Write on: Letters to the editor
Capitalist advertising
Whilst agreeing with Margaret Allum's article in GLW #333 "Women's Right to Work", I cannot agree entirely with her interpretation of the commercial in question. Nor can I agree with the conservative family groups.
What both have failed to acknowledge is that capitalism has happily played one person off against another and sold the product.
The public only assumes that one mother stays at home due to slick advertising.
Capitalism (and this includes advertisers) wants to have its cake and eat it too. Family Circle is on television, as well as in the supermarkets, and the media pushes "quick" recipes in some magazines while recipes elsewhere take longer to prepare.
As a woman with children who's been forced to stay at home at various times due to the failure of capitalism, I have on many occasions had to explain to my children why they could not buy a certain product.
Thankfully, this has taught two young people to shop wisely and that having a lot of money doesn't make you a better person.
If a woman can afford to stay home it doesn't mean that she doesn't have a life.
Although cakes are nice, home-baked is usually pretty good. And if capitalism doesn't stuff it up too much, fruit is even better.
Kingswood NSW
Labour aristocracy
Ben Courtice ["British Labour on record"] (GLW #333) borrows a "conspiracy theory" from the RCG, a British Stalinist sect apt to define almost everyone as "labour aristocracy", to explain the British Labour Party. "The privileged craft union workers", "an upper stratum of the working class", have been "bought off by the capitalists".
So, for 90-odd years, capitalism in Britain has not exploited workers, but bribed them! Bribed the majority, not just a few: Labour has had its main base in the mass "unskilled" or "semi-skilled" unions.
Lenin described the bourgeois character of the ALP as determined by its base of "Liberal English workers". The British Labour Party has had a similar base.
Throughout this century most of Britain's organised workers have been reformist. Because of that, they have left their party in the hands of trade-union bureaucrats and parliamentary careerists who turn the party against their struggles.
We must denounce those leaders. Standing in elections against Labour may sometimes help. But it is not enough for small groups to proclaim themselves the real workers' representatives and denounce pro-Labour workers as bribed.
Marxists must be with Labour workers in their reform struggles, to develop and learn from those struggles, and revolutionise the labour movement from within.
Graceville Qld
A migrant and an Australian
Migrants have made enormous contributions in all spheres of life in Australia. Despite this, we are blamed for the woes facing the Australian economy.
The past two and half years have been a period of escalating racism along with severe cutbacks in immigration, language facilities for migrants, welfare support for newly arrived migrants, education, health, erosion of people's rights to jobs and the further elimination of land rights for Aboriginal people.
The majority of Australians have opposed the anti-social policies of the Australian government. This is reflected through mass anti-racist protests by ordinary Australians.
"One Nation" has been useful to the government in helping to divide the Australian people. It also helps to divert people's attention away from the real issues of common concern.
Major political parties have given tacit support for "One Nation", hence making it easier for the passing of racist and other unpopular legislation.
Migrants suffer on both counts: as victims of racism and, together with other Australians, from being denied fundamental rights belonging to them by virtue of belonging to Australian society.
The wealth created by all of us should serve the basic needs of society. Together with the majority of Australians we want our children to have access to free quality education and health care, to be free of the anxiety of job insecurity and to be able to afford a home.
We should not be just "tolerated", but be treated as equals. There should be non-discriminatory policies on immigration and increased funding to protect and further develop the rich traditions of our languages and cultures. There should be increased facilities for migrant education, language translations, welfare support and support for senior citizens.
We should be involved collectively, along with Aboriginal people, in creating a modern, just society.
Broad Alliance candidate for Greenway
Sydney
[Abridged.]
The preference allocation of the Socialist Equality Party (formerly Socialist Labour League) in the federal election are, at best, bizarre.
In the NSW Senate, SEP preferences go directly to the parties of government — first to Labor and second to the Liberal/National coalition. Only then do any of the smaller left parties standing get a look in.
The SEP harangued the Democratic Socialists in the 1996 federal election for "bolster[ing] the illusion that the return of a Labor government would be the lesser of 'two evils".
The January 12, 1996 issue of Workers News disparages a Democratic Socialist statement that "[we] recognise that the Coalition is worse than Labor and that it is preferable to return a Labor government". The same article goes on to describe the Democratic Socialists' "call to vote Labor" as serving to "maintain the domination of the old labour leadership and prevent the development of an independent struggle by the working class".
So how does the SEP explain its move to directly preference the two major parties of capital before Democratic Socialists, Greens, Communist Party, etc.)? Perhaps its a dialectical leap of logic that "reformists" simply cannot understand.
After preferencing Labor and the Coalition, the right-wing Democrats are preferenced ahead of the Democratic Socialists, the Greens and the Unity — Say No to Hanson party. Preferences then run across the ballot paper from left to right.
This expediency places One Nation, the Fred Nile group and other far-right outfits ahead of Ron Poulsen from the Communist League, who is last on the ballot. (While this may simply look convenient, SEP's absurd claim that the US Socialist Workers Party — the Communist League's parent party — is controlled by the CIA may also have something to do with it.)
Sydney
[Abridged.]