PARTISAN!

Porco, Sydney

The February 9th peaceful protest against Isaac Herzog’s visit was met with extreme police violence. Videos and photos of police assaulting the elderly, children, praying Muslims and Palestinian protesters are widespread across social media. All of this is horrible. And we should be horrified.

Under Chris Minns, NSW Police has been directed to escalate their violence against the Palestine movement. They have begun to use all sorts of weapons to assault protesters; from pepper spray, to tear gas, to rubber bullets, fists, batons, horses… one has to wonder at what point live ammunition becomes a possibility. After all, police snipers were seen overlooking protesters on rooftops in Town Hall. 

So what will the left do about it?

It is becoming politically and strategically untenable for activists and the socialist left to continue living in their fantasy land, that they can peacefully protest their way out of increasingly unstable situations. More and more now, it becomes clear that we need a party. 

We need mass, centralised organisations training people in street politics, medic work and also the logistical, organisational and political tactics that can help protests defeat state repression, but more importantly, for the most vulnerable among us to be allowed to attend without the fear that they will be beaten and arrested by the armed thugs that Chris Minns will continue to send on us.

However, we are incapable of this. Hosting larger and larger rallies and protests is not the solution. They have guns. And as far as I’m concerned, everyone seems to forget this. Activists call Chris Minns and the NSW police fascist, but in comparison to real fascists, these people are restrained. Fascists would kill you for protests like this – though the violence that swept Sydney on Monday evening is reminiscent of the violent assaults waged by Mussolini’s blackshirts against workers and peasants in Italy. If we want to stop the Australian state reaching that point, we need to develop a tactical awareness that no one really seems to have. At least not publicly.

We call for the creation of worker militias, but this may be a naive relic of a former time, if it lacks further elaboration. To be clear, forming armed self defence groups is not the immediate answer to this problem. However, organisation is. Currently, we are not organised, while the police are becoming more violent with each protest.

Our strength is the social support we have in society right now. Our weakness is what we choose to do with it. There are more protests planned in the coming days. What will we learn from them?

What are we going to do about the state? Will we continue to pretend that minute grouplets of excitable anarchists, or miniature socialist sects of first year uni students, are capable of defeating armed thugs with the full backing of a modern state apparatus? Are we insane?

What would it take for the socialist left to recognise that its own disunity is partly to blame for this chaos? Do people need to die? If that’s the case, perhaps we’ve already lost. How aimless, feckless, and detached from reality can these sectarians become? It’s pitiful. We are victims of our own failures; failures which reverberate through history and crash upon the living workers and protesters of the present in every single second that we remain confused about the task ahead.

The task is taking power, and rebuilding a society for and by the working class. That is impossible with a fragmented movement. A united movement with dynamic public discourse and factional debates about strategy happening more or less in the public press? Well that might be a good first step.

The absurdity of it all, is that every section of the so-called revolutionary left, from the anarchists to Socialist Alternative to the CPA, has their own chosen section of liberal capitulators who they collaborate with. Imagine if our revolutionism could become non-negotiable, and our alliance with the reformists was predicated on the understanding that we were united against their opportunistic impulses.

The situation is escalating, whether we like it or not. The squeeze of capital can be felt in every corner of the global social organism. In order to break through the noise of absurd horror and devastation from Albanese, or the bloodlust of the Liberals, we need more than activist parties and miniscule grouplets. We need a strategy.

Until then, we will remain marginal and easily dispersed, and the working class will not trust our utopian and adventurist fantasies. Because in the end, they need to pay their bills, and would rather not be bashed by cops at rallies. How are we going to help them with that?