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Australian Revolutionaries Must Command the Material Interests of Our
Society
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2019-03-31T21:57:25+10:00
To my peers, and everyone else who feels demoralised or confused by the
NSW state election:
Like you, I am tired, to the point of exhaustion. It has been so long
since we have had good news. The march of Communism in Australia has
seemingly ended and gone into full retreat. Just yesterday, I was
accused of "stealing" boxes from Bunnings. You know the refuse boxes
near the checkouts at Bunnings? Apparently you can take too many of them
and be refused service. And by "too many" I mean one too many.
Just yesterday, and I really mean yesterday, I saw the police stopping
cars and guarding events seven times in a two hour period. The police
were literally crawling all over Sydney City on Saturday.
I was listening to radio 2SER 107.3FM on Thursday, and they had an
editorial report on how the NSW Police are basically guns for hire in
our city. The police will now guard whatever event you want for cold
hard cash. Police approval of music festivals and other similar events
is condition on how much money they charge you for guarding your event.
The election result here in NSW has emboldened the Right and the Police,
and virtually every reactionary layer of society, merely within a week.
I feel like people are treating me differently all of a sudden. People
seem meaner and more selfish, and have adopted a "fuck you, I've got
mine" mentality. Perhaps I should qualify what I mean by that. Not
sensitivity gives me the impression that reactionary layers of society
feel more comfortable treating me and people like me like shit.
I felt very demoralised and depressed by the NSW state election result.
Until I found out that the popular vote of the election would have
handed the ALP and the Greens a coalition government if our state
employed a proportional representation electoral system. I was much more
aware of the gerrymandering in Victoria because I was much more
intimately involved in the Victorian Socialists election campaign.
In Stephen Jolley's electorate, the immoral and cynical preference
trading of right wing micro-parties ensured that even though Jolley came
in with the fourth highest vote, he would not be guaranteed a seat in
the Victorin Legislative Council.
So, I am happy to completely write off Australia as not even having the
have to hand over to the electoral commission has now risen to
astronomical heights. You would now need hundreds of thousands of
dollars to field candidates in every seat in a state, let alone get
"above the line" on the now misleadingly confusing senate ballot paper.
So despite all these terrible things, I feel heartened that the reality
of the situation in Australia is very simple. I feel silly saying this,
but I really believe it -- Australia is not just an economic
dictatorship, but a political one as well. The biggest corporations
allowed to trade in our state pay no tax. Enormous handouts of taxpayer
money are just dished out without question, and line the pockets of the
rich. Wages are now as low as they could possibly go, without being
below the means of subsistence. The rich have never had it so good in
Australia. I would go so far to say that we are not even "capitalist"
anymore, by any Marxist definition of the concept. We are more likely a
highly technologically advanced feudal nation, where we are serfs paying
off enormous arbitrary tithes to power companies, mortgagors, landlords,
and retail companies.
The reality of the political landscape of Australia is not complex at
all. Our parliament is the simplest and most transparently corrup body
of hollow people I could ever fear. Politicians in our country do and
say what they are paid to do and say. If the money stops flowing, the
representation in political policy ceases. I bet you all my material
possessions that you can pay a politician to do literally anything.
I suppose this is no news to some. I suppose the argument I am trying to
put forward is that the solution to combating the incredible degeneracy
of the Australian political landscape is much simpler than it is usually
made out to be.
The outlines of a way out of this mess were spelled out to me by the
wonderful pane of speakers I had the privilege of hearing that were
sponsored by the Australian Venezuela Solidarity Network. As you know,
Venezuela is a society that was making incredible strides towards
establishing socialism, until the country, for various reasons, entered
crisis. Venezuela is suffering from a terrible colonial history of being
a nation forced to be a one-export state. Its currency is most likely
subject to sabotage by all the main imperialist centres of capitalist
finance. As a result, Venezuela's economy has ground to a halt, and
daily life has become very difficult for its population to live through,
by conventional means.
But despite the lies and the wanton utter bullshit that pours out of the
mass media about Venezuela, something miraculous is happening. The
people are getting by. The people are making do. They may be more
emiserated now than they were at the height of the success of the
progress of socialism in their country, but the Venezuelan masses have
started to self organise. They have begun to tackle the issue of the
scarcity of necessities themselves. They provide employment and material
compensation where there is none, and where it is needed.
This presents the solution to the crisis of Communism in Australia. We
need to provide alternative structures to capitalism *right now*. We
need to be creating the material power we need to fight capitalism
having enough resources and material power to promote ourselves and
force our way into the political arena.
How else do you think the AYCC was able to organise the enormous masses
of students for the incredible climate action rallies we have all been
to? Money and material resources. Forgive me if this sounds cynical or
conspiratorial, but from my experience with the AYCC, and having been a
member in the late 2000s, I believe they are a front for the ALP. At the
very least the left wing of the ALP.
Marx and Engels talk about the organic nature of humans being labour, or
work. Something has to change about the way we do activism because we
are not treating activism for creating Communism as work, we are
treating it as volunteering. If we could *set* people to work, if we
could somehow cease being parasitic on people's daily commitments, we
could smash the ALP and the Liberal party and the Greens.
The great successes of the revolutions in China and Vietnam were because
the political and military factors of society were able to be separated
from the way social change was able to be done. I submit the economic
factor of social change is able to be searated out in Australia's case.
Somehow, and I don't know how, we need to be able to command the
party of anywhere from 5 000 to 10 000 members -- the former limit being
the relative size of the DSA, if it were proportionate to the size of
the Australian population.
I hope this letter finds you well,
Blair Vidakovich.