On 11 November 1975, the democratically-elected Labor government under Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was forcibly dissolved by the British monarchy. This unprecedented ‘constitutional coup’, carried out by the obedient lackeys of British imperialism, was an unvarnished attack on democracy that starkly reveals the depths of hypocrisy to which imperialism is willing to sink, in order to defend its interests.
When the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) was launched in 2013, it was sold as proof that the state could be compassionate toward the working class. It promised “choice and control.” Then Prime Minister, Julia Gillard called it “a fundamental social reform that will change our nation,” ensuring that “people with disabilities have the same opportunities as everyone else to participate in work and in the community.”
Australia has become a flashpoint in the intensifying rivalry between the United States and China. For Australia’s ruling class, balancing these two powers grows increasingly complex. The nature of the bourgeoisie, since its inception, is marked by short-sightedness, speculation, and a consistent loyalty to whichever imperialist power dominates.
The planet is burning. The seas rise, the air thickens with smoke, and the workers’ human life and soul bend and warp under the crushing weight of capitalist decay. Every sharpening contradiction: the ecological, the economic, the social and psychological – dialectically echoes and reverberates another, because they are born of the same parent: The capitalist system that subordinates that essence which makes us human, to profit. In Australia, as in every capitalist nation, this rot reaches into our most intimate spaces. Behind closed doors, in the homes that capitalism once called “the heart of society,” domestic violence festers and grows. It is not an anomaly. It is a product of the system itself.
Established as a colonial outpost of British imperialism, Australian capitalism grew by extending its reach across the Pacific through financial domination and state coercion. Today it faces a world rocked by capitalism’s rotting system. With America’s relative decline and China’s power surging, the bosses are tightening their grip to protect their profits.
The Communist is produced to arm workers and youth with Marxist ideas in a period of deepening capitalist crisis. War, austerity and environmental destruction are not policy failures, but the inevitable outcome of a system based on profit and exploitation.
Housing, a basic human right, is now more than ever a tool of profit-making for the wealthy. The working class face an acute emergency, intensified by decades of capitalist exploitation. While the rich amass enormous profits, millions are locked out of secure, affordable housing. This is not a policy failure, it is the inevitable result of a system that prioritises profit over people’s basic needs.
We are living through a difficult period for traditional, establishment politicians. In country after country, renegade gangs of populists, demagogues and mavericks are challenging the old liberal elite for power, with increasing success. As the masses’ confidence in the liberals rightly crumbles, across the world the vacuum has been filled by the likes of Farage, Le Pen, Meloni and, of course, Donald Trump.
In December, two gunmen carried out the deadliest mass shooting Australia has seen in decades. This vile, antisemitic attack, inspired by Islamic State, took place during Hanukkah celebrations at Sydney’s Bondi Beach. In its aftermath, the Labor government initiated a brutal wave of repression, cynically using the attack to crack down on Australia’s pro-Palestine movement – the world’s largest outside the Middle East in terms of the number of major protests.
