Immigration and racism
It never ceases to amaze me how some people can keep on pushing the tired old racism barrow when it comes to immigration, when by now it should be crystal clear to everyone, even your journalist Lisa Macdonald ("Population and Politics", GLW February 5) that in order to save the environment from further destruction we have to drastically cut immigration across the board and preferably to cease it all together, never mind whether future migrants are black, white or brindle.
This is the second driest continent on earth, yet we use water like there is no tomorrow, fill in our precious wetlands or drain them for infrastructure and industry, bulldoze the bushland for water guzzling golf courses, housing estates and shopping centres and clear-fell our forests so the royalties can support another flood of migrants! While this may please the housing industry and other vested industry groups it spells disaster for Australia's unique wildlife areas already bearing the brunt of pastoralists and big mining companies.
Above all we discriminate against the most vulnerable members of society, the original Australians of this vast continent, who watch with despair the continuing rape and pillage of an ancient landscape and culture.
The invasion is continuing at an annual rate of 100,000 migrants, so surely Lisa Macdonald is not advocating a continuation of this brazen invasion by stealth to disenfranchise a people that have lived here in relative harmony with the environment for between 40,000 and 100,000 years even further?
Kalamunda WA
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Social Capital
GLW emphasises right/left politics. By publishing, protesting and solidarity in industrial action, this right/left fight may shift the ownership and control of major enterprises, private and public, to honest workers' representatives and disempower big investors, union and party bosses and fat cats.
Is it time to thrash out more specifics and other political dimensions? Do we get the honest representatives by forming splinter parties and grassroots unions to fight the entrenched corrupt alternatives? We can play their numbers game by infiltrating and undermining their power bases and commanding heights. Such approaches risk being taken in turn, as the ALP has been, by capitalist power elites, or as socialist regimes have been, by a fresh lot of bureaucrats, old boy networks and nepotists.
I feel my most effective personal option is to abandon these two-way social splits when and where they have pushed aside my concerns. I feel more empowered to work within specialist lobbies that seem eventually to swing publics and then politicians towards sane, humane and fair thinking and acting.
Perhaps most significant is socialism at the shop level — industrial democracy — stake-holder ownership and control of corporations. One result is tapping of worker expertise to boost efficiency and worker welfare, as some Japanese firms that provide work security have long since found out.
The investment houses that use our savings and superannuation funds to pursue and reward ruthless trading in currencies and shares for short-term profit may eventually take note of stockholder meetings that insist on social and environmental as well as balance sheet concerns.
Industry can't function without capital, but it can be co-operatively owned and managed by workers, consumers and suppliers with a stake in the industry. We don't have to hand it over to big brother finance or union bosses, fat cats or con artists.
Middle Park Qld
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Censorship
Today I witnessed an example of total censorship by the NSW media with the exception of an ABC radio journalist.
As a long time member of the Non Smoker's Movement of Australia, I attended a rally outside Parliament House at 1pm. This rally was in favour of legislation developed by Peter Macdonald and Fred Nile for smoke-free indoor air. As we walked up from Martin Place we noticed a TV crew on the footpath in front of Parliament House. They quickly disappeared when they saw us approaching.
The legislation we support has been subject to much interference. Jillian Skinner wants an amendment for a five-year time lapse after the smoking code. No code exists as yet. Andrew Refshauge, our smoking health minister, wants to force in weaker legislation.
Sixty people a day die from smoking-related disease, often in very painful circumstances. Children die from cot death from being born to a smoking mother.
But the hotel, air-conditioning and tobacco industries lobby the pollies hard and well. It seems occupational safety issues carry no weight.
NSMA intend to keep supporting this legislation. I hope some Green Left readers will join us on the next demo.
Miller NSW
Marxists and the Jewish question
Henry Zimmerman (GLW #273) claims that Marxists who deny that the Jews constitute a nation are echoing Stalin on the national question, and that this was not Lenin's view. However, there is no evidence that Lenin disagreed with the position Stalin presented on this issue in his 1913 article Marxism and the National Question.
Lenin repeatedly stated that the Jews were not a nation, describing this as a "Zionist idea" that was "absolutely false and essentially reactionary" (Collected Works Vol. 7, p. 99). In the same article, Lenin stated: "Absolutely untenable scientifically, the idea that the Jews form a separate nation is reactionary politically."
As for Zimmerman's disingenuous attempt to give the impression that in the 1930s Trotsky became a convert to Zionism: in the interview that Zimmerman appears to be referring to (given in January 1937) Trotsky stated that he had abandoned his original expectation of a "quasi-automatic" disappearance of anti-Semitism within the framework of capitalism. The rise of anti-Semitism in the 1930s had led him to conclude that the "Jewish question ... is indissolubly bound up with the emancipation of humanity", i.e., with the achievement of socialism. But this did not lead him to change his opposition to Zionism.
In the same interview, Trotsky stated that "the facts of every passing day demonstrate to us that Zionism is incapable of resolving the Jewish question. The conflict between the Jews and Arabs in Palestine acquires a more and more tragic and more and more menacing character".
Summer Hill NSW
Third way?
I attended "Progressive Political Currents" on May 2 at Sydney Politics in the Pub addressed by Bob Leach, national secretary of the recently formed New Labour Party, and Frank Stilwell, an academic supporting the new party.
Stilwell and Leach said a fundamental change from capitalist society is required. However, they argued for a "third way" — socialism as an extension of democracy — that they identified as the goal of "democratic socialists" and "reformists", with Leach saying that the NLP is a "left social-democratic" or "left-populist" party. This seems to me to deny that fundamentally changing capitalism means to abolish it as a system. That is a revolutionary change.
Leach proclaimed adherence to a "new politics" rooted in globalisation but raised the very old theme that "history is on the left's side" because capitalism is moving away from the near-century-old social contract with workers and driving them into poverty.
Finally, given that Leach used the occasion to call on people to join the NLP, I was disappointed that he did not accurately report on discussions in the party. A unanimous resolution of the Melbourne NLP branch opposing proscription was instead presented as the view of members of the Democratic Socialist Party participating in the NLP.
Sydney
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Ron Guignard's right. There is no socialist "magic wand" and simply repeating outdated slogans (or even those in fashion) won't get us very far (Write On, GLW #272). But whoever said they would? Real change is going to take a "hard slog". I agree.
Guignard suggests that the ecological crisis won't wait for a new socialist society to be built. Maybe so, but it is even more true that without fundamental social change we have no chance of even approaching ecological sustainability. Sure, let's do what we can under capitalism, but don't let that get in the way of the real "hard slog" of fighting for fundamental change.
With respect to Guignard's 60 years of experience, the general slowness of social change characteristic of normal times is not a good guide as to what is possible when the huge suppressed potential for collective creativity is released in a revolution. All the more so when there is already much of the technological basis for building a sustainable society.
Perhaps you read the history of revolutions differently? You see the challenges of transition, the destructiveness of the counter-revolution and the bitter price of defeat. They are real, but only part of the picture. You don't mention the exceptional creativity and energy of popular power unleashed in a conscious struggle.
Daring to struggle to overturn capitalist rule does carry the risk of defeat. But not to do so condemns us to ecological disaster.
Sydney
A senior spokesman for the ACT CFMEU said this week that he was very angry at the presentation of union songs at the National Folk Festival in Canberra, Easter, 1997. Instead of organising a satisfactory concert to launch the union-financed CD Weipa Heroes, the NFF had put on a loose and lame concert without using available artists from the CD at the launch.
The spokesman commented on the very low level of trade union consciousness of folk artists, and said "we have used Eric Bogle in the past. But never again, because Eric Bogle couldn't give a stuff about trade unions."
The spokesman said the CFMEU had inserted the festival program on the union journal, and that former CFMEU employee, Kate Lundy, now a senator, was to officially open the trade union concert. Instead, to their shock and dismay, festival director, Phillip Wilson had employed a Liberal cabinet minister.
The spokesman continued: "Next year we will insist on a concert which projects the artists on the CD Weipa Heroes or whatever, and we will not sponsor the festival without a written agreement along these lines from the festival directors.
Wentworth Falls NSW
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CFMEU and uranium mining
Once again the CFMEU has aligned itself with the environmental destroyers by supporting the mining of uranium at Jabiluka.
The logic that expanding this filthy industry will create jobs is morally unacceptable. So does any other environmentally destructive activity such as land clearing. Will the CFMEU now support the final dispossession of the Aboriginal people by the extinguishment of native title? This will allow an unrestricted assault on what is left of the natural bush and create jobs galore, for a short time.
The CFMEU should seek the advice of the children of Chernobyl who are dying of leukemia as to further mining of uranium.
Alawa NT
M2-induced traffic chaos
The M2 consortium and the RTA finally agree with those who always said the M2 will contribute greatly to Sydney's environmental nosedive.
In a Sunday tabloid, Tollaust headman Arvo Tinnie forecast M2-induced traffic chaos at Lane Cove. He also demands an M2 speed of 100 km/h, presumably to rush his patrons to the traffic jam more quickly. Did the RTA consider the energy/motoring costs of stop-start 100 km/h operation in its M2 "cost benefit analysis"? But what about noise? Are the RTA's M2 environmental policies and acoustic barriers based on night-time truck speeds of 100 km/h?
If Mr Tinnie and friends feared the Lane Cove gridlock for years, why keep silent until now? (There was no such reticence in negotiating a contract protecting the M2 from competition by viable public transport.)
Mr Tinnie now says his bunch is "ready to build them a tunnel tomorrow" to ease M2-created chaos at Lane Cove ... whisking M2 toll-payers to the Harbour Tunnel, the Eastern Distributor tollgates, and an M5 East Extension where M2 consortium member Abigroup is competing for the tender. How much more must all NSW citizens pay to prop up a private investment?
West Pymble NSW
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