The economic system dominant in Australia and most of the world is called both by its friends and enemies capitalism. Communists are opposed to this form of economy. They oppose capitalism because capitalism can develop the productive and technical capacities of society by intensifying and increasing the exploitation of the worker -- an exploitation arising from the facts that as the productivity of labour increases, the value of wages in relation to the total value of production consistently decreases, and the difference between the two (after deduction for capital reserves) becomes the employer's profit. Communists have always argued that this system should be smashed by the working class, and a non-exploitative system, based on government by and for the working class, and transitional to communism, replace it. This requires the abolition of the existing capitalist state, through which the country is ruled by a small minority of capitalists and its supersession by a system of workers' and small farmers' councils which will bring to bear the power of the overwhelming majority of people against a small minority of exploiters. Far from leading to a totalitarian state, similar to that of Stalinist Russia, what would result would a form of power entirely different form of any existing state which from its inception would wither away. This will be achieved through a people's revolution led by the working class.
The "Communist " Party, in its 1977 election program "A New Course for Australia" offers something very different. It does not argue for a different kind of economy from the one Australia now has. It does not want to attack the parliamentary form of government. It does not advocate revolution. All these things went out the window when the Communist Party went Stalinist. The "Communist Party" tells the worker that if the multinational corporations were smaller businesses, if cities were not as big, and if Australia were more isolated from the rest of the world economically, everything would be lovely, there would be real free competition, and prices would go down again and wages go up. This could all be done, according to the "Communist" Party, by public ownership of most of the multinationals - the Party program says "foreign" and "multinational" mean the same thing - which would cut Australia off from foreigners. It is not, according to the "Communist" Party, capitalists that are the problem; it is foreigners. Communism is abandoned for nationalism. Progress toward a future of workers' control is jettisoned for nostalgia for nineteenth century capitalism, when there were no multinational corporations. Talk of the revolution might annoy ASIO and Sir John Kerr, so the Party says its program will go through parliament and protect the power of the state against the big corporations. There is no point in revolution, anyway, if you haven't got a communist program.
A party, whatever it calls itself, which is abandoning communism for nationalism, will naturally mark its shift in position by direct attacks on the workers. These attacks are foreshadowed in the "Communist" Party program. It calls for a 35 hour week without stipulating that wages must not be cut as hours are reduced. This means Communist Party support for a cut in workers' wages. Some workers in the catering industry have already gone one better that this "Communist" demand - they have had their hours reduced from 40 to 30 with a 10% cut in wages and they don't like it very much. This is not just carelessness in writing a Party Program. The Communist Party has had long experience in formulating programs to avoid being misinterpreted. It means what it says. The "35 hour week" plank is based on an earlier demand in the so-called "Peoples' Economic Program", which calls for a reduction in the working week without opposing pay reductions. The real Communist demand is for a sliding scale of hours and wages, so enabling existing work to be shared between all workers, employed and unemployed, lowering working hours so that this can be done which link wage rates directly to living costs so that they rise as living costs rise, no matter how much working hours are reduced, and without Arbitration Commissions to hold back pay increases.
Through such workers' control of industry the workers themselves could have initiated a sliding scale of hours and wages. The Banks and the capitalist state, however, would use all their combined forces to attack the occupations and again the occupations would fail without a perspective of replacing the state by factory councils that is by a revolutionary perspective. This perspective comes from a revolutionary party. The Communist Party, too frightened to speak of the need to fight the state is too ignorant to understand that banks (which in 1977 are also multinational) are the organising centre of capitalist industry's every attack on the working class. A new Communist Party must be built which will tell the workers of these vital matters. The Communist Left exists to build these party around the demands of a sliding scale of hours and wages, a single chamber centralised republic without states or a head of state, and the nationalisation of the land (including the mining companies) to help the small farmers and aboriginal communities. This can only be achieved through the dictatorship of the working class.
We realise that many voters who understand the Communist Party is no longer revolutionary will be more ready to vote for it, The Communist Party should thus be very grateful to us for exposing its real character. For our Group, The Communist Party is welcome to the votes of middle class trendies who believe Marxism is outdated. The Communist Left recruits from workers who want to fight and prefer the fighting program of Bolshevism to parliamentary cretinism.
The Communist Left is too small to stand candidates at this election. It supports the Labor Party in this campaign as a rope supports a hanged man, that is, it believes a Communist Party can be best built when the Labor leaders are showing their complete unwillingness and inability to defend workers against world recession. There are no principled difference between the Labor and Communist parties. The Communist Party program admits Labor might well adopt most of its policy.
Anyone who believes the Communist Party's nationalist sellout is worth anything might as well vote Labor - it is a stronger party of capitalist nationalism. Two other fake Communist parties - the "Socialist" Party and the "Socialist Labor League -- are also standing this election. They merely represent right and left-wing variations on the same nationalist theme as the "Communist" Party and have equally abandoned the objective of the expropriation of capitalism. They are equally unworthy of support.
The "Communist" Party program totally abandoned the class struggle. Workers may go on to strike or demonstrate but it all means nothing according to the *'Communist" Party until Parliament passes lays to bring in more "public ownership." During the world recession now becoming a depression such perspectives are more than ever completely utopian. The real crises where workers have to fight are in situations like that at Chrysler in Adelaide in mid-1977, where management threatened to sack down seven hundred workers within a week, Stalinists (in this case Maoist Stalinists, not CPA Stalinists) attacked the union leaders (who richly deserved what they got) but refused to occupy the factory (that was a "Trotskyism" tactic arid so it had to be wrong) even though at one stage the bosses were so scared that they had evacuated their offices. The result was that seven hundred workers were sacked because of the crisis of political leadership on the factory floor. This is a situation which, as depression deepens will certainly be faced again.
It would have been no use in that situation waiting for a Labor Government, first, to be elected and then to place the car industry under public ownership. T he Chrysler workers had only a week in which to fight for their jobs. Workers control of Chrysler meant the workers had to rely on themselves, not the government. Once an occupation had begun, however, it could only succeed if similar actions had taken place elsewhere on a large scale. It is as impossible to have socialism in one factory only as to have socialism in one country only. The job of a revolutionary party is to prepare workers for such situation, to teach them the lesson of Chrysler - occupations are vital - and to prepare workers to follow up one factory's occupation with occupation's of other factories. The Communist Party long ago ceased to do this. That is why the Communist Let fights it. There is no alternative to the strategy of fighting threats to jobs with occupations if jobs are to be kept. At a time when Labor bureaucrats refuse to fight for victimised or sacked workers, when unions are more and more totally under the thumb of the government, only occupation is left to the workers as a response to attack.
Election comment authorised by
W. Keats,
126 George Street, Sydney, NSW 2000
for the Communist Left
Box M217 Sydney Mail Exchange, Phone 519 3745