General Australian Politics Thread

Well, the Socialist Alternative seem to have toned down a bit in Uni Syd since the strikes last year. I have a feeling that the more extreme people broke off and found something else.

Socialist Alternative broke off from Socialist Alliance in the first place so that's not so surprising.

They're all over the place down here at University of Tasmania. You can't turn a corner without having communism shoved in your face.

How is the political spectrum down south anyway?

What's wrong with people being Communists anyway? People have different political ideas and theories. Why not actually argue your point of view with people you disagree with?

edited 24th Mar '14 10:54:13 PM by CardsOfWar

Because (from my experience, at least) if you argue they become belligerent, and I don't have time to debate a failed ideology literally every time I go to campus.

Well communism has killed tens of millions so there are serious bad sides to it besides not working at all

Yeah, meeting someone who actually is cool with mass murder really kills any interest in debating political theory.

Not saying all communists are like that, but the movement's track record is pretty shit.

@Mallard

This is just about empowering their political allies like Andrew Bolt who was caught up by the law, otherwise they'd axe the defamation laws too.

They don't have the conviction or the guts to fully apply their purported ideology.

edited 25th Mar '14 6:28:51 AM by editerguy

So has capitalism. Judging socialism or communism as though the Eastern Bloc comprises the ideology in toto is unbelievably skewed; one must also focus on the success of European socialists in bringing about industrialization, welfare reform, and democratization, or the participation of communists in national liberation struggles from France to South Africa.

To be honest, I was lumping all communists in with Soviets and their sympathisers in my comment, which is probably pretty ill-informed. I blame the late hour here.

In the case of Socialist Alternative, the people I've met from that are actually pretty extremist communists rather than social democrats.

Were the Europeans championing industrialization, welfare reform, and democratization actually communists though? Isn't this lumping social democratism with communism, when they are distinctly different?

"Communism" and "socialism" aren't distinct ideologies. In Marxian theory, they're steps on a historical journey which will lead to higher phase communism - ie, global utopia. In practice, they often refer to the same rough type of ideology, though "communist" as a label is generally claimed by more extreme movements, in part due to it's association with the CPC and the CPSU. And yes, many of them were socialistic; the British Labour Party (pre-1990), the German SPD, the ANC...all the way back to the Levellers and the Diggers in Cromwell's time.

As for the Aussie SA; I'm not familiar with them, so I can't comment on what they themselves are like.

edited 25th Mar '14 7:24:29 AM by Achaemenid

I was not just counting eastern Europe.

I was also including African communists, guerrillas in south America, Chinas great leap forward, Cuba's revolutionaries, north Vietnam's invasion of the south, ect.

The vast majority of communist regimes had such things happen. It's not a coincidence.

Sorry for double post but my phone's acting up.

Your blaming capitalism for famines? That's ridiculous. Famines happen regardless of economic law, that's like blaming the gays for hurricanes.

The Bengal famine was a direct result of the East India Company's maladministration of Bengal, which was itself a direct result of British imperialism, which was motivated largely by profit and primitive capitalism. In this case, the use of common lands to grow opium for the East India Company meant food crop production collapsed. If you're prepared to - rightly - attribute the famine deaths of the Great Leap Forward and the Holodomor to Mao and Stalin, then have the intellectual honesty to attribute the Bengal famine to British imperial administration. If you're going to bring in Africa, Asia, and South America, then be prepared to acknowledge the deaths resulting from US-installed/backed capitalist regimes and movements in those regions (most of them replacing socialists who won power through the ballot box), such as Pinochet in Chile, the National Reorganization Process in Argentina, the Apartheid regime in South Africa, Mobutu Sese Seko in Congo, Pahlavi in Iran, the Contras in Nicaragua, the 1964 - 85 Brazilian junta, Suharto in Indonesia, etc etc ad nauseam.

The thing is, the Cold War wasn't just a struggle between communism and capitalism and between the USSR and USA for hegemony in Europe; it also encompassed hundreds of wars of national liberation into which the great powers stuck their mucky fingers, and frequently - arguably usually - "the West" and capitalism found themselves on the wrong side.

The idea that communism/socialism is somehow inherently inclined towards democide is absurd; socialism and capitalism are simply different economic policies, and authoritarianism and brutality are possible within both. Socialism and communism have ranged from Attlee and Allende to Stalin and Kim Il-sung, just as capitalism has ranged from Obama and Locke to Rhodes and King Leopold.

edited 25th Mar '14 9:16:28 AM by Achaemenid

There's also more to Communism/Socialism than the state based approach, Anarcho-Socialists are a real thing, you can count many of the native American tribes as anarcho-communist communities, communities that were destroyed by capitalist imperialism.

Just to let you people know, Socialist Alternative are the people who marched into the lectures that still went ahead during the strike and have to be pulled out by police.

That's the kind of people they are.

I met one who actually tried to explain to me why genocide is valid in particular circumstances. Maybe that guy was unusually extreme even for that group, but regardless the SA are hard to sympathise with to say the least.

fucking hell, they're real nutters aren't they?

I met one who tried to argue that the USSR at its worst was really a capitalist society, and that Marx's idea of the state taking people's children away to be raised in government orphanages was a great idea.

To be perfectly honest. USSR was a State Capitalist society

Two instances stand out to me.

The first is when they where having a party to celebrate the Russian Revolution ("the world's first true worker's state!"). Which descended into civil war, mass murder and decades of a totalitarian dictatorship.

The second is in the student elections last year. The SA ran under the party name "Fuck Fresh" (Fresh being the uber-corrupt Young Liberal incumbents). One tried to speak to one of my classes about their goals. God bless them, they were taking the piss. He somehow managed to connect one of the parties' wanting a new fast food joint to the Israel-Palestine Conflict (the company was owned by an Israeli one). Yeah.

And just today, anyone notice the National Union of Students strike? You might think they could be on to something. That is until I saw them hawking copies of the Red Flag and some Spartacist rag. Way to discredit your protest, guys. Not that it was going to do anything.

Ah, so your problem is not with people who have different ideologies to you, but is with the ones of them that are dicks. That makes much more sense.

state capitalist is an oxymoron. Capitalism is competition between non state businesses. Communism is a state controlled economy(in theory worker run but that never happens on anything above small scale)

So Government-owned^note  At whatever level, from Local to National Government for-profit companies don't exist?

...they do? You don' understand what capitalism is do you? Profits aren't the only requirement

Here's an idea anyone could get behind: let's drop the ideology speak, because it drifts from the topic of this thread and because it's annoying as hell to see one person who thinks they know what they're talking about try and assert their dominance over the subject. Stop.

For the love of God, are there any new stories about our crappy government? I'd rather hear about Tony Abbott legalizing a shorter time period for required vet culling than read this crap.

(Please excuse my frankness/rudeness, but this infected ear has me on edge)