Edith Fischer, Brisbane
Adam Bandt is at it again. Posting on twitter, he once again attacks the “ColesWorths” duopoly and calls for the Australian government to utilise anti-monopoly powers to break up the supermarket giants. This plank is a key part of the Greens platform, advertised to “reduce the cost of living” by introducing competition amongst the big capitalists. Alongside a utopian social housing program and demands to lower the interest rate, Greens candidates and activists repeat the slogan of trust-busting again, and again, and again. Some of us are starting to feel unwell.
It is worth repeating why the socialist movement opposes breaking up the supermarket duopoly. Firstly, the monopsony power of the supermarkets is exactly the source of relatively cheap food in Australia. If Coles and Woolworths did not keep their boot on the neck of the various farmers, agricultural capitalists, and food manufacturers, prices would surely rise. This monopsony power decreases to the degree that more capitalists enter the market. Breaking up the supermarkets would have, in the long term, the opposite of the desired effect.
Secondly, there is the question of trade union organising. The Retail and Fast-Food Workers Union, in an attempt to counter-signal the mainstream of the labour movement, have endorsed plans to break up the supermarkets. This is wrong-headed in the extreme. It is simply easier to organise workers against big capitalists than small ones. The larger the firms, the more concentrated the workforce, the greater the capacity to challenge the power of the bosses on the floor and in the street. Monopolisation is good for the working class, it is good for the labour movement, and it should be embraced, not rejected.
Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, trust-busting is simply reactionary. Monopolisation is a dynamic innate within the development of capitalist production. Fantasies of a return to a more “local, competitive capitalism” are promulgated by the middle classes in order to advance their class interests, but ultimately they are standing before the unstoppable forces of social development. From the perspective of socialists, who seek the socialisation of the means of production and the establishment of a cooperative commonwealth, there is simply no question: monopolisation is favourable to the development of the social forces that ready the ground for the coming of communism. It will be infinitely easier to nationalise two large grocery chains than a dozen smaller ones.
So, the proposal to trust-bust ColesWorths is a reactionary fantasy. Does that mean that we should let grocery capital trundle over the working class unchecked? Of course not! We favour unionisation of grocery workers, price controls on key goods, the establishment of consumer cooperatives, and the establishment of a state monopoly over groceries. However, these are the slogans of a socialist movement. We cannot expect it from a party of middle-class progressives.
Politically, the Australian Greens do not have a future. They are paralysed between two political paths, both of which will end in disaster. Either they can tack to the left, embrace their downwardly mobile petit-bourgeois base, and be outflanked by a regrouped socialist movement, or they can maintain their support amongst the environmentally and socially conscious middle class – and remain a minor party of the bourgeoisie. Either way, a dream of a “Green government” is exactly that: a dream. It is time for a refounded communist party to wake us up.
PARTISAN! 