1968, The year that changed the world by Tariq Ali

There has never been a year like it: unrest, rebellion and revolution. Tariq Ali, at the forefront of the action 40 years ago, looks at how we still live with the consequences of 1968.

After the shallow, fading Cold War decades - the middle period - of the last century, an invigorating fever gripped the world.

Its effect was so strong that even today, 40 years later, conferences are being organised, and essays, documentaries and books are being produced to mark the event.

The tale has been told many times and in many languages, but it refuses to go away. Why? A banal reason could simply be biology: the '60s generation is now in its 60s and some of its members are big in publishing, television, cinema, etc, especially in the West. This could be their last chance to remember, because 10 years from now most will be dead.

In France the debate was revived by Nicolas Sarkozy, who boasted that his victory in last year's presidential elections was the final nail in the '68 coffin.

"May 1968 imposed intellectual and moral relativism on us all," Sarkozy declared. "The heirs of May '68 imposed the idea that there was no longer any difference between good and evil, truth and falsehood, beauty and ugliness. The heritage of May 1968 introduced cynicism into society and politics." He even blamed the legacy of May '68 for immoral business practices: the cult of money, short-term profit, speculation and the abuses of finance capitalism.

The May '68 attack on ethical standards helped to "weaken the morality of capitalism, to prepare the ground for the unscrupulous capitalism of golden parachutes for rogue bosses".

So we are really responsible for Enron, Conrad Black, the subprime mortgage crisis, corrupt politicians, deregulation, the dictatorship of the "free market", a culture strangled by brazen opportunism, et al. Give us a break, Nicolas.

The dreams and hopes of 1968: were they all idle fantasies? Or did cruel history abort something new that was about to be born? Revolutionaries - utopian anarchists, Fidelistas, Trotskyist allsorts, Maoists of every stripe, etc - wanted the whole forest. Liberals and social democrats were fixated on individual trees. The forest, they warned us, was a distraction, far too vast and impossible to define, whereas a tree was a piece of wood that could be identified, nurtured, improved and crafted into a chair or a table or a bed. Something useful for the present.

"You're like fish that only see the bait, never the line," we would mock in return. For our side believed - and some of us still do - that people should not be measured by material possessions but by their ability to transform the lives of others - the poor and underprivileged; that the economy needed to be regulated and reorganised in the interests of the many, not the few, and that socialism without democracy could never work.

Above all we believed in freedom of speech. The events of 1968 were, apart from everything else, an elegy for the print revolution.

A libertarian bulletin published by French students in 1968 sounds old-fashioned when so many live in cyberspace but at the time was a hymn to the written word:

"Leaflets, posters, bulletins, street words or infinite words: they are not imposed for the sake of effectiveness ... They belong to the decision of the present moment. They appear, they disappear. They do not say everything; on the contrary, they ruin everything: they are outside everything. They act, they think in fragments. They do not leave a trace ... as speech on walls, they are written in insecurity, communicated under threat, carry danger in them, then they pass by along with the passers-by, who pass them on, lose them or even forget ..."

ALL THIS seems utopian now to the men and women whose minds have become a market dominated by futures buried in the past and, like members of ancient sects who moved easily from ritual debauchery to chastity, they now regard any form of socialism as the serpent that tempted Eve in paradise.

The Western world appeared tranquil after World War II. The complacent and self-satisfied Western European elites stagnated during the Cold War: they never had it so good. Eastern Europe was less quiescent: an uprising in East Berlin in 1953, an insurrection in Budapest in 1956 and upheavals in Poznan and Prague some years later had shaken the gerontocracy in Moscow.

The crisis of the old empires was typified by the wars in Algeria, Vietnam, Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau. The French and Portuguese refused to leave without a fight. The result was a set of brutal wars, defeats which created a severe crisis in the mother countries, leading to the 1958 collapse of the Fourth Republic in France and a growing crisis for a senile Bonapartist dictatorship in Portugal.

The war in Vietnam was entering its third and final phase. Occupied by France, later Japan, briefly Britain and then France again, the Vietnamese had honed the skills of popular resistance to an art form that wasn't pretty or decorative. And in 1957 the leaders of the United States, convinced by the superiority of the white race and determined not to let the Vietnamese communists unite the country, replaced France as the colonial power and began to send in soldiers to shore up their local puppets.

What was remarkable about 1968 was the geographical breadth of the global revolt. It was as if a single spark had set the entire field on fire.

The eruptions of that year challenged power structures north and south, east and west. Each continent was infected with the desire for change. Hope reigned supreme.

It was the war that caught the attention of the world. Despite half a million soldiers and the most advanced military technology ever known, the US could not defeat the Vietnamese. This fact triggered an anti-war movement inside the US and infected the military. "GIs Against The War" became a familiar banner. And I remember sharing a platform with black veterans of the war in Berlin. "I ain't gonna go to Vietnam because Vietnam is where I am," one of them chanted to massive applause. Their direct heirs today are the "Military Families Against the War" in Iraq.

In 1966-67 I spent six weeks in Indochina at the height of the bombing and saw the devastation and the daily deaths of unarmed civilians. These remain etched in the memory. How can one forget? Agitating for a different world and for solidarity with the Vietnamese was the logical outcome for many in that generation.

And then, to our utter amazement, France exploded in May-June of that year, making it an uncommonly memorable and beautiful summer. Ten million workers on strike, the largest in the history of capitalism; factory occupations during which it became clear that the workers knew how to run the factories much better than any boss.

The example of France began to spread and worried the bureaucrats in Moscow just as much as the ruling elites in the West. They agreed that the unruly and undisciplined people must be brought to heel. Robert Escarpit, a distinguished Le Monde correspondent, expressed the mood well on July 23, 1968:

"A Frenchman travelling abroad feels himself treated a bit like a convalescent from a pernicious fever. And how did the rash of barricades break out? What was the temperature at five o'clock in the evening of May 29? Is the Gaullist medicine really getting to the roots of the disease? Are there dangers of a relapse? ... But there is one question that is hardly ever asked, perhaps because they are afraid to hear the answer. But at heart everyone would like to know, hopefully or fearfully, whether the sickness is infectious."

It certainly was. A "creeping May" took over in Italy and large anti-war demonstrations were treated as virtual insurrections by the British and German social democratic governments. Sweden was exceptional. Here the foreign minister, Olaf Palme, led a torchlight procession against the war to the US embassy and was never forgiven.

In Prague, communist reformers - many of them heroes of the anti-fascist resistance during World War II - had earlier that spring proclaimed "socialism with a human face".
The country was bathed by the lava of the resulting debates and discussions in the state press and on television. The aim of Alexander Dubcek and his supporters was to democratise political life in the country. It was the first step towards a socialist democracy and seen as such in Moscow and Washington. On August 21, the Russians sent in the tanks and crushed the reform movement. Alexander Solzhenitsyn later remarked that the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia had been the last straw for him. Now he realised that the system could never be reformed from within but would have to be overthrown. He was not alone. The Moscow bureaucrats had sealed their own fate.

Later that year Mexican students demanding an end to oppression and one-party rule were massacred just before the Olympics.

And then in November Pakistan erupted. The students took on the state apparatus of a corrupt and decaying military dictatorship backed by the US (sound familiar?). They were joined by workers, lawyers, white-collar employees, prostitutes and other social levels and despite the severe repression (hundreds were killed) the struggle increased in intensity and toppled Field Marshal Ayub Khan in March 1969.

The country was in such a state of excitement. The mood was joyous. The victory led to the first general election in the country's history. The Bengali nationalists in East Pakistan won a majority that the elite and key politicians refused to accept. Bloody civil war led to Indian military intervention and ended the old Pakistan. Bangladesh was the result of a bloody caesarean.

There were ripples elsewhere including Gough Whitlam's opposition to the Vietnam War and his eventual election victory in Australia four years later, which marked a short break with the servility of the Australian political elite.

The collapse of "communism" created the basis for a new social agreement, the Washington Consensus, whereby deregulation and the entry of private capital into hitherto hallowed domains of public provision would become the norm everywhere, making traditional social democracy redundant and threatening the democratic process itself.

Full employment itself is now regarded as a utopia. The fact that no centre-left party today can even propose redistributive income taxes is an indication of how far their leaders have been forced to travel. These parties are without a compass. Their model is the Tweedledum-Tweedledee style of US politics.

Hope has been reborn in South America, where social movements from below have led to electoral victories in several countries, with Venezuela in the lead.

In the West itself an economic crisis beckons: societies cannot live off credit forever. The most significant shift we have witnessed has been a structural alteration of the world market: the Far East is now central to the future of capitalism. China today, like Britain in the 19th century, is the workshop of the world. The impact of this on world politics has yet to be felt. The half-asleep giant might wake up one day with surprising consequences.

Many of those who once dreamt of a better future have given up. Unless you relearn you won't earn is the bitter maxim they espouse and, ironically, the French intelligentsia is among the worst today and presides over a decline in that country's culture.

Renegades sit in every European government reminding one of Shelley's gentle rebuke to Wordsworth who, after welcoming the French Revolution, retreated to a pastoral conservatism:
In honoured poverty thy voice did weave

Songs consecrate to truth and liberty,

Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,

Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be.

I think of another poet, the North American Thomas McGrath, who in the middle of the last century defended the radicalism of the 1930s. His poem Letter To An Imaginary Friend could apply just as well today to the '60s:

Wild talk, and easy enough to laugh.

That's not the point and never was the point.

What was real was the generosity, expectant hope,

The open and true desire to create the good.

Now, in another autumn, in our new dispensation

Of an ancient, man-chilling dark, the frost drops over

My garden's starry wreckage.

Over my hope.

Over

The generous dead of my years.

Now, in the chill streets

I hear the hunting and the long thunder of money ...
Tariq Ali was at the forefront of 1960s political activism and is a novelist, historian and political campaigner.

Sydney Morning Herald January 5, 2008

Mystery: How Wealth Creates Poverty in the World By Michael Parenti

There is a “mystery” we must explain: How is it that as corporate investments and foreign aid and international loans to poor countries have increased dramatically throughout the world over the last half century, so has poverty? The number of people living in poverty is growing at a faster rate than the world’s population. What do we make of this?

Over the last half century, U.S. industries and banks (and other western corporations) have invested heavily in those poorer regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America known as the “Third World.” The transnationals are attracted by the rich natural resources, the high return that comes from low-paid labor, and the nearly complete absence of taxes, environmental regulations, worker benefits, and occupational safety costs.

The U.S. government has subsidized this flight of capital by granting corporations tax concessions on their overseas investments, and even paying some of their relocation expenses---much to the outrage of labor unions here at home who see their jobs evaporating.

The transnationals push out local businesses in the Third World and preempt their markets. American agribusiness cartels, heavily subsidized by U.S. taxpayers, dump surplus products in other countries at below cost and undersell local farmers. As Christopher Cook describes it in his Diet for a Dead Planet, they expropriate the best land in these countries for cash-crop exports, usually monoculture crops requiring large amounts of pesticides, leaving less and less acreage for the hundreds of varieties of organically grown foods that feed the local populations.

By displacing local populations from their lands and robbing them of their self-sufficiency, corporations create overcrowded labor markets of desperate people who are forced into shanty towns to toil for poverty wages (when they can get work), often in violation of the countries’ own minimum wage laws.

In Haiti, for instance, workers are paid 11 cents an hour by corporate giants such as Disney, Wal-Mart, and J.C. Penny. The United States is one of the few countries that has refused to sign an international convention for the abolition of child labor and forced labor. This position stems from the child labor practices of U.S. corporations throughout the Third World and within the United States itself, where children as young as 12 suffer high rates of injuries and fatalities, and are often paid less than the minimum wage.

The savings that big business reaps from cheap labor abroad are not passed on in lower prices to their customers elsewhere. Corporations do not outsource to far-off regions so that U.S. consumers can save money. They outsource in order to increase their margin of profit. In 1990, shoes made by Indonesian children working twelve-hour days for 13 cents an hour, cost only $2.60 but still sold for $100 or more in the United States.

U.S. foreign aid usually works hand in hand with transnational investment. It subsidizes construction of the infrastructure needed by corporations in the Third World: ports, highways, and refineries.

The aid given to Third World governments comes with strings attached. It often must be spent on U.S. products, and the recipient nation is required to give investment preferences to U.S. companies, shifting consumption away from home produced commodities and foods in favor of imported ones, creating more dependency, hunger, and debt.

A good chunk of the aid money never sees the light of day, going directly into the personal coffers of sticky-fingered officials in the recipient countries.

Aid (of a sort) also comes from other sources. In 1944, the United Nations created the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Voting power in both organizations is determined by a country’s financial contribution. As the largest “donor,” the United States has a dominant voice, followed by Germany, Japan, France, and Great Britain. The IMF operates in secrecy with a select group of bankers and finance ministry staffs drawn mostly from the rich nations.

The World Bank and IMF are supposed to assist nations in their development. What actually happens is another story. A poor country borrows from the World Bank to build up some aspect of its economy. Should it be unable to pay back the heavy interest because of declining export sales or some other reason, it must borrow again, this time from the IMF.

But the IMF imposes a “structural adjustment program” (SAP), requiring debtor countries to grant tax breaks to the transnational corporations, reduce wages, and make no attempt to protect local enterprises from foreign imports and foreign takeovers. The debtor nations are pressured to privatize their economies, selling at scandalously low prices their state-owned mines, railroads, and utilities to private corporations.

They are forced to open their forests to clear-cutting and their lands to strip mining, without regard to the ecological damage done. The debtor nations also must cut back on subsidies for health, education, transportation and food, spending less on their people in order to have more money to meet debt payments. Required to grow cash crops for export earnings, they become even less able to feed their own populations.

So it is that throughout the Third World, real wages have declined, and national debts have soared to the point where debt payments absorb almost all of the poorer countries’ export earnings---which creates further impoverishment as it leaves the debtor country even less able to provide the things its population needs.

Here then we have explained a “mystery.” It is, of course, no mystery at all if you don’t adhere to trickle-down mystification. Why has poverty deepened while foreign aid and loans and investments have grown? Answer: Loans, investments, and most forms of aid are designed not to fight poverty but to augment the wealth of transnational investors at the expense of local populations.

There is no trickle down, only a siphoning up from the toiling many to the moneyed few.

In their perpetual confusion, some liberal critics conclude that foreign aid and IMF and World Bank structural adjustments “do not work”; the end result is less self-sufficiency and more poverty for the recipient nations, they point out. Why then do the rich member states continue to fund the IMF and World Bank? Are their leaders just less intelligent than the critics who keep pointing out to them that their policies are having the opposite effect?

No, it is the critics who are stupid not the western leaders and investors who own so much of the world and enjoy such immense wealth and success. They pursue their aid and foreign loan programs because such programs do work. The question is, work for whom? Cui bono?

The purpose behind their investments, loans, and aid programs is not to uplift the masses in other countries. That is certainly not the business they are in. The purpose is to serve the interests of global capital accumulation, to take over the lands and local economies of Third World peoples, monopolize their markets, depress their wages, indenture their labor with enormous debts, privatize their public service sector, and prevent these nations from emerging as trade competitors by not allowing them a normal development.

In these respects, investments, foreign loans, and structural adjustments work very well indeed.

The real mystery is: why do some people find such an analysis to be so improbable, a “conspiratorial” imagining? Why are they skeptical that U.S. rulers knowingly and deliberately pursue such ruthless policies (suppress wages, rollback environmental protections, eliminate the public sector, cut human services) in the Third World? These rulers are pursuing much the same policies right here in our own country!

Isn’t it time that liberal critics stop thinking that the people who own so much of the world---and want to own it all---are “incompetent” or “misguided” or “failing to see the unintended consequences of their policies”? You are not being very smart when you think your enemies are not as smart as you. They know where their interests lie, and so should we.

Michael Parenti's recent books include The Assassination of Julius Caesar (New Press), Superpatriotism (City Lights), and The Culture Struggle (Seven Stories Press). For more information visit: www.michaelparenti.org.

Published on Friday, February 16, 2007 by CommonDreams.org

Howard Zinn On Cuba "AN AMAZING DAVID AND GOLIATH STORY".

Howard Zinn, The renowned activist and alternative US historian, visited Cuba to attend the 14th Havana International Book Fair, where Cubanow interviewed him.

By Catherine Murphy
Cubanow.- CM: What brings Howard Zinn to Cuba?

HZ: The fact that Cuba has just published its own edition of my book, which in the United States is called The People's History of the United States, though in Spanish it's been translated as La Otra Historia de Estados Unidos. They invited me to the International Book Fair to talk about my book and to participate in some other panels on the war in Iraq. I was here last spring and got to be friendly with a number of very interesting people. Cuban people are so warm. They make you feel at home and it feels good to be here. The atmosphere is a very family atmosphere. There is music and spirit… So, I was happy to come back. Cuba represents something very important in this world of wars and power plays and imperial expansion. I mean, here is this little island, which is not expanding anywhere, is not trying to take over the United States. It is, in fact, holding out in a very courageous way with meager resources against the most formidable military power in the world. This is an amazing David and Goliath story; an amazing story of heroism. So, you have to admire Cuba for being undaunted by this colossus of the North and holding fast to its ideals and to Socialism. And even though there are many problems, it's an interesting Socialism with many possibilities… Cuba is one of those places in the world where we can see hope for the future. With its very meager resources Cuba gives free health care and free education to everybody. Cuba supports culture, supports dance and music and theatre. The United States does not do that. The United States is rich enough to do this, but it doesn't. People who are in the arts in the United States, people who are dancers and poets and in theatre, they struggle to survive, and so, there is this model in Cuba for the future of health care, of education, of culture. We are in a world which is so full of violence and injustice that when we see a place that has the kind of future Cuba does, it's important to hold on to it, important to immerse yourself in it, which is what you do when you come here.

CM: Why do you think the US Government, the Bush administration in particular, does not want US citizens to visit Cuba?

HZ: I wish I could probe the minds of the people who run the United States government. I would ask somebody with really advanced knowledge in psychiatry to do that. We can only guess their motives. One of them undoubtedly is that they know that Americans and people from other countries that haven't come to Cuba are intrigued by the kind of things that Cuba has, which other countries don't have; intrigued by Cuba's progress in literacy, in medicine, in culture and so on. The United States would rather have people be ignorant to what Cuba is. If people don't come to Cuba, then the government can say whatever it wants about Cuba and can ignore its accomplishments and nobody would know the difference. But when people come to Cuba, of course, they go back to the United States and spread the word. So, the United States doesn't want that. Then, of course, the United States doesn't want an example set of a small country that fights its government successfully; that insists on surviving in spite of all the attempts to do away with it -whether by invasion, by subversion or by blockade. It's an irritant to the United States to see this model of survival of a small country. There's a psychological problem there: the frustration of this enormously powerful nation that cannot bend this little country to its will. The United States has had this problem several times in its history. It could not defeat the people of Vietnam -a tiny country in Asia with very few resources, and it just could not defeat it.

CM: Your book The People's History of the United States just sold a million copies. One of the things I found so important about the book is the need to keep the history of activism and resistance alive, which has been hidden from us. This is a particularly difficult time in the United States in terms of the dismantling of social programs. Where do you feel people in the US today get hope?

HZ: I think they get hope in several ways. First, by seeing that there are people all over the world who understand things that many Americans do not understand. When the Iraq war was first beginning about fifteen million people all over the world demonstrated against the war in a single day. That is enormously encouraging, and shows that there's a worldwide movement of resistance. How many people support the administration? You know, it's only fifty percent of the people. They look outside the United States and they see that it's eighty or eighty five percent. That's encouraging. The other thing that is encouraging is that people in the United States who might otherwise loose hope look at the history of social movements in the US and realize that these movements always look hopeless, insignificant and powerless at the beginning. Some of them would remember the recent history in the South -this is something I went through myself- where it seemed that Black people in the South were powerless. They had nothing on their side -certainly not the federal government. And yet, they rose, they organized, they agitated, they demonstrated, they went to jail. Things happened to them, but they persisted and changed the South forever. That's a remarkable story of how a powerless people can gain power and how you mustn't look at power in a superficial way or by asking who has the money or who has the guns? We have to ask, who has the commitment and the energy, and the spirit of sacrifice and is willing to take risks? Then you'll see the future.

CM: Your theatre piece Marx in Soho is playing here in Cuba. What significance do you think it has to Cuban people?

HZ: This play about Marx is significant to the Cuban people for two reasons; one of them, probably, is maybe not as necessary for the Cuban people as it is for the American people, and that is for Marx to once again bring alive his critique on Capitalism and say: Capitalism thinks it triumphed with the collapse of the Soviet Union… No, look what Capitalism has done to people. Look at its failures. Maybe the Cuban people know that. Maybe that's why they support the idea of Socialism. But I think that something very important to people in the United States and in Cuba is to give people a clear idea of what Marxism is and what Socialism is.
March , 2005

Socialist Summer School energises activists for a busy year by Dave Holmes,

The 2007 Socialist Summer School was a great success. Sponsored by Resistance and the Democratic Socialist Perspective (DSP), both affiliates of the Socialist Alliance, the event was held at Sydney University’s Women’s College from January 4-7. Some 210 people attended the four days of talks, workshops, meetings and social events.

Conference participants heard plenary talks given by leaders of the DSP and Resistance on a number of key problems of the struggle for socialism. “What is Marxism?”; “War, revolution and imperialism”; “Popular power”; “Marxism and women’s liberation”; “Marxism and the environment”; “Class in an imperialist country”; “Youth, students and revolution”; and “The socialist revolution and the revolutionary party” — such were the titles of these instructive and thought-provoking presentations.

Filmmaker Jill Hickson from Actively Radical TV presented a compilation “2006 in review”, highlighting the big class struggle events and the involvement of members of the DSP, Resistance and Socialist Alliance. A special emphasis was given to the struggle by Indigenous people and their supporters to win justice for the 2004 death of Palm Island resident Mulrunji at the hands of Queensland police. Indigenous activist and Socialist Alliance member Sam Watson is playing a leading role in this struggle.

Trent Hawkins, a participant in the recent Australian solidarity brigade to Venezuela and Perth Resistance organiser, gave a vivid presentation on the December presidential elections there. Hugo Chavez won a historic victory, attracting some 63% of the votes cast. From this platform Chavez has gone on to outline a series of dramatic new moves to take the struggle to create a new socialism of the 21st century to a qualitatively new stage.

Venezuelan charge d’affaires to Australia Nelson Davila took up these themes in his address to the conference. This year is shaping up to be a major turning point in the revolutionary process in Venezuela. US aggression will likewise be ramped up and the solidarity movement in Australia will have to increase its efforts to get out the message and build support.

A highlight of the conference was the very enthusiastic Saturday evening rally that launched the 2007 fund appeal for Green Left Weekly. Last year some $231,000 was raised — 93% of the $250,000 target — to enable Australia’s leading radical newspaper to keep on coming out. This year GLW is again aiming to raise a quarter of a million dollars. Rally participants gave the fund appeal a big kickstart with pledges of $97,000.

Summer school participants attended a range of workshops and educationals on various topics. A number of national fractions to help coordinate the work of the DSP and Resistance were also organised.

2007 promises to be an extremely hectic year. The capitalist neoliberal, anti-worker offensive is continuing on all fronts, and the climate change crisis will only intensify. On the other hand, the inspiring revolutionary advances in Venezuela show what can be done. The Socialist Summer School left participants feeling energised and enthused for the struggles ahead.

[The DSP organises similar educational conferences every second year, alternating with its decision-making congresses. For more information about the DSP, and to see the Socialist Summer School presentations, visit , or .]

From: Australian News, Green Left Weekly issue #694 17 January 2007.

The Down Side of Capitalism by Alexander Cockburn

Here we go again.

"A White House controlled by an unpopular, highly partisan lame duck ..."

Wherever you look, there's lame-duck Bush limping across the White House lawn, or hobbling out to give a press conference.

"It's the same old slur," quacked an angry Bill Mandrake, president of the Society to Protect Less Abled Ducks (SPLAD). "Many of our seniors are on crutches because they gave up a limb for their country on some foreign stream or mere, and year after year they have to put up with these cheap innuendoes. Simply because a duck is on crutches or has a walking stick, it doesn't mean that same duck isn't playing a useful role in society, with many productive years ahead."

Mandrake pledges a renewed effort after last year's failed referendum to make the use of "lame duck" a hate crime.

According to Brewer's ever-useful 1910 Dictionary of Phrase and Fable "a lame duck in Stock Exchange parlance means a member of the Stock Exchange who waddles off on settlement day without settling his account. All such defaulters are blackboarded and struck off the list. Sometimes it is used for one who cannot pay his debts, one who trades without money."

Sounds like W.

Now, Can We Talk About Something Serious?

Now that the biennial democratic pretense here in the U.S.A. has run its course, can we talk about something serious? We can? Good. Hmmm. Ha! Here's a good one we can sink our teeth into for a few paragraphs: the distinct possibility that the world economic system could soon blow up in our faces. You say nobody mentioned this in Campaign 2006? Of course they didn't. Who said political campaigns have anything to do with reality?

Let me direct you to a recent series of polite coughs, reminiscent of a sheep quietly clearing its throat somewhere on a fog-bound hillside in the north of England. Aforementioned coughs emanated at the start of this week from the Financial Services Authority, (FSA), a body set up under the purview of the British Treasury a few years ago to monitor financial markets and protect the public interest by raising the alarm about shady practices and any dangerous slides towards instability.

In a briefing paper under the chaste title, "Private Equity: A Discussion of Risk and Regulatory Engagement", the FSA raises the alarm.

"Excessive leverage: The amount of credit that lenders are willing to extend on private equity transactions has risen substantially. This lending may not, in some circumstances, be entirely prudent. Given current leverage levels and recent developments in the economic/credit cycle, the default of a large private equity backed company or a cluster of smaller private equity backed companies seems inevitable. This has negative implications for lenders, purchasers of the debt, orderly markets and conceivably, in extreme circumstances, financial stability and elements of the UK economy."

Translation: It's about to blow!

"The duration and potential impact of any credit event may be exacerbated by operational issues which make it difficult to identify who ultimately owns the economic risk associated with a leveraged buy out and how these owners will react in a crisis. These operational issues arise out of the extensive use of opaque, complex and time consuming risk transfer practices such as assignment and sub-participation, together with the increased use of credit derivatives. These credit derivatives may not be confirmed in a timely manner and the amount traded may substantially exceed the amount of the underlying assets."

Translation: "The world's credit system is a vast recycling bin of untraceable transactions of wildly inflated value.

"The significant flow of price sensitive information in relation to private equity transactions creates considerable potential for market abuse Although transparency to existing investors is extensive, transparency to the wider market is limited and is subject to significant variation in methodology (e.g. with respect to valuation, fee disclosure etc) and format.The duration and potential impact of any credit event may be exacerbated by operational issues which make it difficult to identify who ultimately owns the economic risk associated with a leveraged buy out and how these owners will react in a crisis."

Translation: Crooks could blow us all up any minute now and we don't even know who's holding the detonator. And you thought Osama was a problem!

The problem is that the oversight and stability of the world credit system is no longer within the purview of familiar international institutions like the International Monetary Fund or the Bank of International Settlements. Private traders are now installed at all the strategic nodes, gambling with stratospheric sums in such speculative pyramids as the credit derivative market which was almost nonexistent in 2001, yet which reached $17.3 trillion by the end of 2005. Warren Buffett, America's most famous investor, has called credit derivatives "financial weapons of mass destruction."

On the political hustings there hasn't been a whisper about this, though the London Financial Times has been issuing frequent alarms, as have such well known figures here as Stephen Roach, chief economist at Morgan Stanley. As the great American historian Gabriel Kolko remarked in a detailed run-down on the crisis in CounterPunch at the end of July:

"Contradictions now wrack the world's financial system, and a growing consensus now exists between those who endorse it and those, like myself, who believe the status quo is both crisis-prone as well as immoral. If we are to believe the institutions and personalities who have been in the forefront of the defense of capitalism, and we should, it may very well be on the verge of serious crises."

Translation: Capitalism has its downsides, and right now we're at the edge of the precipice.

Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair's latest book, End Times: the Death of the Fourth Estate, will be published in February by CounterPunch Books/AK Press.
from Counterpunch

Flying Here: the Red Flag, from Berlin to West Bengal By ALEXANDER COCKBURN Berlin.

Can there be a more vivid panorama of the arc of the Communist movement than the view from the foundations where once stood the Nazi SS headquarters at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8? Before one's eyes are photographs of men like the German Communist leader, Ernst Thälmann. He was arrested on March 3, 1933, a few weeks after Hitler came to power, taken to Albrecht-Strasse 8 and tortured. Never released, never formally tried, he was murdered in Buchenwald on August 18, 1944.

Looking at the big photo of Thälmann --one of scores posted along that block of German Communists and Socialists one can honor courage but also remember epic failures: the blunders of the Third Period, the defeat of the Popular Front in Spain where the German volunteers in the 11th Brigade of the International Brigades, named their unit for Thälmann when it was formed in 1936.

Raise your eyes from the line of photos and glance north and there, a few yards to the north is a stretch of the Berlin Wall, which ran a bit further west past Martin Gropius-Bau, a museum, then swung north along Ebert-Strasse, across Unter den Linden, leaving the Brandenberg Gate in East Berlin and the Reichstag in the West. Here, at the end of the 1980s , the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the GDR, the East German government threw in the towel. Soon most of the wall was rubble, along with --so it seemed --the movement that grew from the writings of Marx and Engels who both studied at Humboldt university, a few hundred yards eastward along Unter den Linden from the Brandenberg Gate. The other side of the street from the university, at a spot where the Nazis started burning books, there's a big stone sculpture of volumes from the German canon. They include the anti-Semite Luther as well as Hegel and Goethe, but no Marx, no Engels.
Movements and political parties wither away when they lose touch with the onward march of history, barricade themselves behind dead ideas and policemen. Look now at a braver prospect that continues to unfold --as it did through the twilight and collapse of Communist Parties in the GDR and the Soviet Union --thousands of miles east of the old Prince-Albrecht-Strasse. In India, as in Latin America, the disastrous neoliberal years elicited retribution and victories for the Left. Whether these victories can launch a long-term counterattack is the great world story of our time.
Early this month a Left front led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) swept West Bengal with a three-fourths majority, 233 seats out of 293 declared. It was the coalition's biggest win since the heyday of the CPIM's land reforms in 1987, the Left's seventh straight win in polling for West Bengal's state legislature and the fifteenth straight victory (if you take elections to the central parliament from West Bengal into account) since the Left was voted into power in Bengal in 1977 and rammed through the most ambitious land reforms program India has seen, the reward for the Left in West Bengal being victory after victory in every election since. They have also smashed the Congress in every one of eight polls to the central parliament since 1977.

This time it was widely assumed in most of the Indian press that the benefits of land reform had run their course and the Left would be turned out. However, the CPIM-led Left has also managed to break into the urban middle classes and educated youth. So while keeping its rural base, it has actually added new voters.

In a country where every other type of government mostly fades after five years, the Left's repeated victories in Bengal have surprised and irked the prfess, the vast bulk of which is of course anti-Left. Hence the imputation this time that those past victories at the polls were won by 'scientific rigging'. This charge in the press was seized upon by the central Election Commission as an opportunity to conduct the 2006 polls in Bengal in five phases under unprecedented police control. All policemen working the polls were brought in from outside Bengal. All government officials manning the election posts were also brought in from outside the state. This time around no one could level a ballot-rigging against the Left which duly won with a much larger margin than in the last election, adding 40-plus seats to their previous tally.

There's no precedent for such a triumph for the Left, in India or indeed anywhere for a state with a population of close to 100 million. Around 40 million people, close to 80 per cent of the electorate, voted in West Bengal to give the CPIM-led Left front this kind of win.

The Left has also swept the south-western state of Kerala, population of 32 million, with a three-fourths majority, the biggest Left victory ever in Kerala's history. The Left Democratic Front won two-thirds of the seats, with the CPIM itself prevailing in 61 of the 98 seats secured by the alliance.

In Kerala, many of the top leaders of the Congress-led UDF (United Democratic Front) were steamrollered in constituencies they had dominated for decades. In the upland district of Wayanad, which I visited last year and where farmers have been driven to suicide amid the devastations of liberal "reforms", the Left front won all three seats for the first time in the history of Kerala.

Among the biggest losers in Kerala was the reactionary Indian Union Muslim League (IUML), with countless thousands of Muslims, especially young people and women, going against them this time. The League lost seats it's held for decades. The Muslim minority knew a few things about the Left: in no state ruled by the Left, when the Left was in power, has there ever been a communal riot and attendant sectarian violence. They could compare that with the record of the Hindu- fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress. Indian Muslims also protested in hundreds of thousands when George Bush showed up here this year. Again, they found the only political force doing the same was the Left. On Iran and Iraq where they see a Congress government fawning on the U.S.A., they find the Left restraining it. (In Kerala last year, on platforms with my friend, the journalist, P.Sainath and also member of parliament Veerendra Kumar I vividly remember addressing a big left meeting on the war in Iraq, organized by the radical bank clerks' union in Kozikhode, where there was a conspicuous presence of prominent local Muslims in the front row.)

Besides, poor Muslims in Kerala have also being crushed by the agrarian crisis that also hurt thousands of small traders, many amongst them Muslims. All this reduced their normal suspicion of the "Godless Communists".

In short, in two states with a combined population of close to 130 million, the Left laid the Congress-led opposition low. The BJP was not even in the race.

In the south-eastern state of Tamil Nadu, in adjustment with the Dravia Maunnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and Congress, the Left took 16 seats in the assembly, its best tally in memory. The party of Ms. Jayalalithaa, the former actress who was the state's (appalling) chief minister was defeated.

In Assam, the Left opened its account for the first time, winning two seats.

Meanwhile, the Hindu-fundamentalist BJP has taken a thrashing. In four of these five states (or rather four states and one union territory of Pondicherry), it drew a blank, even though it was in alliance with the powerful Trinamool Congress in West Bengal. In Assam, it had even postured as a contender for power in the past five years. It went nowhere in the race there, now with only a handful of legislators in single digits. In Kerala, its vote share dropped dramatically as compared to the time of the 2004 parliamentary polls. In Tamil Nadu it has been wiped out.

The Congress has held on to Assam, with its seats and strength much reduced, though it has now managed to form a government by accepting as junior coalition partner the Bodo People's Progressive Front (BPPF) -- previously the separatist Bodo Liberation Tigers (BLT) --which won 11 seats in the elections.(The disbanded BLT, which fought for a homeland for Assam's Bodo tribe was noted for blowing up trains, including one in 1999 that killed 33 passengers. But last year it signed a peace deal with New Delhi and joined mainstream politics, forming the BPPF.)

All in all, this has been a round of enormously significant polls in which the story has been the Left victory, thus strengthening the Left at the center as well, which means it can prod the Congress-led national government a little harder on issues ranging from policies affecting the poor, to Delhi's ridiculous Iran policy.

India has a central (or federal) Parliament and legislatures or "Assemblies" in each state. In 2004, the elections to the central parliament, or Lok Sabha (House of the People), saw the unseating of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) led by the BJP, the Hindu fundamentalist/chauvinist force. It had been assumed in India and worldwide that the NDA, which had furthered the "reforms" agenda initiated by the Congress Party, would sweep the polls that year.

At the same time as the elections to the central parliament, voting for several state legislatures also took place. The most famous was the elections to the Andhra Pradesh legislature, which witnessed the immensely gratifying trouncing of "Reform" poster boy Chandrababu Naidu (not part of the NDA formally but a key ally who contested those polls in alliance with the BJP against a Congress Party,

It was widely assumed that Naidu, loved by Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, the World Bank, et al, would sweep back. Instead, he was humiliated and both in the Lok Sabha polls and in the state legislature, his Telugu Desam Party was annihilated.

So in 2004, riding on the huge anger of poor people and suffering farmers, the Congress came back into power --only to try and resume neoliberal reforms where the BJP-led NDA had Left off. This time, though, there was a problem. The Left had over 60 members in the central parliament and the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) could not rule without their support. The Left compelled the UPA to draw up a National Common Minimum Program and declared that if the UPA stuck to this, there would be no major crisis and they would support the UPA even though this caused them problems in their home states and bases, where the main rival to the Left is not the BJP but the Congress. However, the Left takes a national view and realizes that the BJP's Hindu Talibanism would wreck the country. So it swallowed its natural antipathy and made it possible for the Congress to rule at the center again, even though the UPA government would fall the day the Left withdraws support on a major issue.

This put the Left between a rock and a hard place. To keep the BJP's crazies out, they had to support their main rival whose policies they abhorred. Realizing that the Left is trapped, the Congress has repeatedly violated the Common Minimum Program (to the extent it bothered itself with the program at all) and got down to the more important business of privatizing everything it could.

The major Indian national media, with the honorable exception of The Hindu and a handful of other papers, are overwhelmingly anti-Left. They made fools of themselves in 2004 when they predicted popular approval at the polls for the neoliberal reforms and were astounded when the opposite occurred. In 2006 they have made asses of themselves again. In West Bengal, they now offer the explanation that the latest CPIM victory is all due to the splendid personality of Buddhadev Bhattacharya, chief minister of West Bengal, a man the elite see a great 'reformer', using the word to denote the imposition of the neoliberal agenda.

In fact the Left, in West Bengal and elsewhere, has always been pro-reforms, in a decent use of the word: land reform and labor reform. They believe these are a prerequisite to other kinds of reforms. Their position on foreign investment is not a regression to autarky. They favor it if it leads to more employment, adds to India's technological base, does not undermine public interest and employment and if it's in productive sectors and not merely an injection of hot money that will disappear at the drop of a hat.

The Left opposes privatization that simply means theft of public resources of the sort that Evo Morales has just reversed in the natural gas sector in Bolivia. In short, it's against selling off the family silver, particularly profit-making public sector enterprises and public sector enterprises that may not immediately be making big bucks but which are capable of revival with a little investment. The Communists do emphasize trying to raise capital within India, do insist that loans from overseas with all sorts of unpleasant conditions attached to them, meekly rubber-stamped by the Congress Party are not okay with them, and so on.

The Left has led major agitations against privatization. On September 29, 2005, a Left-led strike swept through industrial units, banks, airports, and enterprises employing nearly 40 million workers. This was an explicit warning to the UPA against rampant privatization.

Despite this, the media pigeonholes such activity as mere 'rhetoric', blaring hopefully that 'Buddha' (Buddhadev, chief minister of Bengal) is a 'reformer?' and that this is why the Left won the elections this time around. This does not explain how the CPIM-led Left has won for 24 of 29 years without Buddha leading them, nor does it explain why the Great Reformer of Andhra Pradesh, Chandrababu Naidu, bit the dust so badly in 2004. Buddhadev himself showed exasperation when reporters credited him alone for the victory of Bengal's giant political force. "Try giving some credit to the people of Bengal," he said and added that they didn't seem to understand how and why people support the Left.

In Kerala the Left is led by V.S. Achuthananda, a man dubbed as "anti-development' and as a "Stalinist". So how come the same CPIM sweeps Bengal with a reformer and Kerala with a "Stalinist"? That's why CPIM Secretary Prakash Karat dismissed a question on Bengal with "I don't what this word 'reforms' means. Whose reforms? For whom?"

If an electorate as politically conscious as Bengal's elects a communist party 30 years in a row, the CPIM must have got some things right, which it has --especially in the countryside.

Bengal has had a very different growth story from the rest of India. It is the fastest growing state economy --but the composition of its growth is very different from the other states . It is not driven by IT or services but by small producers, which means it has had greater equity in its growth. In fact, only Bengal seems to have bucked the trend on agricultural growth --which has been a horrifying disaster for all the so-called high growth states. For 11 years, Bengal's agriculture growth has been way ahead of the stagnant national rate. Bengal saw land reform after the Left came to power in the late 1970s. When agricultural growth surges, many ordinary people do well. Bengal is the biggest producer of rice and vegetables in India and has been for a while.

Unsurprisingly, the Left's astounding victories are causing dismay in the media. The more you talk about the triumphs of the Left, the more you have to talk about 'them", the Left. And the media might even have to admit the Left's take on 'reforms' strikes a mighty chord with vital sections of the public. They might have to admit that it has been Left politicians and organizers who have been talking about hunger, starvation, food security, neoliberal reforms, the agrarian crisis, the public sector, and against privatization. But then, getting into that highlights 'their' agenda for your audiences. So best say it was all due to a charismatic chief minister.

The triumphant Left coalitions now face appalling problems, starting with one pervasive all-India problem --unemployed youth in large numbers. Hence the zeal to industrialize and get them jobs. (Here, Bengal is different from Kerala in that it has been an industrial base right from colonial times.)

Two, in such zones as the tea gardens of Darjeeling or the pepper groves in Kerala, prices have tanked thanks to volatility in gobal marklets, as I saw in Wayanad, Kerala.

Three, many of the policy levers affecting the agrarian crisis in Bengal and Kerala are not in the hands of the states. Import duties, quantitative restrictions on agricultural imports, minimum price supports --all these are in central hands, i.e., the congress-led UPA government right now (earlier the BJP and before them, the Congress!).

Four, central governments have discriminated very severely against Bengal between 1977 and 2004; so central allocations for Bengal have been dismal. The much richer state of Maharashtra has the same population as Bengal, roughly, but always got much better treatment.

This means that for Bengal to raise capital, it has to walk a tightrope. Where can it go? On what conditions? How does it try and get national capitalists to invest? What will be the trade-offs? Thus far, they've walked that rope well. It will get more and more difficult.

At the same time as the Left coalitions clash with the center, they also have to keep the governing coalition in New Delhi afloat, or risk the return of the BJP , which would be a disaster . So not only neo-liberalism, but foreign policy (Iran and Iraq) will spark trouble.

Kerala faces an even bigger problem. The agrarian crisis is deadly in Wayanad and Iduuki, but quite a few people outside these regions do not understand it or its intensity. Kerala's economy is even more intertwined with global currents and is getting shafted on coffee, pepper, tea, vanilla. As Sainath has described in his reports in The Hindu, pepper prices have slumped by over 70 per cent across the past few years. Vanilla has fared far, far worse. The coffee economy is in a shambles in a district where it occupies close to 70,000 hectares and has some 60,000 small growers. Reaching 130 rupees a kg a few years ago, the coffee price is now around 24 rupees a kg and sliding. The better grades of cardamom have seen prices dip by 75 per cent. Tea prices, too, have slumped. As Sainath writes, many plantation owners have simply walked away, deserting their workers. Hence the new trends in this long-time UDF bastion.

Kerala, in Sainath's view, cannot follow the Bengal route. It's a different state and economy. Giant industrialization won't work and will prove damaging. The Left can at least will start undoing some of the damage that commercialization of education has done. We may see Kerala's first communist education minister in many years.

In a nutshell, the problems are huge and complex. Where there is comprfehension of what has to be done --the tools of policy might not be in the Left's hands. The Left can turn its stunning victories to long-term political advantage only if the proper lesson is drawn from the different outcomes: even in periods of fairly high economic growth, governments such as India's present ruling coalition, kept in power by the Left, need to pay attention to the reality of mass deprivation and do something about it.

In West Bengal Hidai Sheikh, a fifty-year-old farmer, told a reporter from the bi-weekly Frontline , "the CPIM is the only viable alternative we have. After all, in times of need, they are always there beside us." The red flags I saw last year in villages in Wyanad are not antique emblems, like the bric-a-brac now on sale at Checkpoint Charlie, the crossing point in the old days between the Soviet and U.S. sectors of Berlin.. In political terms they are alive and vibrant.

Footnote: thanks to CounterPuncher P. Sainath's indispensable inputs into this column, a much shorter version of which ran in the print edition of The Nation that went to press last Wednesday. See also Vijay Prashad's terrific column, The Indian Road, on this site on May 5.

Rebuilding Democratic, Militant Unionism- Socialist Alliance

A. Introduction--the union movement today

On a global scale, there are more workers and more unionists than ever before. In newly industrialised countries such as Brazil, Korea and Indonesia, unionism has taken root. There has been a huge growth in the working class and in the number of unionists. These new unions often have a militant outlook.

In contrast, in Australia and other advanced capitalist countries union membership has been in decline for decades.

The ALP-ACTU Accord played a central role in this decline. Under Hawke and Keating, unions gave up on rank-and-file organising, looking entirely to deals at the top to advance wage, conditions and the “social wage”.

The results were disastrous—wages and conditions declined, social provision improved only marginally, the agenda of wholesale privatisation was set, the Builders Labourers Federation (BLF) and the Australian Federation of Air Pilots (AFAP) were smashed.

Even worse was the demobilisation of the unions. Official rank-and-file structures decayed. Delegates committees became entrenched in constant negotiations over implementation of national agreements, which always included productivity improvement. Mass meetings were few and far between, industrial action even rarer.

That legacy of hollowed-out unions continues to be a dead weight today. However, there are the beginnings of a revival, especially in Victoria. The Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) and other construction unions have made gains on hours and conditions. Workers First emerged as a potent force in the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU), supported by the membership on a platform of standing up for members and being prepared to take on the boss.

Some of the densest concentrations of unionism can now be found in female dominated industries such as health and education which have immense potential.

The Textile, Clothing and Footware Union of Australia (TCFUA) in Victoria has shown what good leadership can achieve. A union whose leadership was racist, sexist and in the bosses’ pocket has been completely turned around.

Workers have the chance today to rebuild militant democratic unions. What our class needs is political perspective and organisation. Active, organised and militant trade unions are important in giving workers a sense of their own power when they are organised collectively.

Historically, union organising has usually involved a conscious intervention by the left. Two examples of this are the Militant Minority Movement, led by the Communist Party in the 1930s and the 1970s shop committees and workers’ control movements, led by the Communist Party left and other socialists.

In Australia today, there are hundreds of militant unionists scattered through a wide range of unions and workplaces. If these union militants were organised, they could have a big impact transforming more unions into more militant organisations. Socialist Alliance, as a united left organisation, could play a key role here, especially in countering the politics of the ALP leadership.
B. Socialists and unions

(i) General: Socialists since Marx have seen trade unions as the vital basic organisations of working class people.

It is only through struggle that the working majority in society wins any gains from the capitalists in our conditions of life. It follows that the better our organization and capacity to struggle, the more we can win and defend. A class without unions is atomised exploitation fodder for the owners of the workplaces.

The working class is also the bearer of the “the other world that is possible”. Only the workers have the social power to challenge the rule of the capitalists—only the workers have the motivation to establish a society based on solidarity. Hence, trade unions are indispensable arenas of struggle for all-round working class, i.e. socialist, politics.

(ii) Our principles: Socialist Alliance’s attitude to unions stands on these principles: solidarity, democracy, unity in action, independence from the state and the bosses, militancy, preparedness to break the law when necessary, internationalism and adopting a working class position on all political issues.

These ideas direct our action in the unions, which Socialist Alliance will strive to implement by showing leadership in practice. That leadership is not a one-way street—socialists have to learn as well as teach. We can draw out lessons from the whole history of the working class movement, but we have always to listen to developments amongst the union ranks.

Our goal is to restore the unions to the membership so that they truly become instruments with which a politically conscious membership decides on its own interests and action.

(iii) Leaders and ranks: Unions are most effective as fighting organisations when the ranks are organised, politically conscious and in control of the union and when they have a leadership with the will and the political understanding to lead struggles.

Often, however, unions produce leaderships that prefer an easy life of negotiations with the boss to the hard yakka of workplace organising and industrial action. Sometimes a sell-out official has started as a militant, but succumbed to the pressures of office. Sometimes they have been in the bosses’ pocket from the start.

Sometimes they have genuine motives but have succumbed to the idea that workers can only safeguard their jobs if they help increase their employers’ profits.

There are many such tame-cat union leaderships—the Shop Distributive and Allied (SDA) union leaders are an example of the worst sort. They constantly do sweetheart deals over the heads of the membership and use their base to pursue a right-wing Christian moralist agenda.

At all times we seek to organise the ranks, to increase the numbers, morale and fighting strength of the union membership.

When union leaderships act to forward those goals, we support them. If they do not, we work with other militants to pressure the leaders. If that is not effective, we work with others to organise rank-and-file action independently and develop an alternative leadership. In the early twentieth century words of J. T. Murphy in The Miners’ Next Step: “If the leaders won’t lead, the rank and file must”.
C. Unions and political representation: building the working-class political alternative

Unions cannot abstain from politics. Solidarity is not only among unionists, but also for all those whom capitalism does over.
That means unions need to encourage debate on broad political issues amongst the ranks and build a base of support for action around those issues.

Come election time, unions have a responsibility to their members to work for a government of the workers.

In Australia, most unions have seen the Australian Labor Party (ALP) as their party—either through formal affiliation or through informal ties (e.g. the teachers’ unions have rarely been affiliated, but their officials have generally been in the ALP and they have worked hard to return ALP governments in elections).

Socialist Alliance works towards a break by militant unions to build a mass class-struggle workers’ party.

As steps along this road:
# We argue for unions to take a stand on politics and to involve their membership in those debates;
# Where unions are affiliated to the ALP, precise tactics will vary. We argue for the union to seriously take up the fight against the pro-capitalist politics of the ALP leaders;
# We stress the need for unions to organise publicly for pro-worker politics. We argue against secret deals with ALP leaders and governments;
# Where there is a move towards disaffiliation from the ALP, we argue for rank-and-file debate and conscious, democratic choice by the union membership instead of intra-bureaucratic factional maneuvering;
# Disaffiliation on the basis of “anti-political” conservative politics is no advance—what is needed is a concrete alternative that will improve the union members’ political representation;
# For disaffiliation from the ALP to be political step forward, there needs to be a process of generating rank-and-file involvement in the decision as to what alternative political proposal the union should adopt;
# Socialist Alliance will take every possible opportunity to promote, initiate and/or host debate and discussion on the road to rebuilding an authentic political voice for working people, within individual unions and across the movement as a whole;
# Socialist Alliance does not, at the present stage of its development, encourage unions to affiliate directly to it. We do urge unions to fund political parties, Socialist Alliance included, to the degree that the union membership judges that such parties advance their interests; and
# We encourage as many individual unionists, including militant union officials, to join and participate in the Socialist Alliance.
D. What Socialist Alliance needs to do in unions

Socialist Alliance offers big possibilities for a trade union practice that goes beyond that of any individual affiliate. In many unions, Socialist Alliance has a substantial number of members. If we organise them and develop well-grounded perspectives, we can have a big impact.

Already Socialist Alliance is beginning to be seen as an organising force among militant workers.

Our work this far has been limited, but promising. We have built successful meetings in solidarity with the Skilled Six and Workers First and have made a start on organising networks in particular unions.

The Trade Union Solidarity Committee in Melbourne is a useful initiative—holding regular forums and producing a trade union bulletin.

Socialist Alliance needs to prepare for long-term consistent work—this is a perspective over years, not days or months.

To have an impact in the unions, Socialist Alliance needs to:
# Be active and provide serious leadership on the day-to-day issues of wages and working conditions;
# Propose campaigns around key issues such as the shorter working week and propose that unions adopt the method of pattern bargaining instead of enterprise bargaining;
# Work to rebuild delegate structure, workplace meetings and trade union democracy and participation;
# Propose campaigns that extend and defend the interests of the members of individual unions and organized labour as a whole (for example, shorter working week, repeal of the Workplace Relations Act, against full privatization of Telstra, in defence of Medicare);
# Promote solidarity with unions and unionists that are being victimized and attacked by the state and the bosses;
# Integrate struggles over the special needs of women workers, lesbian, gay, bi and transgendered workers and people of colour;
# Consistently take an internationalist, working-class approach, especially to “difficult” issues (refugees, racism), in this way, combatting Australian nationalism and xenophobia;
# Bosses try to divide workers along race, sex, skill level and age lines. It is important that Socialist Alliance activists in unions strive for their unions to overcome these divisions in order to build a strong union based on solidarity;
# Unions need to have a class approach when taking up campaigns. Issues such as the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, racism, women’s rights, Medicare, workers compensation, unemployment benefits and Work for the Dole schemes are all class issues. These issues may only directly affect some union members, but indirectly, these issues effect all union members because they affect the whole of the working class—the family members of unionists, unemployed workers and retired workers. Social issues need to be taken up by unions because they are working class issues;
# Be in the forefront of campaigns to organise and unionise unorganised workers, especially young workers and casual workers;
# Maintain a flexible attitude to existing rank-and-file formations and class-struggle leaderships. We will apply the principle that we support leaders when they lead; and

# Help members in non-militant unions develop as workplace delegates and develop unionism in the workplace.

To be able seriously to take up these goals, Socialist Alliance will undertake the following:
# Where useful, establish Socialist Alliance networks in individual unions at local, state and national level, open to non-Socialist Alliance members and operating as loose collectives based on consensus;
# As these networks develop their organisation and a perspective for the union, they should consider establishing workplace and/or union-wide bulletins as well as establishing and/or strengthening—with others—a broader militant and democratic formation;
# The networks will promote alternative policies and democratic, militant unionism in union elections. This may mean supporting existing leaderships that are leading struggles (for example, the Victorian and WA CFMEU, Victorian AMWU Workers First, Victorian TCFUA) or participating in electoral challenges;
# Seek to recruit unionists into the Socialist Alliance. As part of this we seek to build the links within the Alliance between members who are active trade unionists and other members who are students, fulltime political organizers, unemployed, and others. We aim to become a major resource for militant unionists.
# As appropriate, establish local, state and national cross- union committees (e.g. the Victorian Trade Union Solidarity Committee) open to non-Socialist Alliance members;
# Develop Socialist Alliance trade union publications (state and national) as organisation of our work develops; and
# Hold education and training forums and workshops on the history of struggles, debates in the union movement and organising methods, in order to develop both the practical skills and political analysis of unionists.

# When appropriate, initiate a national conference of union militants.

This perspective outlines a significant amount of work. Implementing these decisions and further developing our political orientation and practice in the unions needs a serious commitment from all levels of the Alliance. Branches, regional, state and national bodies will need to organise regular discussions to ensure that priority and focus are maintained.

National Conference believes that trade union organization is a crucial issue for Socialist Alliance. As such National Conference directs the National Executive to do the following: a sub-committee be setup to construct a trade unionists’ education program. This to be properly resourced and deal with: history of struggles, debates in the union movement, and organizing methods as well as strategy, tactics and critical analysis skills. Further that these courses should be delivered locally, regionally, statewide and nationally and be open to non-Socialist Alliance members.
If resources allow, the working group, in conjunction with the National Executive, is to produce a pamphlet which runs over the history of the trade union movement, current debates and industrial issues, and the Socialist Alliance trade union policy. Such a pamphlet would include the Liberals’ anti-union agenda, the Workplace Relations Act, as well as tactical issue such as pattern bargaining. As part of the education program and the Alliance’s activity the working group, in liaison with relevant state and national organizations to investigate the possibility of hosting broad meetings/seminars on the attacks on the unions and resistance to these attacks, and the fight to build militant, democratic unions.