PARTISAN!

Edith Fischer discusses the causes and extent of the cost of living crisis in Australia today, and argues for militant workers’ struggle to ensure its end.

The Australian working class has a knife to its throat. Rising living costs have made a significant impact on wages, with workers facing a 6% cut in real living standards this year. In real terms, Australian workers have been thrown back almost two decades, with wage gains being reversed as prices climb. Those on welfare suffer a similar fate, with pensioners, students, and the unemployed crushed between rising rents and stagnant welfare payments.

Under the crushing weight of rising costs, old evils re-emerge. Cases of scurvy, a disease caused by an acute Vitamin C deficiency, are on the rise, with doctors in Western Australia warning that rising living costs are causing the re-emergence of “19th Century diseases”. The Tharawal Aboriginal Corporation’s medical service in Western Sydney has noted dramatic weight loss amongst patients, caused by skipping meals. The Foodbank Hunger Report, published this year, noted that 2 million households are now experiencing severe food insecurity, with millions of families skipping meals and cutting down on fresh food. In many more families parents regularly skip meals in order to feed their children, and send them to school with enough in their bellies to learn. This is the face of a war on the working class.

These numbers do not spring from nowhere. Nor are they the result of a handful of greedy monopolists. They are the result of the very real crisis in capitalist society. Systematic underinvestment in production, caused by a falling rate of profit in industry, renders supply chains brittle and vulnerable to shocks. This contributes to spikes in prices, which in turn fuel further price rises as capitalists seek to pass costs on to consumers. Capital pours into speculative markets, especially in housing, which drives up prices and rents. All the while, workers are faced with higher prices, higher rents, reduced social services, and real wage cuts.

Reforms proposed across the political spectrum are largely smoke and mirrors. The representatives of sectoral capitalist interests, the Liberal Party and their middle class allies amongst the so-called “Teals” call for the power to smash trade unions in order to crush wages. This would of course immiserate tens of thousands of workers. However, we cannot see the program of Labor in government as any less of an attack on the working class. The Albanese government has presided over this systematic attack on living standards, with everything from the collapse of the Medicare bulk-billing system, to rising dysfunction in the education system, to dramatic increases in living costs occurring under their stewardship.

In turn, the Nationals and the Greens propose regressive reforms as the solution. The proposal to break up the grocery duopoly would benefit only the ranks of smaller, less successful capitalists – farmers, small grocery chains, and various agricultural industries. For workers it would undermine trade union organising and end the monopsony power of the grocery chains, likely leading to long-term increases in agricultural prices.

While many workers broadly support reforms proposed by the Labor Party and the Greens, we should be willing to point out their potential problems. A mass construction program for public housing, while urgently needed, will almost certainly have inflationary effects given the unprofitability of the building industry and the systematic underinvestment in construction inputs. Mass construction programs require reindustrialisation – a program that the middle class core of the Green movement is unlikely willing to pursue. Even if they did, which sectors of capital would be willing to invest is such a program!

The fact is that there is no simple reform to end the cost of living crisis. The crisis is caused by the profit system itself, and without doing away with such a system poverty and hunger will continue to mount. If workers want to wrest the knife from their throat, they will need to do away with middle class reformers and liberal bureaucrats, and organise for their independent class interests.