Clothing donated for a relief operation was instead used to wipe Emmanuel Asuncion’s blood off the floor of the Worker’s Assistance Center in the Calabarzon region of the Philippines on 7 March. Not too far away in Batangas, the 9-year-old son of Chai Lemita Evangelista and Ariel Evangelista hid under his bed after witnessing the state-sanctioned murder of his parents in their bamboo home.
The day is now known as “Bloody Sunday”. In total, nine human rights activists were killed and six others were arrested in simultaneous police and military operations. While the government’s attacks were an escalation of state repression, they were not exceptional—government assassination is common in the Philippines.
President Rodrigo Duterte’s main innovation since being elected in 2016, the thing that sets him somewhat apart from his predecessors, has been the increasingly overt deployment of state terror. His so-called drug war, according to conservative estimates in a June 2020 report from the United Nations High Commissioner, has claimed more than 8,000 lives. Other estimates put the number three times higher.
The killings are largely the result of the increased use of “tokhang nanlaban”-style raids. Tokhang is a portmanteau of two local words meaning “knock” and “plead”; nanlaban means “resist”. When the drug war was launched, the president emphasised the first word to allay fears of state violence. But, as an editorial in the Philippine Daily Inquirer noted in 2018: “tokhang has become a familiar word with a familiar, unmistakable meaning: it means ‘killed’”. One operation a year earlier in Bulacan, just north of the capital, Manilla, claimed 32 lives in one night. Now “tokhang nanlaban” raids are being used not only against suspected drug users and dealers, but against Indigenous people, unionists and activists.
According to Rappler, an online news site, Calabarzon police chief Brigadier General Felipe Natividad confirmed that the “Bloody Sunday” operations were part of a new “whole-of-nation” approach to ending the 52-year insurgency led by the Communist Party of the Philippines. Duterte last year established a task force ostensibly aimed at ending “local communist armed conflict”. But it has orchestrated an intensified campaign of counterinsurgency operations that do not distinguish between armed combatants of the New People’s Army—the Communist Party’s armed wing, which conducts guerrilla warfare in the countryside—and unarmed political activists.
The Philippine House of Representatives also passed an anti-terrorism law. Claiming to address “violent extremism and terrorism”, its imprecise definitions facilitated increased repression against both armed and unarmed groups that have legitimate and long-standing grievances against the Philippine state. In addition, there has been a rise in “red-tagging”—the blacklisting of individuals or organisations critical or not fully supportive of the president. They are “tagged” as either communist or terrorist, or both, regardless of their political beliefs or affiliations.
Each president since the end of the Marcos dictatorship in 1986—from Corazon Aquino through to her son Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino (Duterte’s predecessor)—had their own version of a counterinsurgency plan. Each presidential term also had its own notable headline human rights abuses.
As early as 1990, the Los Angeles Times noted that international human rights organisations had issued reports of “widespread ... abuses, including murder, torture and illegal arrest”. They criticised then-President Corazon Aquino’s government and the country’s armed forces. At the time, Amnesty International claimed:
“More than 200 real or suspected critics or opponents of government policies, including human rights activists, church workers, trade unionists and peasants, were killed in apparently extrajudicial executions by government or government-backed forces, and dozens reportedly ‘disappeared’.”
The content of the report could be recycled for each successive president. In another report, published by Human Rights Watch in 2011, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo was criticised for similar reasons.
A culture of impunity is deeply entrenched in the Philippine state and reflects the deep class divisions in Filipino society. On one side, Duterte and the armed forces represent the interests of the ruling class to preserve existing inequalities and to preserve the integrity of the state to that end. On the side are the slain activists who represent the interest of oppressed Filipinos who campaign for rights to housing, higher wages and the conservation of the environment.
When ordinary Filipinos organise, even simply campaigning for higher wages, the state places a target on them. Their organising work and the state’s repressive response confirms the criticisms of Philippine society offered by the Communist Party and others on the left—the country’ problems cannot be solved without revolutionary means.
“Bloody Sunday” took place in the Calabarzon region, which has the highest concentration of manufacturing workers and has become the second-largest contributor to national GDP. Automotive assemblers are mostly located in Laguna province; semiconductors and high-tech industries and electronics are in Cavite and Batangas, and garment manufacturers are in Rizal. The issues that slain activists campaign around provide an indication of the economic and political situation in the region.
Chai Lemita Evangelista and Ariel Evangelista were fisherfolk and staffers for the citizens’ network against the destruction of nature and land. The group fights against mining and land-grabbing and works on issues pertaining to the rights of fishing communities.
Emmanuel Asuncion was a coordinator for Bayan, a campaign centre for several left-wing organisations. It hosts seminars, pickets, marches, demonstrations and people’s strikes. According to Bulatlat, an online news site, Asuncion was working at a Taiwanese company in Cavite Export Processing Zone as a machine operator in 1999. He and seventeen others were laid off and, while pursuing the case with the Workers’ Assistance Center’s help, he became a full-time activist. Since then, he has campaigned around many issues, such as for wage rises, and was involved in resolving land disputes. Furthermore, as a coordinator, Asuncion oversaw information gathering about human rights violations in Cavite province.
Mark Lee Bacasno, siblings Abner and Edward Esto, and Michael Dasigao were members of a local organisation that advocates for housing rights in Kasiglahan Village, Rodriguez, Rizal. According to Rappler, Bacasno and the siblings were homeless until at least 200 people occupied empty housing units in Rizal in 2017. They continuously fought for their housing since. Dasigao, as the head of the organisation, took care of local farmers’ concerns about quarrying sites. He also assisted residents in the aftermath of Typhoon Ulysses last year and helped student organisations distribute relief packages for farmers and scavengers in Rodriguez, Rizal last month.
Puroy dela Cruz and Randy “Pulong” dela Cruz were members of the Dumagat tribe—a major and semi-nomadic indigenous group in Calabarzon numbering 30,000 people—and activists with Dumagat Sierra Madre. They advocated for the rights of Indigenous peoples and fought against the controversial Kaliwa Dam project reintroduced by the Duterte government under his “Build, Build, Build” program. The tribe successfully fought against a larger dam twelve years ago.
These short profiles of the “Bloody Sunday” victims confirm that the Philippine state does not distinguish between armed combatants and non-violent activists. It would rather commit a massacre than take steps to ameliorate the conditions of poverty, landlessness and national oppression that allow guerrilla war to persist.
The National Union of People’s Lawyers has called for a review of the issuance of the search warrants (more aptly described by some as “death warrants”) that resulted in the killings. While supportable, it does not acknowledge how unjust the legal system is.
The state kills civilian dissidents with or without warrants. A lack of warrants did not stop the deaths of thousands in the drug war—it was sufficient to call them “drug pushers” and members of the urban poor. Having dubious search warrants did not stop the murder of Emmanuel Asuncion, whose search warrant was meant for his home in another town as reported by Lian Buan of Rappler. 
A search warrant, legitimate or otherwise, in the Philippine context is a pass for murder. National police chief General Debold Sinas claims the operations that resulted in the nine deaths were covered by search warrants and were, therefore, legitimate. With Duterte’s term ending in 2022, repeats of Bloody Sunday can be expected. More organisation on the part of oppressed people is needed and for more to see the fight against human rights abuses as not just the fights of activists and their families.
The New People’s Army, in response to the Tumandok Massacre, which claimed the lives of nine Indigenous leaders in similar simultaneous raids in December, has announced the formation of partisan units. Others on the Left, such as the Party of the Labouring Masses, also condemned the killings and is calling for “non-stop protest—on the streets, on social media, in Congress, in the Supreme Court, and by any means [that] we can express condemnation of arrests and killings”.
In 1988, Myanmar looked to the People Power Revolution of the Philippines that had ended the Marcos dictatorship two years earlier. In 2021, the Philippines can look to Myanmar’s Spring Revolution, particularly the leading role of the working class in the mass movement against the military junta.

Yen Llanes

Ben Reid

Bloody Sunday in the Philippines

75 years of the United Nations: what is it good for?

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s latest outrage is an attempt to shift the blame for rising numbers of COVID-19 cases onto health care workers. Duterte made his extraordinary outburst—accusing them of inciting “revolution”—after reimposing strict quarantine in many of the country’s major cities on 2 August. With more than 150,000 cases, and having overtaken Indonesia’s lead within South-East Asia, the Philippine epidemic is out of control. This is mainly due to Duterte’s flawed policies. 
Coming to power as a “strongman” and populist in 2016, he promised to make some progressive changes. Yet his government increasingly is characterised by all the worst features of his predecessors. For the COVID-19 crisis, it meant a highly militarised response with draconian enforcement of lockdowns and roadblocks. Coordination with primary health care agencies and mass testing received little emphasis. Repression and harassment of the media also escalated. And new counter-terrorism laws further threaten civil liberties.
The failing health care system and increase in state repression both reflect the broader historical and political malaise of the Philippines. With a resident population of more than 108 million people and a per capita income of just US$3,890 (Australia’s is US$54,910), more than 20 percent of the population last year still lived below the country’s nominal threshold of poverty. In 2017, per capita health spending was just US$132.90, and the infant mortality rate was 23 per 1,000 births (compared to US$5,332 and 3.1 in Australia). There was only one hospital bed per 1,000 of the population in 2011.
Both the endemic poverty and this latest crisis are the product of historical factors that provide the context for understanding Duterte and the struggle against his government.
First is the country’s history of colonialism and ongoing relationship with the world’s imperialist powers. The archipelago’s colonisation by Spain after 1565 led to the forced conversion to Catholicism of much of the population. Church friars administered the territory, transforming favoured local chiefs into large landowners. These landowners, known as ilustrados, became a wealthy social class and a vital link in the chain of colonial domination. Political and economic power shifted towards the more densely populated and controlled region on the main island of Luzon. The Spanish retained control until the end of the nineteenth century, when a nationalist political revolt began.
Meanwhile, industrialisation and the emergence of monopoly capitalism in the United States had spurred its desire to acquire territory in the Pacific. The Spanish relinquished ownership of the Philippines in 1899 after war with the US. But Filipino nationalists wanted the US out as well, launching a liberation war for independence. Three years later, between 250,000 and one million Filipinos were dead and the US was in control. However, US administrators did not dismantle the social hierarchy that Spain had established. They ruled in conjunction with and through local elites. The hacienda system of a few large landholders endured, and US-based corporations developed widespread plantation agriculture.
Philippine capital specialised in agricultural and raw materials exports, retailing, banking and real estate. Only a minority of the elite envisaged expanding local industries and producing consumer goods or machinery. Any Philippine-owned businesses that focused on these sectors faced stiff competition from US imports with open slather access to markets. As a result, and as in most colonised regions in the world, no deep industrialisation occurred: the economy and exports remained mostly agricultural and raw materials during the stage of colonial capitalism between 1902 and 1946. Yet an urban and rural working class emerged. The population grew and migrated to cities and towns to work in the limited industry that did develop.
The big landowners and elites also benefited from the presence of the US military. It provided them with security. This military broke the centuries-long resistance to colonialism from the mostly Muslim Bangsamoro population on the country’s southern island of Mindanao. Mindanao was opened for exploitation and internal migration for Christian settlers.
A left-wing political movement, centred on the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (Communist Party of the Philippines, PKP), increasingly challenged the elite’s power after 1930. The Philippines became notionally independent in 1946, after a destructive period of Japanese occupation between 1941 and 1945. The elites dominated the political system, controlling the state and the main political parties. Modelled on the US system, the Philippines emerged as the first “democratic” republic in Asia. As Leon Trotsky’s concept of uneven and combined development suggests, however, a country can appear to have a functioning and stable bourgeois democracy, but that does not mean the historical conditions exist to sustain the institutions.
All bourgeois democracies—such as the United States—by their nature are never truly democratic. Elite control can coexist alongside universal suffrage and freedom of association, rather than brutal repression. A strong ruling class can contain challenges to its power by bribing voters and exploiting divisions within the working class based on race, sex or other factors.
However, as the Philippines remained politically and economically underdeveloped, the power of its ruling class was not as entrenched. Its formal democracy depended on intricate systems of local control to subvert efforts at substantive social change or reforms. Local landowning families often controlled the electoral process. Widespread use of bribes and corruption meant populations tended to follow “directions” on how to vote. Political violence and repression also existed closer to the surface. The left and the PKP were suppressed after 1950.
Various terms described the Philippine system, such as elite or cacique (“chiefly”) democracy. So while the Philippines had established a capitalist system and functioning bourgeois democracy, its colonial inheritances and ongoing relationship to the US and world imperialism meant the political system was unstable.
This system eventually broke down with Ferdinand Marcos’ dictatorship between 1972 and 1986. The dictatorship, the successful resistance to it and the restoration of elite democracy became the dominant themes of Philippine politics. Deepening stagnation of the economy and increased tensions within the elite marked the years leading up to the Marcos dictatorship. The country’s close alliance with the US and the presence of its military bases also encouraged the emergence of a mass anti-Vietnam War movement.
The left revived through the formation in 1968 of a new Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) with a Maoist political program. A year later, a New People’s Army-led insurgency began. Marcos responded by introducing martial law in 1972. Despite claiming that he would transform the Philippines by attacking the old “oligarchy”, his dictatorship mostly just enriched his faction of the elite. Notionally more robust measures of land reform, for example, targeted Marcos’ political and economic rivals.
Although parity agreements that allowed US corporations equal ownership rights expired, the regime remained a close US ally. It also received substantial financial support from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Ethnic Chinese were allowed greater rights, with some granted licences and concessions to compete against old industries. Relations with Beijing were also normalised. However, the world recession and international debt crisis of the early 1980s put an end to any semblance of economic development. The value of the Philippine peso collapsed, and per capita income contracted from US$1,800 to US$1,400 between 1983 and 1985. It recovered to its previous high only in 2004.
Mass protests in opposition to the regime ballooned. and the CPP-led insurgency experienced a surge in support. Militants groups like the Kilusung Mayo Uno trade union centre also developed within the urban working class. Much of the elite lost confidence in Marcos, and some began to fear a victory by the New People’s Army. Marcos eventually called a snap presidential election in 1985. Widespread cheating allowed him to defeat Corazon Aquino, the widow of Marcos’ rival Benigno Aquino (assassinated in 1983).
A resulting political crisis culminated in the much mythologised “people’s power” revolution in February 1986. Although often promoted as a model of so-called non-violent revolution, it did not lead to substantive political or social change. The uprising began with a rebellion by military units led by self-interested members of the elite, such as the former constabulary head Fidel Ramos and defence minister Juan Ponce Enrile. Leaders of the Catholic Church backed the rebels, and protesters gathered to prevent the pro-Marcos sections of the military from repressing the coup plotters. After numerous defections within the elite and the military to the side of the rebels, Marcos eventually fled the presidential palace aboard a US-provided helicopter. Aquino emerged as president, and the US switched its support to her.
The widespread jubilation over the ousting of the dictatorship initially seemed to create an opening for some substantial political and social changes. Yet Aquino was herself part of the old landowning elite and within a year renewed the war against the NPA-led insurgency. Proposals for wide-ranging land reforms and a new constitution were gutted of most of their more politically radical content. By 1987, the old elite-led political machines had cemented their control over the electoral process. The Aquino government also agreed to continue the old regime’s onerous foreign debt payments.
However, the US’s political reputation had suffered due to its support for Marcos. A mass protest movement—aided by the Mt Pinatubo volcano eruption near the Clark Air Base—helped ensure no renewal of the Philippine-US military bases agreement in 1991.
The urban middle and working classes continued to expand, although most employment growth was in the informal sector, light industry and services. While the elite retained its base in land ownership, it diversified its activities. Its members often obtained more formal qualifications in fields like law. Overseas employment and remittances also became a significant source of income.
Meanwhile, the left fragmented, with groups breaking away from the old CPP. After “reaffirming” its strategy of “protracted people’s war” in the early 1990s, the party’s allied legal organisations made a surprising and increasing turn towards electoral work. It used the “party-list” system—introduced in the late 1990s to counterbalance the seats held by the old clans—to establish a small bloc of progressive legal political parties.
Political scientist Mark Thompson argues that the subsequent presidential regimes followed a pattern of alternation between “insider” and “outsider” alliances of elite families. During the 1990s, Fidel Ramos deepened the trend to economic liberalisation while managing to buy off residual opposition in the country’s Congress. He introduced a visiting forces agreement in 1999, allowing for a lower key presence for the US military.
He was followed by the “outsider” and quasi-populist former movie star Joseph Estrada. “Pro-poor” rhetoric notwithstanding, little was accomplished, and he was removed after mass protests in 2001. His replacement, however, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, inaugurated an era of even worse corruption and violence. The Maguindanao massacre of 58 people in 2009, for example, was orchestrated by Arroyo’s political allies. The pendulum then swung back to the Aquinos’ “insider” clan. President Benigno Aquino Jnr’s government between 2009 and 2016 did astonishingly little while in office.
However, national politics became defined by an “anti-trapol (traditional politician)” sentiment. The restoration of formal democracy resulted in the old elites retaking control. Sections of the left tried to explain that this was likely to remain the case until the power of the elite as a whole was challenged. In 2016, a large section of the population instead opted to back Duterte’s populist authoritarianism. Duterte’s election brought about a further escalation of violence and repression.
As Philippine political commentator Walden Bello surmised, Duterte was “a volatile mix of will to power, a commanding personality, and a gangster charm that fulfils his followers’ deep-seated yearning for a father figure who will finally end the national chaos”. Belonging to a Christian settler family in Mindanao, Duterte had been a long-time mayor of Davao city. He depicted himself as an “outsider” fighting against entrenched Manila-based elites. He was a consummate career politician who had combined authoritarianism and explicit threats of violence with a direct and “hands-on” approach to governing. Human rights organisations estimate that death squads conducted more than 1,000 extrajudicial killings during his term as mayor. Duterte even teasingly admitted connections to these crimes during his presidential campaign.
Initially, his presidential bid also focussed on introducing some progressive measures, such as limiting the endemic casualisation of labour. Some labour organisations, such as the official Trade Union Congress of the Philippines, even supported his campaign. Once in power, though, he moved quickly to replicate his regime of vigilante-style violence on a national scale. A so-called drug war, mostly against “shabu” (methamphetamine) dealers and users, took place. Some 3,967 drug “personalities” died, and a further 16,335 homicides took place.
While Duterte made a big deal about courting closer relations with Russia and China, the country’s military remained wedded to the US and its other traditional allies. US ground forces became involved in intense fighting during 2017 in Mindanao.
The regime mostly dropped proposals to amend the constitution to enable more decentralisation of control away from Manila. More far-fetched plans by some supporters to establish a “provisional revolutionary government” met with mass protests and opposition. However, Duterte still retained a massive 82 percent approval rating in January 2020. As one commentator from Focus on the Global South explained, Duterte successfully “sought to lay the blame for the country’s ills on the same predictable line-up of groups: drug users and peddlers, criminals, narco-politicians, corrupt public officials, leftist groups, and government critics ... using them as scapegoats for all forms of social deterioration helped his administration appeal to the broad middle class and obtain their support”.
In July, under the guise attacking the influence of the “oligarchy” over the country’s media and politics, Duterte defended the closure of one of the country’s two major broadcasting agencies. As with Marcos in the 1970s, these supposedly anti-oligarchy measures were a cover for authoritarianism and were aimed at Duterte’s elite rivals.
A period of historically high economic growth, averaging over 5 percent per year between 2011 and 2019, also underpinned Duterte’s popularity. Infrastructure and election spending further strengthened domestic demand. However, the economy was already deteriorating before the COVID-19 pandemic struck. Official unemployment levels then increased from 5 to 17.7 percent between January and April 2020. The incidence of self-reported “hunger” rose to more than 20 percent of the population by July.
Like most governments, Duterte’s responded with stimulus spending. The payments were poorly implemented and inadequate. Support for paid workers was limited to the formal sector. He has no real plan for dealing with the epidemic and instead boasts his relationship with Chinese leader Xi Jinping may allow early access to a likely illusionary vaccine.
It is currently unclear if growing authoritarianism and hardships associated with the epidemic may dent Duterte’s appeal. The left faces a challenge providing a more hopeful and coherent alternative based on the organised mass resistance of workers and farmers to the political dominance of the country’s elites. The main alternative appears to be a relapse into even greater authoritarianism.

Understanding politics in the Philippines

While much of the world remains preoccupied by COVID-19, the Duterte government in the Philippines has launched a raft of authoritarian measures. Draconian anti-terrorism legislation and attacks on media freedom have now emerged, along with continued widespread use of extrajudicial violence.
The Duterte government’s main response to the pandemic was highly militarised, with widespread use of roadblocks to enforce lockdowns, as opposed to mass testing and treatment. This month, the president signed the 2020 Anti-Terrorism Act, which provides a vague and overly broad definition of terrorism and permits warrantless arrests. It allows authorities to hold individuals in custody for up to 24 days without charge.
There is widespread opposition and several legal challenges to the new law, alleging that it breaches the Philippines constitution. Adopted in the aftermath of the Marcos dictatorship, the 1987 constitution established strong protections for civil and political rights.
There are very real fears the anti-terror law could lead to a further intensification of extrajudicial killings by security forces and vigilantes. The United Nations Human Rights Council issued a report on 5 June that found “widespread and systematic killings and arbitrary detention in the context of the war on drugs, killings and abuses targeting farmers and indigenous peoples, the silencing of independent media, critics and the opposition”.
An estimated 8,663 people (including 73 children) have been killed in “the war on drugs”. At least 208 human rights defenders, journalists and trade unionists have been killed since 2015.
The legislation also comes in the wake of increased attacks on media institutions. ABS-CBN media abruptly stopped broadcasting on 5 May after receiving a “desist order” from the country’s media regulator. One of two major broadcasting groups in the Philippines, ABS-CBN controls 42 television stations, 10 digital broadcast channels, 18 FM and five AM radio stations.
The network’s conflicts with government started some time ago. It allegedly refused to broadcast advertisements for Duterte’s campaign in the 2016 presidential election.
All television licences require government legislation, and ABS-CBN’s franchise expired at the end of March. Congress began the process of renewal only after the network apologised to Duterte in February. On 10 July, 70 of Duterte allies within the 85-person congressional investigation committee voted against granting another 25-year licence. Numerous hearings and testimony had established the channel had not violated legal provisions.
Controlled by the Lopez wing of the Philippine oligarchy and, like many mass commercial media networks, ABS-CBN is hardly a source of staunch criticism of Philippine politics and society. The dispute, however, highlights deep rifts and conflicts between more established sections of the oligarchy and Duterte’s government.
Duterte represents the more provincial components of the elite and maintains popularity through a populist law and order agenda.
Other attacks on press freedom include the conviction of Maria Ressa from the Rappler internet news service on 15 June for “cyberlibel”. Her arrest and conviction followed a complaint filed by Wilfredo Keng, a businessman connected to Duterte, over an article published in 2012.
Rappler has been a strong critic of the government’s human rights abuses, Duterte accusing it of being a “fake news outlet”. Rappler, however, represents a broader current of progressive investigative journalists that originated in the anti-dictatorship struggle of the 1970s and 1980s.
Duterte remains popular despite these abuses, maintaining a “tough on crime” image. Deep divisions exist within the capitalist and landlord elite over his rule. A small opposition movement continues to resist the increase in repression.

Philippine anti-terror act may increase rights abuses

“Tasks and perspectives” is an interesting term. The plural of the word perspective doesn’t formally exist in the English language. It was the Communist International that introduced the term as a translation of a Russian term.
“Tasks and perspectives” reports, however, became the staple of many a revolutionary meeting. John Percy’s Keeping the red flag flying: the Democratic Socialist Party in Australian politics, Documents 1992-2002 is an interesting collection of many of his “T and P” reports to various conferences and national committee meetings between 1992 and 2002. 
The DSP was a considerable organisation on the Australian far left, until its dissolution in 2010. Unlike John’s previous two volumes on the history of the DSP, this volume is a collection of edited primary texts, as John passed away in 2015.
T and P reports were a specialty for John. Therefore, much of the content is often an account of various initiatives the organisation was pursuing and how the circulation of its press was going. Coming towards the end of various meetings, the broader political discussions had often already taken place in other reports. 
Yet some facets of the party’s political evolution still come out. 
The volume commences in 1992 with the DSP at a crossroads: confronting the ideological confusion that emerged in the wake of the collapse of Stalinism. John’s brother Jim Percy, then the national secretary, passed away late in the year. John was elected national secretary, but he never pretended he could fill Jim’s boots. A keen thinker, he was best of all an organisation-builder. Hence the T and P reports.
Politically and organisationally, a main theme emerges of “holding the line” of building a revolutionary party in adverse conditions. At the same time though, the party’s “broad” newspaper Green Left Weekly experienced early success with circulation and influence. 
The party also pursued a seemingly dizzying range of campaigns through its youth organisation Resistance and around the environment, Indonesia and East Timor solidarity and other issues. 
For a politically slow period, the party focused a lot on creating its own campaigns and activity. Some larger and episodic political developments and outbreaks of large protest actions (anti-Kennett protests, campaigns against nuclear testing and so on), perhaps surprisingly, don’t get much mention. 
Dissent broke out in the party too, often around attempts to loosen the group’s politics and “broaden out” in the hope that it would affect changes in Australian politics. 
A very sharp dispute, for instance, broke out between the party Perth branch secretary Steve Robson and most of the party in 1994-95. Steve wanted a looser and “broader” party, eventually leaving to join the Greens for a while. 
There was a steady trickle of people out of the party over these years mostly out of politics and activism altogether. The DSP felt pressure from these people and others on the left to try and substitute for the bad political situation through initiating campaigns and absorbing itself in day to day trade union activity. 
Yet as John pointed out when Robson claimed the party was sectarian: “Are we sectarian? Well yes and no ... we are certainly still in a semi-sectarian existence”. 
John had no illusions that the small forces of the DSP could suddenly leap into leading the masses of the Australian working class in struggle. What was needed was to patiently build forces and explain the party’s ideas to a narrow section of the population. 
John does, however, discuss the impacts of the change in government federally after 1996 and the subsequent rise of the movement against racism and Pauline Hanson’s poisonous politics. The party used its base among young people to organise some impressive campaigns
In part as an outgrowth of the emphasis on supporting the Timorese independence struggle and Indonesian democratic movement, the party increasingly built international links from around 1998 onwards. 
While the party was probably right to try to relate to larger but non-revolutionary forces internationally, some of the John’s remarks do seem naïve in retrospect. At one point, the refounded communists in Italy and the Scottish Socialist Party are lauded as examples of the needed party that can begin to lead masses of people in struggle. Both formations collapsed into crisis only a few years later.
Finally, the anti-globalisation movement and campaign against the Iraq war brings a gust of renewal and new members into the party. What emerges, though, is an image of a party trying to manage some difficult contradictions. 
It was on, on the one hand, maintaining a core of Marxist cadre. It remained a party, on the other hand, of activism and campaigning. It produced a plethora of publications requiring an intense level of activity and fundraising. 
Yet the party also increasingly looked on a little too enviously at other international contexts and the emergence of new political organisations of the left, hoping that it could one day replicate these experiences. 
It was an imbalance and was perhaps reflected in the lack of mention in John’s reports of the closure of the party’s cadre school in the early 1990s. He acknowledges the party’s approach to education became “haphazard” and “lackadaisical”. 
Ominously, he later recognises that there had been a turn away from serious Marxist politics and thinking towards impressionism by many in the party. Perhaps the party focused on trying to do too much and neglected its most important task of maintaining and developing its members as Marxist political activists and revolutionaries. 
Keen students of the history of the socialist movement will find much of interest in the volume as they chart their own “tasks and perspectives” for today.
Keeping the Red Flag Flying - The Democratic Socialist Party in Australian Politics: Documents, 1992-2002, published by Interventions, is available for purchase at <a href="shop.redflag.org.au">shop.redflag.org.au</a>

John Percy's unfinished 'tasks and perspectives'

The federal election results suggests that, while no candidates from the far right were elected to lower house seats, they did influence the result in some areas. It is too early to say what will happen in the Senate.
Leader of the “pack” One Nation did the best overall. Thirteen of the 15 seats in which it scored greater than 10 percent were in Queensland. Its highest vote was in the NSW seat of Hunter. There is evidence that a scare campaign was waged about an incoming ALP government ending coal mining.
The better performing areas for One Nation were regional, although there was some creep into outer Brisbane.
The same can largely be said of outfits such as Bob Katter’s Australian Party and Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party. The former was almost completely confined to regional Queensland, Katter winning on 39 percent of the primary vote in Kennedy and getting results above 5 percent in four other seats.
Palmer’s big spending campaign had additional impacts, with some higher votes in suburban Melbourne (Fraser and Gellibrand). He attracted (funded?) candidates from some ethnic minority groups and thereby distanced his populist message from the anti-immigration stance of his rivals on the right.
Fraser Anning’s National Conservative Party fortunately sank largely without trace. Its higher votes were mostly in regional Queensland, although it scored above 1.5 percent in some outer suburban seats such as Calwell and Bruce in Victoria.
There is evidence that One Nation’s coal industry scare tactic was used outside of Hunter, mostly in Queensland. In an election in which few seats changed hands, Herbert, located around Townsville, was one notable case of the Liberal National Party taking a regional seat from the ALP: a combined far right and right populist primary vote of 27 percent translated into an almost 8 percent swing to the LNP.
Across the country there was a strong correlation between the size of the far right vote and the swing to the Coalition.
While the populist element no doubt attracted some support from workers, this was far less common in urban working class areas. Although there were some disturbing votes for the far right in outer southern Brisbane, the ALP held its base.

The ‘populist’ right and the regions

This is part of Red Flag's guide to Australia’s four major political parties – <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/6762">Labor</a>, <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/6753">Liberal</a>, <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/6769">National</a> and <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/6772">Greens </a>– and One Nation. This article by Ben Reid looks at One Nation.
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The re-emergence of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation as an electoral force in 2016 was a local expression of an international trend of so-called right populism. It reflects the periodic trend in modern capitalism for racial and militaristic politics to become more pronounced than usual. 
However, like other examples of right populism, One Nation’s policies also draw on economic nationalism. The party supports multinational corporations paying their “fair share” of tax, “freezing politicians’ wages” and opposing “foreign ownership of Australian land and assets”. 
On the face of it, these are not likely to be popular policies with big business and most sections of the ruling class, which have been implementing policies aimed at boosting profits through the neoliberal restructuring of the Australian economy. 
Despite some appearances, however, One Nation offers no solutions for working people. It is a type of political party of the far right that emerges in times of crisis or turbulence. Although the base of these organisations comes from outside the ruling class and big business, they don’t fundamentally threaten capitalism. When close to or having achieved power, they work in cooperation with the big corporations. Even when acting as a pole of “protest politics”, One Nation supported most of the federal government’s anti-union and austerity measures.
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While the forms political parties take in capitalist societies can vary considerably, there are usually four common facets: a leadership, policy and ideology, an electoral base and a way of governing. Marxists have long recognised, however, that political parties ultimately rule on behalf of social classes and factions of these classes. 
In the older and more stable capitalist countries, the class character of most mainstream parties of the “centre right” is often quite explicit. Employer and industry associations and people from these ranks in society dominate their leadership and policies. They adopt the posture of being “natural” parties of government. The Liberal-National Coalition performs this role in Australia. 
But these parties face a problem: most members of the population are wage workers or small proprietors with interests that diverge from those of the wealthy elites. While the leadership and actions of such parties in power are thoroughly dominated by tiny wealthy elites, their policies must have wider appeal. As Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky remarked: 
“The economically powerful big bourgeoisie represents an infinitesimal minority of the nation. To enforce its domination, it must ensure a definite mutual relationship with the petty bourgeoisie and, through its mediation, with the working class.”
These leaderships must appeal to the so-called middle classes as an electoral base. One key way they may also win some support is through cultivating nationalism and other prejudices. 
Not surprisingly, the ability of these parties to maintain support wanes at times. In the inter-war years of the Great Depression and its aftermath, disenchantment with the traditional parties of the centre right led to the rise of mass fascist parties and movements. The softer nationalism of the centre right gave way to a darker message. It shifted the blame for political and economic woes to external and internal “enemies of the people” by appealing to racism, militarism, nationalism, anti-Semitism, sexism and homophobia. 
“Outsider” political parties can benefit from exploiting these fears. Most far right parties start with a base among people disenchanted with the traditional centre right. 
While many business leaders may initially oppose aspects of this harder economic nationalism, other sections of the elite will toy with them. Faced with a crisis, most of the ruling class will swing behind the far right.
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While most expressions of contemporary right populism are not yet openly fascist, there are parallels to the 1920s and 1930s. In Italy, Benito Mussolini brought together a coalition of far right nationalist political forces with an explicit goal of opposing the labour movement coming to power. Widespread mass strikes and protests had broken out in the “red years” of 1919 and 1920. 
The fascist Squadristi (black shirts) were formed among the middle classes to stage violent attacks on striking workers and the left. Instead of replacing capitalism with workers’ control, the fascists promoted a “corporatist” state and society. A “new man” and modern and scientific society would emerge out of the partnership of workers with the corporations. The black shirts eventually marched on Rome and occupied many government posts, prompting King Victor Emmanuel III to appoint Mussolini as prime minister in 1922.
The rise of the Nazi party in Germany was similar. By 1918, the German ruling class project of establishing a zone of control in in central Europe through a war of conquest had ended in disaster. Germany entered a protracted political and economic crisis. The ruling class also feared the rise of the country’s powerful labour movement and mass electoral support for the Social Democrats and (to a lesser extent) the Communist Party. 
Some political leaders and business figures had long hoped to establish a nationalist party to rival the Social Democrats. But parties such as the Catholic centrists and right wing National Liberals did not have mass working class support. One of these projects – initiated by Anton Drexler – became the National Socialist German Workers Party (the Nazis). The original goal was to attract urban workers to an anti-Semitic, nationalist and anti-Marxist party with a “socialist” guise. 
The Nazis did win support, but not largely among urban workers. Rather, they were popular with disenchanted war veterans. The economic and political crisis of 1923 resulted in the first burst of support for the Nazis. Now under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, they staged a failed political uprising. 
A new set of crises in the late 1920s meant the Nazis soon emerged as major electoral force. Their largest initial base of support, however, was among the rural population, especially Protestant farmers. As Thomas Childers documented, as the economic crisis accelerated between 1928 and 1932, the Nazis gained a footing in urban areas among the now impoverished middle classes.
These middle classes retained a strong sense of identity and elitism. Public servants and some professions had been granted a “rank-like” status in the prewar Bismarckian state. They reacted to unemployment by blaming the working class and Jews. 
While sections of big business had long supported the Nazis, most “respectable” political and business leaders kept an arm’s length from Hitler’s “rabble”. But as the party grew in popularity and the threats posed by the working class deepened, many came over to the party. 
Hitler’s ideology was not that distinct from expansionist German nationalism, the ambitions of which he saw as being “betrayed” by “international Jewry”. His Mein Kampf and an unpublished “second book” outlined his plans for Germany to become a great military power through annexing territory in the east. 
Once in power, the Nazis quickly abandoned any pretence of “socialism”. After banning trade unions and parties of the left, the regime even repressed sections of its own base. 
A secret rearmament program helped maintain some level of economic growth and employment, despite the strains this imposed on German capitalism. The regime was eventually forced to launch its campaign of military conquest years earlier than planned.
Australia was not immune from the influence of fascism. A network of far right political organisations emerged after 1918. In the aftermath of the war and failed conscription referendum, the Australian Protective League comprised paramilitary squads ready to assist with the maintenance of “law and order”.
Later in the 1930s, the so-called New Guard emerged. Less secretive than its predecessor, the Old Guard, it recruited more openly among the middle classes and attacked meetings of the left. The goal was to bring down Jack Lang’s ALP government in New South Wales. 
In all these cases, the combination of political and economic crisis and threat posed by the labour movement resulted in the emergence of middle class fascist movements. 
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Fascism had largely discredited itself in the war. The Soviet Union had ended up in control of a large part of Europe. Conditions of economic boom meant few major political forces would openly express extreme nationalist sentiments. These factors combined to create a pattern of “stable” political competition between rival centre left and centre right political parties in the more established capitalist countries.
The situation began to change after the early 1970s. The faltering postwar economic boom and backlash against mass protest movements of students and workers created the conditions for the emergence of a new populist right. 
Political parties emerged like the National Front in France and the Italian Social Movement (later National Alliance) and Northern League, and the Austrian Freedom Party. The popularity of these parties waxed and waned with the political and economic climate. Disenchantment with the neoliberal policy consensus between the centre right and left parties gradually created more openings for the so-called populist right.
Unlike prewar fascism, these parties largely did not cloak themselves as often with selective language derived from the left. They did, however, focus on nationalism and national populism, especially in their economic policy rhetoric. They are also mostly committed to a broader ruling class strategy of political and military intervention throughout the world. This includes war and occupation of the Middle East. 
While anti-Semitism is often present, today’s right populists instead more often exploit fear about the impacts of mass immigration, especially from Third World countries. The decades of the “war on terror” resulted in a growing prominence of anti-Muslim and Islamophobic themes. 
Since 2008, the combination of the lingering impacts of the great recession and influx of refugees from conflicts in the Middle East has underpinned a new rise in popularity of the far right. In Britain the most successful right populist party was the United Kingdom Independence Party. 
In Britain and the United States, significant far right influence also exists inside the main parties of the traditional right. The Tea Party movement in the Republican Party gave way to Donald Trump’s takeover in the face of opposition from much of the party’s leadership. 
As with the inter-war period, these currents and parties’ bases are often among regionally based and non-urban populations. The consistent theme is a prevalence of middle class voters who resent the impacts of growing precariousness in employment and economic insecurity. Some sections of the working class – especially where significant racial and ethnic divisions exist – support the right populist parties. 
An increasing divide also exists within the elite and ruling classes. A majority probably supports staying a course of standard neoliberal economic and social policy. They currently promote the idea of defending the “centre” against populist threats. 
In reality, the “mainstream” and the “populists” differ only in degree over how much they promote racial and nationalist themes. Another section – fearing the effects of a renewed economic crisis – see right populism as an effective strategy to contain any rebellion by working people. 
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Australia is, of course, a minor player in world affairs. One Nation – with its chaotic internal political culture and inarticulate leader – is widely seen as a political joke. It is a mistake, however, to dismiss entirely it and other right populist elements in Australian politics. 
While it is true that the One Nation of the late 1990s eventually imploded, it did make lasting impressions on policy. It had some successes as a “protest party”: there was a tightening of some immigration and visa restrictions. The major parties’ refugee policies – boat turn-backs, temporary protection visas, offshore gulags – came from One Nation. 
The revival of One Nation after 2016 was largely unexpected. This was possibly a reflection of the strategy the revived party adopted of targeting regional areas, largely in Queensland. The party’s vote increased from around 1 percent to more than 9 percent in Queensland, yielding two Senate seats. Votes of 4 percent in Western Australia and New South Wales resulted in the election of one senator from each these states (the double dissolution election halved the quota required to gain a Senate seat). 
The striking aspect of the vote was its geographical concentration. It was largest in rural and regional areas. These two “heartlands” were traditionally bulwarks of support for the Liberal and National parties. Contrary to popular opinion, most of these areas were not experiencing significant economic stress. 
Unemployment was often lower than average. Average age and home and other asset ownership was higher than in urban areas such as Brisbane. The closer voters were to large urban and multicultural cities, the less they were (generally) likely to vote for One Nation.
The party’s subsequent electoral performance was mixed, receiving 8.2 percent of the vote in the upper house in the 2017 Western Australian elections and winning three seats. Its 13.9 percent vote in the 2017 Queensland state election (where there is no upper house) yielded only one regional seat (Mirani, south of Mackay). 
As in the late 1990s, its federal parliamentary caucus collapsed into division. Hanson’s Queensland running mate Malcolm Roberts was disqualified. Following in the steps of NSW senator Brian Burston, Roberts’ replacement Fraser Anning resigned. 
As Rebecca Barrigos argues in Marxist Left Review, Hanson’s concentration of support in Queensland appears related to the state’s distinctive history and relatively decentralised population. Queensland has long been noted as a state with a peculiarly conservative political culture, being dominated for decades by premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen and the National Party.
Given this predicament, there were probably three factors that helped One Nation to re-emerge. First, there are similarities between the experiences that these populations have had with the mainstream political parties and that of other countries. The Liberal and National parties (and the ALP) spearheaded the neoliberal restructuring of Australia’s economy in the 1970s and 1980s. 
Second, and in the longer run, one consequence was the long “rural crisis” between the 1970s and 1990s. Employment, investment and the number of firms operating in agriculture declined across the period. The vote for the rural base of the conservative coalition, the National Party, consistently declined at the same time. 
While the economic and social status of the bush notionally improved after 2000 or so, the boom brought its own problems. The spread of mining and resource extractive industries upended communities and created new conflicts on the land. 
Third, both the Liberal and National parties (already merged into one party in Queensland) experienced a set of crises after being elected to federal government in 2013. The popularity of both parties collapsed under the leadership of Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey. While the former’s replacement by Malcolm Turnbull allowed the government narrowly to win a second term, discontent was high among the most conservative sections of the electorate. 
Hanson capitalised on this discontent in the election and its aftermath. She has taken on and promoted an economic nationalist message and xenophobia, and aspects of the so-called alt-right agenda such as men’s rights, law and order and opposition to “political correctness”. 
The chaos of the party notwithstanding, its popularity was clearly a factor in emboldening the most right wing elements in the federal Coalition caucus around Peter Dutton to eventually challenge Turnbull’s leadership in 2018. They hope to win back some of the One Nation vote by pandering even more to xenophobia. 
As in the 1990s, One Nation has played a protest role in electoral politics, helping to legitimise the rightward direction of the mainstream political parties, especially the Liberals and Nationals. While these parties currently have only limited use for extreme xenophobia and militarism, looming international conflicts and the threat of a second major slump in the world economy could change this. 
In addition, while One Nation receives the most attention in debate and the media, it is not the only right populist party that is active. Senator Fraser Anning’s maiden speech was even more racist than others by One Nation politicians, calling for a “final solution” to Muslim immigration into Australia.
He had defected to and was strongly defended by Bob Katter, leader of Katter’s Australian Party, of which Anning was briefly a member after leaving One Nation. Katter had previously been softer in his use of racism. He appears to be moving to even more explicitly racist positions on Islam and immigration. 
Then there are less high-profile outfits such as the Australian Liberty Alliance and the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers. The latter already has elected members in upper houses in Western Australia, New South Wales and Victoria. Its policies are very similar to One Nation’s on immigration but mostly focus on rural discontent with expansion of conservation areas and Australia’s strict gun control laws.
Most of the right populist parties do not (now, at least) have the extreme ambitions of inter-war fascism. There are similarities, though. Where the ruling classes have had to accept some forms of democratic legitimacy and voting over who notionally controls the state, they invariably create political parties that can compete with the mass parties of the left favoured by most workers. 
The parties of the centre right promote themselves as “natural” parties of government. Their ties to the ruling class mean they invariably take policy measures that alienate a part of their base. The softer nationalism that these parties promote gives way to more extreme forms of xenophobia, militarism and racism. 
In the inter-war years, the ruling classes eventually embraced far right parties in the face of threats from militant labour movements. Today’s right populist parties are more protest parties that combine xenophobia with economic nationalism. 
One Nation and its rivals have carved out a space playing this role in Australia. The question of whether the threat this poses dissipates depends partly on whether any significant section of the ruling class adopts these parties’ policies and positions.

One Nation and right-populist protest politics

This is part of Red Flag's guide to Australia’s four major political parties – <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/6762">Labor</a>, <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/6753">Liberal</a>, National and <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/6772">Greens </a>– and <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/6773">One Nation</a>. This article by Ben Reid looks at the National Party.
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As the junior party of most of Australia’s centre right coalition governments, the National Party of Australia does not receive the same level of scrutiny that the Liberal Party does. Yet it is an important part of the ruling class’s hold over the political system. And while not likely to disappear soon, the party has been in consistent decline since the 1950s. The crisis reflects both the decline of “agrarian” political parties in many wealthier capitalist countries and the unique features of the Nationals. 
Originating as the Country Party, the Nationals were a strongly agrarian-based organisation. As Linda Botterill and Geoff Cockfield note in their 2009 book The National Party: Prospects for the Great Survivors, there has been considerable variation in the forms that agrarian political parties have taken around the world. Their unifying theme has been “understanding agriculture and farmers as holding a special place in society”. The political and ideological implications of these views varied according to the time and level of economic development. 
The inter-war Eastern European “peasant parties” (like the Polish Peasant Party “Piast” or later the People’s Party), for instance, often promoted ties to the monarchy and landowning classes. Others, like the Czech Republican Party of Farmers and Peasants, supported land redistribution. Most were socially conservative. In other cases, small farmers were more politically radical and sympathetic to the labour movement. The Landless Peasant Movement in Brazil today is one example.
For the most part, though, the agrarian parties’ main base of support was small and middle farmers with a “sectoral” allegiance to agriculture. These groups were often hostile to both “big business” and “big labour”. Although often struggling to survive economically, small farmers nevertheless believed that they had interests distinct from the growing working classes. They above all wanted to preserve their property rights. 
Yet the growth of capitalist relationships tended to doom most small farmers to bankruptcy. Only the most competitive survive using capital-intensive farming methods. 
Many of these parties formed unstable alliances with urban commercial elites against the labour movement. These ruling class elements, in turn, granted concessions to small farmers to preserve an electoral base. Such political alliances inevitably promoted conflicts and occasionally broke down. 
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From its origins in 1920, the Country Party defined its role and electoral base by a desire to promote the interests of agriculture in Australia. The party promoted “country-mindedness” as its own form of agrarianism. Despite already being a heavily urbanised country by the 1920s, Australia was presented as an essentially agricultural society with a “pioneer spirit”. 
For example, Don Aitkin argued in a 1985 essay that political “power resides in the city, where politics is trapped in a sterile debate about classes. There has to be a separate political party for country people to articulate the true voice of the nation”.
Country-mindedness drew on myths around the “ANZAC legend” and other facets of Australian nationalism. It also included hostility to foreign interests and Indigenous claims to land. The environment was a resource to be productively exploited. While country-mindedness promoted the image of the small farmer in the face of city-based interests and organised labour, it ignored that it had often been wage labourers who had built the agricultural sector before World War One.
Significant industrial organisations had been built from the 1870s onwards among shearers and miners. The economic depression of the 1890s led to widespread strike waves, resulting in many defeats for the trade union movement. The ensuing emergence of the ALP eventually led to the creation of arbitration and the entrenching of some labour rights. The ALP also advocated protection of the manufacturing sector, which disadvantaged agricultural exporters. 
The main agribusiness interests, therefore, began to organise their own conservative and anti-labour candidates. Several state-based parties such as the Victorian Farmers’ Union and the Farmers and Settlers Party of New South Wales had already supported candidates after 1912. 
The Country Party eventually emerged as a compromise between large and smaller farmers. The former opposed tariffs and changes to land tenure. The latter wanted their own form of protection in price support schemes and marketing pools. 
Many comparatively smaller and medium-sized farm owners were united with large farmers in opposition to unions. While a large section of the rural population was wage earners, they often gravitated to the more well-to-do farmer interests that had the ability to mobilise resources and pose as local leaders.
When the Country Party emerged in an unexpected position of having the balance of power (12 of 75 seats) in the 1922 elections, its leader Earl Page was able to negotiate a coalition with the centre right Nationalist Party (after it ejected former ALP leader Billy Hughes). Page remained the party’s main leader in the inter-war years. The federal party set the main trend of governing in coalition with centre right governments. 
The party was able to maintain its representation and shared government with the Nationalist and later United Australia Party. It helped implement a range of anti-trade union measures in the 1920s. The 1928 Transport Workers Act, for instance, targeted maritime workers. And it enthusiastically supported measures that led to declines in conditions for urban workers. Well-to-do people promoted antipathy between workers on the docks and farmers, to distract the latter from real causes of their problems (banks and traders). 
However, the agricultural sector received increased support through funds for infrastructure, subsidies and settlement schemes. Ongoing turbulence in international markets meant the income of the wheat and meat industries fluctuated. The Meat Export Bounties Act established a bounty payment on any exported beef. Similar measures supported the livelihood of dairy farmers. Wool, however, remained the backbone of agriculture and Australian capitalism’s exports. Big pastoral interests dominated government decisions. 
There were also changes in how farming was conducted, with a reduction in demand for labourers. There were 403,000 people employed in agriculture in 1911 – around 23 percent of the workforce. Owner-proprietors were 52.6 percent of the agricultural labour force. 
By 1933, the number of people employed in agriculture rose to 513,000 (still 23 percent of the labour force due to the depression and unemployment in the cities). Yet owner-proprietors had increased to 59 percent of people working in the sector. The Country Party reached its highest level of support in 1940 with 13.7 percent of the vote and almost 20 percent of seats in federal parliament. 
By 1947, total employment in agriculture had fallen to 452,000, or just 15 percent of the labour force, and owner proprietors were 64 percent of people working in the sector. The type of employment also shifted away from wage labour to self-employment. “Bounties” and other measures (such as allocating land to returned soldiers) also expanded the number of owner-cultivators. 
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These conditions continued into the 1950s as the Country Party solidified its role as a coalition partner with the Liberal Party during long years of Robert Menzies’ prime ministership. However, things began to change in the 1960s. The Country Party’s vote had fallen below 10 percent by 1951. It maintained this level of support through the rest of the decade. By 1961, however, agriculture accounted for just 10 percent of the labour force. The proportion of Australians living in rural areas was also declining. 
Other changes to farming practices began to impact owners of smaller farms. Although export markets had diversified away from reliance on the UK, the prices of key commodities wool, wheat and meat fluctuated. Severe drought also occurred between 1958 and 1968. 
One result was the emergence of the so-called rural crisis in the 1970s and 1980s. While sheep flocks and areas under cultivation increased, the number of farms and rural enterprises began to decline. These had remained steady at around 250,000 between 1930 and 1970. But by 1990, there were fewer than 130,000. 
The Country Party’s primary vote first fell to below 8 percent in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The decline had prompted it to rename itself the National Country Party and then National Party of Australia in 1982 to appeal to non-rural voters.
The Nationals, however, remained loyal servants of capital. Between 1973 and 1975, the party’s leader Doug Anthony participated in attempts to remove the first federal ALP government since 1949. And he led attacks on the trade unions under the Fraser government between 1975 and 1983. 
Yet cuts to services and reductions in subsidies impacted the party’s base. Resentment emerged against the banks in the 1980s as increasing numbers of farms were foreclosed. 
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The National Party became caught in a net of contradictions. Its hostility to the labour movement and support for capitalism meant it was unwilling to argue for measures to prop up its shrinking base among farmers. By 1979 a new peak body emerged – the National Farmers’ Federation – which supported the neoliberal restructuring of the rural sector. The party largely was relegated to a role of “softening the blows” of these attacks while in government. 
Three main trends emerged in different parts of Australia. 
In Western Australia, the state branch had always maintained some independence from the federal party and from state Liberals. And it had split over participation in the state coalition government between 1978 and 1983. While maintaining several seats in the state parliament, it was only ever able to regain one federal seat, in 2010. Tony Crook, however, opted to sit as a cross-bencher. 
Another path was merging with the Liberals. The Nationals had been the dominant partner in coalition governments in Queensland. As Rebecca Barrigos documents in a Marxist Left Review essay, Queensland was, historically, an exceptional state. Its settlement was more decentralised than others. The ALP had ruled Queensland virtually uninterrupted between 1915 and 1957. It had reinforced its power by establishing a gerrymandered electoral system in 1949 that favoured country areas where the party had a base among the then still large wage-earning population. 
The combination of increased farm mechanisation and the 1950s split in the ALP reversed the situation. The Country Party was able to manipulate the system even further to entrench its rule. The high point was premier Joh Bjelke-Peterson’s rule between 1968 and 1987. Bjelke-Peterson implemented a range of reactionary measures while opening the state to intensified resource development from mining capital. During this time, the Nationals arguably succeeded in becoming the main party of business interests in the state. 
Perhaps dizzy from success, Bjelke-Peterson was touted for a time as a potential prime minister through the infamous “Joh for PM” campaign. The state’s Liberal Party had already left the government in 1983. 
Bjelke-Peterson eventually lost power after the Fitzgerald Inquiry revealed widespread corruption in the state. Faced with declining support, in 2007 the Nationals and the Liberals merged into the Liberal and National Party.
The third and main trend was the emergence of competitors. Nationally, the party’s share of the vote continued to fall. One Nation emerged as a serious competitor between 1996 and 2001, exploiting xenophobia and disenchantment with the political system in regional areas. In 1998, the Nationals obtained just 5.3 percent of the primary vote, although still controlling 10 percent of federal lower house seats. As early as 1990, Doug Anthony’s seat of Richmond in NSW was lost to the ALP, largely due to demographic changes. 
In 2010, the party’s primary vote reached its lowest level, 3.4 percent. Most seats were lost to its coalition partner, the Liberals. Others went to rural independents such as Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor. Bob Katter also won his seat of Kennedy. Katter left the National Party in 2001. His history is highly illustrative. His father, Bob Katter senior, had initially been a union official and ALP member before the 1957 split. By 1966 he had defected to the Country Party, winning the seat of Kennedy. He could easily shift from the right wing and agrarian Queensland ALP to the Country Party. 
Katter Jnr had a long career in the Bjelke-Peterson government before shifting to federal politics. He established his own Bob Katter’s Australia Party in 2011 to “represent agriculture” in Australian politics. Then, in 2016, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation unexpectedly re-emerged with almost 10 percent of the Senate vote in Queensland. 
Other competitors include the Shooters, Farmers and Fishers Party. It emerged to protest the Howard government’s restrictions on gun ownership in the late 1990s. It now has lower house seats in NSW and upper house seats in state parliaments across the country. It openly attacks the Nationals as not being “dinkum about doing anything for the country-side’s long term future”.
In the spirit of the “country-independents” who broke with the National Party in 2010, yet another current has emerged in the New England region of NSW. Drawing attention to the impacts of coal seam gas mining and climate change, activist Charles Tym established an “Anyone But Nats” campaign, arguing: “The National Party turn their backs when a lot of rural people are very concerned about climate change and they are doing deals on water and it’s just not good enough”.
Like many agrarian parties around the world, the National Party has experienced considerable declines in support and influence associated with the decline of the agricultural sector. Its attempts to rebrand itself and appeal to a broader voter base have floundered. It remains a party dominated by agribusiness and well-to-do farmers hostile to the labour movement. Its coalitions with the Liberal Party entailed support for unpopular neoliberal policies that undermined many small farmers and regional communities.
These contradictions – economic and political – have undermined the party.

The National Party in decline

The ongoing armed conflict between government forces and Islamist rebels in Marawi, the Philippines, has taken a familiar turn. Evidence is emerging of increased US and Australian military support for the government of Rodrigo Duterte and the Philippine military. 
The fighting in Marawi – the capital of Lanao del Sur province in Mindanao – started in May 2017. Philippine military and police remain engaged in a pitched battle with Islamic State-affiliated fighters from the Maute (or Islamic State of Lanao) and Abu Sayyaf groups. 
The fighting purportedly began when the Philippine military attempted to apprehend Abu Sayyaf leader Isnilon Hapilon. Maute and Abu Sayyaf forces responded by occupying large areas of the city, leading to a siege and fighting. 
The heaviest urban fighting of recent times in the Philippines has destroyed large parts of the city. More than 600 insurgents, 140 government troops and 80 civilians have been killed, with many more wounded and displaced. 
Duterte used the crisis as a pretext to declare martial law across the whole of Mindanao. Its 20 million inhabitants have faced increasing repression since May. Duterte has also unleashed a wave of violent repression across the Philippines against small time drug peddlers and the poor. 
The Philippine elite’s traditional military and political allies have now re-emerged as crucial backers of the Duterte regime. Despite frictions with the United States in the early part of Duterte’s government, the Philippine military confirmed that there were foreign troops “on the ground” in Marawi in June. 
According to the New York Times, the United States also confirmed that Special Forces troops were “providing support and assistance in the southern Philippines”. Armed Forces of the Philippines spokesperson Restituto Padilla added that these military units had “been moved to help ground forces in Marawi”.
According to the Stratfor news service, other military allies have also been involved in the fighting. The United States and Indonesia increased maritime patrols in the area. Australia and Singapore have been providing surveillance and intelligence services. The Australian government has provided two high-tech AP-3C Orion aircraft for surveillance support to the Philippine military. 
While much attention has recently focused on Duterte’s increasingly friendly relations with China, it has so far played a limited role. China provided a package of small arms assistance worth $11.7 million. But it remains focused on trade and investment opportunities and is considering what the status of Davao in Mindanao might be in its One Belt, One Path infrastructure initiative. 
The presence of Special Forces follows a long history of United States intervention in the Philippines, which is intimately bound up with the current conflict. An occupying colonial power between 1898 and 1947, the United States has continued to act as a security guarantor of last resort for the Philippine elite and its interests. 
Widespread resentment over the United States support for the Marcos dictatorship between 1972 and 1986 eventually contributed to a partial retreat of its military presence in the 1990s. 
While the 1987 Philippine constitution prohibits the presence of foreign combat troops, the 1951 mutual defence treaty still bound the two countries to provide aid to one another if threatened by a third party.
Although the leases that provided the United States with permanent military bases in the country expired in the early 1990s, a visiting forces agreement allowed for a more or less permanent presence to be re-established. 
The Philippine elite historically welcomed this presence. It has confronted threats from major insurgencies from opposition groups over the last five decades. One of these has been conducted by a succession of organisations based among the predominantly Muslim and minority Bangsamoro population in the country’s south. 
The origins of the conflict stemmed from the colonisation of the Philippines. The Spanish colonial authorities were able to control most of the archipelago by co-opting tribal leaders and establishing an elite class of landowners between the 16th and 19th centuries. 
However, they were never able to gain full control of the areas already governed by Islamic sultanates in the south. It was only with the United States occupation that these areas were integrated into the colonial state. There were also Lumad and other indigenous minority groups. The population has long felt alienated from the Manila-based elite and the larger, predominantly Christian, population. 
Waves of “land-hungry” settlers from other parts of the Philippines and increasing political and economic marginalisation caused Mindanao’s population consistently to experience higher levels of poverty and unrest. The incidence of income poverty was still 59 percent of the population (compared to 26.3 percent for the Philippines) in 2015. 
These conditions led to and were accentuated by the emergence of armed insurgencies in the late 1960s. The Moro National Liberation Front eventually concluded a peace agreement with the Ramos government in 1996. The breakaway Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) continued fighting until reaching an agreement with Benigno Aquino’s government in 2014.
The origins of the current fighting lie in the failure of these agreements and the rising appeal of rival Salafist groups. The end of the Marcos dictatorship in 1986 resulted in a re-establishment of control by traditional economic and political elites. They have used their power and wealth to control elections and subvert any threats to their power. 
Most recently, the elite-controlled Congress prevented the adoption of the Bangsamoro Basic Law to establish a Bangsamoro Autonomous Region. 
In any event, some small groups had already broken with the MILF due to disagreements over the settlement. In light of the stagnation of peace efforts, it appears some of them became increasingly attracted to the Islamic State. 
Meanwhile, Mindanao’s importance in national politics continued to rise after Duterte (a Christian and former mayor of Davao) was elected president in 2016. While promising a shift to federalism and the implementation of limited social reforms, his regime has instead mostly sponsored widespread vigilante and police violence against small drug dealers. It is estimated to have cost more than 7,000 lives. 
While some point to Duterte’s “populism”, he has mostly succeeded in generalising his “warlord” style of governing Davao. He has taken the worst features of previous governments – such as Ramos’ “open for business”, Estrada’s fake social reformism, Arroyo’s widespread use of violence and increased relations with China and Aquino’s “do-nothingism” – to a whole new level. 
This has not stopped some sections of the left from fraternising with the regime. Groups and forces aligned with the Communist Party of the Philippines have pursued negotiations. Some figures from groups such as the National Peasant Movement have even sought to head government departments, such as the Department of Agrarian Reform. The negotiations have stalled, and the Congress-controlled Commission on Appointments has vetoed attempts to install these activists. 
Small pockets of opposition to Duterte’s government are beginning to emerge and are organising protests actions against the extrajudicial killings. Duterte, however, remains popular. Very few are attracted to or sympathise with the tactics of the Islamic State-aligned groups in Mindanao. 
Despite this, it is increasingly clear that no lasting political settlement in Mindanao is possible while political figures such as Duterte – and traditional backers like the US and its allies – continue to dominate national politics. The current challenge is how to develop links between the true defenders of the Bangsamoro people’s rights and the emerging opposition to Duterte.

Understanding the conflict in the Philippines

It's a peculiar image to launch a website with. Picture a ramshackle milk bar somewhere in suburban Victoria, accompanying an opinion piece headlined “From laissez faire to much, much fairer”.
Such is the way that thefairgo.com – the Liberal Party’s foray into online campaigning – chose to go.
The image and title encapsulate the contradictions that Australian right wing politics increasingly confront. The milk bar brings a sense of nostalgia, conjuring up memories of playing space invaders after getting your chocolate milkshake from one of the mouldy smelling fridges.
Yet milk bars are fast disappearing. There are now little more than 1,000 left across Victoria. Cluttered appearance and peculiar odours notwithstanding, their decline has been mainly due to the advent of longer supermarket opening hours which overwhelmingly advantaged the two main grocery chains: Coles and Woolworths.
It was precisely the owners of milk bars and other small businesses who were the bedrock of Liberal Party branches. Decades of pro-market policies led to a squeeze on these small businesses. Laissez faire really meant giving corporate capital open slather.
Peter Strong, the author of the milk bar article, claims: “It’s time the Australians who make up the small business sector got a genuinely fair go”.
He’s dreaming.
The main story in Australia since the early 1980s has been a gradual shift of the proportions of national income going to wages and profits – the wages share down, the profits share up.
But there’s another story in the figures: the income share of “unincorporated enterprises” (non-corporate firms) fell dramatically, from more than 30 to just over 20 percent of GDP, between 1960 and 1980. This corresponded with a decline in the number of small farmers and other small businesses. It has stayed at that level until today.
The financially squeezed owners of small businesses seldom blame the real cause of their hardship: big capital and its political representatives. Instead it is “the unions”, “greedy workers”, “too many immigrants” and so on.
The politics of “the fair go” caters to these illusions, because in reality the site is about a fair go for the rich – like the silver spoon offspring of the late reactionary columnist Paddy McGuinness. In one piece at the site, Parnell McGuinness describes popular left wing politicians Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn as “shuffling, slipper-wearing, above the workaday fray grand-daddies”.
Yet as more than one observer noted, the launch of the fair go website in May was followed mostly by older men who make Corbyn and Sanders look like the leaders of a youth contingent. McGuinness rants:
“It is vital that our immigration and residency criteria protect Australia from going down the path of a Europe which has been weakened by division and is now being wracked [sic] by Islamic terrorism. One of the foundation stones of effective integration is a shared language.”
In other words, support the Coalition’s regressive changes to immigration policy. It is just as overt as One Nation’s foul Islamophobia.
Some have speculated that thefairgo.com is an attempt to counter the influence of Getup! – the mostly pro-Labor online campaign site. Getup!’s real aim was always to channel campaigns into getting ALP governments elected.
Labor leaders knew that few activists were attracted to joining the ALP because the party had long been committed to policies as pro-big business as the Coalition’s. Hence, a “civil society” cloak was invented to subtly bring people back in behind the ALP.
Thefairgo.com is more about appealing to the disenchanted on the right who have migrated to One Nation and other far right outfits. As David Marr has shown, social media was important for bringing disenchanted older voters behind Pauline Hanson.
It will be amusing to watch how thefairgo.com competes for this audience. It can scapegoat migrants and bash unions, but sooner or later it will have to defend the Liberal Party’s inevitable attacks on small businesses and older voters.

Bloody Sunday in the Philippines

75 years of the United Nations: what is it good for?

Understanding politics in the Philippines

Philippine anti-terror act may increase rights abuses

John Percy's unfinished 'tasks and perspectives'

The ‘populist’ right and the regions

One Nation and right-populist protest politics

The National Party in decline

Understanding the conflict in the Philippines

Liberal Party’s ‘fair go’ failure

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