In some parts of the capitalist world, including Australia, the struggles of working people have secured many democratic rights. In some cases these rights have been established for so long that most people regard them as automatic and unchallengable entitlements of citizenship.
Yet, as the capitalist system sinks deeper into crisis it is driven inevitably to curtail and suppress civil liberties in order to limit resistance to its austerity drive. The socialist movement opposes every attempt to encroach on the democratic rights of working people and stands for the greatest unity in struggle to preserve and extend these rights.
The new social movements engendered by the deepening crisis of capitalism reflect a determination to extend and redefine basic rights — the right to peace, to a pollution-free environment, to action to correct inequalities resulting from discrimination based on race, national origin, age, sex or sexual preference. The concept of inalienable human rights has motivated all the progressive social movements over the past two decades — struggles by women, migrants, Aborigines, students, gay men and lesbians, the aged, the handicapped, prisoners, etc.
Working people have everything to gain from taking the offensive whenever possible to secure legal recognition of the human rights of all who suffer oppression and discrimination under capitalism. Every such gain reinforces the fighting strength and unity of the working class as a whole. In the course of struggles for such rights, they will come to realise that capitalist rule and the private-property system stand in the way of the full realisation of human rights.
In a society based on the exploitation of wage labour, the most basic right is that of workers to withdraw their labour. Workers must oppose all attempts to restrict their freedom to strike, whether these attempts take the form of legislation or agreements negotiated by the union bureaucracy with the capitalist state. It is necessary to struggle against no-extra-claims provisions, compulsion to provide prior notifications of strikes, compulsory arbitration, fines and lawsuits against unions, strike ballots imposed by the capitalist state, restrictions on the right to organise pickets, etc.
Vigorous defence of civil liberties is also of the highest importance. Freedom of speech, the press, assembly, and association, and the right to privacy, are essential to the ability of workers and other progressive fighters to organise and struggle against the capitalist class. It is in the interests of all workers and progressive activists to demand the removal of all laws curtailing the exercise of these rights; to oppose all attempts by capitalist governments to censor information and opinion; and to fight for the dissolution of ASIO and other political police agencies, which are used by the capitalist rulers to spy on, harass, and disrupt the struggles and organisations of workers and their allies.
Civil liberties are essential to the political independence of all working-class and progressive organisations, as well as to the defence of other democratic rights won through decades of struggle within the framework of capitalist parliamentary democracy.
The party fights for the replacement of the capitalist parliamentary state with a more democratic political system — a democratically centralised system of popular power. In a truly democratic state, the supreme power should be vested in a single popular assembly made up of representatives of councils of working people's delegates from each city, town and rural district, functioning as both legislative and executive bodies. Elections to local self-government bodies and to the national assembly should be based on proportional representation.
All officials — civil, military and judicial — should be subject to election. All elected representatives and officials, without exception, should be subject to recall at any time upon the demand of a majority of their electors and should be paid at a rate not exceeding the average wage of a skilled worker.
The standing army and police, with their pro-capitalist officer corps, should be replaced by a popular militia indissolubly linked to the factories, mines, offices, farms and progressive mass movements, with commanders drawn from the ranks of the working people.
It is only through these measures that a genuinely democratic state, that is, one in which the majority actually rules, can be brought into being and maintained.
It is likely that even the first steps along this road will meet stiff resistance from the capitalists and violent repression from their state machine. The struggle to extend democracy into the economy cannot be separated from the struggle to break the political power of the capitalist class. Repeated experience has shown that the despotic power of the capitalists over workers at the enterprise level cannot be overcome while the capitalists' state power remains intact. Similarly, the subordination of the needs of working people to the anarchic drive for private profit at the level of the capitalist economy as a whole cannot be surmounted without the conquest of state power by the working class and its allies.
The defence and extension of the democratic rights of working people and of all the oppressed thus inevitably poses the need for a struggle to replace capitalist domination in all its forms with socialist democracy.
The oppression of women is institutionalised in the family system. In class society, the family is the only institution to which most people can turn for the satisfaction of some basic human needs, including love and companionship. However poorly the family may meet these needs for many, there is no real alternative as long as class society exists.
Nevertheless, the main purpose of the family is not to provide such basic needs. The family is not simply a group of adults voluntarily living in a common household, along with their children. It is the primary socio-economic unit of class society, based on a legal and binding marriage contract that enables the transmission of private property and the perpetuation of class divisions from one generation to the next. It is the basic mechanism through which the exploiter classes abrogate social responsibility for the economic well-being of those whose labour they exploit.
As an economic unit, each family is responsible for the economic needs of its members. Under the family system there is no concept that society as a whole should provide all of its members with a secure and comfortable standard of living. As a result, people are compelled to stay together in individual households.
The family system imposes a social division of labour based on the subjugation of women and their economic dependence on an individual man, their father or husband. Upon this material foundation, an all-pervasive sexist ideology is fostered by the exploiter classes. This portrays women as physically and mentally inferior to men, and biologically unfit for roles other than procreation and domestic labour. The low status of women in class society becomes the source of anti-woman violence — rape, wife-bashing and female infanticide.
While some aspects of this oppressive system have been challenged in recent years, and some individuals have been able to reduce the degree of their oppression, the system as a whole still remains effectively intact.
There is no other institution in class society whose true role is as hidden by prejudice and mystification as that of the family. Bourgeois moralists claim that the family is the basis for the natural and moral unity of society. Bourgeois anthropologists perpetrate the myth that the family unit has always existed. They deny the fact that the family originated with and flowed from the development of private property, class society and the state. They obscure the fact that in pre-class society the basic social unit was the clan and that within each clan wealth was shared in common.
However, with the development of a permanent economic surplus and the appropriation of this surplus by private individuals, pairing couples began to separate themselves from the clan and set up separate households. Women became isolated from communal activity, and monogamy for married women was strictly enforced to assure the paternity of heirs.
The family and the subjugation of women thus came into existence along with the other institutions of emerging class society in order to buttress nascent class divisions and perpetuate the private accumulation of wealth. The state, with its armies and police, laws and courts, enforced this relationship.
The origin of the family system in private property is reflected in the Latin origins of the word family: famulus, which means household slave, and familia, the totality of slaves belonging to one man.
Over millennia, the structure and functions of the family institution have of course varied between different societies and between different classes within the same society. But the essential function has always remained the same. Like the state, the family is a repressive institution designed to perpetuate the unequal distribution of wealth and the division of society into exploiter and exploited classes.
It is absurd to speak of abolishing the family. Socialists seeks to remove the economic and social compulsion that drives the vast majority into the family system at the present time, and to give individuals a far wider and freer range of choices as to how they live. Nevertheless, the socialist revolution will inherit many of the institutions of the old society, including the family. The role of the family as an economic unit will only wither away as society as a whole takes increasing responsibility for people's material needs.
Just as the family system is indispensable to class society, so the oppression of women is indispensable to the maintenance of the family system. With the rise of the family system, married women ceased to have a direct role in social production. They were confined to domestic work within the individual family unit, being economically dependent upon their husband. This economic dependence determined the second-class social status of women, on which the cohesiveness and continuity of the family system has always depended. Women were relegated to domestic servitude and second-class status in society not because it served the interests of men in general, but because it served the needs of those men who owned property.
Capitalism has refined and modified the oppression of women to suit its own needs. For capitalism, the oppression of women has a number of vital economic benefits:
Before capitalist industrialisation, women had few rights and almost no identity or life outside their functions within the family. The rise of industrial capitalism began to end this domestic isolation by giving women an independent productive role outside the home. Brutal and exploitative as this work was, large numbers of women began to achieve some degree of economic independence for the first time since the rise of class society.
The involvement of large numbers of women in industry generates a contradiction between the increasing economic independence of women and their domestic subjugation within the family unit, propelling women to fight against their oppression and the ideology that props it up.
The oppression of women as a sex constitutes the objective basis for the mobilisation of women in struggle through their own organisations. The party supports the construction of a mass women's liberation movement organised and led by women, and whose first priority is the fight to win and defend women's rights. Such a movement must refuse to subordinate the struggle for women's rights to any other interests, and must be willing to carry through the struggle by whatever means and with whatever forces may prove necessary.
Like all other progressive movements, such an independent women's liberation movement will not be able to win its struggle alone. Only by fusing the objectives and demands of the women's liberation movement with the struggle of the working class and other progressive movements will the necessary forces be assembled to achieve the liberation of women.
While all women are oppressed as a sex, the effects of this oppression are different for women of different social classes. Women workers experience sexist oppression in its most acute forms and, unlike women of the propertied classes, have no interest in the maintenance of the ultimate source of that oppression — the private-property system. If the women's liberation movement is to carry through its struggle with the necessary resolution, it must take up the demands of working-class women and involve them in the leadership of the movement.
The struggle for women's liberation poses the problem of the total reorganisation of society from its smallest repressive unit — the family — to its largest — the state. The liberation of women demands a thoroughgoing restructuring of society's productive and reproductive institutions in order to maximise social welfare and establish a truly human existence for all. Without the socialist revolution, women will not be able to establish the material preconditions for their liberation. Without the conscious and equal participation of broad masses of women, the working class will not be able to carry through the socialist revolution and build socialism.
The party seeks to convince the working class of the centrality of the struggle for women's rights to its own struggle for social liberation. The party seeks to give clear and concrete answers to the questions raised by capitalism's oppression of women, and to help the women's liberation movement to establish clear political goals.
The party raises demands directed towards eliminating the specific oppression of women and against the capitalist class and its social and political institutions, which are responsible for the economic and social conditions in which the oppression of women is based. These demands can be summarised under the following broad headings:
1. The right of women to control their own bodies. It must be the sole right of each woman to decide whether or not to prevent or terminate a pregnancy. All anti-abortion laws should be repealed. Abortion should be available on demand and the cost should be fully covered by the health-care system. Safe, reliable contraceptives for both women and men should be freely available to anyone wanting them. State-financed birth control and sex education centres should be set up in schools, neighbourhoods, hospitals and large workplaces. The right to reproductive freedom includes the right of a woman to bear children if she chooses. Sterilisation without a woman's consent, or the use of pressure to obtain her consent, should be outlawed.
2. The right of women to economic independence and equality. This includes the right to full-time employment, equal pay, access to non-traditional occupations, and the raising of wages in traditional female occupations to make them comparable with those of traditional male occupations requiring similar levels of skill. Part-time workers should be guaranteed the same hourly wages and benefits as full-time workers. The party also supports paid parental leave, continuity of job seniority during parental leave, equal access to unemployment benefits regardless of marital status, and an end to discrimination against women in training and retraining programs. Beneficial protective legislation providing special working conditions to women should be extended to men in order to improve working conditions for all workers and to prevent such measures providing a pretext for discrimination against women.
Affirmative-action programs, with legally enforced quotas, are essential to redress the effects of decades of systematic discrimination in hiring, training and promotion. To overcome existing imbalances, preferential treatment must be accorded to women in hiring, training, job upgrading and seniority adjustments.
Cheap and conveniently available childcare services are essential to enable women to participate equally in the workforce. A program is urgently needed to create a network of free, government-financed, childcare centres in every neighborhood and at large workplaces. Such centres should be open around the clock and be able to cater for all children from infancy to early adolescence. The rearing, welfare, and education of children should be the joint responsibility of society, rather than solely the burden of individual parents. Laws granting parents property rights and total control over children should be abolished.
Women will not be able to enjoy genuine economic equality with men as long as they are forced to bear the main burden of domestic work. This is a socially created problem that demands a social solution. This would include the socialisation of domestic services through the creation of a network of easily accessible, low-cost, high-quality public laundries, cafeterias and restaurants, house-cleaning services organised on an industrial basis, etc.
3. The right of women to equal educational opportunities. The present education system discriminates against women at all levels from preschool to postgraduate. There must be an end to sex stereotyping in educational textbooks, an end to channelling of students into supposedly male and female subjects, and to all forms of pressure on female students to prepare themselves for so-called women's work (homemaking, nursing, teaching and secretarial work).
Special preferential admissions programs should be introduced to encourage women to enter traditionally male-dominated fields of study and employment.
4. The right of women to freedom from sexual violence and exploitation. Sexist violence is a daily reality that all women experience in some form. Even when this does not take the extreme form of rape, beatings and murder, there is the ever-present threat of sexual assault implicit in the widespread circulation of sexist literature and in gratuitous sexual comments and gestures in the streets and on the job. As the capitalist social order decays, this violence becomes more pronounced. The capitalist mass media and capitalist advertising create a social climate that fosters sexual violence and harassment by portraying women as sex objects.
A massive education campaign is needed to counter this debased view of women. Such a campaign should be promoted by the government in collaboration with the women's movement. Laws against sexual harassment of women should be strengthened and strictly enforced.
Increasing incidences of rape, wife-bashing and sexual assault on children reveal the need for a massive increase in the provision of facilities for the victims of such abuse. Such facilities must be independent of the courts and the police, both of which see their role as to enforce the status quo.
All laws that require corroboration of sexual assault or evidence of physical injury, or which imply blame on the part of female rape victims, should be repealed. Questioning of sexual assault victims about their past sexual activity should be prohibited.
Prostitutes should not be treated as criminals. All laws victimising prostitutes should be repealed.
By generalising commodity production, capitalism carried this process to its ultimate conclusion, transforming all human relations into commodity relations. As a result, capitalism stripped away the hypocritical religious halo that surrounded family relations under feudalism. Marriage was revealed to be primarily a property relationship and only secondarily a loving and affectionate relationship.
Having ripped away the family's sentimental veil, however, the capitalist class soon found it prudent to restore at least a figleaf to cover the nakedness of the mere money relation. The more far-sighted of the capitalists began to realise that the wholesale conscription of women and children into the factories during the Industrial Revolution threatened to wipe out the family system within the working class, together with a large part of the next generation of wage-slaves. This prospect forcefully reminded them of the direct economic benefit of the family to the ruling class as a whole. Under the pressure of this realisation and of the rising working-class movement, hours of wage labour for women were restricted, and the exploitation of child labour was restricted and eventually more-or-less abolished.
The capitalist class has a contradictory relationship with the modern nuclear family. On the one hand, it derives enormous economic benefit from it. The family provides free of charge, primarily through women's unpaid labour, the next generation of workers, care of the aged and sick, the care and feeding of the present generation of workers, etc. Moreover, the family remains one of the primary institutions for instilling conservative values in the young.
On the other hand, the capitalist class cannot help constantly undermining this institution. The ups and downs of the economic cycle, as well as events such as war, force them alternately to weaken and strengthen the family by drawing women into social production and pushing them out again.
It might appear that a society which regulates heterosexual behavior in order to ensure the paternity of children would not necessarily go on to proscribe homosexual behavior. However, few, if any, societies long justify social institutions solely in terms of their real function. Except in periods of deep social crisis, most social institutions are maintained not by brute force on the part of the ruling class, but by ideological means. Institutions are deemed to be natural, god-given, necessary to ward off some natural or supernatural evil, etc. No social institution has been so subject to such ideological mystification as the family.
It is only a small step from regulating sexual behavior in order to ensure the paternity of children to asserting that procreation is the sole permissible reason for sexual relations. Indeed, this assertion has remained a cornerstone of the ideological justification of women's oppression to the present day.
The existence of homosexuality stands in contradiction to the ideological defence of the family and women's oppression. As such, many of the defenders of early class society branded it unnatural, contrary to the commandments of their deity, etc.
The oppression and persecution of homosexuals thus arose as a by-product of the oppression of women, as a result of the need to portray the family system as ``natural'' and inevitable. Of course, the precise connection between female and homosexual oppression has varied between different societies and at different times, as well as with the importance of the family, its economic function, and the presence or lack of a political/ideological challenge to it. Moreover, the ideological justification for persecution of homosexuals is capable of developing further according to its own dynamic.
But there is an important difference between the relationships of heterosexual women and gay men/lesbians to the family system. Whereas ruling class economic needs cause it frequently to modify the projected image of the supposedly ideal woman, the same is not true concerning homosexuals. The capitalist class has no economic motive to change the image of lesbians or gay men — a closet homosexual can be exploited as easily as an open homosexual — while on the ideological plane continued homophobic prejudice provides an element of stability, a second line of defence for the family even in periods when the capitalists are deliberately bringing more women into social production.
The forms of oppression of gay men and lesbians are thus fairly constant in capitalist society. Changes in the general attitude towards homosexuality are not the direct product of capitalist economic interests but of changes in the level of working-class militancy, the efforts of gay men and lesbians themselves, and similar political factors. It is thus not surprising that the struggle for homosexual rights has made its greatest progress at times when other oppressed layers have also been in motion, and has declined in periods of reaction.
The party stands for complete non-interference of the state and society in sexual matters, so long as nobody is injured or coerced. This general principle means that all sexual relations between women or between men should be treated in exactly the same way as sexual relations between men and women, and this should be reflected in law in regard to marriages and to defacto relationships. Sexual preference should be recognised as a matter of individual choice, a basic democratic right.
The party demands the repeal of all anti-homosexual laws, the outlawing of discrimination against lesbians and gay men in employment, housing, and child custody and an end to police harassment on the streets, in bars, etc. The party supports the building of an independent movement campaigning for the recognition of the full democratic rights of gay men and lesbians. In addition, sex education for young people and the broader community should stress the variety of non-coercive sexual relations that exists, without moral judgment.
As well as oppressing heterosexual women, gay men and lesbians, class society suppresses the sexuality of young people. Through the family system, it moulds the behavior and character of children from infancy through adolescence. It trains, disciplines and polices them, teaching submission to established authority, and curbing rebellious, nonconformist impulses. It represses and distorts all sexuality, attempting to force it into socially acceptable channels of heterosexual activity for reproductive purposes, and approved socio-economic roles. It distorts all personal relationships by imposing on them a framework of economic compulsion, personal dependence and sexual repression.
At the same time, the disintegration of the family under capitalism brings with it much misery and suffering because no superior framework for personal relations can yet emerge. While advocating measures to socialise the economic functions presently carried out by the family, the party supports laws and the provision of services that seek to alleviate the suffering caused by the family system and its disintegration in capitalist society. The party favors sex education classes for young people, freely available and safe contraceptives, halfway houses for young people and women trying to leave impossible family situations, and counseling and self-help services to aid people in this central aspect of their lives.
Racism was used by the Australian ruling class to divide the working class and to brand Chinese and South Pacific immigrant labourers as pariahs. By fostering racist attitudes among the overwhelmingly white working class, the bosses were able to promote the idea that the threat to these workers' jobs and wages came not from the employers but from foreign, particularly non-white, workers. The bosses' success in promoting racist and xenophobic attitudes among Australian workers was reflected in the labour movement's support for the notorious White Australia policy.
The massive influx of non-English-speaking migrant workers from southern Europe following the Second World War was encouraged by the Australian ruling class in order to provide a cheap, unskilled, labour force for its expanding industrial base. The pro-British cultural xenophobia underlying Australian nationalism was used by the capitalists to justify discrimination on the basis of ethnic background. The capitalists and their governments refused to recognise qualifications obtained by migrant workers in their home countries, forcing them to accept low-paying, unskilled jobs. Migrants were denied proper English language courses so as to limit their ability to unite in action with Australian-born workers.
Today, migrant workers from non-English-speaking ethnic backgrounds form a large and increasing component of the working class and it is essential that they be encouraged to participate fully in trade-union and political life. The inability to speak and write in English is a major factor limiting full participation of many in the economic and political struggles of the working class. Most migrant workers do not have the opportunity to learn English because their physically demanding jobs and family concerns leave little time or energy for English courses. Non-English-speaking migrants should be granted paid leave to attend such courses, which should be provided free of charge by the state during working hours. Widespread and easily accessible translation services should also be provided.
Large-scale immigration from non-English-speaking countries has enriched Australia's cultural life. The Australian ruling class has been forced to abandon its previous policy of seeking to assimilate non-British immigrants by imposing the British-based Australian national culture upon them, and instead has adopted a policy of multiculturalism — though sections of it would like to return to the old policy.
Insofar as the policy of multiculturalism reflects greater respect for the right of ethnic communities to maintain their cultural traditions, the party supports it. The free interaction of different cultural traditions helps to break down narrow national-cultural exclusiveness. At the same time, the party does not support the promotion of any particular national culture, and opposes those elements in every national culture that contradict democratic rights and humanistic values.
Within the education system there should be no segregation along ethnic lines. The party stands for a single, ethnically mixed, system of public education in which students from different ethnic backgrounds have access to supplementary courses on the language, history and culture of any nationality of their choosing.
Today, as the capitalist economic crisis deepens, right-wing forces are attempting to make immigrants into scapegoats, to divide the working class by promoting racial and ethnic animosities, and to restrict immigration by non-white and poor people. At the same time, such right-wing forces do not oppose all immigration. They support increased immigration of white racists from South Africa and of wealthy Asians. It is well known that migrants to Australia are often screened to prevent militant unionists and left-wing political activists settling in this country. The party opposes any discrimination in the field of immigration, whether it be based on racial or national origin, political affiliation, personal wealth, or any other criterion. Australia should open its doors to all who wish to immigrate, and should impose no restriction on those wishing to emigrate.
The party does not seek to organise the economic and political struggle of workers along ethnic lines. It seeks to convince all workers that their interests are the same, and that they can defend those interests only by uniting for a common economic and political struggle against the common enemy, the capitalist class.
Discrimination against Aborigines is not, as ruling-class apologists like to pretend, the outcome of an unfortunate historical event whose legacy is steadily being overcome. It is an inherent and continuing feature of Australian capitalism.
The Aboriginal people constitute a racially oppressed minority within the Australian nation, systematically discriminated against in employment, housing, education, health and other services. They suffer disproportionately higher levels of unemployment, and are concentrated in the worst paying jobs. The quality of education and health facilities for Aborigines is far below the average for the Australian population as a whole, and their average life expectancy is comparable to that of many of the poorest Third World peoples. As a result of extreme poverty and systematic police victimisation, Aborigines have one of the highest imprisonment rates of any people in the world.
As a racially oppressed minority within the Australian nation, Aborigines will only be able to fully win their rights through the independent mobilisation of their people and by winning the active support of those in the majority non-Aboriginal population who are also victims of capitalist exploitation and oppression. The struggle to win non-Aboriginal people to support the progressive demands of Aboriginal people is also crucial to the fight to remove the debilitating influence of racist ideology within the working class and the progressive movement.
The party supports the struggle of Aboriginal people to end their racial oppression and for recognition of their special rights as the dispossessed original inhabitants of the Australian continent. It calls for specific measures to enable Aborigines to achieve full political, social, and economic equality. These measures include:
Special income benefits, low-rent housing, vocational training schemes, genuine job-creation programs and support services are urgently needed to ensure that unemployed and homeless youth are not forced into crime and prostitution. Unemployment benefits equal to those available to adults must be provided to all school leavers regardless of age. The junior wage should be abolished. Pay scales should not discriminate against young workers. There must be a massive expansion of apprenticeship programs, with apprentices guaranteed full union rights.
As the capitalist crisis deepens, the right of working-class youth to a useful and fulfilling education is under continuous attack due to cutbacks to public education. While private schools are provided with large government subsidies, the public school system suffers from declining funding, poor facilities, overcrowding and understaffing. Government subsidies and grants to private schools should be ended, and funds to public schools should be massively increased.
The administration of public schools should be taken out of the hands of government bureaucrats and placed in the hands of democratically elected community committees. The autocracy of high school principals should be replaced with boards elected by local communities, teachers and students. High school students must be accorded full democratic rights, including freedom of speech, freedom of dress and freedom of political association.
As a result of the third technological revolution in which productive technology based on simple electric motors is progressively replaced by semi-automated production using electronic devices, late monopoly capitalism needs an increased pool of skilled workers and technicians. This has led to a vast growth of the size of the university and college student population since the Second World War. The campuses have grown in social weight and have greater influence in the intellectual and cultural life of the country. As a result of the vast increase in tertiary training, the percentage of workers with some tertiary education has increased. The percentage of students who will become wage and salary earners has increased, and the percentage who are working while studying has also increased.
While each student is of course affected by the class position of the family into which he or she was born and raised, students as a social group have no direct relationship to the means of production or role in the social organisation of labour. Students do not function as workers, capitalists or petty bourgeois. They are preparing to assume one of these roles. The attitudes of the social class to which they believe their education will lead them can have a stronger influence on them than their class origins.
The social position of students has changed dramatically in the past century. No longer are they predominantly children of capitalist and upper petty-bourgeois families in training for capitalist and petty-bourgeois careers. Today, the majority of tertiary students are drawn from working class and lower petty-bourgeois families and are destined to become wage or salaried workers of some kind.
Because modern universities and colleges concentrate large numbers of students mainly of working class and lower petty-bourgeois origins, and because of the relative freedom of student life, social and political crises tend to find sharp and prompt expression among such students, and their responses can easily pass beyond the campus to affect layers of working-class youth. This, of course, is not a one-way process. Working-class struggles can win broad support among students.
In the final analysis, the political mood of students is heavily influenced by the state of the conflict between the decisive social forces in capitalist society: those of wage labour and capital. However, the relationship between the two is not usually direct and immediate. The development of student struggles often has a logic of its own.
The same expansion of tertiary education that increased the social weight of students also accentuated the contradictions between the role of the education system as an institution of capitalist rule and the needs and aspirations of the majority of students. The deepening crisis of the capitalist system exacerbates these contradictions. The ruling class today is compelled to rationalise tertiary education, forcing campus students and their families to pay more of the cost of education, tying the content and organisation of education ever more directly to the needs of big business, moving to sharply increase the narrowly vocational emphasis of education, and taking steps to restrict students' political freedom.
The party opposes these reactionary tendencies. It supports student struggles for completely free tertiary education available to anyone wanting it, and for the provision of a guaranteed livable income to all students. The administration of each university and college, including its curricula, should be under the democratic control of the students and the faculty.
Instead of being education factories serving the interests of monopoly capital, the universities and colleges should be institutions serving the needs of working people, and organising centres for anticapitalist activities. Students and staff should have the right to use the resources of the universities and colleges to assist the struggles of the working class and all the oppressed.
The dumping of household, industrial and mining waste products (garbage, untreated sewage, chemical and metal wastes, radioactive tailings from uranium mines, etc.) and extensive use of chemical pesticides, has led to the poisoning of land, rivers, lakes and coastal waters. The poor design of cities and excessive reliance on private automobile transport rather than public transport has led to serious air pollution problems and the disappearance of much of the best agricultural land under suburbs. Cancer threatens to become a national epidemic as a result of radiation and toxic chemicals on the job, seepage of industrial wastes into homes built over abandoned dumps, and the poisoning of the air, water, food and other basic consumer goods.
The technology already exists to deal with these problems — to clean up and control pollution, to preserve the natural environment, to recycle industrial and domestic waste, to introduce environmentally safe production processes and to plan livable cities. The lack of concerted action on these problems is a result of the subordination of the health and welfare of the mass of people to monopoly capitalism's rapacious drive for private profit. Capitalist enterprises operate with almost total disregard for their impact on the environment and the health of their employees and the community in general.
Protection of the environment and of workers' health on the job are closely related matters. As part of its austerity drive, big capital is trying to roll back existing environmental and health standards, and is fiercely resisting the development of new standards.
Working people are entitled to full information about, and control over, the environmental conditions that affect their health and survival where they work and live. Environmental and health standards must be established by working people and communities with full access to technical information and based on consultation with experts of their own choice.
Elected community committees must be empowered to decide directly on projects to establish factories or use industrial processes that may adversely affect the local environment. Such committees must be empowered to gather full and accurate information about the relevant ecological and health issues, and to make their decisions on the basis of this information, not out of concern for corporate profits.
The poisoning and destruction of the environment is a crime that threatens human survival, and should be treated as such. Corporations that violate environmental standards should be forced to pay the full cost of cleaning up the damage they have caused and fully compensate all whose health has suffered as a result of such violations. These corporations must be forced to install pollution control equipment and prohibited from passing on the cost of this to consumers through higher prices. Companies manufacturing chemical pesticides and artificial fertilisers should pay a levy to finance the development of environmentally safe fertilisers and methods of pest control.
A large-scale program of public works, funded by increased taxes on corporate profits, should be introduced to clean up our land, rivers, and coastal waters, to carry out reforestation projects, and to establish publicly owned plants for recycling industrial and household waste.
The habitats of rare or endangered species of plants and animals must be declared national parks, and an extensive program must be introduced to restore the ecological balance of these areas. Communities currently based on the economic exploitation of such areas must be guaranteed compensation, job retraining and alternative employment.
Every aspect of the nuclear power industry, from the mining of uranium to the disposal of radioactive waste products, is fraught with lethal and insurmountable dangers. The party opposes any attempts to establish a nuclear power industry in Australia and demands the immediate cessation of the mining and export of uranium.
Just as they should reject the false dilemma of having to choose between employment or cuts in wages, working people should reject arguments by the capitalists that they cannot afford to take the measures necessary to clean up and protect the environment, or that workers' jobs will be threatened by environmental protection measures. Working people cannot afford bosses who put profits before the health of their employees and the community in general. Such companies should be nationalised without compensation (except for small stockholders) and placed under the control of workers' committees provided with complete access to the government funding and all the technical information required for meeting the requisite health and environmental protection standards.
Where environmental protection can only be achieved by the closure of an industry, as in the case of uranium mining and the nuclear power industry for example, governments and employers must be forced to provide alternative work, training and retraining, and where appropriate, compensation to employees and communities affected by such closures.
While victories along these lines can slow the slide to environmental catastrophe, ultimately this problem can only be resolved through the replacement of the capitalist system with a worldwide system of democratic socialist planning. Mass political action aimed at winning concessions from the capitalist ruling class can play a crucial role in raising mass consciousness of the need for such a radical social transformation, and in organising the social forces that can carry it through.
The Australian military machine has been used to break strikes at home and to suppress national liberation struggles abroad. Through its alliance with Washington, it plays a supporting role in US imperialism's system of global nuclear terrorism.
The security of Australian working people is not enhanced, but undermined, by the continued existence of this imperialist war machine. Our lives are imperiled by imperialism's nuclear arsenals and by being involved in conventional wars to maintain imperialist domination of the Third World. The war machine wastes resources that could be used to defend our economic and environmental security. War and the threat of war are used by the capitalist rulers to restrict our democratic rights.
In the face of nearly unanimous scientific opinion that a full-scale nuclear war would destroy civilisation, if not the very physical existence of humanity, preventing imperialism from unleashing a nuclear holocaust is a task of the highest priority.
The party supports the building of a broad, non-exclusionary movement for nuclear disarmament in Australia. The party seeks to encourage direct mass actions focusing on concrete demands directed against the role of the Australian government in the US-led imperialist nuclear war machine. Such demands include:
In order to fight its wars, Australian imperialism has repeatedly sought to introduce conscription. In the face of the capitalist economic crisis, sections of the ruling class have raised the idea of compulsory military or quasi-military service for the unemployed. The party opposes any and every attempt to draft the unemployed or anyone else into the imperialist army.
In the context of large-scale and permanent unemployment, particularly among young people, the ruling class seeks to boost supposedly voluntary recruitment to its military forces by presenting them as a means to acquire technical training. At the same time, it denies decent pay and full civil liberties to the ranks of the military forces, and secure and adequate accommodation to their families. The party demands a massive increase in the availability of civilian technical training programs; provision of decent housing and adequate pay for rank-and-file military personnel and permanency of residence; and recognition of their right to exercise every democratic freedom enjoyed by other Australians.
War and preparations for war threaten the lives and welfare of the overwhelming majority. Decisions related to war must be taken out of the hands of the capitalists, their political representatives, and general staffs. Working people and rank-and-file soldiers have a right to know all the real aims and commitments of the government's military and foreign policy. All military and diplomatic treaties and agreements should be made accessible to the public. The people should have the right to vote directly on the question of war.
While the party seeks peaceful social change, it also recognises that privileged classes usually do not hesitate to resort to violence to preserve their unjust rule. While society remains divided into antagonistic classes, there will be armed forces. In their own defence, the oppressed classes must have armed forces under their control.
Nor is the party indifferent to the question of defending Australia's national sovereignty. For the capitalist rulers, however, national defence does not mean defence of the nation, that is, of the interests of the majority of the population. On the contrary, for the imperialists, national defence means defence of their property and profits at home and abroad. The Australian military forces are recruited, trained and structured in a manner that guarantees they will defend these predatory interests.
A genuine policy of national defence is only possible when the armed forces are no longer a weapon for the defence of capitalist exploitation, that is, when the working class has state power and the armed forces are recruited, trained and structured so that they defend its interests. As a first step on that road the party demands the right of workers' organisations to establish voluntary military training associations, with free election of instructors paid by the capitalist state.
The struggle against the imperialist war machine cannot be separated from the struggle against imperialism in general. The Australian imperialist war machine is only an instrument for the defence of the interests of the imperialist capitalist class, particularly the defence of its ability to exploit the workers and peasants of Asia and the Pacific. The party opposes Australian military intervention abroad and all forms of Australian military aid to pro-imperialist Third World regimes, in particular the training of their military personnel and police.
The ruling class recognises that Australian capitalism is an integral part of the world capitalist system, and is affected by the outcome of struggles between the exploiters and the exploited internationally. It therefore extends moral and material solidarity to the forces of imperialist reaction throughout the world. Working people in Australia need to be just as class conscious about their international interests and extend solidarity to struggles against exploitation and oppression in other countries.
The party regards the promotion of international solidarity as one of its major tasks. It does this by helping to educate Australian working people about the importance and development of progressive struggles in other countries and by building campaigns and solidarity committees that can provide political and material aid to those struggles. In carrying out its international solidarity work the party gives priority to struggles that are in the frontline of the fight against the imperialist system in general, and to those directly threatened by the Australian imperialist state.
Racism, xenophobia, and nationalism are powerful ideological tools of imperialist foreign policy, supplying implicit justification for imperialist war preparations and military intervention in the Third World. The fight against nationalism and racism at home is thus closely linked with the fight against imperialist aggression abroad.
Effective resistance to this offensive is only possible if the workers' movement rejects so-called wage restraint, fake industrial democracy projects, profit-sharing schemes, and all other forms of class collaboration that subordinate workers' living standards and working conditions to capitalist profitability. Above all, the workers' movement must fight all attempts by the capitalist state to control wages and working conditions, either through its industrial courts or by making union agreements with individual employers subject to enforcement by the civil courts.
While fighting for the right to free collective bargaining between unions and employers, it is necessary to remember that any collective agreement is merely an armistice. The capitalists will violate these agreements at the earliest opportunity. The unions must be prepared to do the same when this benefits their members.
During the two decades of unbroken capitalist prosperity prior to the onset of world capitalism's present chronic economic crisis, the expectations of the Australian working people increased. They came to expect relatively high and steadily rising standards of living, which included quality housing, health care, education and social security as well as civil liberties.
Under the present austerity drive of the capitalist class quality housing, medical care, education and a secure retirement are becoming the preserve of steadily fewer, rather than rights enjoyed by all. The party considers that urgent measures are required to ensure that these social and economic rights are guaranteed to everyone:
In the face of the twin evils of late monopoly capitalism — permanent unemployment and permanent inflation — the party advocates a sliding scale of wages and a sliding scale of hours to challenge the capitalists' power to use price rises to erode real wages, and their power to decide who should and who shouldn't have a job.
Instead of being constantly forced to struggle just to maintain the existing purchasing power of their wages, workers need to secure protection of their wages against continually rising interest rates and consumer goods prices. The workers' movement should fight for a guaranteed minimum income based on a standard budget drawn up by the trade unions and a system of automatic wage indexation, in which wages are compensated fully and promptly according to a cost of living index maintained by the trade unions and consumer committees. Indirect income, social security payments, and social spending should also automatically rise in accordance with this index. Such an indexation system must be free of any restraints on working people to fight for extra increases in their buying power.
To ensure that such automatic compensation for inflation is not negated by pushing working people into higher tax brackets, a radical reform of the tax system is essential. Indirect taxes that hit working people first and foremost should be abolished. A progressive direct tax on total earnings and capital should be introduced, applying only to incomes above the average wage. Tax brackets should be adjusted automatically to compensate for inflation.
To combat unemployment, structural as well as conjunctural, there should be an automatic reduction of working hours with no reduction of the existing weekly wage and without any increase in the speed of production.
Additionally, large-scale job-creation projects should be launched to provide jobs for all. An important aspect of such job creation would be a massive program of socially useful public works. Such a program would aim to provide low-rent public housing; an efficient and accessible public transport system based on community needs; a comprehensive network of childcare centres; new hospitals and community health centres. It would also involve a concerted drive to clean up the environment.
This public works program and the accompanying expansion of public services should be paid for by increased taxes and special levies on the big corporations and banks.
It is essential to supplement these measures with a struggle against employer control over hiring and firing. The seniority system won through previous battles by the labour movement is one measure limiting the bosses' ability to pick and choose workers and victimise the most militant. Together with the union-enforced closed shop, the seniority system establishes a degree of workers' control over hiring and firing.
The unions must also take steps to prevent the bosses using the seniority system against struggles of the specially oppressed to overcome sexual and racial discrimination. Unions should demand that workers have a right to a say over layoffs, and that no layoffs occur without adequate redundancy payments and the offer of an equivalent-paying job in the same region or employer-funded retraining.
While struggling to eliminate unemployment, the unions must also pay close attention to organising the unemployed. In the long run, the lack of organisation of unemployed workers weakens the unions and may help to create a social base for ultrarightist forces. The unions must strenuously resist attempts to use the unemployed as a cheap labour force through work-for-the-dole schemes or government subsidies to employers to cover the wages of rehired workers.
The union movement must advance specific demands for the unemployed, including free public transportation, a moratorium on debts, credit for food and housing, unemployment benefits equivalent to the worker's previous wage, equal compensation at the minimum union wage for those seeking their first job, and voluntary training or retraining with full pay.
There should be no discrimination in the provision of unemployment benefits on the basis of marital status, age, personal savings or assets. Nor should there be any waiting period or arbitrary cut-off time in the payment of such benefits to unemployed persons.
On the job, workers must protect themselves from the attempts of the bosses to increase the rate of surplus value through speedups, automation, erosion of health and safety standards, etc. This requires workers' control over working conditions. Workers must have veto power on questions of job safety. They must have the right to insist that work cease immediately on demand of workers, or their elected representatives, and at no loss in pay whenever their safety is at stake. All safety control and the pace of work must be collectively set by the workers themselves.
The employers and their lawyers will undoubtedly claim that all these demands are unrealisable, and would drive them out of business. Workers should not be intimidated by such arguments. Realisability or unrealisability is a question of the relationship of forces, which can only be decided by struggle. In order to expose the bosses' lies and threats of bankruptcy, the unions should demand that the bosses open their books to inspection by the workers.
Where a company's accounts reveal that it would be ruined, workers should not capitulate to the bosses' bookkeeping blackmail. The workers should demand that such enterprises be nationalised without compensation (except for very small stock holders) and reopened under the control of workers' committees.
Nationalisation by a capitalist government does not guarantee that an enterprise will be run openly and in the interests of the public. To the contrary, enterprises owned by the capitalist state are managed by boards consisting of capitalists and their loyal experts. They operate behind closed doors to guarantee hefty interest payments to their former owners and other wealthy bondholders, or to provide heavily subsidised services at public expense to private employers.
Such capitalist nationalisations are simply designed to conceal the socialisation of the losses made by profiteering owners who have run an enterprise into the ground and shifted their capital to more lucrative operations. Often, when these enterprises have been made profitable again through massive injections of taxpayers' money, they are returned to private ownership.
In contrast to such capitalist nationalisation schemes, the party demands that all state enterprises be operated as public services, with profit subordinated to this aim. To avoid capitalist abuses in the management of nationalised enterprises, and to safeguard the interests of working people, all aspects of their administration should be subject to rigorous supervision by workers' committees, and be open to public scrutiny.
Workers should also reject the capitalists' claims about the need for sacrifice in the interests of international competition. The question of living standards and working conditions should be approached from the standpoint of workers' needs, and not from that of competition between the exploiters of different nations.
Protectionist measures, such as import tariffs, which are professedly aimed at keeping jobs in Australia, are really aimed at allowing Australian corporations to charge higher prices and reap greater profits in the face of foreign competition. They are no less inflationary than devaluation of the dollar, which deprives workers of the possibility of purchasing less expensive foreign-made goods.
Tariffs and currency devaluations are all aimed at imposing the burden of the capitalist economic crisis on workers, whether in this country or abroad. Instead, the workers' movement should demand a state monopoly of foreign trade with decisions about what goods are imported and exported subject to control by a central board elected by a national conference of workers' control committees representing each branch of industry.
To reach their decisions on a sound basis, workers' control committees will need full information about the operation of the economy and each unit within it. This can only be made possible by the abolition of all business secrets. All financial accounts, technical information, reserves, inventories, safety and environmental records, speed-up schemes, etc., should be open to public scrutiny. In the first place, the banking system — now the accounting and credit system of the capitalist class — must be opened up for inspection by workers' committees.
Through such measures, national conferences of workers' control committees will be able to draw up an inventory of the resources of the country and a national economic plan to meet the needs of working people. To put such a plan into effect, however, it will be necessary to nationalise the monopolies in order to break the capitalists' domination of the economy.
Workers' control thus constitutes a school for planned economy and a preparation for workers' self-management, which is possible only after the conquest of political power by the working class has opened the way for the expropriation of the key branches of capitalist production. Defence of working-class living and working conditions is thus inseparably connected with the struggle for a working people's government.