First published in Australasian Spartacist No.22, August 1975.
Recently Aboriginal Liberal Party Senator Neville Bonner concocted a claim that the “violence” of many young black militants was caused by hard drugs, supplied to them along with arms by “subversive elements”, mainly “Trotskyists” (The Australian, 14 June 1975). Bonner’s scurrilous red-scare frame-up attempt is only a part of the general step-up in the harassment and oppression of blacks. His crude slander is intended to discredit all those, including the Trotskyist Spartacist League (SL) and the fake-Trotskyist Communist League (CL) and Socialist Workers League (SWL), who have been involved in the defence of black militants and in organising opposition to black oppression.
One example of this fight has been the defence of black militant Denis Walker and his co-defendants, Lionel Lacey and John Garcia, against frame-up charges of “attempting to obtain money with menaces” and “conspiracy”, and opposition to Walker’s extradition from NSW to Queensland to face these charges. In Sydney defence activities have been conducted by the united-front Queensland Act Confrontation Committee (QACC). (For earlier reports of the defence campaign see Australasian Spartacist No.10, July 1974; No.11, August 1974; No.14, November 1974; No.16, February 1975; No.17, March 1975.) Despite defence efforts, on 20 June the Sydney Magistrates’ Court ordered Walker’s extradition, after the High Court in Sydney on 10 June had refused to hear his appeal.
Prior to this final High Court hearing, Walker had announced publicly his intention to attend the hearing carrying an unloaded rifle “for protection against police” and as a symbolic gesture “to demonstrate to all oppressed groups in the country, especially the workers that they should be prepared for armed struggle” (The Australian, 10 June 1975). When he appeared outside the courthouse with an unloaded .22 rifle, he was immediately seized by police, bodily carried away and charged with possessing a rifle while having been a person convicted on a summary jurisdiction, resisting arrest, and using “unseemly” language. These charges are further examples of the persecution of black militants. All class-conscious militants must defend Walker in respect to both the frame-up Queensland charges and the gun incident.
The SL defends the right of blacks to self defence, including the bearing of arms, against racist and state repression, and in general the democratic right for the oppressed and working class to possess weapons. Nevertheless Walker’s action was a stupid and wasteful confrontationist stunt which it was clear could only give the state an excuse for his further victimisation. It was politically comprehensible to the majority of workers and to militant blacks only as an appeal to the latter to imitate his flaunting of bourgeois legality and to take on the bourgeois state now. Billed as the “Black Nation v. High Court of Australia” (the heading of an anonymous leaflet calling for a demonstration to support Walker on 10 June (“armaments optional”) and paralleling Walker’s politics), his gimmick was not only disastrously adventurist but promoted dead-end, petty-bourgeois, illusory nationalism.
Faced with a long prison term, Walker was understandably desperate; in this sense his action is not just folly, but also reflects the oppression and despair of blacks who are victims of systematic racism in Australia’s bourgeois courts. But this cannot excuse the likes of the CL, which boasts that Walker is a “sympathiser” (Militant, 3 July 1975) and mindlessly enthuses over just such examples of futile confrontationism. The CL failed to criticise (or even mention in its press) the gun incident while boasting of its close connections with Walker and other black militants. Through this opportunism, together with the “armed struggle” rhetoric which it bandies about thoughtlessly and unseriously, the CL shares political responsibility for Walker’s dangerous adventurism. (The CL’s cowardly, Menshevik practice belies its rhetoric. Thus despite all its talk about “laying bodies on the line”, the CL had no significant organised presence at the demonstration outside the Court on 10 June which was broken up by cops (reacting to Walker’s stunt), resulting in six arrests.)
An attempt has been made to link the defence of Walker to defence of the Aboriginal Legal Service (ALS) through the Black Defence Committee (BDC), initially based on the demands to defend Walker and the ALS. Funded by the federal government through the Department of Aboriginal Affairs and run by councils of “community representatives”, the ALS represents a minimal reform, providing legal representation and advice to blacks who previously would not have had easy access to such services. The SL defends the ALS against its harassment by police (who find it an obstacle to their general victimisation of blacks) and against the threat of cutbacks, and has participated in the BDC in agreement with the aims it originally set itself.
For most of the participants in the BDC, including the CL, SWL, the various liberals associated with student race relations bodies and the black leaders of the ALS, defence of the ALS is important primarily on the grounds of “community control”, which they see threatened by the federal Labor Government’s proposed Australian Legal Aid Offices (ALAO). The SWL for example says:
“The independence of ALS and its control by the black community itself is now in doubt. Supporters of the ALS are demanding guaranteed and continuing financial independence for the service and control by the Black community.”
—Direct Action, 26 June 1975
Clearly the Labor reformists and the government bureaucracy resent the “political” activities of those who run the ALS, and it is quite probable that an attempt will be made to disguise a cutback in funding through its submersion into the ALAO. The ALS is not however intrinsically superior to the ALAO; far from being “independent”, the ALS as much as the ALAO is a minimal reform service with an umbilical cord to bourgeois state financing. The “community control” of the ALS is simply a token gesture designed to give the service a fake “democratic” garb. It will be no real defence against cutbacks in ALS funds (doubtless inadequate even at present), because the capitalist state controls the purse strings at the source. In practice, “community control” only serves as a vehicle for aspiring petty bureaucrats. Exemplified by the ALS, a strategy of “black community control of black affairs” is intrinsically reformist and/or utopian, counterposed in the final analysis to the revolutionary mobilisation of the working class and the oppressed against capitalism.
The BDC has suffered from the unprincipled and opportunist impulses of almost all its participants. The liberals, naturally anxious not to “tell the blacks what to do”, simply end up tailing the black nationalists. One of the latter, ALS officer Paul Coe (apparently now deposed from his ALS job), argued that a demonstration proposed for 31 July should be based on demands for land rights, self-determination, black control of black affairs and everything else blacks might support—a program appropriate to a black nationalist political party (or vicarious nationalists like the SWL/CL) but not to a united front defence campaign.
At its recent conference the CL proclaimed that the need for “a fully co-ordinated national and international campaign” to defend Walker, Lacey and Garcia is “critical” to the class struggle (Militant, 3 July 1975), but it did not even send representatives to some of the meetings (nor did the SWL, though they too insist on the importance of the defence campaign). Building a “co-ordinated national and international campaign” was left to a CL sympathiser who presented to the BDC a draft leaflet for circulation in the name of the BDC supporting separate black trade unions and “self-determination” (“encapsulated in the demand for land rights”), and declaring “There can be no rights, decent standard of living for blacks until black control of black affairs is put into practice.” Not only would the adoption of such a program, by politically excluding broad layers of potential support, destroy any possible effectiveness of the BDC in organising defence of blacks; this separatism can only reinforce the isolation of blacks from the only force with the potential of fighting racial oppression, the working class. By supporting these policies the CL actually impedes the working-class struggle.
The majority of the BDC agreed to call a demonstration for 31 July (later abandoned) around the demands: For land rights; An end to police victimisation; Release of political prisoners such as Walker, Lacey, Garcia and Meredith; In defence of the concessions gained (eg, the medical and legal services). The SL agreed to participate in the demonstration despite its ambiguous demand “For land rights”.
While revolutionary Marxists recognise the demand for land rights as legitimate in a number of concrete circumstances, Coe, the liberals and the ALP government see land rights as a form of “self-determination for all blacks”, an idealist notion of freedom from all forms of oppression through real or ersatz separatism, totally alien to the Leninist understanding of the right of self-determination as the right to establish a separate state (which can only be based on the existence of a nation which the blacks in Australia are not, judged by materialist criteria). Both the CL and the SWL, who sometimes pretend to be Leninist, go along with this, though the CL embellishes it with the more “militant” “unconditional land rights”, an appeal to idiot liberal moralism suggesting a black right to the whole of Australia.
As a basis for clear agreement on a concrete demand the SL counterposed the demand for the immediate return of all reserves and missions to the ownership and control of the blacks living on them. This demand does not cover all legitimate black claims to land rights. For example, ownership rights to land needed for religious practices currently or recently observed must be recognised. Moreover the black question goes far beyond land rights. The right to adequate health care, education and employment (blacks have a rate of unemployment ten times as high as the rest of the population); the end of all discrimination; the expropriation of the stations under workers’ control; and in some non-metropolitan areas with a majority of blacks the right of regional autonomy, are key elements of a program to end black oppression as part of the transitional program for workers’ revolution.
Plagued by opportunist manoeuvring and the internal wranglings of the ALS, the BDC has virtually collapsed. There is still a plan for a picket of the Queensland Tourist Bureau on 14 August, but any defence campaign will be crippled as long as it is not established on a clear united-front basis for specific actions against black oppression aimed at mobilising the social power of the working class, at the same time allowing each participant full freedom to propagate its program.
No pleading with the capitalist state (be it run by the ALP or the Liberal/CP coalition) for more social welfare crumbs or phoney black nationalist solutions spiced with CL-type “revolutionary” rhetoric will significantly alter the terrible conditions forced on blacks by racist capitalism. Only by mobilising the working class to fight against all manifestations of black oppression and linking this fight to the struggle for proletarian revolution to overthrow capitalism can the racism infecting the working class itself be overcome and all oppression and victimisation ended.