Telcontar reports on their experience at the tumultuous Disrupt Land Forces protests that rocked Melbourne recently.
The brutal and unrelenting crackdown by Victoria Police has drawn much attention to Disrupt Land Forces (DLF) as the full force and viciousness of the Australian state was revealed in all its blood-soaked glory. Rubber bullets, tear gas, flash bang grenades and pepper spray were all unleashed against the daring protesters demonstrating against the Military-Industrial Complex’s festival of genocide. Socialist Alternative’s chants of “This is not a police state!” may appeal to the idealist students they hope to win over, but the working class knows better. The police are scabs, they are the blood-soaked ‘velvet glove’ of the capitalist state.
The iron fist of the military has not needed to be deployed for many years in Australia, but it is always an option that the state will fall back on if the need arises. Even as the price of these operations spiral (current estimates of the cost for the police to defend a bunch of warmongering capitalists is upwards of $10M) the state will continue to throw munitions at its problems.
Whilst the most literal aim of disrupting the conference was a success, this is not to say that Disrupt Land Forces was a success for the working class, or something that the left should try and idealise as the model for future actions. The opening day’s picket was full of blunders, strategic mistakes, and vain buffoons trying to carve out a name for themselves, or to ensure that they looked good on camera to the detriment of the actual aim of the picket. There were three broad tendencies at the picket itself, all of which will be criticised in turn.
The first, and the one that has drawn the most criticism from the left by far was Socialist Alternative under the banner of Students for Palestine. Throughout the morning Socialist Alternative’s preferred tactic of stunts for the sake of stunts crippled the entire endeavour. Their move to the second entrance early in the morning led to a great amount of protesters being kettled by VicPol [Kettling is a crowd-control tactic wherein police officers surround and contain large groups of people and keep them in place for long periods of time].
Indeed, roughly half of the protesters were kettled and trapped from escaping by the main road, and protesters were fortunate that the police did not cut off small side exits (such as the concrete barrier). This allowed for protesters to break the kettle easily as they were able to circumvent the police line. The memory that will stick with me most is running through the hedge gathering with my comrades, and one of them slinging her backpack around and taking her morning estrogen.
The vague milling that emerged after the breakout revealed the bankruptcy of the ‘strategy’. Indeed, this saw the de facto split into two blocks that would dominate the rest of the picket. The well-established Melbourne black bloc scene, and the bloc around the people that had the microphones and some vague idea of a plan (Socialist Alternative). As we marched back to the main entrance and the picket proper, the stunt-based approach to politics revealed its weakness. As protesters tore down the plastic coverings on the fences raised to surround ‘Jeff’s Shed’, the lack of a clear defensive position or strategy began to be revealed.
After the temporary fence was pulled apart by the mass of protesters, there was nothing to respond to the first wave of pepper spray. The sheer violence of the initial crackdown was nothing surprising. But what was flat out negligent was the lack of a plan by the supposed organisers and leaders of the protest for this response. The admirable work done by the medical team was counted by the lack of serious work on building up any defences. While a copy of Red Flag may very well shield you from pepper spray, I’m sure you’d prefer an actual shield of some kind instead.
It is here that our criticism must turn to the black bloc, and the politics of the spectacle they revel in. Whilst the black bloc were at the forefront of fighting the police, and for that we salute them, their tactics were bad. A brief attempt to create a barricade saw the dragging of a large bin out into the streets, which would be the scene of some of the bin fires that so dominated photo coverage as police took control over the main bridge across the river by Batman Park. But the disjointed nature of the black bloc, which is supporters so laud as good in of itself was its own failure here. There was no coordination on creating a barricade, or on how to respond to police aggression. This is how the situation emerged where the front of the protest was holding their hands in the air whilst at the same time the police were pelted with fruit and eggs.
The naked face of state oppression, and the clear failure of the current left to effectively respond to it draws a dark message for any revolutionary. For if one is looking for an example of what genuinely revolutionary action will look like in Melbourne, DLF revealed a brief snippet of what street fighting might look like. Securing the bridges that cross the Yarra, disarming the police, establishing some small level of nautical capabilities so as to disrupt the police boats used to rapidly move state forces around. All of these will be vital parts of any militant sections of revolutionary action in Melbourne. Whilst some of these will no doubt be secured by the revolutionary masses themselves; it is vital that a mass militant workers militia exists in these situations. If we merely wished to grind Melbourne to a standstill, we need simply look towards Mai 68. Yet that is not our task. We are revolutionaries and as such we must look elsewhere.
The two greatest weapons of the Australian state are the monopoly on force it wields, and the coordination that it is able to utilise when working with and around said monopoly on force. If revolutionaries wish to smash the state, we must smash these two pillars, and for that we will need numerous tactics and strategies. Yet at their core must be the organised and militant power of the working class. This is not some Gonzaloist or Maoist call to wage Protracted People’s War in Melbourne’s fair streets, nor is it a call to go out and form the Melbourne (or Naarm) Red Guards. For whilst true democracy is a rifle on the shoulder of the working class, the vast majority of the working class have yet to be won over to a truly oppositional position. Whilst some will argue that the very nature of Australia’s historical formation as genocidal settler colony means that the majority of the working class are unable to be revolutionaries, they are wrong. Just as those who loudly claim that colonisation is over are. The working class has nothing to lose but their chains, yes, they are bought off, but they will wake up.
Finally, I wish to turn to the third tendency at the picket. The radical liberals, which in this particular case organised under the banner of ‘Disrupt Wars’. Whilst many of their tactics may appear similar to the black bloc, they still rest under the fundamental assumption that the state is something that can be reformed, or at least made better. This is a strange position that they are in, as many will turn around and correctly rail against the Australian state as a racist, genocidal institution before calling for a Greens vote. This strange double-think is the natural endpoint of liberalism. For all that they see the bold-faced blood-soaked nature of the Australian state, they cannot conceptualise a world without it.
These are perhaps the greatest threat to any revolutionary movement in the Imperial core, because they are able to unleash the most radical rhetoric, yet they leave no revolutionary road forward. They give easy solutions, and when they betray the working class out comes the honeyed words of ‘I sympathise with your aims I really do, but we need to be realistic about this’ or ‘look we just can’t afford to support striking workers right now’. It is the same honeyed words that led to Marx proclaiming ‘Instead of the Conservative motto, ‘A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!’ they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: ‘Abolition of the Wage System!’’
Yet where once Lasselle and his State Socialism is what we fought against, now we stand against vulgar reformism. The meaning of socialism is lost, and instead a vague promise of reform within the system is used to poison the self-organisation of the proletariat. We must be unerringly against this in every manner. Elections are tool, but we must stay aware of the old adage ‘if all you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail’. The working class has far more than simply the allegorical hammer of electioneering. It has the literal hammer of revolutionary action. The road to revolution will require first the re-groupment of the Communist Party, and it’s elevation to a mass basis. The primary task that the party must play is building a counter-pole to state power. To fully separate the proletariat cultural, social, and political sphere from the bourgeois one. This should include the entirety of the revolutionary movement, to unify on the single need. The need for revolution.
It is this understanding that fully separates us from the radical liberals, for no matter how radical they may think of themselves to be, they believe that they only need take state power and all power will fall to them. They fail to understand the simple fact, that the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat will take the pre-existing state apparatus and smash it. The road to workers’ power rests upon the total obliteration of the bourgeois mechanisms of power. Be they the police, parliament, capitalist courts of law, or the army; communists must fight for their total destruction. Communism is the real movement to abolish the present state of things, and we must fight as such.
Thus, to tie this polemic back into the broader analysis of Disrupt Land Forces. The need for a true class party has never been higher and until such a time as one is formed all major protests will turn out like this. When the Commissar of Victoria Police proclaims that he could not be prouder of his officers he does so know precisely what their historical and social role are. Let the liberals, and fools denounce the violence and brutality unleashed by the state. The Communists know better, we know that there is no way to stop this barbarism without the mass revolutionary action of the working class. History will absolve us, yet we must write it ourselves. The muck and detritus of the age’s rests upon us, we will not be able to wash it all off, yet we must endeavour too. We need to fight back against the capitalist offensives, we must make it clear that true democracy and freedom will only come through the destruction of capitalist society and the planning of Labor’s red banner on every corner of the world. For that is the flag of the working class, and it is dyed with the blood that will be shed by the tools that the capitalists chumming it up inside Land Forces were ohhing and ahhing at.
PARTISAN! 
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