In Perth, we had about 300 people. An former member of Australia's elite military SAS spoke. He'd been to Iraq, among other places. He's still conservative, but also a firm supporter of bourgeois democracy. Mind you, this fellow led the SAS onto the Tampa, a ship of refugees boat people who were messed around with by the government and finally let go to pursue lives in Australia. His take on the invasion was that it done because the PM 'believed' Bush about WMD--in other words, the "Howard is Bush's toady" argument pulled out by democratic nationalists. His reason for coming to the demo was to tell Howard to get the Australians out of Iraq. There was also this very passionate speech given by an 8th grade girl in Muslim headress. The WA Greens Senator spoke too. I'd say 90% of the people who attended were working class i.e. people who had to sell their labour power and skills in order to make a living. They didn't couch their arguments in terms of their class interests, but they were acting in their class interests and expressing various identity forms of politics or even nationalistic ideologies. There were also some people there professing socialist ideology, mostly from the Socialist Alliance. They tend to be descendents of Trotskyism who have nothing but good things to say about Cuba.
What is to be done?
I like Marx's answer. Be a communist, bring out the property question i.e. the wages system, profit and which class benefits from same. At the same time, support what you can while not letting yourself be silenced by being assimilated in non-socialist organizational movements. To wit:
***************** The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement. In France, the Communists ally with the Social-Democrats(1) against the conservative and radical bourgeoisie, reserving, however, the right to take up a critical position in regard to phases and illusions traditionally handed down from the great Revolution.
In Switzerland, they support the Radicals, without losing sight of the fact that this party consists of antagonistic elements, partly of Democratic Socialists, in the French sense, partly of radical bourgeois.
In Poland, they support the party that insists on an agrarian revolution as the prime condition for national emancipation, that party which fomented the insurrection of Cracow in 1846.
In Germany, they fight with the bourgeoisie whenever it acts in a revolutionary way, against the absolute monarchy, the feudal squirearchy, and the petty bourgeoisie.
But they never cease, for a single instant, to instill into the working class the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat, in order that the German workers may straightway use, as so many weapons against the bourgeoisie, the social and political conditions that the bourgeoisie must necessarily introduce along with its supremacy, and in order that, after the fall of the reactionary classes in Germany, the fight against the bourgeoisie itself may immediately begin.
The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European civilisation and with a much more developed proletariat than that of England was in the seventeenth, and France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution.
In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.
In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time.
Finally, they labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries.
The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch04.htm
**********************
Best, Mike B)
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