That leads us back to earlier comments on the united front. Within this united front of course there must be co-operation between the component units of it. But the Communist Party (M.L.) does not see it as similar to the schemes for united fronts of the past nor as something confined to some united action between the labor party and the Communist Party. It is a living struggle for united action by all who are prepared to unite in struggle against U.S. imperialism. The common denominator is the struggle for an independent, people’s democratic Australia, against U.S. imperialism and its Australian traitor flunkeys and the other imperialist oppressors of Australia.
It is not a question of collecting a few public personages and calling that the united front, a tactic beloved of the revisionists, and then within that, finding the very lowest common denominator, all of which results in amalgamation. The consequence of that sort of thing is that the given movement tends to attract the militant workers and then adapts the whole activity to capitalism. Thus do the revisionists serve capitalism.
The Communist Party (M.L.) while co-operating in these united activities maintains its independence and initiative.
The process of uniting the overwhelming majority of the people against the U.S. imperialists and their local flunkeys is going on very actively. Many spectacular highlights of it have developed. Big demonstrations against Australia’s involvement in U.S. imperialist aggression against Vietnam were very frequent. Defiance of the conscription laws occurred daily. Great strike struggles have occurred on a wide variety of issues. Young people have revolted against authority in every possible way. Women have been active. Pensioners have struggled. The Australian black people and the peoples of Papua-New Guinea are struggling more than ever before. The common denominator has been struggle against the reactionary policy pursued in Australia under the dictation of U.S. imperialism and the Australian flunkeys of U.S. imperialism.
In all these struggles the Communist Party (M.L.) has fully participated. It has striven to maintain its independence and initiative. Its members have been leading figures in many struggles as in the struggle (1969) against the attack on the workers through so-called penal powers when a veteran Marxist-Leninist Communist was the leading figure. And at the same time Communist Party (M.L.) members and supporters have participated at every level in every form of activity.
By its maintaining and fighting to maintain its revolutionary integrity, and consistently upholding the fight against U.S. imperialism, it has greatly assisted in arousing the consciousness of the participants in all these struggles.
The bourgeoisie constantly seeks to determine the tactics of struggle by the working class. It seeks to set the limit of parliamentary politics and trade union politics on the working class. In this way it can contain and control the struggle of the workers and working people. Valuable service is done for the bourgeoisie in this respect by the revisionists of both the pro-Russian group and the anti-Russian group.
The struggle to expose parliamentary politics as the sham of politics has been initiated and led by the Communist Party of Australia (M.L.). In a world where armed struggle of the workers and working people is the order of the day, advocacy of compromise in any way with parliamentarism is entirely incorrect. Capitalism is collapsing and with its collapse the old institutions are collapsing. Everything is under challenge. It must be said that the Communist Party (M.L.) campaign and exposure of parliamentary politics is becoming a mass question; it is being gripped by the masses precisely because it is in accord with the experience of the masses.
Its twin, trade union politics, has likewise been the subject of much campaigning and criticism on the initiative of the Communist Party (M.L.). The basic proposition that trade union politics are bourgeois politics has been fought for by the Communist Party (M.L.). Many, many fetishes or sacred cows have been built up in the trade unions and in what is called the trade union movement. The bourgeois line is to make the trade unions subservient to and instruments of the bourgeoisie. In Australia, the A.C.T.U. carries that into effect. A whole bureaucratic apparatus in the trade unions is used by the labor lieutenants of capitalism to suppress the workers. It is used to inculcate the idea that the workers’ struggle should be confined to the struggle for economic demands, that is, economic demands within the framework of capitalism. Positively the A.C.T.U. enters into open partnership with big business. This too is a formidable enemy of the national-democratic revolution and socialism. The Communist Party (M.L.) has raised the question – trade unions for whom and for what? It has consistently fought to arouse the workers to control their own trade unions, to wrest the trade unions from the control of the labor lieutenants of capitalism and to return them to fighting organisations of the working class. All this too is an essential feature of the struggle against U.S. imperialism and the local reactionaries.
Side by side with parliamentarism and trade union politics goes bourgeois legalism, conformity with bourgeois law. The bourgeoisie creates a great halo around its legal system, everything within the law is all right, everything outside it is banditry, the mob, hooliganism, murder, arson, looting. Justice is impartial. Tribunals are concerned only with the law. The truth that this legalism is a weapon of the bourgeois bandits, that their army and police force are uniformed mobs and thugs, that their justice is not impartial but just a rubber stamp for their own exploitation and oppression, has been taken up by the Communist Party (M.L.) thus tearing the mask from this particular hypocrisy. Many workers and students have refused to comply with this bourgeois law and order.