DEMOCRATIC SOCIALIST PERSPECTIVE

At the heart of the capitalists' solution to the structural crisis of late monopoly capitalism is a radical increase in the rate of profit through an offensive to cut working-class living standards and conditions of work.

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:

• A massive program of public housing construction, carried out by a government-owned construction agency; laws to fix rents at no more than 10% of a tenant's income; confiscation of unused dwellings and their inclusion in the stock of public housing; outlawing of landlordism; nationalisation of the banks, building societies and finance companies to ensure that low-interest housing loans are made available to working people and home loan repayments are substantially reduced; cheap loans to be made available to enable public housing tenants to purchase the dwellings they live in.
• Introduction of a universal health-care system, in which all medical and dental services are provided free of charge to everyone.
• Termination of all subsidies to private schools and colleges; free tuition, free textbooks and adequate living expenses should be provided to everyone who wants to attend public schools, colleges and universities.
• All elderly and retired persons should be able to receive adequate social security benefits. In addition, there should be a massive expansion of publicly funded social services (specialised health care and nursing, domestic work services, etc.) to enable the aged to live in dignified conditions.
• Society should provide the material conditions that will enable all people with disabilities to as much as possible exercise the basic human right of controlling the course of their lives and of making decisions regarding their daily lives. Thus they should have access to adequate social services and benefits and/or meaningful employment. Public transport systems should be designed to include the needs of people with physical disabilities. Building codes should take account of the needs of the physically handicapped, and should be strictly enforced.

While maintaining its support for struggles centred on immediate demands aimed at defending and improving workers' existing living standards and working conditions, the party also advocates transitional demands that provide a bridge from such struggles to a generalised offensive against the capitalist system.

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.