Workers' Liberty is a Marxist group. We are for socialism, created by the collective action of the working class. Capitalism is a bankrupt system, destroying the world, denying the means to earn a living, causing starvation and misery to many. At the same time capital employs the labour of those it can make the greatest profit from, whether they be children, whether they be denied the right to organise by their governments, whatever part of the world they might live in. But capital in exploiting labour, creates the working class. When working class people learn together that the capitalism is our enemy, and when we act together against the enemy, we can learn our potential to create a better world.
As Marxists we learn from our contributions to working class struggle, by putting forward and discussing our analysis of current politics.
The socialism Workers Liberty advocates has nothing in common with the discredited Stalinist regimes. We welcome their collapse, which clears the way for a rediscovery of democratic revolutionary socialism. We adhere to the principles of Trotsky's struggle against capitalism, Stalinism and reformism, but reject a great deal which seems to us false in the common run of neo-Trotskyism since the 1940s.
The horror movie that is the 6.30 news shows a procession of people, children and adults, malnourished, starving, in ill-health, injured, raped, tortured, dead, separated from loved ones, dispossessed - in Africa, Asia, and in Australia too. We cannot watch in passive hand-wringing despair if we understand that socialism is the alternative to this international barbarism. The TV news shows little of people's resistance to injustice and inhumanity, but resist they do. As socialists we have much more to offer than sympathy. We have a view of the way to a new socialist society which would not tolerate this inhumanity.
We see socialism as the self-emancipation of the working class. "The emancipation of the working class is also the emancipation of all humanity, irrespective of race or sex" (Marx).
Socialism is possible only as the result of the self-organised working class realising its power as an alternative to that of its masters, the capitalist ruling class. The Paris Commune was the first brief experience of working-class power. It was democratic and egalitarian, the basis for Marx developing his views of the need for workers' power to do away with the capitalist state. Repeatedly working-class movements have begun to form themselves into soviets or councils, as potential alternative regimes, for example the Russian soviets in 1905 and 1917, Germany 1918-19, Barcelona 1936, Hungary 1956, Chile 1971, Portugal 1975, Poland 1980-1. In Russia, 1917, the workers took power, but were overwhelmed in the 1920s by a bureaucratic counter-revolution.
Socialism means a society restructured according to the working-class principle of solidarity. It means an economy of democratic planning, based on common ownership of the means of production, a high level of technology, education, culture and leisure, economic equality, no material privileges for officials and managers, and accountability. Outside the organisation of the toil necessary to ensure secure material comfort for all, it means the maximum of individual liberty and autonomy.
Working-class socialism - counterposed by Marx and Engels over 150 years ago to all forms of "reactionary" or "bourgeois" socialism - builds on the best of what capitalism has achieved, in technology, economic coordination, communications, education, democracy and individual liberty; and revolutionary socialism can be far freer and more democratic than capitalism could conceivably be - through integrating economic and political power in highly democratic structures, through thorough accountability and provisions for political participation, and through extensive political and individual liberties. At the same time a socialist regime would have the power and the will to allocate sufficient resources for all human needs, so that no individuals or groups would be cast off and cast out as dregs, as they are under capitalism.
Some on the left theorise a period of post-capitalism or post-modernism, in which history has ended along with Stalinist power in Europe. For them, capitalism is no longer monolithic, but aimed at niche markets, and old-fashioned "Fordist" mass production has been superseded by teams which empower workers, making "the working-class" and "class struggle" old-fashioned, troglodytic notions.
We recognise the continuation of the core social relations of capitalism, the ownership and control by capital of the means of production, and the consequent power of capital over the direct producers, particularly those who must sell or attempt to sell their labour power. Far from those relations dwindling away, exploitation is intensifying, as hours of work for those in employment tend to increase, while the proportion of jobless also increases. All over the world, governments are privatising, to give capital more direct influence and growth, and to fragment trade unions and weaken the working class. In the Newly Industrialising Countries, especially in Asia, the working class is expanding rapidly, mostly under repressive conditions. As surely as capitalism continues, so does the working class and class struggle. The results of that class struggle depend at least in part on the strength and understanding which an organised revolutionary left, built up by long effort including in times of low class struggle, can bring to it.
The trade union movements of the advanced countries, and their political representatives in various labour and social democratic parties, have been ineffective in resisting the restructuring of capital. They have largely given up on extending or even defending state welfare provisions such as those in health, education and housing which reduced inequality after World War 2. Instead they accept capitalist demands for more competitive production, whilst trying to satisfy through cooperation and containment of the damage to the working class. The reformist labour movements, political and industrially, have overwhelmingly assisted or acquiesced in moves to privatise, corporatise, and lower the cost of labour to capital.
The contradiction is that the labour movements are also the major form of self-organisation of the working class. When the labour movement is weak, so is the left. It is an elementary duty of Marxists to work to strengthen the existing unions and the political parties based on them, against capital and for the basic interests of the working class.
The left is small, in Australia and internationally. It is fragmented even on this elementary duty of Marxism, to focus on the existing organisations of the working class. There are also differences on the meaning of imperialism, on the significance of the collapse of Stalinism, and on other movements for social change.
We
have distinctive ideas. Our contribution at this stage is to put forward these
ideas, discuss them openly, and to help build working-class independence and
support for socialism, recognising that at the moment we are mainly able to
influence individuals, but aiming to influence groups where resources and opportunities
exist.
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In Australia we aim to develop a clear political alternative within the labour movement. We want public ownership of industry, workers' control of working conditions, and democratic planning of the economy. We want a labour movement that rejects racism and sexism, that is accessible to all oppressed people, accountable to its rank and file, and militant against capitalism.
We reject the notion that Australian workers and Australian capitalists share a "national interest". We support the struggles of workers and oppressed nationalities world-wide. In particular, we support the national rights of the East Timorese against the collusion by the Australian government in their oppression by the Indonesian dictatorship.
We are for a republic, with all legislative power and control of the executive in the hands of a single democratically-elected assembly, and for the abolition of the Reserve Powers and the Senate.
We support the demands of Aboriginal people for land rights and compensation for their dispossession. We are for the full provision of water, sanitation, electricity and transport to Aboriginal communities. We are for the right of every Aboriginal person to have a job with equal pay and conditions, and freedom from racial harassment.
We oppose immigration controls and detention camps for migrants, whose only "crime" was to be desperate enough to come to Australia despite sharks and pirates. There is no logic in opposing immigration on the grounds that sparsely populated Australia is "overpopulated" - as if the countries that migrants come from are empty.
We are for the liberation of women from oppression. We propose first and foremost economic independence for women from husbands and fathers, in the form of the right to a job, with equal pay and conditions and freedom from sexual harassment. Women need the opportunity to combine motherhood with waged work, free from anxiety about the well-being of their children, through good affordable childcare and reduced, flexible working hours with no loss of pay. Motherhood should be by choice, supported by access to abortion, contraception and fertility services.
The drudgery of housework and the sexual division of labour should be broken down, not simply by berating men for failing to take on domestic tasks, but by changing the whole structure of domestic labour so that it is socialised, performed collectively as social labour. The architecture which isolates small family groups in segregated dwellings should be changed to facilitate socialised domestic labour and caring for dependent people, infants, children, elderly and severely disabled, so that the alternatives are not just either that the closest woman in the family gives up her personal freedom to provide care, or else these people are segregated into institutions which provide unsatisfactory and often commercialised accommodation with minimal care.
Today children are treated first and foremost as the appendages of and responsibility of individual adults, rather than as free individuals with dependent needs for which society accepts responsibility. Children should have both civil rights and rights to a decent standard of health, education, nutrition, housing, and love.
We demand an end
to the scourge of unemployment which has impoverished many working-class households.
The "remedies" of immigration controls, import controls, and fiddling with interest
rates, have all been shown to be sheer quackery. Unemployment is based on and
reinforces the excessive duration of the work done by employed workers. For
example, unemployment among teachers could be ended by reducing class sizes.
Similarly, the provision of better health services would employ more nurses
and auxiliary staff. The government must fund "unproductive" expenditure on
social welfare and legislate to cut the working week.
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The Australian labour movement
Thanks to a combination of circumstances, Australian workers developed an exceptionally strong labour movement. They were able to win the world's first labour government, and relatively high living standards.
Australia's rich natural resources and the secure markets for its products in the British Empire provided favourable economic circumstances. Australian capitalism's use of mainly settler, rather than indigenous, labour obliged it to offer comparatively good wages. The dominance of large landed property pushed workers towards class action rather than individualist responses. The many thousands of rebels who emigrated or were transported to Australia from Britain and Ireland provided a vital leaven.
Yet all Australian labour's achievements were tainted by being encased in the framework of a settler outpost of the British Empire, and specifically by working-class racism against the continent's indigenous people and the peoples of Asia. Karl Marx's comment on American labour in the 19th century applies also to Australian workers: "Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black skin it is branded". The "labour aristocratic" position of the Australian workers relative to the Aboriginal peoples and to Asian workers gave the politics of the Australian labour movement a "labour aristocratic" or "liberal-labour" colouring.
Britain has declined as a world power throughout the 20th century; in the last 40 years the British Empire has collapsed; Britain has become a minor second-rank capitalist state, and one, moreover, oriented mainly to the European Union. The Australian capitalist class has reoriented to the USA and to Asia. Its programme now, whether through "managed change" (the ALP) or through more drastic measures (the Liberals) is to cut down the Australian labour movement, deregulate, privatise, slash costs, so as to fit the Australian economy into the international capitalist competition of the Pacific Rim. In this scenario, Australia will retain a position of advantage, as a site for finance, education, tourism, and some high-technology industry, as well as for its natural resources, but large sections of the Australian working class will be marginalised and impoverished and the whole class reduced to a much more insecure existence.
To this programme of the Australian capitalist class, we counterpose solidarity with the workers of Asia, a drive to level up workers' standards internationally, an open door for immigration, the integration of immigrant workers into the labour movement, and a perspective of using the historic strength of Australia's labour movement, the vitality of its emerging multicultural working class, and the richness of its natural resources, as levers for a socialist project of winning a decent life for all throughout Asia, Australasia, and the Pacific.
So long as the Australian labour movement remained politically a "liberal-labour", and not revolutionary-socialist, movement, it was bound to be dragged along with the programme of the Australian capitalist class.
The ALP governments of 1983-96 chose to be the executors of that programme. The consequent betrayals demoralised the labour movement, and led many Australian leftists to seek political activities outside the labour movement.
Yet Australia will
be reshaped by the organised working class fighting for socialism, or by the
capitalist class, not by anyone else. Socialists must win the organised working
class to our politics or remain sideline protesters.
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The political importance of the working-class movement
The working-class movement is strongest when it unites all the oppressed - overcoming national prejudice, racism and sexism within its ranks. A determined fight against racism and sexism cannot be postponed in the name of unity. Discrimination against and oppression of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transsexual people, and those with disabilities, also divide the working class. It is our responsibility to fight for the labour movement seriously to take on these issues. We support the self-organisation of oppressed groups and advocate close links with the labour movement. Working-class unity can only be achieved by opposing all forms of oppression.
The trade unions represent the working class - but incompletely, unsatisfactorily, binding the class to capitalism. That was particularly apparent in the 13 years of Labor government between 1983 and 1996, with the Accord between the unions and the ALP. Union membership declined, along with industrial militancy.
But the unions still remain the major organisations of the working class, the major vehicles of class struggle. There is no short-term prospect of them being replaced by new organisations. Socialists who recognise socialism as the liberation of the working class by the working class must focus on the trade union movement, rather than on "radical" movements without a working-class or socialist perspective.
The problem of the conservatism of the ALP is tied to the conservatism of the trade union leaders. The ALP is the political wing of the trade unions, no more no less reactionary, no more no less a tool of capitalist ideas than the unions. The unions are more closely tied to the bedrock class struggle on wages and conditions, and the ALP to the state machine: nevertheless, the Labor government of 1983-96 was able to push through its pro-capitalist policies only because of the consent and cooperation of the trade unions.
If there were no political party based on the unions, then we would have to advocate the formation of one, on the grounds that the unions should not be confining themselves to industrial/economic struggle and that politics is a tool of capitalist rule, a rule that should be challenged politically by the working class. Whether a particular socialist group works in the ALP branches, or whether it just works in the unions, backs the ALP in elections, and pushes working-class demands on the ALP leadership through the union affiliations to the ALP, is a tactical question of resources and opportunities.
Various independent election campaigns are an understandable reaction to the conservatism of the ALP, and have appeal for radicals who are frustrated by the ineffectiveness of the left within the labour movement. However, we cannot at present identify any of the independent election campaigns as contributing to a movement for socialism or to working-class independence. The conditions under which we would support an independent socialist or labour candidate would be if they:
Active commitment to a socialist programme by the mass of the Australian working class cannot be achieved without enormous debates and upheavals in the labour movement, including the ALP. It is necessary for socialists to form their own democratic and revolutionary working-class party in the course of the struggle to transform the labour movement. All working-class history indicates that a real revolutionary party, with a real base in the working class, will be created only with a struggle in the existing labour movement, coupled with a drive to recruit and mobilise youth and other unorganised workers. Attempts by small sects to create their "own" labour movement can at best produce larger sects. If socialists do not have proposals for the whole labour movement, then prattle about "the need for a revolutionary party" is worse than useless. We want socialists who support our basic ideas to work in their unions and be part of the battle of ideas.Advocated a socialist solution; Called for the renovation of the labour movement; Emphasised the need for working-class struggle; and Called for a class-based vote, with preferences to the ALP or other workers' parties, not to the Democrats. In any case, we are for the return of an ALP government, as long as the ALP remains the political expression of the overwhelming majority of the organised working class.
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The post-war arms race between the USA and the USSR caused many people to fear for the survival of the human race. Peace movements were formed that appealed to all people, working-class or not, who were alarmed by the threat of atomic warfare. Similarly, many supporters of the environment movement now see the threat to the biosphere as a threat that transcends in importance the traditional concerns of the labour movement.
We welcome the formation of movements around problems of human survival - but we believe that these problems can only be solved by the working class. We believe that it is in the interests of peace and environment movements to seek to have a constructive relationship with the labour movement.
Impatient attempts to replace the working class as the agent of social change under capitalism will at best be ineffectual.
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In 1898 Rosa Luxemburg defended the goal of workers' power against Eduard Bernstein, who wished to "modernise" Marxism by rejecting revolutionary change. Luxemburg wrote: "Can the social democracy be against reforms? Can we counterpose the social revolution, the transformation of the existing social order, our final goal, to social reforms? Certainly not. The daily struggle for reforms, for the amelioration of the condition of the workers within the framework of the existing social order, and for democratic institutions, offers to the social democracy the only means of engaging in the proletarian class war and working in the direction of the final goal - the conquest of political power and the suppression of wage labour. Between social reforms and revolution there exists for the social democracy an indissoluble tie. The struggle for reforms is its means. The social revolution is its aim".
When Luxemburg wrote these lines, Marxist parties were called "social democratic". Now the social democratic parties are dominated by "reformists" who, like Bernstein, refuse to challenge the capitalist system. They are opposed by small revolutionary groups who are for revolution but who, on many fronts, do no serious work for reforms... Our rule is the one expressed by Trotsky in the Transitional Programme: "The Bolshevik-Leninist stands in the front-line trenches of all kinds of struggles, even when they involve only the most modest material interests or democratic rights of the working class".
"Bourgeois democracy" means democracy that is stunted and warped by the economic power of the capitalists and the dependence of the workers on wage labour. Compared to workers' democracy it is a miserable farce. Yet even bourgeois democracy was a great historic advance over rule by a feudal aristocracy or the rule of an absolute monarch.
Today it is still far more favourable to the workers' movement than a fascist or Stalinist dictatorship. Freedom of speech and assembly, the right to vote and to form parties, the right to organise against exploitation - these freedoms and rights are the oxygen of the workers' movement.
Wherever these "bourgeois" freedoms are denied to workers, we support the workers in their fight for liberty - even against a self-styled "workers' government". We accept Lenin's dictum that "whoever wants to approach socialism by any means other than political democracy will inevitably arrive at absurd reactionary conclusions".
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Since the Bolshevik-led revolution in 1917, the attitude to take to that revolution and to the USSR have been issues that socialists could not ignore. The USSR has now collapsed, but it is still necessary to explain why this collapse is not the "failure of socialism".
The 1917 revolution was a genuine working-class revolution that placed power in the hands of workers' councils. The devastation resulting from the world war and civil war meant that the reconstruction of the country was more urgently dependent on material aid from a workers' revolution in the West. The working-class revolutionaries - the Bolsheviks - never believed that they could build socialism in one country, least of all in backward Russia. They were establishing a bridgehead for a working-class revolution which they hoped would triumph in the advanced countries of Europe, to create a union of workers' states that could build on the most advanced technology and culture developed by capitalism.
Because of the lack of adequate Marxist parties in the advanced countries, the workers' revolutionary efforts there were defeated. The workers' revolution remained isolated in Russia. A bureaucratic layer, round Stalin, first, through its malign influence on the Communist International, wrecked the chances of revolutionary victories in other countries, and then strangled the revolution in Russia.
By the 1930s workers' power had been utterly extinguished. Stalin's regime was not the continuation of the revolution but its savage and bloody negation. For Stalin, "socialism" was not what it was for Marx, an economy based on "the freely associated producers", but a system of state-organised exploitation.
In 1989-91 the Stalinist regimes in the USSR and its East European satellites were overthrown by popular revolutions which were of a bourgeois-democratic character but massively supported by the working class. These events showed conclusively that those old regimes were not post-capitalist, in the sense of representing progress beyond capitalism.
The new regimes have opened up to the world market and pushed privatisation, creating massive pauperism. We oppose these capitalist policies and support the anti-Stalinist socialist groups and independent workers' movements in Eastern Europe and the ex-USSR.
Nevertheless, it was entirely right to support the popular revolutions in 1989-91. They opened up the possibility for the working class to organise independently and to explore and debate ideas; and, if the emancipation of the working class must be the task of the workers themselves, that possibility is the first essential for any socialist progress. That working-class organisation and political regroupment is proceeding very slowly in the ex-USSR and Eastern Europe is unsurprising, given the extirpation of all working-class political traditions by Stalinism and the current weakness of the left in Western Europe: it is no justification for any desire to return to the old regime.
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Capitalism develops unevenly on a world scale, and with a tendency for the unevenness to increase and compound itself. Some countries become sites for modern infrastructure, advanced industries and services, major finance capital, the headquarters of multinational companies, and heavy investment, while others remain with few industries (often primary-product or low-technology), operated by low-wage labour, with low investment and widespread pauperism. The richer capitalist states, and the banks and multinationals based in them, dominate over poorer countries.
Against political domination we fight for the right to self-determination of all nations and for consistent democracy. Against the impositions of the IMF on poorer countries, we support the struggles of workers and peasants in those countries. Against the depredations of international capital, we fight for social ownership and for the planned use of the world's resources and technology to get rid of poverty.
This fight against imperialism is a part of our fight against capitalism, not something superseding and overriding it. The capitalist classes even of the poorest countries are oppressor, not oppressed, classes: we reject any alliance with them beyond possible joint actions for political independence.
World capitalism, and the hierarchies of power within it, are fluid and ever-changing. Alongside world capitalism's tendencies to accentuate unevenness, and interacting with those tendencies, are tendencies to "level out" development through the decay of the richest states and the emergence of new industrial centres. Imperialism is not a matter of a fixed imperialist "camp" confronting another "camp", nor is it a system which cannot change except to decay. In the last fifty years the big colonial empires have been broken up; most of the ex-colonies have won political independence; a number of them have developed substantial industry and big working classes.
Stalinist imperialism was and is as much to be opposed as ordinary capitalist imperialism. We supported self-determination for the nations of Eastern Europe, and for the peoples of Afghanistan, against Russian domination; we support Tibet's fight for freedom from Chinese rule.
Every capitalist class has imperialistic impulses. Indonesia's domination of East Timor, or Serbia's drive to dominate Kosovo and large parts of Bosnia and Croatia, are as much to be opposed as the imperialist ventures of larger, richer states. We recognise the development of "sub-imperialist" centres in such countries as India, South Africa, Nigeria, Mexico, and Brazil, where the ruling class has gained sufficient economic and/or military strength to act as a big power in its region.
Australia is a centre of finance capital, of a number of multinationals, and of relatively advanced industry, although it is not a big power on the world scale. Borrowing the term used by the Australian Trotskyists in 1944, we recognise it as a "dependent imperialism". Nationalism in Australia has a parochial and reactionary character, with measures such as the White Australia policy, immigration controls, and tariff barriers. The Accord and "clever country" notions are in that tradition, as is the large part of the environmental movement which opposes further immigration. For us, the main enemy is at home - the Australian capitalist class.
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Democracy and the national question
The national question is one of political democracy - national "self-determination" means that a nation may democratically decide, without being threatened with blockade or invasion, whether to form a separate state or to remain in a political union with another nation. The Marxist commitment to international working-class unity implies consistent support for the right of all nations to self-determination.
The notion of "anti-imperialism" should mean the same thing but in practice it has not. Some socialists divided the world into an imperialist and an anti-imperialist camp. The anti-imperialist camp supposedly included all Stalinist states. Resistance by the peoples of Eastern Europe and by the Afghans to the imperialism of the former USSR was then opposed on the grounds that it would weaken the struggle against imperialism! We reject that approach.
We believe that the only solution to the British-Irish conflict is a free united Ireland which recognises as much regional autonomy for the distinct Protestant Irish community as is compatible with the right to self-determination of the Irish-majority Gaelic-Catholic people. In practice, we believe, this means some sort of federal Ireland.
We are for a socialist United States of the Middle East, with self-determination for minority nations like the Kurds and the Israeli Jews. We reject calls for a "secular democratic state in all Palestine", because this desirable ideal solution is impossible until after the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been resolved and relegated to history: as an immediate proposal the slogan can only be camouflage for a programme for the subjugation of Israel by the surrounding Arab states. We support the struggle of the Palestinian Arabs against the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, and against discrimination inside Israel.
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Our group was formed in 1980 by members from what had previously been two discussion groups in Melbourne and in Sydney. We had and have close links with the Alliance for Workers' Liberty and its predecessors in Britain, but we are committed to developing an analysis of the specifics of Australian politics, Australian history and the Australian working class, and to working out our tactics from that analysis, not by mechanically copying tactics overseas. We published a journal, "Socialist Fight", from 1981 to 1987: at present we produce a bi-monthly Australian Workers Liberty and circulate the British journal of the same name.
In 1984-5 we accepted an invitation from Labour Militant to operate as a grouping within their organisation. Labour Militant shared the political views of the then SWP, now Democratic Socialist Party (DSP).We broke from them as they turned towards alignment with Stalinist forces (Castro, Gorbachev, Castro again...) and away from the Australian labour movement towards a search for alliances with the Greens and the Australian Democrats.
Those issues continue to separate us from the DSP. From the other sizeable avowedly-Trotskyist group in Australia, the ISO, we are separated principally by the shallowness of their notion of a "revolutionary party": they see it as a matter of building a tightly-disciplined organisation of a certain size, by any means available and largely irrespective of precise politics, rather than the organisation being only a means for and an expression of a fight for political clarity in the labour movement and the working class. This problem expresses itself in the opportunism of their orientation in the trade unions (any slogan will do for them, however sectarian or adaptationist it may be, as long as they calculate that it will bring them organisational advantage), by their hostility to open debate and discussion on the left, and by the "anti-imperialist" demagogy which leads them to give credence to people like Saddam Hussein and Hamas.
We are active in
our trade unions, in campaigns, and, where it seems suitable, in ALP branches.
We urge all working-class socialists to study our literature, debate our ideas,
and join us in our fight to build a clear revolutionary Marxist organisation
in the labour movement.
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