Workers' Liberty

'the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class'  

Workers' Liberty Australia  

Asylum seekers: Our movements cross borders - making the connections in the run up to S11

by Xborder found at http://antimedia.net/xborder/xb_2.htm

Ruddock weeps crocodile tears
As hundreds of refugees took courageous action to highlight their plight by going over and under the barbed wire on June 12/13, Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock reached first for the racist slander of depicting asylum seekers as carriers of disease and criminals and, when that failed, for the theatrics of crocodile tears.

'People-smugglers', we were told, were responsible not only for people seeking asylum in the first place, but also for the prospect of being caged up for months if not years in the refugee internment camps. How terrible, Ruddock lamented, that these 'organised criminal syndicates' were exploiting human misery? In this way, the Government sought to shift responsibility for its own treatment of refugees to shadowy otherworld figures.

The prohibition industry of 'people smuggling' would not, however, exist if it were not for the barriers that have been erected against refugees by all western countries in the last 10 years. But not even the profits made from exploiting the needs of people to flee can compare with the profits being made legally and with Government encouragement.

Ruddock is concealing the transfer of millions of public money into the coffers of the global incarceration giant, Australian Correctional Management/Wackenhut that runs all the refugee internment camps and carries out deportations and deterrence. Who stands to gain the most from ensuring that such misery continues?

Internment Camps
Today in Australia, there are thousands of people who are imprisoned, often for months, always for indefinite periods, without charge and without trial, who are not able to access the courts to review either the merit of their imprisonment or its duration, and whom the Federal Attorney-General, Daryl Williams, has said do not have a right to be informed of any of their remaining rights, including the right to seek legal advice upon their imprisonment. The Government and Opposition refer to these people as 'illegal immigrants'. This is a calculated lie. As a 'Parliamentary Joint Standing Committee on Migration' Report explicitly says, the incarceration of asylum seekers is "the deprivation of liberty other than as the result of a conviction for an offence."

We are confined so that capital can move against us
As capital moves ever more freely around the world; we are locked up, confined, enclosed. In the last decade of the 20th century, as trade and financial movements were deregulated, as the rules governing the actions of bosses, merchants and bankers were eased or abolished altogether; it became almost impossible-more often than not illegal-to flee the impoverishment brought about by austerity programs, to escape the wars, the economic and environmental devastation brought about by IMF and World Bank-sponsored "development" and debt-induced conflicts.

So that capital can incite the kind of competition that would compel us to work for as next to nothing as possible - the underbidding wars that go by the name of 'the race to the bottom' - workers have to be territorially divided by region, city, and country, divided again by firm through 'enterprise bargaining', and divided in turn through individual contracts and the like. Borders between workers-including the border between documented and undocumented workers, the borders assembled by ethnicism, racism and nationalism-are the key ingredients in the power of global capital.

Pass laws, prisons and reserves
Much like centuries ago, as Australia was colonised by the British crown for use as a penal colony, so today incarceration and pass laws have become the favoured means for controlling and criminalising the attempts of those in the most wretched of circumstances to escape their impoverishment. The regimes of 'mandatory sentencing' that have targeted indigenous peoples, the system of 'mandatory and non-reviewable detention' of asylum seekers who arrive without papers, the criminalisation of strikes and industrial action, the privatisation of public spaces, the return of forced labour in the form of work-for-the-dole, and not least the new round of 'development' which has forced millions off lands in many third world countries...

These are the latest version of the procedures that accompanied the so-called 'free trade' capitalism of previous times: the tossing off of indigenous peoples from their lands so that they have no option other than to work for the profit of others or live by the charity of the missionaries, the pass laws that restricted their movements to reserves, these local systems of enclosure were the vicious corollary of the poorhouses, workhouses, and the enclosures of the commons that provoked the creation of this continent as the prisonhouse of those declared to be 'surplus populations' and 'the dangerous classes' ousted from the heart of the Empire.

S11 Alliance in Melbourne

by Richard Lane

Lively, energetic busy. That sums up the feeling at s11 alliance meetings in Melbourne. Students, greens, the left groups, and a sprinkle of unionists: 80 - 100 people turn up to work out tactics and details. There are regulars, occasionals and oncers. After the plenary (all in one) session, working groups consider details. There are lots of people at the demonstration tactics group: hardly any at the accommodation, childcare, and logistics one. There has been an attempt to improve that by spreading out the mundane tasks amongst the sexy ones.

I go to the "welcome" working group. I discover there that the Public First group initiated the s11 alliance, but they have now gone their own way. Public First have held public meetings on what the World Economic Forum (WEF) is and are organising an alternative forum on 9 September. People seem to be working together pretty well. There has been a fair bit of self-selection going on - i.e. Public First involves a lot of activists, including union officials, from a Stalinist background. Many anarchists organise through s11-awol. Everybody agrees on what they are against - corporate capital as epitomised by the WEF. What they are for is another matter. As is what comes after the protest. Some want to continue as a sort of peak body for the left.

One person points out that studies in the US show that 18 months after a major protest, 80% of attendees have dropped out or developed a drug addiction or mental illness. He uses this to motivate the need for a "chill space" during and after the action. He does not make the connection that continuing organisation, ideally a broad party of the left could keep people involved and healthy.

It is exciting to see so many people organised and enthusiastic. But it is sobering to think of where that energy will go if the demo is the end point, instead of the beginning of a renewal of the labour movement.

Melbourne :S11 Alliance meets
6.30pm Wednesdays
RMIT Student Union building
Swanston Street
Melbourne

Sydney: CACTUS meets
6:30 pm Thursdays
outside the UTS Broadway tower block cafe