First published in Australasian Spartacist No.25, November 1975.
The leaflet reproduced below was distributed at the Sydney public meeting and demonstrations in Sydney and Melbourne in defence of the Brisbane Three.
The SL had initially refused to build the Sydney meeting as part of the defence effort because the committee had refused to guarantee either an open platform or some provision for democratic discussion. The SWL grudgingly agreed to a period of floor discussion only when the SL refused to release $100 of funds remaining from an earlier defence committee until workers’ democracy was observed (the committee needed the money to fly in black civil service bureaucrat Charles Perkins). The SL then agreed to sponsor the meeting.
At the public meeting (which attracted close to 200 people) most speakers confined themselves to attacking racism and Bjelke-Petersen. The three speakers from the centrist CL failed to put forward any program to defend the Brisbane Three and fight racial oppression apart from a half-hearted proposal for an open enquiry conducted by blacks into the condition of black oppression. They also stated that blacks were a vanguard in Australia today by virtue of their oppression and, echoing Perkins, that the racism of the white working class was holding their struggle back. A Spartacist spokesman pointed out that racism within the working class would not be overcome by liberal guilt but through fighting for integrated struggle against the capitalist class, and moved a motion calling for the “Sydney Committee to begin a campaign to mobilise industrial action within the working class around the demands—Drop the Charges! Smash the Queensland Acts!”
The meeting was closed abruptly with large parts of the audience calling for discussion. Predictably, the chairman, SWLer Jim McIlroy, having got the $100, attempted to allow only about ten minutes for discussion (after having previously agreed to forty). The SWL’s staid and heavy handed reformism was too much even for Perkins, who gave them a lesson in demagogy by demanding a nationwide general strike to free the Brisbane Three!
Correction: In the article in Asp No.24 (October 1975) the number of SWL supporters at the Brisbane Three united front committee meeting of September 29 was misrepresented as having been 15. While we are not clear as to the exact state of affairs, it appears there were at least 7 SWL members at the meeting as well as some other people either influenced by or on the periphery of the SWL.
The vicious frame-up of anti-racist militants Denis Walker, John Garcia and Lionel Fogarty by the Bjelke-Petersen Queensland Government starkly confirms the Marxist understanding that capitalism, in its historical decline is incapable of granting any lasting reforms, and must attempt to savagely cut back even its minimal reforms and repress and demoralise the most militant representatives of the working class and poor as it moves into recession and crisis. This action by the Queensland Government is only part of a wider campaign against blacks, leftists and the workers movement. It is the elementary duty of all tendencies in the workers and left movement to defend these militants. But the issues raised by the repression brought down on Walker, Garcia and Fogarty cannot be limited purely to defence. This racist attack raises the questions of what strategy can end black oppression and how to overthrow the final bulwark of that oppression, the bourgeois state.
The development of Australian capitalism, while historically progressive in establishing the conditions that make possible the ending of all oppression and exploitation through the elimination of their material basis in economic scarcity, brutally tore apart the primitive tribal societies and cultures of the Aboriginal people. Through means ranging from theft and degradation to systematic genocide Australian capitalism has succeeded in reducing the Aboriginals to a caste of racial paupers, its surviving people used as cheap labour for inland cattle stations and seasonal farm work, or forced into government-controlled reserves or ghettos around cities and country towns.
Long and painful experience with the bureaucratism, corruption and hypocrisy of the federal government (whether Liberal or Labor) has shown that reliance on pro-capitalist politicians and parliamentary reforms will not fundamentally alter, let alone eliminate, the material conditions underlying black oppression. The reformist misleadership of the working class historically has pushed the most virulent racism (the “White Australia” policy). While no longer so explicit in its racism, today, apart from liberal charity, it does nothing for blacks, totally neglecting to organise black workers (usually super-exploited and among the most oppressed), and by restricting the class struggle to sectional interests and capitalist reforms, these class traitors actively help to maintain black oppression. Faced with these betrayals and the Aborigines’ own marginal numerical weight (0.5% of the population), some black militants (including Denis Walker) have turned to separatism and withdrawal from “white” society, seeing in the slogan of land rights the promise of economic independence, “control” over their communities and “self-determination”.
For Marxists the right of nations to self-determination is a democratic demand with a specific meaning—the right of a nation to secede and form a separate state. This is only possible when the material conditions exist to bind members of an oppressed grouping together as a distinct nation—a common territory, culture, language and political economy. Scattered throughout Australia, most Aboriginals have been forcibly drawn into the bottom-most rungs of the social, economic and political life of the towns and the cities, their cultures and languages shattered, with no distinct political economy of their own. Thus the demand for self-determination is either utopian and/or reactionary, presumably envisaging forced population transfers (a blueprint for race pogroms), and placing the social problems of blacks upon a primitive form of social organisation which cannot begin to alleviate them.
However the assimilation of blacks into urban ghettos is incomplete. For the remnants of the traditional tribal society (eg the black reserves and missions or the Gurindji at Wattie Creek) land rights does have a real objective basis and political meaning. In such cases, where blacks are isolated from and not closely tied into Australian society, the right to live on and use in their own way the land they occupy is a minimum democratic right and would eliminate the most atrocious forms of bourgeois harassment, oppression and theft. This, however, scarcely constitutes the basis of a nation. In arguing against those who vaguely pose “land rights” as a cure-all for blacks, the Spartacist League has counterposed the concrete demand for the immediate return of all reserves and missions to the ownership and democratic control of those living on them. In Australasian Spartacist No.22 August 1975 we further noted that:
“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.”
Within urban areas the demand for “self-determination” has been transformed into an appeal for “community control” or “black control of black affairs”, a substitute kind of separatism which tries to make a virtue of the concentration of blacks in ghettoes such as Redfern in Sydney. According to its advocates, the oppression of blacks in such enclaves stems not from the de facto segregation of blacks within society, not from the utter poverty and rotten conditions which prevail there, but from white interference. But it is the racism of Australian capitalist society and the deprivation imposed on blacks—housing and job discrimination, no access to education and adequate health care, deprivation of legal rights etc—which forces them to live in these ghettoes as a reserve pool of labour for capitalist exploitation. Advocates of black community control accept the prevailing racism which created Redfern and imposes segregation. Black “control” of poverty-stricken ghettoes is meaningless, and would not even begin to attack the real problem. The means of production, wealth and state power remain concentrated in the hands of the capitalist class, which benefits from and perpetuates black oppression. Only the Australian working class can rip all social wealth from the grasp of the ruling class and smash the material foundations of black oppression.
Thus it is no accident that “community control” in practice has merely acted to contain black struggles within the framework of the concessions acceptable to capitalism, such as the Aboriginal Legal and Medical Services. These minimal reform services meet real needs and must be defended against cutbacks and extended. But they are completely dependent on bourgeois state financing; their claimed “autonomy” is a mere facade. And in practice, “community control” projects are a breeding ground for the petty-bourgeois aspirations of would-be black bureaucrats to “get ahead” in capitalist society, through bribes of administrative positions offered by the bourgeois state.
Characteristic of the reaction to these Leninist criticisms was that of black activists Marcia Langton and Gary Foley, who both spent most of their presentations at the Sydney John Garcia meeting on 26 August attacking the SL. They claimed that the SL has no real knowledge of the black movement and that political criticism of the movement when it was under attack from the bourgeois state is “destructive”. Foley also argued that the “white” (ostensibly socialist) groups and their ideas are basically irrelevant to the needs of blacks anyway, at least until after the revolution. Such arguments reflect the common separatist line that only blacks can say anything about the solution to black oppression, that to criticise the black movement is to infringe on its “autonomy”. Others have claimed that such criticism is an attempt to impose a policy on blacks. Maoists typically claim it is even “racist”. Far from it: to refuse to criticise, openly and honestly stating your views; to refuse to attempt to point the way forward, is not just an abdication of revolutionary duty but is itself the patronising inverted racism of white liberals. Nor does political criticism inhibit the defence of Garcia, Walker and Fogarty. Such arguments lead directly to the bureaucratic suppression of criticism. Revolutionary criticism and workers’ democracy are essential to the real unity needed to defend these militants. Broad support for them can scarcely be obtained by demanding that anyone who disagrees with the views of the Brisbane Three must suppress his own views before helping to defend them!
In stating at the 26 August meeting that the present aim of the black movement is “to withdraw black society from white society, designed to ensure survival until your great revolution”, Foley confirmed the truth of our description of the current separatist politics of the black movement, and of our warning that this means abandoning the perspective of socialist revolution. Yet nothing could be more disastrous for blacks than Foley’s “strategy”: not only is it impossible for all blacks to withdraw completely from “white” (ie capitalist) society; to the extent that they do they will not gain “survival” but simply make themselves an easy target for racist pogroms.
While it is understandable that many blacks have been driven to embrace a false separatist course in the face of Australia’s strong white racism, this is hardly true for the pseudo-Marxist and so-called revolutionary groups who, seeking short cuts to popularity, have uncritically tailed behind this destructive separatism in the name of “solidarity” and the “mass movement”. The reformists of the Socialist Workers League (SWL) and the Communist Party of Australia see the main task as pressuring the bourgeoisie through “mass movements” or “mass mobilisations” for immediate reforms. The SWL has predictably confined its efforts in the defence campaign to an appeal to bourgeois liberalism. Capitulating to the separatist illusions within the black movement, the SWL even calls for a separate black political party! This call for the political unity of all blacks to the exclusion of all whites is a disgusting betrayal—a call for class collaboration and stronger racial division. Neville Bonner is on the other side of the barricades from poor blacks in Redfern or on the Queensland reserves; the revolutionary white proletariat will be on the same side.
While special organisations concentrating on the organisation of blacks to fight their oppression may be necessary, in order to be revolutionary any such organisation must be based on the revolutionary program—emphasising those demands relevant to blacks’ particular needs and problems, but also a program for workers power—and must be under the leadership of the revolutionary workers’ party. Only thus can the black struggle be organically tied to the general assault on capitalism necessary to black liberation.
The centrist Communist League also capitulates to the false consciousness of the black movement, which it tries to link to militant rhetoric about the need for socialist revolution. Thus the CL has called for “unconditional land rights” and published an article by then CL sympathiser (now member) Marcia Langton in their paper, the Militant, which echoed the SWL’s call for a black party. (Langton, while still a CL sympathiser, on one occasion also called for black trade unions. The CL has never repudiated Langton’s views.) The CL’s appetites for a false unity with militant blacks leads them to abandon Marxist principles and to hinder the class struggle.
At the other extreme the fake-Trotskyist Socialist Labour League (SLL) does not fight for any program to answer the specific oppression of blacks. The only logical interpretation of the SLL’s abstentionism is that it believes that no such fight is needed because the solution to black oppression (and all other oppression) is proletarian revolution. This rampant economism is not only a complete rejection of Leninism; it is a disgusting capitulation to white racism within the working class. To ignore the special problems of blacks is to indirectly build racist chauvinism among white workers. Unless this chauvinism is smashed—by the struggle of the vanguard party to win white workers to fight against all manifestations of black oppression—the working class will remain unable to unite to successfully smash capitalism. That is why the SLL, despite its pretensions, cannot lead the socialist revolution but in fact holds it back.
The treachery of the SLL’s opportunism is reflected in their refusal so far to give any real concrete assistance to the defence of the Brisbane Three, in spite of their token verbal “support” of the defence campaign.
Only the development of the organised power and consciousness of the working class and the formation of a unified revolutionary leadership can lead the working class, with bonds forged in common struggle with the various oppressed groupings, to smash the capitalist state, reorganise production and thus do away with the basis of all exploitation and oppression.