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title: 'Final Essay for Overland: Unionism and Imperialism'
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2018-08-26T22:31:47+10:00
Unionism Inside Australia and Imperialism
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Collective struggle is borne of the decline of material conditions. The
rise or decline of the union movement broadly represents the working
classes faith in the ability of the movement to secure material gains.
Mass support for unionism is caused by the level of development of a
union movement's organisation. The more a union movement is able to
wield political power through the expression of mass militant action,
through rank and file democratic will, the more developed it is. The
intrinsic purpose of any union movement must therefore be to secure
material gains for the working class, and help it grasp the nature of
its position within capitalism. The purpose of unionism is to act as a
tool for the working class to defend its interests against attack both
at home and from abroad.
In this paper I will argue that unions within the core of imperialism,
such as in Australia, should adopt clear anti-racist, anti-imperialist
and pro-refugee objectives. They should also be committed to the
objective that the capitalist mode of production should be abolished. We
can only achieve a just, common future through the establishment of a
democratic mode of production. Furthermore, we can only achieve this end
with a guiding principle of international working class solidarity in
all union activity. If there is anything that I want the reader to take
away from this, it is that there is no genuine conflict of interests
between workers inside or outside the barbed wire fences of imperialism.
I also want to argue that Australia unions should disaffiliate from the
ALP, and adopt strong anti-imperialist and strong anti-racist platforms.
In order to show why this is so, I will provide an overview of
capitalism and the contradictions it generates.
The economic and political system the the entire human population
currently lives under is capitalism. Capitalism is an economic system
which declares that 'all capitalists are created equal', and that
economic profit is to be maximised at all costs. The costs referred to
are those suffered by the mass of working people. The whole point of
capitalism is to maximise one's amount of capital. That is the only
thing that matters under this mode of production. The importance of this
goal is so overwhelming that entire industries are created for the
purpose of allowing sums of money to multiply as if by magic. This is
the unstated aim of the finance industry, to attempt to free the
multiplication of bank accounts from any physical connection to
labouring.
From the very moment of its birth, capitalism created its own
resistance--the working class. Capitalism requires an enormous human
population to spend the majority of their lives working, in order for
the system to function. In order to entice people to work, capitalism
wields the threat of starvation and poverty. Therefore, in order for
capitalism to become a successful economic system, most of the human
population had to be stripped of all their wealth so that the only thing
they had to trade on the market was their own labouring power.
Occasionally, the working class is able to wring some minor concessions
from the capitalist state, when the capitalists themselves fail to
provide sufficient resources to survive. The state makes these benefits
difficult to access, and the press aids their vilification of all who
seek access to a basic level of social security.
Capitalism also transformed human life, restructuring the priority of
human behaviours to those of labouring and economic exchange. In So
Doing it dramatically reduced the breadth and variety of human
capacities that were promoted on earth. This reduction of human
behaviour to just labouring is called alienation. Rather than explore
human activities, workers are compelled, by virtue of their material
position, to labor in the manner prescribed by the capitalist. Rather
than collaboratively organise so as to meet shared needs, workers are
thrown into competition with one another, reinscribing an unnatural, and
thoroughly intolerable arrangement. Grasping at scraps thrown out by a
given capitalist, the worker lurches through various forms of
alienation, never able to realise their potential. All of this is caused
by capitalism's reduction to and replacement of human interaction with
commodity exchange.
Life is rendered desperate for the many because of the organisation of
human society around generalised commodity production. The state of
human existence right now is a bizarre and temporary one. Life does not
need to be this way. Mass emiseration and destitution is unnatural. In
this period of human history, there is sufficient resources for each
human being to live a dignified life. [UN
Citation](http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/csdb/en/) Right from the
very beginning of capitalism, people have frequently and periodically
risen up and resisted the imposition of work. As Marx and Engels wrote
so long ago in 1845,
"For \[capitalism\] to become an"intolerable\" power, i.e. a power
against which people make a revolution, it must necessarily have
rendered the great mass of humanity "propertyless", and produced, at
the same time, the contradictions of an existing world of wealth and
culture...\" (The German Ideology, 24)
The interests of the international working class are bound together by
the nature of this shared, antagonistic relation to capital. Global
capitalism is integrated together through the political instrument of
imperialism. Imperialism is when capitalism grows to be the dominant
mode of production on Earth, but is unable to grow any further within
certain confines. What happens next is that industrial production and
financial interests fuse with particular capitalist states, so that
their militaries become appendages of certain industries. This incessant
calcification of power requires the expropriation of the wealth of those
countries often referred to as "developing nations". Those in charge of
imperialism create an artificial separation between different
populations of the global working class. This allows the global
capitalist class to subjugate and rule over the global south and allows
the workers in the core of imperialism to live in apparent relative,
temporal material advantage. Global imperialism also artificially pits
firms in the global south against one another, and by maintaining arms
length relations with said firms, transnational corporations are able to
maximise the surplus value extracted, all the while obfuscating the
nature of their dealings. For instance, much of the profit derived from
international capitalism originates within the global south, but is
deceptively recorded officially as originating within the core of
imperialist economies. John Smith revealed in his book *Imperialism in
the Twenty-First Century* that:
In 2009, according to the International Coffee Organization, the
roasting, marketing, and sale of coffee added \$31bn to the GDP of the
nine most important coffee-importing nations, more than twice as much
as all coffee-producing nations earned from growing and exporting
it---and, as noted above, this does not include the value-added
captured by cafés and restaurants (p29).
Mainstream economists contort the reporting of economic data so that the
economies of countries in the global south appear unproductive, and
therefore, that their status as 'developing' countries is somehow
deserved.The reality is that these countries are, as Michael Parenti
puts it, subject to "superexploitation" (Against Empire, Page 9). The
economies of the global south are the ones propping up global
capitalism, it is not the other way around. The profit seeking behaviour
of capital is the motive force behind the outsourcing, and offshoring of
jobs. Neoliberalism is as much a story about the offshoring of
industries to the global south as the savage cuts to the public sector
within the global north. Massive profits to all the major sectors of
imperialism are generated through the relentless minimisation of labor
costs. The appearance of disparate interests between populations of
workers from the north and the south, is just that--an appearance. It is
not the truth. The falsehood can only seem true as long as neoliberalism
holds sway as the dominant ideology.
The subjugation of the working class in the global south only benefits
the capitalist class. The concoction of racist ideologies disseminated
by the mainstream media gives the appearance of divergent interests
among the international proletariat. As Marx and Engels put it in the
Communist Manifesto, "the executive of the modern state is but a
committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie." (p
15). Capitalist states all over the world restrict the free movement of
labouring people just as much as they promote the free movement of
money. This is the fundamental way in which capitalism is developed
today. Racism has always been an ideological stick wielded by the global
capitalist ruling class, but never before has it seemed so
all-pervasive, and apparently widely-accepted by the population of the
core of imperialism. Racism, xenophobia, and demonisation of refugees is
the most important ideological agenda for the capitalist class right
now. While the global ruling class uses massive bodies of armed people
to physically coerce the workers of the global south, their strategy in
the north is much more insidious.
The global ruling class opts to poison the minds of as much of the
population of the global north as possible. Racism and xenophobia is a
classic divide and conquer strategy. it is as simple as it is evil.
As Lenin wrote in *Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism*,
The receipt of high monopoly profits by the capitalists in one of the
numerous branches of industry, in one of the numerous countries, etc.,
makes it economically possible for them to bribe certain sections of
the workers, and for a time a fairly considerable minority of them,
and win them to the side of the bourgeoisie of a given industry or
given nation against all the others. The intensification of
antagonisms between imperialist nations for the division of the world
increases this urge. And so there is created that bond between
imperialism and opportunism, which revealed itself first and most
clearly in Great Britain, owing to the fact that certain features of
imperialist development were observable there much earlier than in
other countries (page 298)
While the working class is divided over mythical internal antagonisms,
their class enemies more and more get away with hyper exploitation, in
pursuit of ever more elusive profit margins. The origins of racism in
the global north are directly caused by capitalism's need to maximise
profit. The most effective way to do this is to minimise wages, or as
economists put it - production costs. Racism is an artificial concept
that is predicated upon, and feeds into the notion that some groups of
humans are simply deserving of less, and this is exactly the myth that
capitalists must promulgate in order to avoid outright class warfare.
This is the reason why the vilification of refugees, and various migrant
groups is a prevailing feature of capitalism today. It is because the
ruling class requires the maintenance of false and immoral ideas in
order to keep the global working class divided, so that they may
maintain hegemonic rule. The capitalist state, as the organising
committee of the ruling class is directly interested in quelling all
social movements which aim to affirm working class solidarity. This is
evidenced by the repeated historical and present efforts of states to
crack down on all militant unionised action - particularly that of mass
striking. Strikes directly cause fraternisation between white and
non-white people. The recognition of shared humanity is unavoidable, and
this in and of itself is threatening to bourgeois ideology. Boots Riley
provides some useful historical context in a recent interview:
Racism, or the creation of the idea of race and the racist ideas that
formed around it, was necessary for the creation of capitalism.
Slavery was necessary. Before that you always had groups of people
that didn't like each other, but it was around nations. There was no
one who thought that the people from Ireland somehow because they
looked the same were similar to the people from France. It was easier
to justify that these darker-skinned people were different than the
rest of the European working class, and that it was okay, by saying,
'This is a different race.' This is a different species, basically, is
what they were saying. 'You don't have to worry, white working class'
--- that was how they ensured capitalism was able to work. It's
something that still has utility to this day, in the same way. Racist
ideas about people of color are how poverty is now explained: that
there are cultural deficiencies people of color have, such as families
not being together, or even just outwardly racist ideas like we're
stupid or savage or we have this aggressiveness that I need to learn
away...You're not going to get rid of racism without getting rid of
capitalism. On the other hand, you're not going to be able to have a
movement that gets rid of capitalism without also working to get rid
of racism at the same time.
[Citation](https://jacobinmag.com/2018/08/sorry-to-bother-you-boots-riley-interview)
As previously established, the union movement is only alive in so far as
it is able to further the essential interests of the working class.
Consequently the policies of imperialist capitalism are diametrically
opposed to the efforts of union movements that fight for the interests
of the working class. This helps explain the state of the leadership of
the Australian union movement today. Much of the leadership of the
Australian trade union movement remains under the control of Laborism.
Laborism is the political philosophy of the Australian Labor Party. It
is the philosophy that, through class collaborationism, unions
affiliated to the Labor party can bring about the effective development
of neoliberalism in Australia. The ALP is what Lenin called a
'capitalist workers party'. It is a party of class collaboration which
serves to help promote and strengthen the development of capitalism in
Australia. The introduction of neoliberalism into Australia was sold on
the compromise that if unions agreed to suppress the growth of wages,
greater economic ''productivity'' in Australia would lead to an increase
in living standards for the working class. Australia indeed enjoyed a
period of relative prosperity during the beginning of neoliberalism, but
this ''growing of the pie'' actually lead to the relative decrease in
the percentage of working class wages as a component of overall GDP.
Now the lie that neoliberalism actually benefits anyone no longer needs
to be maintained. ''Secure work'' is now almost impossible to find if
you are starting work at a new job today. The emergence of increasingly
insecure sections of the economy - such as the 'gig economy' reflect the
reality of capitalism - capital strives to maximise the rate of profit,
at any cost to the working class. Suffice to say, the claim that the
marketplace will provide any benefits for the mass of people has proven
itself again and again to be unfounded.
"It is not enough for an economy to deliver headline growth
statistics. The aggregate numbers are only part of the picture.
Sitting below the numbers are communities, businesses and workplaces.
Economic relationships make up the bulk of our social relationships.
The jobs we do, where we work and how we relate make up the essence of
our day-to-day lives. The economy is not separate from the social
system. It is an integral part of a culture and a way of life."
*(Lindy Edwards, How to Argue with an Economist, xvi)*
This explains why much of the leadership of the Australian union
movement remains captured by position that certain imperialist
capitalist ventures can sectionally aid the interests of the Australian
working class. It is because the Laborist leaders of the Australian
union movement are more interested in maintaining the power of the ALP
and its neoliberal agenda, instead of forwarding the actual interests of
the working class. Take for instance the enormous coal mine that the
federal government and the Adani corporation wants to build in
Queensland. The leadership of several unions in Queensland have refused
to come out in outright opposition to it, citing that in the short term,
it would help them secure employment for their members. This kind of
cynical, contentless analysis is a dead end for the working class, and
can only ever lead to transient gains. Without democratic control over
the value created by workers, there can be no just, common future.
Unionism has a future as an institution for progressive transformational
change in our lives in so far as it addresses the dynamics of capitalism
as they are. This means grasping fully the role that racism and
xenophobia serves to help perpetuate capitalism. The capitalist mode of
production is a given set of transitory social relations and it does not
suit the human condition well, Capitalism's failures do not implicate
the mass of ordinary, working people. Workers of the world are fully
capable of realising the full extent to which they yield this
transformative power. The haze of bourgeois mystification hangs heavy
only so long as the working class are disorganised. Active, collective,
principled struggle is the most liberatory praxis.