PARTISAN!

On May 1^st, it will be 136 years since the foundation of the Second International for Labour, Socialist, and Marxist parties. On this day, workers across the globe come out into the streets and unite to celebrate and commemorate the struggles of the international working class. May Day is an opportunity to reflect on our long history, assess the past year, and plan for the next.

In doing so, we find three major obstacles that workers face in Australia: the rise of far-right populism, attacks on our standards of living and militant trade unionism, and Australia’s alignment with US imperialism.

Trump’s election has, rightfully, caused a crisis-of-faith in liberalism. Politics-as-usual has failed, again, to fight the far-right. Many are seeking alternatives to the liberal system. Many are afraid that this far-right wave that is rising in Europe, that has already broken the banks of liberal democracy in the US, is spreading to Australia. The Liberal-National Coalition has trended right under Dutton, adopting a culture-war-first approach to politics.

The notion that this is a movement of the “left-behind” manipulated by a grand, social-media based conspiracy is wrong. In fact, it is a movement of small businesses alongside industrial and resource capital. These forces are reacting against the dominance of global banking capital on the one hand, and the advances made by women and racial minorities since the mid 20^th century on the other.

These forces are weak compared to what the workers’ movement could be, but strong compared to our current state. The alliance with liberal capitalists against the far-right has failed, because such an alliance is always to the benefit of the capitalists against the workers. We must build a united front between all workers and workers organisations to exert our class power.

In an echo of the Accords, the Labor Party has swept in to subjugate the workers and restore profitability. They have overseen a choking increase in the cost of living. They have made an example out of the CFMEU, primarily to increase profits in the failing construction sector, but also to intimidate trade unionists into submission.

The disunity and disorganisation of the socialist movement allowed this. Without socialist influence in the union movement, without dedicated involvement supporting the unions, and without militant class solidarity from other unions, we were powerless to stop the attacks on the CFMEU.

The current leadership of the Australian working-class, the Labor Party, continues to support the AUKUS alliance and sell out to US imperialism abroad. However, many working-class activists have supported arms to Ukraine (and the NATO aligned war effort) in the same breath that they condemn Israel and AUKUS, comparing Ukraine to Palestine.

This is a defencist view which picks the side of the US imperialist camp against the Russian imperialist camp – leaving the working class of all countries holding the bag.

We face a workers’ movement in the grip of a reformist, nationalist, and class collaborationist leadership. These weaken our movement, and their dominance stops us rebuilding mass working-class militancy.

Our task is to sweep away these ideologies and win the working class over to itself and its own ideology – Socialism.

But the socialist movement reflects these wider obstacles. We are uselessly divided. We do not compete for the leadership of our politics in the workers’ movement. Instead, we follow behind the current bankrupt leadership, either in the Labor Party, the Green Party, or unaligned NGOs, union bureaucracies, and activist grouplets. We are wedded to one or another form of cynical opportunism: tailing US imperialism on the one hand, or Russian or Chinese imperialism on the other. So long as these tendencies dominate, we are unable to coherently, explicitly, and effectively agitate for revolutionary politics.

The original demands of the May Day International were the eight-hour day, the class demands of the workers, and for universal peace.

On May Day, we raise these demands:

• Completely break with the ideologies of the union, NGO, and reformist party bureaucracies and their mis-leadership of the working class.
• Reject Australian nationalism and imperialism of all stripes – American, Russian, or Chinese.
• First, unite the socialist movement into a single revolutionary party. Second, rebuild a strong and united workers movement.

In sum, we demand a working-class movement that is politically independent of the capitalists, with its own class organisations, its own program for seizing power, its own class rhetoric, and united in a single international struggle against its own divisions.