Victorian Socialist Alliance (SA) members from Geelong and Melbourne branches discussed the context in which to advance progressive campaigns at SA’s Victorian conference on February 16.
Jeremy Smith, an associate professor of sociology at Federation University, discussed the problem of inflation from a Marxist perspective.
He challenged bourgeois economists’ arguments that wage rises and public debt cause inflation. He showed that corporate debt, which has ballooned since the pandemic, is a key driver of inflation. Supply chain disruptions, high energy prices and opportunistic price hikes by major companies, are also.
Smith said the necessary emergency public spending over 2020-2021, in response to the pandemic, did escalate public debt (in 2020 it was 99% of global gross domestic product) but it does not explain why inflation is continuing now it has ceased.
Smith said United States President Donald Trump’s tariffs are likely to further raise the costs of producing and shipping goods around the world, thereby adding to inflation, further hitting consumers.
He said Russia’s war in Ukraine and Israel’s genocide in Palestine would also be inflationary, as are the arms industries “mired in corporate profiteering” from the US$2.43 trillion annual expenditure.
Michael Bull, a pro-Palestine campaigner and unionist, assessed politics in the context of neoliberalism.
He described neoliberalism’s attacks on the working class, which started with Labor’s prices and incomes accord, which aimed to destroy the independence and fighting spirit of the union movement.
He said whereas once we owned the energy and water corporations, privatisation means that the publicly built infrastructure has been handed over to the capitalist class which it has used to attack working conditions and put up barriers to progressive policies, such as renewable energies.
Merri-Bek Socialist Alliance councillor Sue Bolton and former City of Greater Geelong councilor Sarah Hathway addressed the topic of why SA runs in elections, and its aims in the federal election.
Bolton argued that while socialists should participate in elections, “we should be under no illusion that capitalism will be overthrown through a vote”.
She said elections provide socialists with an opportunity to present our ideas to a much bigger slice of the population, and cited the experience of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Duma. “We have to maximise every opportunity to put our politics forward and win support for socialism.”
Hathway outlined how SA is preparing to contest Corio, in Geelong. She outlined how the arms industry, supported by local MP and Defence Minister Richard Marles, was “worming its way into local institutions”, including Deakin University.
She said the Corio campaign would focus on for public funds to be spent on people’s needs, as opposed to the global military industrial complex. SA is emphasising people need to do more than just vote, Hathway said. “Join us and build the socialist movement.”
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