The Political Class, Electoralism, the Working Class and Capitalism

Whatever It Takes To Win and Hold Power?

A group calling itself ‘ONE TERM TORIES’ posted a meme recently on Facebook and by the looks of their past posts, they are a hack Australian Labor Party, (ALP) group. I have tried to access this post again for the sake of this article but their profile on Facebook has been locked and is unavailable.
These clowns posted a meme featuring the reactionary federal parliamentary
opposition leader Peter Dutton wrapped in towels and the reactionary opposition
treasurer semi-naked in a towel with pierced nipples. They stand in a locker room
having a conversation (with a strong lisp) about their election policies. The image and portrayal are a heteronormative stereotype of queer, gay and homosexual men. This denigrating blokie joke reveals much about the function of this political class. ‘ONE TERM TORIES’ resurrect hate and ignorance, which many thought was long gone but which persists as it is structural to class society. Ridicule and hate in class society, has the function to ostracise and diminish other humans as inferior and unworthy. The same function racism, sexism, ableism, and ageism has in class society. Their meme is an attack on queer, gay and homosexual men. It is a pathetic homophobic smear. Their post doesn’t stop there and moves on to bully and denigrate people with speech different to the mainstream. They want a reactionary emotional response to win approval and support. Their cynical manipulation of ignorance and prejudice, to win support by making queer, gay and homosexual men look stupid, worthless and less human reveals the practice of capitalist democracy for the fraud it is. As the corrupt, former ALP senator for New South Wales (NSW) and stereotypical back-room power broker Graham Richardson said, “we do whatever it takes” and as politics shift to the right, the ALP shifts with it, to do whatever it takes to win and hold power.

Social Revolution As A Democratic Choice, Last Option Or Necessity?

The practice of political parties is the practice of autocratic western capitalist ‘democracy’. This is the practice of control through division. Division in this instance is expressed through a concocted political circus (ALP, Lib/Nat Coalition, Greens, Independents, One Nation), generating the illusion of choice and control. I chose to only mention this one form of division propagated as a control mechanism by capitalism as I am discussing the use of the political class to oversee the management of the capitalist system. We are indoctrinated to only believe and to see the ‘natural order of things’ as comprising elites and ‘natural’ social, political and economic hierarchies, the benefit of globalism, growth and consumption for profit and that if we depose ‘the natural order’ the global economy would crash into chaos, deprivation and societal disintegration. A trend to be observed now and this is with the capitalists in control! This fabrication is used to legitimise the imposition and control of capitalism. The mythology of social progress driven by competition is another fabrication and to further justify the global destruction capitalism brings. They blame you to excuse capitalist destruction of global eco-systems, as an unavoidable necessity because of your consumption. The elites of society are there because they have stolen what does not belong to them, the instruments of production, the wealth we produce and the resources of the planet. They use state violence to ensure the preservation of this theft.

The Interests Of The Working Class Are The Antithesis To Those Of The Capitalist Classes And Are Irreconcilable.

We are repeatedly misled that we live in the greatest country in the world and there are ‘others’ that want to spoil this or take it away. A consensus is sort to create a manufactured common interest between the capitalist ruling class and the working class, built on nationalism and xenophobia to defend ‘our country’. This propaganda ensures that the working class shoulder the burden of inter-ruling class warfare and do all the dying and fall in line and guarantee loyalty to their ruling class. The manufactured common interest is cause for the creation of borders, glorification of war, police, prisons, detention, mass surveillance, militarism and imperialist alliances. The interests of the working class are the antithesis to those of the capitalist classes and are irreconcilable. The real purpose of nationalist propaganda is to permit all means of oppressive mechanisms to be built by and paid for by those the oppression is to be used against. As an extension those oppressive mechanisms are used to suppress and isolate the social problems, chaos and conflict caused by capitalism and to defend the local capitalist class not only from external aggression but also from internal dissent. i.e. to entrench autocratic capitalist domination and their monopoly on state power. What rights we have are being eroded, and our voice which has never been heard will not be, we are simply told what to do. This you will never get to vote on!

The ALP Is A Treacherous Party Of The Political Class In Service To Capitalism.

The ALP like the Democrats in the United States, the British Labor Party, the NZ Labor Party in Aotearoa; Social Democrat, Greens, Technocratic and devolutionist nationalist parties in Europe, claim to be the opposition to reactionary conservatism and fascism, yet open the path to reaction and oppression and try to disguise their collaboration. In so-called Australia, the ALP embraces imperialism and militarism, just as their political opposition does, support with American bases, imperialist alliances, and nuclear subs that has sparked a regional arms race and the increased likely hood of nuclear war. They expand militarism, with more spending on arms and surveillance, imperialist interventions in the region and an aggressive ’forward defence’ posturing. They actively intervene on behalf of the international arms traders, to sell weapons and assist arms manufacturers, with real battle ground proving of their weaponry for more efficient, effective and reliable killing technologies. Despite their trumpeting of sanctions against Russia, they hypercritically import through third parties, Russian oil into Australia. and profit from arms sales used in the inter-ruling class warfare between Ukraine, Russia and NATO. They sell warfare technologies to enable colonialist genocide in Palestine and West Papua and hypercritically deny their participation in genocide.

State Violence And Oppression Is The Choice of the Political Class. The Working Class Needs To Define the Terms by Which To Resist This Violence.

They have militarised police with technology, weapons and brutality to smash dissent and will not hesitate to unleash state violence as we saw at the blockade of the international arms dealers fair “Land Forces 2024 exposition” in Naarm (Melbourne). They conducted a secret trial of a dissident who exposed war crimes in Afghanistan by Australian soldiers and have the temerity to push for the release of another imprisoned dissident Julian Assange, from a UK prison because of the popularity of this cause. They have used an anti-terrorist police squad to arrest and legally harass and intimidate climate dissidents because they upset the head of a criminal fossil fuel corporation by picketing her home. In the state of Victoria, the ALP government has arbitrarily deleted the rights of young people, the victims of class oppression, to the right to be bailed if arrested and moved to limit the right to protest on the streets. They have criminalised young kids, incarcerating and brutalising them in prisons by lowering the age of criminal responsibility. They persecute and vilify the rightly rebellious young indigenous kids, with systematic and brutal oppression, reintroducing racial segregation disguised as curfews, allowing police to commit terrorist acts in communities and continue stealing the children of first nations peoples. The default position of the capitalist legal system is to imprison first nations peoples, which is another form of state terror. Despite being only 4% of the population first nations peoples comprise just under 33% of the entire prison population. The prisons are full in the Northern Territory with first nations peoples, with the obvious conclusion that oppression now operates through internment in concentration camps. They kill first nations peoples in their prisons, because of criminal actions by state operatives or inaction at other times. They peddle deceit with intent to mislead on the decarbonisation of capitalism, renewables technologies, and adaption in the face of capitalist induced crises (CICC’s) Despite commissioning a report to assess the security implications of CICC’s, they refuse to release its content or acknowledge its completion. They rollover on protecting the natural environment on command for poisonous salmon farming in Tasmania, the destruction of pristine old growth native forests, extraction of water from aquifers for agribusiness, mining, gas fracking in the Northern Territory or urban expansion all for capitalist growth, destruction, waste and inefficiency. They continue to expand capitalist extraction and use of fossil fuels and minerals used in renewables technology, and in the process dumping massive quantities of radioactive sludge, poisoning land and waterways, deepening environmental damage, starting imperialist wars and the further dispossession of global indigenous populations. They export uranium and support nuclear waste dumps and hypercritically claim to be anti-nuclear. They discriminate against and villainise immigrants and imprison refugees, the exact same politics of the abhorrent John Howard government in the early 2000’s. They are intolerant of any challenge to their power and expel members who expose their duplicity.

The Political Class Have Waged Warfare On The Working Class For The Past 50 years. Only A Revolutionary Working Class Can Fight Back.

On behalf of the capitalist ruling classes, the political class conduct warfare on workers as a class, our organisations and rights. They individualise, divide and weaken the working class with the criminalisation of effective trade unionism, and seizing the assets of workers organisations for their own use. They introduced legal sanctions against workers taking direct industrial action, effectively outlawing strikes and secondary boycotts. They autocratically impose work contracts and the suppression of workplace organising. They foster the illusion of ‘self- empowerment’ in the gig economy, and a confection of privatised workplace training, to the imperilment of hard-won workers’ rights and to the advantage of capitalist exploitation. They abandon communities of the working class devastated by CICC’s, disease or those now redundant for exploitation, when and as needed, inflicting socio-economic destruction and appalling psychological distress. They alienate the working class from control of their trade unions to the advantage of ALP cronies and union bureaucrats answerable only to the political class. They tie up trade unions in the executive bureaucracy and legal system, unable to resist the predatory practices of capitalism. They treat workers as a commodity, flying them in and out to work, to be used and exploited and then discarded. They import indentured labour from Papua New Guinea, Pacific nations and Timor-Leste, housing them in appalling conditions with exorbitant charges and turn a blind eye to their abuse and hyper-exploitation. They grant workers from other parts of the world permission to work on condition, under the threat of deportation, to be bonded to an employer, to be exploited and abused. They commit ‘social murder’, which is unnatural deaths caused by social, political, or economic oppression where those responsible for the conditions leading to deaths, such as the political and capitalist classes along with state bureaucracy and collaborationist unions are aware of them but fail to act. This is evident in workplace deaths and disabling physical and psychological injury to workers resulting from accidents due to poorly designed and maintained workplaces, long debilitating working hours, harsh and dangerous working conditions, expensive time consuming and exhausting commutes, bullying and intimidation. It is also evident in the lessons of the Covid pandemic. The working class were last in consideration for health and safety in the pandemic, as the priority is as always for the political class, the maintenance of capitalist production and consumption. Workers and their communities were sacrificed, to the deadly pandemic, for capitalist production and consumption. The left must have been isolated in isolation during the pandemic, as the silence about the authoritarian response to the pandemic is telling of an unconditional adherence to the ALP despite its actions being wrong. The inadequate response from the left shows how irrelevant we are in the life of the working class at present. What should have been a health response led by collaboration between the community and science, and driven by the community, as the response to HIV was, became an issue of division, blame, discrimination, victimisation, racism, xenophobia, policing, control and suppression. Bad faith actors, fascists, opportunists, anti-science antivaxxers, conspiracy delusionists and the clueless, emerged and strengthened their influence. The lockdowns and quarantine ended in a panic, the capitalist class impatient with disruption to production and consumption. We were all sent back to work, and consumption, case and death numbers were no longer reported, as if mysteriously the virus suddenly disappeared. The death toll mounted, the political class no longer commented on the pandemic, silenced by the capitalist class, and there was widespread anxiety, and confusion on wearing masks, quarantine, testing and vaccination. To date there has been an underestimated 7,000,000 deaths from Covid, unknown numbers with the debilitating symptoms of long covid, and 1,000,000 current cases globally. Social murder is also evident in the epidemic of femicide and suicide. There was a 30% leap in women being murdered by their male partner from 2022 to2023 and it is getting worse. This statistic does not even acknowledge the widespread and routine physical, emotional, psychological and economic violence inflicted on women, trans and queer people caused by oppressive hierarchical patriarchal power relations which is structural to capitalism. In 2020, 3129 people committed suicide. The suicide rates for children under 15 years increased by 92% between the 1960s to 1990s. Suicide rates are higher amongst males, first nations peoples, and people outside the major cities. First nations peoples suicide rate is over three times that of the general population and is amongst the highest in the world. There has been a shift towards people aged 20-39 killing themselves. Suicides increased 37% between 2000-2018 and decreased slightly between 2018-2020 and have jumped back to their peak. For the last 20 years, there has been a dramatic rise in suicide rates around the world. Suicide deaths are personal and often complex, but what corresponds to peaks and troughs in the suicide rate are the prevailing social and economic conditions imposed by capitalism. Femicide, domestic violence, sexual violence and abuse, suicide, many mental and physical illnesses are a consequence of the capitalist social and economic system and when deaths happen, that is social murder. We are not permitted to vote to end exploitation, destructive power relationships or the alienated and toxic conditions in our communities that exist because that would mean the end of capitalism.

An Alienated Society Is A Society Vulnerable To Fascism.

Capitalism is destructive of human development and social relations. Capitalism creates social and economic conditions that negatively influence human behaviours. Capitalism alienates us from meaning, fulfilment, and direct control over our lives. Capitalists cultivate a mythical culture of the necessity of control. We are dictated to in the workplaces and infantilised in the process to become dependent on their dictates. When workers see through their mythology, we are economically sanctioned by being fired or when we as a class we become conscious of the need to remove capitalists they resort to oppression and state violence. Capitalist control over production alienates us from the social value of what we produce as workers and the necessity for liberation from capitalist control through collective socialisation of production. The imposition of capitalist control of production and consumption separates production and consumption from the natural world and human needs. They dictate what we produce, how we produce it, when and how quickly to produce and why we produce it. Capitalist production and consumption have destroyed the collective thread that binds us together as a community, something that gave us a feeling of belonging. We are reduced to individualised units of production and consumption. We are being exploited, tied to, made dependent on and cowered by debt to the capitalist class. We are isolated in unaffordable housing on the outer reaches of the cities or in massive high rise apartment developments, crowded into unsuitable, inadequate, insecure and expensive rentals at risk of homelessness. We are isolated from community support and solidarity, and healthy sustainable food systems, dependent on expensive cars or inadequate public transport, ripped off and reliant on manufactured imitations of food, and other necessities from capitalist monopolies or duopolies. It is no wonder people want to escape and withdraw to find comfort and space so as to cope with the isolation, fear and hopelessness of the capitalist system. Withdrawal is a difficult option as it ultimately means the very things we try to escape will remain dominant. We are unavoidably forced to consume capitalist media, that spews an unrelenting stream of deceit, fear, hate and loathing. The alienated withdrawn individual feels they don’t belong, further weakening our social bond of solidarity and mutual aid, divides us and diminishes our power. It makes people susceptible to manipulation, to blame and scapegoat ‘others’ for the problems the capitalist system produces, opening of the dark path to fascism.

To Fight Back And To Win, We Must Address the World As It Is. Not How We Think It Is.

The ALP has no commitment to us, not even to a program of much needed urgent and just reforms. It has an adherence to doctrinaire neo-liberal capitalist economics. Research shows that this system means we suffer a loss of social trust with our neighbours, other workers, with friends and partners and increases illicit drug use. It burdens the working class with income tax, puts us at the bottom of priorities and are the most negatively impacted by state largess to capitalist privilege. The result is health, educational, local community infrastructure, housing, ambulance and emergency fire rescue services, climate adaption and other social services the working class depend on are neglected. On the flip side, there is always a very high priority of the political class to spend on police, the military and surveillance. With the advent of more frequent, longer, intense and costly capitalist induced climate crises, whole communities, are not insured because it cannot be afforded. It is not a priority of either the political or capitalist classes to spend on climate abatement. Our communities are in the sights of the next mega climate disaster, and the abandoned by the state, left to fend for ourselves. We need to be very clear eyed and see where electorialism takes us and that is nowhere! Squandering time and resources to get Labor re-elected, is an irrational and emotional response to an illusion of reforming capitalism. The dirty tricks of the ALP in the service of capital have a long and well documented history. When capitalism demands the political class snap to their attention. The system is working well as it always has on behalf of those that designed it. The practice of the Liberal and National Party coalition in power, or any government supported by independents and Greens has always been and will continue to be what the ALP does now. We know the coalition would shoot us all in the head given an opportunity, but we don’t seem to acknowledge that the ALP repeatedly stabs us in the back.

We’re Not Saying Not To Vote. We Are Saying Join With Us To Organise and Resist!

The historical mistake of the international socialist movement was to accept the legitimacy of capitalist ‘democracy’ and seek a place at the controls of state power. Through the process of electoralism and reformism, over centuries, much has been promised, that still has not been delivered, except for further entrenching capitalist domination, class society, social stratification, imperialism, colonialism, genocide, war and global ecological collapse. Electorialism legitimises capitalist control and exploitation and is a distraction to the urgent task of a real radical egalitarian remaking of society. It disempowers the working class by burning up people and resources that can be used more effectively in rebuilding democratic class struggle workers organisations. It is a surrender to working-class autonomy to capitalist domination and submission to play by their rules and limits. In this bleak historical moment, we can build back a stronger and more united and revolutionary working class with the clear aim of displacing the capitalist system. Without extracting our class from the bureaucratic, political and legal limits imposed on us, we will be powerless to defend our class from capitalist class warfare, win improvements and reforms in the short term, or effect revolutionary change. The hope to reform our way to socialism, defeat fascism or avoid global ecological collapse, by surrendering our future to and entrusting functionaries of the capitalist state to do this is an illusion and a dangerous one in our current political, economic and environmental crises. As the French anarchist Jacques Reclus (1830 –1905) said; “Power has always made its possessors foolish. If you send your mediocrities into a place of corruption, be not astonished if they come out corrupted”. Electoralism is duplicitous and naive, it neglects to address the power, persistence and the ability of capitalism to adapt to challenges to its legitimacy, because it is at the centre of power. Capitalism controls media news and information, the cultural narrative, the social and economic institutions and the parameters within which to define what is politically acceptable for it. The working class for two centuries has been misled by politicians that claim with them in power, and through reform or a political coup that seizes state power, the demands of the working class will be won. The historical reality is the exact opposite. For how many more centuries will we keep pursuing this distraction?