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Proletarian issue 43 (August 2011)
YOUTH UPRISING SUPPLEMENT: Revolt is an example to emulate
A letter from our Australian correspondent.
As an Australian proletarian, I must congratulate the British proletariat who have stood up to the brutal oppressors of the bourgeois state and the racist persecution of their armed wing, the police. We face a similar situation here in Australia, where of course police harassment is universal to the working class, but for our brothers and sisters who happen to have darker skin, then that oppression runs even deeper.

In recent years, Australia has seen an increase in migration from muslim and African lands, and these communities have felt the full sting of racist police oppression. Not so long ago, in Melbourne, an Indian student was murdered by a racist thug, following which the Melbourne Indian community, supported by progressives from the non-Indian community, stood up to the police and demanded action from them against racist attacks, while the cops claimed there was no racial motive behind the violence.

Yet despite migrant communities facing such racism, today, the most marginalised and oppressed community in Australia is still our own aboriginal, indigenous community.

In 2004, in Redfern, Sydney, long the urban cultural centre of Aboriginal Australia, police pursued and killed an Aboriginal teenager, provoking a heroic uprising by the oppressed indigenous community, directed not only against the racist police, but also against poverty. This was met with the same demonisation from the bourgeois apparatus as is happening right now in Britain, and with the same racist overtones: namely, that these people were shiftless, lazy slackers, merely acting out their criminal ‘nature’.

Watching the TV coverage of British unrest over the last few days, a number of impressions have been foisted on the Australian people by the guardians of ‘truth’ and ‘honesty’ who work in our ‘respectable’ bourgeois media.

One of them is that the man murdered by police was a ‘gangster’, whom the cops had no recourse but to shoot in the ‘interests of public safety’! The bourgeoisie’s journalist hirelings present this latest police execution as an isolated incident; they have sudden memory lapses regarding the endless list of racist atrocities committed by the police.

Another theme propagated, none so subtlely, is that the workers who have revolted are nothing more than criminal opportunists, cashing in on a looting spree. Yet these same bourgeois mercenaries have to concede that the centres of revolt are condemned to poverty and unemployment – but of course there is no relation between the two!

The sheer breathtaking hypocrisy of imperialism is best exposed by the attitudes towards the events in London (and other cities) and Syria and Libya. Sent by their employers to ‘cover’ the imperialist-sponsored ‘uprisings’ in Benghazi and Lattakia, these revolting journalists paint Syrian and Libyan vandals and wreckers in revolutionary colours, presenting their actions as spontaneous popular revolts by oppressed people yearning for freedom. These ‘neutral’ observers exclusively plant themselves in the ranks of the ‘rebels’ (ie, imperialism's proxies), and file their stories from the perspective of the ‘freedom fighters’.

Yet when these same ‘journalists’ return to their homes in the imperialist heartlands, something odd occurs to their need to ‘support the underdog’, those resisting oppression. Thus in Britain, instead of finding themselves reporting from the side of the proletariat fighting for a just and legitimate cause, there they are on the police front line, mouthing verbatim the lies of the armed wing of the bourgeois state. In Syria and Libya, the forces of the state, who have mass support, are portrayed as tyrannical thugs; in London, the state forces, who are reviled by the poor, become heroic defenders of ‘law and order’.

Australian TV screens have been saturated with emotive stories of business owners suffering damage to their property, and with endless shots of (predominately black) sinister faces looting shops. On the front page of a Murdoch-owned tabloid rag that masquerades as a newspaper, a huge photo of a factory engulfed in flames accompanied the headline, "THE BLITZ", as if London itself was gone! Member of the Australian ‘Labor’ Party government have lined up to condemn the fury of the oppressed – and this coming from a party which, with terrific zeal, has acted as cheerleader for the barbaric attack on Libya!

The revolt of the British proletariat is an inspiring and heroic stance against all the wonderful ‘freedoms’ of capitalism (poverty, racism, despair, etc), and is a shining example that the Australian proletariat should emulate. Of course, it also highlights the need for a strong communist party to lead the proletariat in toppling the moribund system of capitalism, which is the sole cause of the events in London and elsewhere.

The British proletariat has no greater friend than the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist Leninist). Good luck to the comrades of the CPGB-ML, and to our proletarian brethren in the days and months to follow. Victory is assured!

Death to racism and poverty. Death to capitalism!
Forward to communism!


YOUTH UPRISING SUPPLEMENT August 2011:
> Rage against capitalism
> Bourgeois ideologues battle for control of the working-class movement

> Uprisings terrify the ruling class - October 2011
> Mr Morley and Mr Rahman - October 2011
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