Leftism down under

does Australia have any hope in getting a decent leftist/socialist government or is labor too incompetent/right wing? Also what are your opinions on Bill? No one here likes him and the media/liberals think he is a commie for some reason.

Other urls found in this thread:

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_labour_movement
cpaml.org
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_referendum,_1951_(Communists_and_Communism)
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

Nobody likes Bill, hes a terrible fucking leader for labor. Now go and name a good one. Yeah its hard isn't it? Rudd was decent but Julia destroyed any trust the public had in labor.

Right now no legitimately left wing parties seem to have a real shot at making it in the electoral system, revolution or through "alternative organizing" or whatever. Its not that there aren't leftists in the country, its that we are all sectarian fucks and the few parties with decent membership sizes have no mainstream success or any real strategy.

Well thats my take on it anyway, I also could be wrong and dumb.

wtf? Rudd was a traitor he was terrible and he leaked shit to the liberals. OP read bookchin

I hate Julia Gillard she ruined everything, but she's milf af

Her step daughter posed for Zoo.

No animals, disappointed.

I have friends who actually work along side bill and talk to him regularly, they say that once you get to know him you really understand the kind of man he is, a bureaucrat, through and through, and not a bad one at that, but still a bureaucrat and not a leader. From their perspective if he was elected, the country would run like a silent purr, no big scandals and very boring but necessary changes made, leaving nothing of note.

nearly every labor leader till Hawk was good, since then Keating was alright, mainly for a laugh, he wasn't really one for major worker change. Labor as a whole has evolved along side unions, so it's no wonder that the moment that unions become business themselves that labor as a party goes to shit

pouring gasoline on a burning house ain't exactly ruining it, even if it isn't helping

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Katter's Australia? How are they more left wing?

bob hawke was a lad even if his economic policy was strongly objectionable. (although Australia's transition to neoliberaism seems far less painful to Britain, and he appears to have adopted some SocDem measures like wage bargaining and food price controls rather than 20% interest rates and an intentional economic crash.)

but if you want an unapologetically good ALP leader
GOUGH
O
U
G
H

Bump, post cute Gillards

What? I meant a good candidate for leadership within the current labor party. I didn't mean name one that had ever been good. Gough was based.

M8s just like radicalise the youth somehow.

Right.
We've got fucctonnes of land and loads of people completely uneducated politics wise.
We intergrate ourselves in country towns and preach socialism. The kinds of places the gov don't check for guns n shit.
Once we got enough support, we create communes in the bush and use them as a base to spread further.
Once we have some form of media attention, we act all goody two shoes and denounce the government. Hide our power level.
Then we radicalise the unions (especially dock workers). Keep it quiet tho.
Once the unions are on our side we shut off the ports, trains and trucks. Then we give our demands for the gov to fuck off.
When they inevitably use force, we declare a potracted people's war
Since at that stage we have most of the countryside and have crippled their logistics, victory shall be ours.

Okay I don't care how his government was this lad is a fucking legend.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. This country needs a Cultural Revolution.

From the earliest point in our history, there was class struggle. the convicts were forced to work in slave labour conditions on farms owned by bourgeois settlers or be punished by colonial soldiers (the same soldiers who, at the behest of the land owning settlers, went out and shot Aboriginals).

The Gold Rush also brought class struggle with it, as working class miners (who wanted to own the product of their labour) fought against the British Empire at the Eureka Stockade. The Eureka Rebellion was also partly a reaction to a bourgeois hotel owner James Bentley being acquitted after he murdered miner James Scobie.

One of our greatest folk heroes was an Irishman in a British world. Ned Kelly was seen as the Australian Robin Hood and is also a popular Anti-Authoritarian figure today.

The Swagman is also a constant theme in Australian history. Men, down on their luck, travelling across the country in search of work, often having wages withheld. Waltzing Matilda is essentially the story of a homeless, hungry man being attacked by the cops just for wanting a bite to eat.

Even today in Australia, things like a fair go, mateship and Egalitarianism are common in our ethos. We even have the notion of cutting down the Tall Poppy, Australians can't stand wealthy elites.

I think if Socialism is to get anywhere in this country, it needs to play on Australian patriotism. We'd be foolish not to. The history is there, we have the potential for it.

Katter is left wing economically, but actually reactionary.

post yfw you realize the best hope for communism in australia is literally if china takes over

Biggest hurdle is political apathy.

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Does anyone have any good books on the history of leftism in Australia?

There are many good strikes and things throughout our history, but I don’t know much about them.

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Ok so what do we do?
Do we wait or try to chuck up some propaganda or some shit? What do we target?
Also,
CAST SPELL THREAD NECROMANCY

A few suggestions
1) infiltrate the labor party. A bit of a long shot but labor has had radical leaders such as Whitlam, who visited China in 70’s when everyone thought it was Asian USSR, and Chiefly, who wanted to nationalise the banks in the 40’s. We could at least sway some of their voters as labor has been focusing on income inequality, which is only a few redpolls away from actual leftism

2) like said, we should make propaganda that takes advantage of Australia’s leftist history and make socialism patriotic. This makes it more appealing and accessible to the common worker who doesn’t have time to read a million books on Marx or thinks that the left are 🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧sjw🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧 trying to anuddah shoah them with multiculturalism or whatever.

3) take advantage of political frustration. Polls say about 25% of aussies don’t like either of the main party are turning to radical parties like one nation. These aussies are probably the most willing to listen to radical solutions so smoke them out and convert them. Also the royal banking commission is going ahead so once that is done we should use that to encourage anti-capitalism

4) wait for China to take over. They already bribe half the politicians so maybe they’ll be nice enough to take over, or at least make maoism/Marxism mainstream

Reading up on Aussie labour movements is pretty interesting.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_labour_movement
5/5 Breddy gud

I think we should also try to foster some Anti-American sentiment. Maybe paint Australia as an American puppet state that we need to rebel against. Maybe even shift the responsibility of wars away from Australia and onto America (as in, "Australians are against all these wars, it's the Americans who drag us into them"). Maybe even pull a 'Never Another Gallipoli' or something.

Cucked by Yanks much?

This.

Piece of advice from a britbong, entryism can 100% work but it requires organisation: what you need is a Momentum-type organisation to work from, one that can sustain the activism of replacing Labor MPs with ones that are actually leftist over a long period of time. Tbh this group does not have to bee that big, Momentum itself is about 30k compared to the 570k of Labour itself; it has to be dedicated though. Momentum however does have numerous members from former left wing splinter groups like Socialist Party UK (trots), CPB (Eurocomms) and the Campaign for Labour Democracy (DemSoc). So I think entryism could work, but ti takes some effort and a tight it org.


Interesting fact about this: the plan was that in the 1900s Australia would adopt American spelling (like the Canuks did) and Labor was founded during this period, however they never did so the verb and the noun is labour, but it is the Labor party.

Two prongs to Australian Socialism as I see it.

1/ Firstly, join your Union. The Union movement is the backbone of Australian labour struggle. No political party policy or radicalisation strategy is ever going to be half as effective as the unions. While a strong cadre party (for Leninists) or an anarcho-syndicalist union (for anarchists) would both be lovely things to have, our concrete history and conditions continually compel one conclusion: the unions are the backbone of the struggle. We need leftists in unions, talking to co-workers, recruiting and organising on the job. Join a union, and put workplace activity and union activity first.

Even the awful unions like the SDA only got awful because of a lack of lefties. I'm not sure the SDA is fixable today (look up the RAFFWU though if you're a retail or fastfood worker), but it's strategic mistake to see actually-existing unions as flawed in order to justify retreat into your ultraspecial five-member sect as the only 'real' leftism.

Similarly, if Labor is awful these last few decades, it is because the unions are weakened. If Labor can push the unions around and get them to meekly roll over, that's a problem of weak unions, not eeeevil Labor. Build strong unions, even just establishing an upward trajectory, and watch the momentum push the political parties. The ACTU has recently announced a few election demands, and it looks like they're trying to build up to the fight. Now is the time, maybe the first good opportunity since Howard, to pitch in with that struggle.

Focus on the workplace, and then build up from there. Don't go focussing on student politics (as in student elections) or lifestyle politics (Save the Gay Whales rubbish, like Students For West Papua), that shit hasn't been relevant or effective since maybe the 80s. If you're a student and a worker, think of yourself as a worker first and a student second. If you're only a student, DO join the NUS and take part in campaigns on issues that actually effect you, like tuition fee rises.

2/ Join a political grouping. (Almost) ANY of the left parties are fine ( Left Labor, Greens, or further afield like Socialist Alliance or Socialist Alternative or the Socialist Party) depending on your outlook. Anarchists, join your city's Solidarity Federation, or Anarchist Affinity, or the Melbourne Anarchist Club, or just go and volunteer with Food Not Bombs. Personally I am a member of Socialist Alliance, but today's Australian left isn't yet at a point where it's worth fighting too much over narrow sectarian distinctions - given our current low level of agitation, we have to build experience for the first time in a generation, and hopefully developing material conditions will show us the way, and give us criteria to judge more effectively. For now, the thing is to start anywhere.

The point of this is to get you talking politics with people who care about them, which is necessary for morale - lone dudes locked in their rooms late at night can go crazy or subside into liberal defeatism. This also lets you build practical experience dealing with random members of the public, and "non-political" people (election campaigning, etc.).

(Caveat: don't join Socialist Equality Party, who are really weird Trots. Don't let them fool you, they're particularly bad, and take anti-union stances and all sorts of crazy shit. Same goes for the Sparts. Be careful with the smaller, nuttier groups out there.)

Ain't there loads of trot parties but no ML parties?

Yeah, basically. There's the Communist Party of Australia, who are trying to resurrect the name and the brand. Unfortunately they haven't yet met the electoral registration (500 people I think) requirements.

A lot of the bigger 'Trot' parties (Socialist Alliance, Solidarity) aren't really Trots in a historically relevant sense of the term (either dogmatically with Permanent Revolution stuff or behaviourally with the splitting and the hero-worship).

Socialist Alliance has a lot of old Trots from the Democratic Socialist Party, but they're some of the good ones, and the Alliance is genuinely multi-tendency (I am one LibSoc among many and we get on fine). The best way to characterise them might be something like Post-Trotskyist. Even Socialist Alternative, although they do run seminars occasionally with names like "Trotsky: Who Was He, And Why Does He Matter Today?", doesn't really push a noticeably Trotskyist line in public.

Oh my, we're certainly cucked aren't we. Loving that inner city brown Melbourne cock a bit too much aren't ya

hehe he said cuck

Should we support the CPA or are they a bunch of devious little creatures?

Also there are apparently some MLs about.
cpaml.org

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_referendum,_1951_(Communists_and_Communism)
still one of my favourite historical oddities.

wasted opportunity

Fundamentally, you do not understand how protracted people's war works.

The term "protracted" is used precisely because it is a PROTRACTED process. In the Philippines and India, where revolutionaries are operating under far more favorable conditions that we could in Australia, they have been fighting their PPW since the 1970's, and still have to set to move beyond the strategic defensive phase, or even to establish physical base areas (In the traditional sense).

If you want to talk about PPW in Australia, there is a lot of shit you need to factor in before you can even begin planning a general strategy.

1. Finances. According to the ex-finance minister of FARC, in a third world Guerilla struggle, the cost of a single Guerrilla is around $6000 USD a year. This covers food, living wages, medical costs, equipment, etc. In a country like Australia, you're looking at substantially more than that. You'll have to at least match a minimum wage level of income for fighters, and then some for equipment and medical costs, which puts you at around $30'000 a year. For 100 full time fighters, you need at least $3 million USD ready to go, and dispensable. That isn't even factoring leadership costs, general party costs, mass movement & STP type costs, etc. In all, you're looking at tens of millions of dollars just to get started with a handful of fighters, let alone wage an actual successful people's war.

Then you have to factor in the far more difficult conditions we'd face. It wouldn't be possible for us to simple "Form communes/build a base area in the bush area" because of military airpower. Even in the best possible conditions, the military has drones which can track you via infared view. The government could locate any group of Guerrillas in the bush within a matter of hours, and kill you within minutes via drone strikes.

That is even assuming you get to that point. Start stashing weapons, or talking about armed struggle, even in the most remote communities, and you'll have the police at your door within days. The government here has the power to round up, and black bag any radicals practically over night, and not only will the average Australian not give a shit, they will cheer it on.

If you're serious to any degree beyond LARPing/virtue signalling about setting up a PPW in Australia, start thinking logistics. If you can't show me a way that you could feasibly amass 100 million dollars just to kick start it, no reasonable human being should treat you as anything other than a LARper.