbers of new people in, what guarantee is there that Socialist Alternative will remain a cohered, disciplined and principled revolutionary organisation? How do we educate new fighters in Marxist theory? Won’t we be swamped?
Lenin had to face exactly this problem during the 1905 revolution in Russia. The revolutionary upsurge saw tens of thousands of workers move towards the small Bolshevik nucleus. Lenin not only argued that it was vital to draw in these new people; he counted on the “solid core of social democrats” – the party’s cadre - to influence, educate and train the new recruits. And he counted on the strength and training of this cadre to prevent the party’s politics and traditions being overwhelmed and forgotten.
We Bolsheviks…have demanded class consciousness from those joining the party, we have insisted on the tremendous importance of continuity in the party’s development, we have preached discipline and demanded that every party member be trained in one or other of the party organisations…[i].
This cadre, this “solid core”, is just as important in times of retreat, when workers suffer setbacks. In order to hold a revolutionary organisation together in times of defeat theory is even more paramount. When the going is tough a much higher level of theoretical agreement is necessary to hold a propaganda group together because a small group without roots in the working class is inherently more unstable than a mass party. You can’t survive on the basis of a few slogans, you need a more sophisticated analysis. The cadre has to be steeled. That means a high degree of political demarcation from those on the left who don’t agree with any aspect of Marxism. There can be no compromises, no concessions to soft left ideas that fudge key political questions. However a larger organisation in periods when the struggle is surging forward can be more open. It can recruit on the basis of agreement on a few central slogans.
Today socialists are operating in a frustrating and complicated political period. There is little support for the neo-liberal economic agenda that is being constantly rammed down our throats; little support for the US’s imperialist adventures. When serious forces, such as the trade union leaders, give workers and students a chance to demonstrate their discontent – at the union rallies against the IR laws and at the anti-war protests in 2003 – they do so in unparalleled numbers. Yet there is no concerted ongoing opposition. Neither the union leaders, the ALP nor the Greens are prepared to unleash a challenge to the ruling class’s agenda. This leads to pessimism about the possibility of real change. If you don’t have a clear analysis of the political situation, you can succumb to impressionistic moods and miss out on the significant opportunities to build a revolutionary organisation that exist today. There are important opportunities to grow, but growth won’t happen automatically. It is not plain sailing. Having a cadre that is clear on the nature of the political period and how to respond to make the most of the opportunities is decisive if the organisation is to go forward.
So building a propaganda group involves more than just recruiting new people, it also involves developing them into revolutionary cadre. What does this mean? The newer members, comrades who have only been in the group a year or two, have to be trained in the basics of Marxism. But Marxism doesn’t just reside in books. For those ideas to become a material force they have to be embodied in individuals, they have to take an organisational form. If the organisation is to survive and grow, its members have to be able to argue socialist ideas to uncommitted people, to convince them that they should become active revolutionaries. Political education serves little purpose if it is separated from building a socialist organisation. There is no point being an expert on the Marxist theory of imperialism if you do nothing to build a revolutionary organisation today. Indeed one of the best tests of whether a comrade understands a particular area of Marxist politics is having to argue that position with people outside the organisation.
But there is more to being a cadre than understanding Marxist politics and being able to argue for those ideas. Cadre must be able to scientifically evaluate the development of the class struggle and society generally, in order to work out how to take advantage of these developments. They must understand and be able to carry out the mechanics of building the organisation. They must understand the tactics: the various twists and turns that a propaganda group has to go through to build a mass party. Such a cadre is not trained overnight. Nor are they trained without hard work, without an intense effort in theoretical education and in the practical tasks of building a socialist organisation. But without the development and continual expansion of that layer of cadre, a revolutionary organisation builds on sand.
Identifying your audience
The next question that arises for a propaganda group is: at whom should it aim its ideas? What is its audience? It can’t for the present win the masses, but who can it win? Unless a propaganda group can answer this question, then it is yet again on the road to oblivion. It is not enough to have formally correct but abstract ideas – to understand everything in Marx’s Capital. Marxists must understand how to concretely apply those ideas. They have to be able to answer the central political question: what do we do next?
Identifying an audience, creating a periphery around your organisation for Marxist politics, is not an easy task. An audience is not a static body of people. It changes depending on political circumstances, the depth of the crisis in society, the ebbs and flows of the class struggle and the size of the propaganda group. As well, it is not just a question of saying that at this particular moment, this specific group of people are our audience. You then have to be able to concretely work out how to relate to them, to find the issues that will give you an “in”, to patiently and consistently debate the questions that have a cutting edge with these people.
Traditionally Marxist propaganda groups had a certain guide as to their audience: they tried to relate to the vanguard - the most politically conscious section of the working class and the already established left-wing forces. So when Marx and Engels published their most important propaganda work, The Communist Manifesto, they were not aiming it at the mass of workers, but at those who already considered themselves communists. Marx and Engels polemicised against the erroneous conceptions of these early socialists – their conspiratorial methods, their utopianism, their elitism - and tried to win a minority to their world view. Similarly, after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, when Lenin established a new Communist International (the Comintern), he won his first supporters from the existing socialist movement. The small bands of supporters of the Russian Revolution aimed their fire at the reformist parties of the Second Socialist International – the parties that had betrayed the working class by their support for their own ruling classes in World War I. The Bolsheviks hoped to win over cadres from the left wing of these reformist parties. Only when they had regrouped these forces could they appeal to the broader unorganised masses.
Again, when the Trotskyists were expelled from the Stalinised Communist parties in the late 1920s, they did not immediately turn their backs on the CPs. The CPs still had the support of the most class-conscious workers. The small Trotskyist groups had to win over some of the better elements in the CPs. They had to pound away arguing about what was wrong with Comintern policies. That was how they recruited their initial cadre. To attempt to jump over this stage, to appeal directly to people not involved in socialist politics, would have led nowhere. For the reality is that when such people begin to move politically, they look for leadership to the already existing vanguard. Marxists had to implant themselves in that vanguard if they hoped to lead the masses in the future. Those revolutionaries in the early 1930s who tried to force the pace artificially, to jump over the necessary stage of political development, came to grief. Some of them ignored the Communist parties and their entire membership. They said you had to build among workers who had not been infected by the virus of Stalinism. They were quickly demoralised and collapsed. Others, declaring that it was a sectarian and conservative course just to win over individuals or groups of people from the CPs and hence train a cadre, argued for mass work to build a new party. They too got nowhere and began to retreat from Marxist principles in the direction of opportunism as they chased an illusory audience for their mass work.
However, this traditional approach for building a propaganda group presents today’s revolutionaries with a serious problem. There has been no organised political vanguard in any meaningful sense in Australia or in most other advanced capitalist countries since the 1970s. There is no mass organisation of radicals of any description, nor any significant current of politicised workers that revolutionaries can orient to. There are, of course, in every workplace a few workers who are active in the union or more left wing than most workers. But they do not form an organised layer that revolutionaries can relate to on an ongoing basis.
Nor are there ongoing campaigns that we can relate to that are radicalising and organising into activity significant bodies of people. On issue after issue over the last decade or more people have been shaken up politically and inspired to take action, whether it be the union rallies against WorkChoices, the protests against the war on Lebanon, Pauline Hanson, the Maritime Union dispute, demonstrations in support of refugees or the enormous protests against the Iraq war in 2003. However, by and large these have not led to the emergence of ongoing organised movements that provided a significant audience for socialists. The most important – but short-lived – exception to this pattern was the anti-capitalist movement that developed amongst a layer of young people in the wake of the Seattle protest against the World Trade Organisation in 1999 and the blockade of the World Economic Forum at Melbourne’s Crown Casino in 2000. For about 18 months the anti-capitalist movement provided Marxists with a concentrated audience of people looking for an alternative to capitalism. It opened up the possibility of quite rapid growth.
When such movements do develop it is vital for socialists to quickly seize the opportunity and to throw themselves into them. When there is a layer of people being radicalised around a particular issue, revolutionaries have to relate in a practical way to that issue or struggle. While socialist propaganda groups will rarely be in a position to lead major struggles, when these struggles do occur, socialists can’t just stand on the sidelines preaching the general ideas of socialism. They have to be able to relate those ideas to the specific issue. Socialists have to be able to argue a strategy for winning the struggle, to put forward concrete proposals that point the way forward. They have to draw out the lessons at all stages of the struggle, to point out the role of the police, the media, parliament, the ALP, the trade union officials and so on. Most importantly, a propaganda group must be able to link the particular issue, whether it is WorkChoices, the war in Iraq or cuts to education, to broader questions such as the capitalists’ neo-liberal agenda, the nature of imperialism, the role of the working class and how we can change society. But let’s be clear, most of the time intervention by a propaganda group means intervening in political debates that occur either in society as a whole, or among the milieu in which they are working. Whether or not the group is involved in a specific campaign, the discussions the group needs to have with other activists, if they are to influence them in a socialist direction, have to go a long way beyond just campaign tactics and strategy.
The fact that there is no organised working class vanguard or cohered body of radical activists or movements that attract ongoing, large-scale support does not mean that there is not a significant audience of people open to socialist arguments. The relentless ruling class offensive against workers, the never- ending “war on terror”, the continual attacks on democratic rights and the failure of the ALP and union leaders to offer any concerted resistance continually throw up an audience of people looking for an alternative to twenty-first century capitalism. But by and large these are scattered individuals who are relatively new to political activism and have little knowledge of Marxist ideas.
Relating to students - a milieu to work in
The long term aim of a small revolutionary organisation is to get bigger – and primarily, to have an influence in the working class. Yet the leap between the present and the future is a continuing source of debate among socialists. It seems common sense that, if we think only the working class can lead a revolution, then we should build among workers. So why does Socialist Alternative put considerable effort into building among students, and what has that to do with the leap from the isolation of a small group to the influence of a mass workers’ party? The experience of working class militants in surviving in the workplace – and the need to involve a majority of the workforce in any successful industrial activity – makes them more practical than students. If they have been involved in any political activity as workers, it will most likely have been through their union, an organisation of some size and strength, which has the potential to deliver action. A propaganda group simply can’t do that and as a consequence will not seem serious in comparison to a union. But because often a small minority among students can carry out meaningful activity – hold a lively protest or occupation or initiate a campaign – quite small groups of socialists can realistically play a leading role and be taken more seriously.
For one thing, they can organise groups of students to do much more than is possible in a similar situation at work. Just think of the regular information stalls and club meetings socialists can hold on campus and the regular activist meetings to be involved in. For these reasons a socialist intervention can have more impact. But as well socialists can more easily find on campus an audience that can be won over on the basis of an intellectual argument, rather than on the basis of what they can deliver. That is why for any propaganda group a milieu of student activists is one of the best places to gain the vital experience they need and help to orient the group away from sectarian abstention.
Moreover students can play a role in social upheaval, and they can genuinely fight for their rights. Their volatility can mean that after periods of calm, they may be the first to burst into rebellion. In the sixties they took the lead in country after country, drawing workers in behind them.[ii] So student struggles are not some Mickey Mouse affair for revolutionaries to “practise” on. Socialists can gain invaluable experience and train a cadre capable of leading important struggles on the campuses. So Socialist Alternative doesn’t relate to students because students are more worthy or more left wing than workers. We certainly don’t think they can lead a future revolution – but they can play an important part in social upheaval. Students’ struggles and concerns are legitimate and can play a role in radicalising many students in the here and now. Because of their generally different lifestyle and class position from workers, especially older workers with family responsibilities, perhaps a mortgage and/or a career, students are more likely to take seriously a small group of socialists with not much more than their ideas to offer.
The argument for relating to students does not in any way imply that all students are likely to be interested in left-wing politics. It is certainly not the case that because they are more “educated”, students are likely to be more radical. Actually, the main aim of education is to train people to work for industry and to carry out technical tasks, and so for the most part, students will be taught, and will accept, some variant of the dominant ideology of capitalism. However, there is an inbuilt contradiction in the bosses’ need for education. If you want creative workers, you have to allow a certain amount of debate and critical thought. During those few years of tertiary study, students deal in ideas in a way that most other groups in society do not. The rhetoric of academic freedom and exploration clashes with the reality of an increasingly corporatised education system. The gap between how the world is, and how it ought to be means that a minority of students will be interested in discussing and questioning ideas.
The nature of student life provides opportunities for small groups of revolutionaries. If a propaganda group is to be able to learn to make arguments that are not purely abstract, it needs a “milieu” in which to work, where its members have to answer people’s arguments, convince others to get involved in activity, of the best way to win a campaign etc. Socialists have to learn to lead, i.e. how to convince others of ideas they initially don’t totally agree with. All small socialist groups can have tendencies to abstract propagandism. That pulls them away from relating to peoples’ real concerns. But consciously looking for ways to interact with others we may be able to influence on an ongoing basis is one way to minimise this danger. The important phrase here is others we may be able to influence. An individual socialist in a workplace – up against a union bureaucracy that can produce thousands of leaflets, get on the evening news, demand that other unions do this or that – will have a hard time convincing her fellow workers that a socialist group of a few hundred or a few thousand, even if they were all a trade unionists, knows how to better run a strike. This is not an argument against socialists trying to lead at work. Even if they can only recruit the occasional individual, steady union work and leading the occasional industrial action adds to the general knowledge and experience of the organisation. It helps build a layer of members who have some feel for how to make arguments relevant in unions. It is simply that union activism cannot be the central focus for building a propaganda group.
Students relating to workers
Won’t a group with a large number of student or ex-student members be incapable of relating to workers when it’s needed? It’s true that such a group can develop ways of doing things which might seem strange to some blue-collar workers. However, this is much less the case than in the past. Before the massive expansion of tertiary education in the post World War II boom, students were an elite, with a completely different background, lifestyle and expectations from workers. In Australia many of them supported reactionary movements, for example acting as strikebreakers in struggles like the 1917 NSW general strike and backing fascism in the 1930s. However, even then, for all the reasons above, a minority were pulled towards socialism. And those small numbers could provide an important nucleus for socialist organisations which were to lead masses of workers. The Bolsheviks in Russia had many students who were recruited to Marxism. Just think of the background of leading figures such as Lenin, Trotsky, Krupskaya and others, and people like Rosa Luxemburg in Germany or Antonio Gramsci in Italy. They had all become socialists while students.
When workers are involved in mass struggle, they can become open to new ideas on a rapidly expanding scale. Workers can take revolutionary ideas more seriously than previously simply because they realise they need new ideas to win their struggles. But very importantly, it depends on whether there is a serious organisation on offer. With even some hundreds of students in a single city, let alone thousands, an organisation could intervene effectively to offer strike support and ideological argument. The very process of this kind of work would develop and change the existing members, who would have to learn to be sensitive to workers’ needs, ideas and experiences in order to intervene. Some of this can be learned before an upswing in struggle, but it cannot be seriously tested in the absence of serious mass, radical struggles.
The importance of a propaganda routine
Because there is no single issue that is radicalising large numbers of people, socialists have to be able to relate to people on a range of questions. We have to be able to take up the specific issues that they are concerned about and explain how they fit into a Marxist analysis of what’s wrong with the world. We have to be able to talk to them about everything from the growing gap between rich and poor, the war in Afghanistan or the way to defeat WorkChoices to more general questions like why the working class can change society, why Russia wasn’t socialist and the way forward for socialists today. To intersect with all these scattered individuals, revolutionaries need a high profile.
That’s why we in Socialist Alternative put great emphasis on doing regular information stalls, where we sell our magazine Socialist Alternative, in city streets and on university campuses. We make a concerted mobilisation for virtually all demonstrations, whether large or small. On the demonstrations we have information stalls, sell our magazine and march as a contingent – a Red Bloc – made up of our members and supporters. At the end of the demonstration we usually have a well-advertised debrief meeting where we discuss the way forward for the particular campaign and debate out whatever controversial issues have arisen. All our major branches hold well-advertised regular meetings, and our clubs on campuses hold regular forums.
We have established a regular propaganda routine that helps us to intersect with these scattered individuals and ensures that we actually follow them up, talk to them personally to try to convince them to get active as a socialist, and invite them to our branch meetings and other events and demonstrations. A stable propaganda routine of regular magazine sales and branch meetings, campus work and following up people we meet, forces us to look outwards, to address people beyond our ranks, people who only agree with some of our arguments. It helps prevent the organisation from becoming inward-looking. It keeps the group active, and provides a discipline that can help ward off passivity. Of course, a propaganda routine is no guarantee against complacency. Routine can easily become routinism. That is why revolutionaries must be ready to break and adapt their established routine to meet changed conditions, to make new interventions. Our audience can change quickly as the political climate changes. Socialists won’t always be appealing to scattered individuals. Flexibility is key. But without a stable propaganda routine, without regular branch meetings and sales of a publication, without the systematic following up of potential supporters, a socialist organisation will be in no position to take advantage of opportunities that do open up.
For well over two decades, workers’ living standards and trade union rights have been under relentless attack, under both Liberal and Labor governments, and there is no sign of the bosses’ offensive letting up. When you add to this the ever-looming environmental crisis and the prospect of decade after decade of brutal imperialist war, you can understand why there is growing unease among millions of workers and students. Yet at the same time official politics continues its march to the right and the rich and powerful seem never satiated. And still we are told we are living through boom years.
We can not predict how and when these growing tensions will come to a head. However, we can be confident that at some point there will be a major revival in working class struggle. The decisive struggles of the future will pose both major opportunities and difficulties for socialists. The unfolding of the struggle will be complicated and tortuous. Nothing will be straightforward. To make the most of these challenges, we have to prepare today by deepening our political understanding, by testing ourselves, by confronting the tasks of the moment. One of the most important tasks of the moment is to grow. To the extent that socialists can grow now, when furious struggles are not raging, we will be better placed to intervene and offer an alternative when workers and students are on the move. And it is important to emphasise that there are opportunities to grow today, not just when there are mass demonstrations on the streets over WorkChoices or the war in Iraq but in the quieter patches in between.
It is also important to be clear that the growth of a propaganda group is only in part determined by the external political environment. Short of a mass radicalisation, socialists will not recruit hand over fist, but a propaganda group can make headway against the pace of events. All sorts of internal factors – the coherence of the group, the clarity of the group’s perspectives and the experience and confidence of the members – can be just as important in recruiting the next ten people as the ebbs and flows of the class struggle.
To summarise
So let’s summarise the central tasks of a propaganda group. The first is political clarity: only by deepening their political understanding can Marxists lay a sound foundation for the future. Second, a propaganda group has to aim to grow in size and at the same time develop a layer of members – a cadre - that understands Marxist ideas and is able to apply those ideas in the specific circumstances of today. For a propaganda group putting those ideas into practice means identifying an audience for Marxism, establishing how to relate to that audience, and finally doing the detailed work – organising and carrying out routine propaganda work and not-so-routine interventions in the debates and struggles that break out – that is necessary to recruit new forces.
Finally socialists cannot jump over the necessary stages of the development they have to go through. In the present situation in Australia, and given the length of experience of the majority of its members, Socialist Alternative cannot be anything like the Bolsheviks in 1917 or the Communist Party in the 1930s. They had been through decades of major political and social crises, not just a few years in a period of a low level of struggle. Those decades of mass struggle challenged them in a way that socialists in Australia today have not yet experienced. A revolutionary organisation is steeled in significant ideological debates and major struggles. We cannot conjure these up.
This article first appeared in Socialist Alternative in January 2008.
Chapter 1 – The nature and tasks of a socialist propaganda group[i] V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 10, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1978, p31.
[ii] See Mick Armstrong, 1,2,3, What Are We Fighting For? The Australian student movement from its origins to the 1970s, Socialist Alternative, Melbourne, 2001.