More than a million people living in Uruguay’s capital, Montevideo, have been unable to access safe drinking water for the last two months as the country faces its biggest drought in 75 years. All, however, are not suffering equally; corporations’ access to and usage of fresh water is increasing.
All life on this planet requires water. But under capitalism, even this most essential of products has been turned into a commodity. The situation in Uruguay is a terrifying glimpse of what will only become more frequent as the climate crisis rages on.
Foul tastes, stomach aches and doctors’ prescriptions for bottled water are recurring complaints made by people in Montevideo. 
To manage the water shortages, government officials announced in May that they would dilute public drinking water supplies with salty water from the La Plata River, increasing salt levels in tap water to more than double the previous maximum levels permitted by the state water service. According to Environment Minister Robert Bouvier, the water is “not drinkable in the perfect definition [of the word]”. Those with health conditions have been advised to avoid drinking tap water. For the more than 500,000 people who earn less than A$940 per month, government-provided bottled water only became available in mid-July.
Unionists and activists have protested the lack of drinking water throughout June and July. Protesters bang on empty water bottles, shouting “it’s not drought, it’s looting”, a chant which has featured in recent protests for water in Chile and Mexico. 
The chronically underfunded public water system has been neglected for decades. Ismael Cortazzo, an official in the public water workers union, told Public Services International that “it was only in February of this year that the [public water] administration began to take some kind of action, but nothing substantial enough to mitigate what was already a major water crisis”. 
According to Cortazzo, staffing in the public water services has reduced by a quarter since 2020. Meanwhile, clean water leaks out of decrepit infrastructure onto the streets.
But the problem isn’t simply inadequate public infrastructure. Private companies in Uruguay consume extraordinary quantities of water. A 2018 investigation conducted by Uruguayan newspaper Brecha found that household water usage made up only 5 percent of the daily total. Export industries, such as soybean and rice farming and pulping mills, use up the bulk. Businesses are frequently allowed to siphon water from the Santa Lucia basin, Montevideo’s main public water supply. 
Earlier this month, the Guardian reported that a Google data centre currently under construction in southern Uruguay is expected to consume 7.6 million litres of water per day—directly from the public drinking water system—to cool its servers. This is equivalent to the normal daily water usage of 55,000 people. The World Rainforest Movement estimates that Uruguay’s third mega pulp mill, which opened in April, devours 20 million litres each day.
While ordinary Uruguayans get sick and suffer from lack of access to safe drinking water, the taps pour freely for the rich.

Chris Giddings

‘It’s not drought, it’s looting’: Uruguay’s water crisis

Things might be getting tough for most of us, but it’s a good time to be an energy capitalist. Energy distributors have scored billions in extra profits due to regulatory loopholes and are set to make even more in the months and years to come.
In New South Wales, South Australia, Victoria and south-east Queensland, energy networks have made super-profits 67 percent higher than “normal profits” in the last eight years, according to data from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. 
These distributors have monopoly control over patches of infrastructure, so regulators are supposed to prevent them from price gouging. IEEFA researcher Simon Orme calculates that, by overestimating operating costs and charging customers based on the exaggerated figures, energy companies have managed to squeeze an additional $10 billion on top of the $15 billion in “normal profits” that they would have made. 
Orme estimates that this super-profit loophole will be responsible for between 15 and 30 percent of the coming energy price hikes for most of Australia’s east coast. 
While the energy companies were raking it in, more than a quarter of households—including nearly half of renters—struggled to pay their skyrocketing bills, according to research published by the Australian Energy Regulator last August. Another 37 percent anticipate difficulties paying bills in the next few years. Only 2 percent of households were not at all concerned by electricity prices.
You can get a sense of the cost-of-living crisis from how households are planning to cut back on energy usage and spending. Respondents to the AER survey said that they plan to “eat less”, “[sit] in cold, dark rooms”, “wash less” and “freeze” to deal with energy costs.
And the price hikes just keep coming. Power bills across the east coast of Australia are expected to increase by around 20-24 percent on average from July.

Power company super-profits pushing up bills

After fourteen years, the Melbourne public transport ticket system, Myki, is being replaced. Most of us won’t miss it. Myki’s successor is unlikely to offer any real improvement to the severe inadequacies of public transport in Victoria. But looking back at the confusing and costly Myki system in its dying days is yet another reminder of just how illogical and wasteful capitalism is.
The private running of public services like public transport has made services worse and simultaneously more expensive as companies try to profit at each step of the process. 
Purchasing tickets is confusing and complicated for first-time passengers who reasonably but incorrectly assume that they will be able to get them at any tram stop or from a bus driver. Instead, 7-Eleven and a random assortment of pharmacies and newsagents are the core infrastructure of Victoria’s public transport ticketing system. 
The introduction of the Myki system cost more than $1.5 billion and took seven years longer than anticipated to roll out. When the contract was renewed in 2016, the Victorian government paid out an extra $700 million. 
In comparison, estimates reported in the Age last year put the monthly cost of free public transport in Victoria at $75 million per month. In other words, the contracting fees paid out to Myki alone could cover close to two and a half years of free public transport.
Myki is only part of the problem. The private companies that run train services cut corners all the time. Leaked documents in 2015 found that Metro trains cancelled services and skipped stations to meet punctuality targets to get extra government funding. 
The capitalist class values public transport infrastructure because it enables millions of workers to get to work. But that doesn’t mean that transport needs to be efficient. The idea that workers are all individually responsible for their own transport means that it’s individual workers who end up bearing the costs of a failing public transport system. 
Where public transport is scarce or unreliable, workers are expected to put up with congestion while paying thousands for cars and petrol. When public transport is available, we’re expected to pay exorbitant fares to help the private companies that run it to turn a profit. 
It would be better, and cheaper, to put public transport back in public hands.

Why is public transport so crap in Melbourne?

In 1994, 15-year-old Jimmie Åkersson sought out a neo-Nazi party. Today, he’s brought that party into the mainstream. In disturbing results, the Swedish parliamentary elections on 11 September have given the far-right Sweden Democrats, which Åkersson has led since 2005, more than 20 percent of the vote. The party is now the second most popular in the country, and holds more seats than any other party.
In previous elections, the Sweden Democrats had been locked out of deals to form a minority government. Now, with more votes than any of the traditional conservative parties, the party could play a decisive role in forming the next coalition government, as negotiations take place to determine its composition.
Over the last couple of decades, the Sweden Democrats have attempted to overhaul their image. The party has banned the wearing of Nazi uniforms in its meetings and changed its logo from a flaming torch to an illustrated flower. But it’s remained as nationalist and xenophobic as ever, as former party secretary, Björn Söder, has proved. During his time as a parliamentary minister, Söder affirmed to the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter that he wanted to “create a society with a common [Swedish] identity”—which he argued in 2018 excludes Jews, Muslims and indigenous Sami people.
The Sweden Democrats made law and order, racism and Islamophobia central to this election. The party has publicly supported dawn raids and deportations of migrants and has threatened to deport whole families for being unemployed or “asocial”. Åkersson has taken up the slogan “Make Sweden good again”, and one of the party’s advertisements on Stockholm’s subway carriages reads, “Welcome to the migration train. You have a one-way ticket. Next stop, Kabul”. 
The far right have also made concerning gains among workers in recent years by blaming migrants for deteriorating health care and worsening conditions for pensioners. Of the members of Sweden’s blue collar trade union, 25 percent reportedly voted for the Sweden Democrats—more than any other political party.
The rise of the Sweden Democrats reflects an ongoing trend across Europe of far-right parties entering the mainstream. The popularity of the far-right Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy in the lead-up to the Italian election and the continuing significant support for Marine Le Pen in France demonstrate a frightening pattern that threatens the rights of workers’, the left, migrants and the oppressed.
Support for the outgoing Social Democratic government, on the other hand, has dwindled, and the last two elections were the party’s worst since the introduction of universal suffrage in 1921. Dissatisfaction with the status quo and the political establishment is rife. The Social Democrats’ rightward neoliberal trajectory has opened up space for the far right disingenuously to present themselves as the defenders of workers and to build support among sections of the working class.
Since the mid-1990s, privatisation has been on the agenda in Sweden. Electricity, health care, aged care and education have all been opened up for private profit, while real wages have stagnated. The Social Democrats, in government for 20 of the last 28 years, have been responsible for a significant portion of this neoliberal offensive.
When forming government at the start of 2019, the Social Democrats signed on to a deal with the Centre Party and the Liberal Party that allowed the Social Democrats to retain government in exchange for carrying out the economic policy and budget of their right-wing coalition partners. Under this agreement, the Social Democrats have imposed extensive restrictions on the right to strike, increased the retirement age and removed price regulations on rent for newly built homes. 
The Social Democrats’ collaboration with the free-market right was politically discrediting in the eyes of many workers. Rainor Melander, a worker and a member of the Social Democrats, told investigative journalists from the current affairs program Uppdrag Granskning that his first response to the agreement was, “How the hell could I be able to go out to my workmates and say that they should vote for the Social Democrats now?”
In the last few years, neoliberalism and inequality have only intensified. Swedish workers have been subjected to rapid deterioration in their living standards. This year they have suffered the most significant decline in real wages since the economic crisis of 1993, according to Scandinavia’s largest bank, Nordea. The Stockholm Chamber of Commerce estimates that electricity bills will be equivalent to just under $12,000 for 1.1 million Swedish households between October and March. The Swedish newspapers Express and Gothenburg Post have reported on numerous pensioners who have been forced to live without heating and to limit showers to once or twice a week in order to get by. 
Despite its reputation for well-funded state services, Sweden now has a two-tier healthcare system. Workers often rely on private healthcare insurance from their employers, and those who don’t have access to private health care put up with increasingly long waiting times for essential surgeries and appointments. The system was at breaking point before the pandemic and is now in a perpetual state of crisis. Calculations by the newspaper Dagens Nyheter show that nurses and midwives in just five Swedish hospitals worked 1.8 million hours of overtime in 2020-21. 
While working-class people’s lives have worsened, the Social Democrats have shifted the blame onto migrants and refugees and have accepted the Sweden Democrats’ concerns about “the integration problem” and law and order. They’ve increased police powers and implemented permanent limitations on refugees entering the country. In the process, they’ve made migrant workers more precarious and vulnerable.
The Social Democrats’ immigration minister, Anders Ygeman, has proposed plans to prevent “ghettos” by introducing maximum limits on the number of residents from migrant and low-economic backgrounds in any one area—a policy that would require the dispossession of thousands of migrants and the poor. This policy was defended by the recently resigned prime minister, Social Democrat Magdelena Andersson, who told Dagens Nyheter in an interview: “We do not want to have Chinatowns in Sweden, we do not want to have Somalitowns or Little Italies”. This rhetoric does little to win workers away from the far right but instead gives legitimacy to the extreme nationalism and bigotry of the Sweden Democrats and normalises their positions.
The parliamentary aspirations of the supposedly anti-capitalist Left Party prevent it from being any real alternative. The Left Party received some popularity for opposing anti-strike laws and calling for a vote of no confidence against the Social Democrats during their attempts to deregulate rental prices. But they’ve since made it clear that being part of the Social Democrats’ coalition government is far more important to them than challenging attacks on workers, migrants and the oppressed. 
The leader of the Left Party, Nooshi Dadgostar, has spent the last few months emphasising her willingness to compromise and get along with the Social Democrats and the parties to their right. Dadgostar told Dagens Nyheter that she “is learning how to give things away” and that her party is “not putting forward ultimatums”. Swedish social democracy has not only failed to challenge capitalism’s inequalities but has defended and entrenched them, providing fertile ground for the far right to broaden support for their regressive politics. 
Building a radical left is needed to offer a genuine alternative which identifies capitalism, not the most oppressed in society, as the real reason for growing poverty and crisis. As capitalism plunges into deeper and deeper crises, we urgently need a left that can channel anger against the status quo into resistance against the right and the system that produces it.

Far right makes gains in Swedish elections

The Victorian Labor government—which purports to be the most progressive in the country—oversees an increasingly punitive criminal justice system in which cops are handed money and powers with reckless abandon.
This month, the state parliament passed anti-protest laws that will hit environmental activists with up to $21,000 in fines or 12 months’ jail for obstructing logging operations. Meanwhile, the state-owned logging company VicForests, which in 2021 was exposed by the ABC as engaging in illegal logging activities, has faced no consequences for its unlawful environmental destruction. 
New proposed laws will likewise give the police a slew of new powers. The Major Crime and Community Safety Legislation Bill does away with existing restrictions on undercover policing and expands the search and seizure powers of police, especially in relation to digital assets. A further draft bill expands police investigative powers, making it easier for them to obtain and execute search warrants.
On 18 August, the Victorian lower house passed amendments to existing legislation that grant greater powers to police and protective services officers to punish individuals for being in the vicinity of police stations for reasons other than assisting police. According to Nerita Waight of the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service, “under these laws, someone standing outside a police station being rude to an officer could be fined over $900 if they don’t [leave]”.
These latest moves are a continuation of the law-and-order agenda that has characterised the Victorian Labor government since its election in 2014. Under Premier Daniel Andrews, Victoria Police has become the largest law enforcement agency in the country, measured by numbers. In 2016, Andrews signed onto the largest increase in police officers in the state's history in response to media-manufactured hysteria aimed at African migrants. On top of this, each year the government has committed to increasing police numbers. 
Victoria has around 22,000 police personnel, considerably more than New South Wales, a state that has 1.4 million more people and three times the area.
In the ten years between 2011 and 2021, annual police spending in Victoria has more than doubled, an increase of more than $2 billion. These spending increases have funded a significantly more militarised police force, complete with semi-automatic rifles and an arsenal of weapons designed, as Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton told the Age in 2018, to deal with “demonstrations that go over the top”. 
The arsenal of new anti-protest weapons includes projectile launchers, chemical weapons detonators and stinger grenades that release smoke, light and eight-millimetre pellets. In 2020, Victorian police got their hands on a fleet of advanced helicopters with long-range cameras. The latest addition to police weaponry was the announcement in December last year that access to tasers will be extended from just two of the police’s most militarised squads to every front-line officer.
Along with military-grade weapons and massive increases in personnel, the Andrews government has given the police the authority to shoot and kill reckless drivers. It has also introduced anti-association laws that allow police to impose bans on people as young as 14, which prevent them talking to or being around anyone who has been convicted of a criminal offence. 
The Andrews government has also impeded legislation that would increase the age of criminal responsibility from 10 to 14, a reform that is intended to keep children out of the prison system and which would bring Victoria into line with the global average. This is also an important social justice measure: a majority of imprisoned children under the age of 14 in Victoria are Indigenous, and Indigenous youth are 7.3 times more likely to be detained than non-Indigenous youth. According to Amnesty International, in Australia Indigenous children make up 65 percent of imprisoned 10 to 14-year-olds, with 68 percent of these children not convicted of a crime.
The Andrews government’s commitment to a more militarised state has resulted in Victoria reaching its highest prison population relative to the population since 1896, with 109 prisoners for every 100,000 residents in 2021. The Andrews government has torn down and privatised public housing, and yet prison funding has grown by 96 percent between 2013 and 2019. More than half of the Indigenous people currently in prison, and 44 percent of all prisoners in Victoria, have not been found guilty of any offence but are locked up because of restrictions on the right to bail, courtesy again of repressive measures introduced or maintained by the Labor government.
While the Liberal Party whips up hysteria and moral panic around crime, in practice it’s Labor that has carried out a historic expansion of the repressive carceral system. In the process, Victorian Labor has victimised the most vulnerable in our society.

Victoria, the police state

Sweden kept businesses, bars, restaurants, most schools and sports venues open for more than a year after first registering a coronavirus case in January 2020. State epidemiologist Anders Tegnell explained—in a now removed article in Dagens Industri, a Stockholm-based financial newspaper—that the country’s strategy to contain the virus would not “compromise our social functioning in a way that is more detrimental to any profits”. 
The strategy has failed. 
Sweden has the third highest per capita number of new daily COVID-19 cases in the world; infections are running at twelve and seven times the rate of neighbouring Finland and Norway respectively. Nearly 14,000 people have died and almost 1 million people have been infected. Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter has reported several incidents in which elderly patients with COVID symptoms were refused oxygen, placed on morphine, which is a respiratory inhibitor, and left to die. The healthcare workers’ union, Vårdförbundet, reports that one in five workers at Danderyd Hospital, Stockholm, have been diagnosed with COVID, and more than a quarter of staff who caught the virus reported having long-term health issues as a result.
Now, in the third wave, hospitals are overwhelmed. David Konrad of Karolinska University hospital told reporters from Dagens Nyheter that the hospital has an occupancy level of 170 percent. In Uppsala, a city north of the capital, the onus of preventing the spread of the virus has been put onto individuals; there are few limitations on most businesses. 
The head of the infection clinic at Uppsala hospital, in an interview on the national public broadcasting network Sveriges Radio, warned: “If this continues, there are not many more resources left. We have no more staff to borrow. We are beginning to come close to catastrophe”.
Across the world, the crisis has posed a dilemma for the capitalist class: either continue business as usual to secure immediate profits while the virus spreads, or minimise economic activity to limit the spread of the virus. Regardless of the horrific consequences of business as usual, Sweden became the model held up by the political right for how to respond to the pandemic.
T.J. Rodgers, a business executive, in an April 2020 Wall Street Journal article, praised the country’s response: “Sweden is fighting coronavirus with common sense guidelines that are much less economically destructive than the lockdowns in most US states”.
Elon Musk, who in the following month announced on Twitter that he was breaking local restrictions to reopen Tesla factories in California, repeatedly glorified Sweden’s approach. Three weeks later, he admitted on social media that he was diagnosed with COVID—in Sweden.
When Sweden and Britain faced a second wave in November, prominent British far-right politician Nigel Farage justified his new anti-lockdown party, Reform UK, by pointing to the “credible alternative” to serious public health measures that was “effectively being practised to a large degree in Sweden”.
The “herd immunity” supposedly achieved through mass infection, which Swedish authorities proposed, was touted by figures such as UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson for months to justify trying to reopen large sections of the economy by allowing COVID to spread rapidly through Britain. Johnson met with the Swedish epidemiologist who was the architect of the no-lockdown strategy two days before delaying circuit breaker lockdowns in September 2020. A professor in microbial genomics at the University of Birmingham, Alan McNally, estimated that the delay was responsible for 1.3 million extra infections. 
BBC Brazil reported in May that the fascist Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro had gloated about Sweden to justify the lack of lockdowns in his own country. “Shall we talk about Sweden? Ready! Sweden hasn't closed!” Close to 400,000 deaths officially have been registered in Brazil. 
Keeping schools open in Australia meant putting more people at risk of infection, but it ensured more workers could go to work. Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy accepted the same herd immunity arguments in an interview on the ABC’s Insiders program in March last year: “If [school students] are getting infected and they’re perfectly well, whilst they might spread it, it also creates a herd immunity”.
Alan Jones claimed on Sky News in August that Sweden “got it right” and preached the importance of letting “the rest of us get on with our lives”. The Victorian branch of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation demanded that Australia “adopt a proven-to-work model from Sweden”. In October, Australian journalist Adam Creighton described Sweden as an “example of a sane response to what’s turned out a relatively mild pandemic”. 
Maintaining business as usual has been responsible for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of deaths around the world. It has destroyed the lives of many more whose health will be permanently impacted. Sweden’s mass infection strategy has been a total disaster.

Sweden's hands-off coronavirus model has failed

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted existing inequalities, exposed the failings of neoliberal economics and laid bare the bankruptcy of capitalist politics. Amid the worst crisis in generations, the <a href="https://www.victoriansocialists.org.au">Victorian Socialists</a> are campaigning to put people before profit.
We will contest local council elections across Melbourne’s northern and western suburbs next month. We’re focusing on the failures of privatisation, the neglect of working-class communities suffering from high unemployment, the crisis of public housing and the need to challenge racism and take urgent action on climate change.
This will be the third election the Victorian Socialists have contested. We have already garnered tens of thousands of votes from left-wing and working-class people around Melbourne in the last state and federal elections. In the council elections, Victorian Socialists are standing nineteen candidates across five council areas—the most serious socialist campaign in a local election for decades.
Hundreds of thousands of workers have been made jobless in this crisis, but the federal government plants to slash JobKeeper and JobSeeker from late September. Meanwhile, bosses are pushing to reopen the economy as quickly as possible, putting all of our lives at risk. Unemployment and workers’ rights are matters of life and death. Our campaign will be a voice of the people, demanding that we protect lives, but also protect workers’ livelihoods.
After decades of privatisations, many carried out by local councils, wealthy capitalists are getting richer from under-resourced private aged care facilities, where the elderly have been left to suffer during the pandemic. The outsourcing and privatisation of Victoria’s health services led directly to the second outbreak. We’re campaigning to reverse the privatisations—to make sure that our parents’ and grandparents’ lives are always put before profits.
Residents of underfunded public housing towers have been among those who have suffered the most during this pandemic. Victorian Socialists want to see more money put into public housing—so we can both tackle the city’s housing crisis and make sure that everyone is living in a safe and clean environment.
Refugees are still locked up indefinitely, including in the Mantra hotel in Preston. The pandemic has made their situation more dangerous and crueller. Victorian Socialists are demanding that the refugees be released and granted protection visas so that they can live the rest of their lives as free people.
Climate change has not gone away, and the Victorian Labor government has quietly lifted bans on gas drilling. Victorian Socialists are campaigning to shift to 100 percent renewable energy and a zero-carbon economy.
Local councils are often nests of political cronyism that put the interests of property developers above those of residents. But activist councillors can organise communities to resist attacks from big business, to stand up to developers, to amplify the voices of the oppressed and to challenge policies of state and federal governments. That’s exactly what we will do if elected.
This year’s Victorian Socialists campaign is about electing councillors to build campaigns to challenge every form of inequality and injustice, while cutting through the lies of mainstream politics. Our candidates are activists, who can use council positions to take up important questions like Black Lives Matter and LGBTI rights. 
We have a chance of getting a socialist elected. But this might be our last opportunity in the realm of local councils. In past elections, Victorian Socialists received up to 10 percent of the vote in working-class areas. But under a biased system introduced by the Labor Party, the rules will change after this election—all councils will transfer to a “single member ward” system designed to benefit the major parties and keep smaller parties out of council.
The lockdown means we can’t have the meetings, the rallies and the mass events that Victorian Socialists usually excel at. That means the elections are even more biased than usual: the restrictions are good for candidates with connections to the mainstream media.
So we’re <a href="https://www.victoriansocialists.org.au/covid_19">campaigning as hard as we can</a> because we believe that these local elections could have a huge impact. If socialists are elected through Melbourne’s north and west, there will be more voices disrupting the status quo of official politics as the health and economic crises continues to unfold.
We pride ourselves on our people powered campaigns, which rely on hundreds of volunteers. Despite all the COVID-19 restrictions, we’ve found every opportunity to campaign safely. We’re calling local residents, letterboxing when we can, fundraising and putting up yard signs. <a href="https://www.victoriansocialists.org.au/volunteer">Every single volunteer</a> is crucial to making the most of this opportunity to get socialists elected to council.
Melbourne City Council
Our campaign in Melbourne has a simple premise: the next lord mayor should be a front-line worker. Victorian Socialists will campaign to end the dominance of big business in Melbourne and be a voice for the workers who make the city run. In the Melbourne City Council elections, business owners and landlords get extra votes—so they’re officially rigged for the rich. But the council should represent working-class people. So we’re putting up <a href="https://www.victoriansocialists.org.au/melbourne-city">Kath Larkin</a>, a unionist at Metro Trains, as the Victorian Socialists candidate for lord mayor. Kath’s team includes social worker Daniel Dadich and teacher Chris di Pasquale.
Moreland
Moreland Council includes Brunswick, Glenroy and Pascoe Vale—neighbourhoods with some of Melbourne’s highest levels of unemployment, rental and mortgage stress and casualisation. One of Moreland’s privatised aged care facilities, St. Basil’s in Fawkner, has been the site of one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks.
Public housing in Brunswick West has been destroyed under the Labor government’s “renewal” program. And property developers are still driving local politics— Moreland’s council is considering planning reforms that would give property developers a rubber-stamp approval process, removing democratic oversight of new developments.
Moreland is also known for its diverse population, with residents from many different migrant backgrounds. That’s why far-right racists tried to stage a march through Coburg several years ago. <a href="https://www.victoriansocialists.org.au/moreland">Victorian Socialists candidates for Moreland Council</a> were among those who organised a community protest to challenge them. Our candidates are Nahui Jimenez, an Indigenous Mexican-Australian socialist and organiser of many anti-racist protests, and Daniel Taylor, an editor of Red Flag.
“We need to stop selling off our public housing and build more”, Nahui says. “We need public housing, not ‘social’ housing. We need to stop investing in prisons and giving handouts to private developers. We need to fight for affordable rent. We need to be prepared to stop evictions. All Victorian Socialists councillors will fight evictions both on the ground and in any council we are in. We need to end this housing crisis now.”
Maribyrnong
Maribyrnong Council represents some of Melbourne’s western suburbs, known for their working-class and migrant heritage. The council has supported privatisation, and local residents have endured attacks on green spaces like Footscray Park, and suffered from toxic fires and from unlawful chemical dumps. But communities are also known for collective resistance.
<a href="https://www.victoriansocialists.org.au/maribyrnong">Victorian Socialists candidates in Maribyrnong</a> include Jorge Jorquera, an educator and long-term community activist, Andrew Charles, a climate scientist, and Liz Walsh, a hospitality worker and member of Socialist Alternative. They're campaigning to overturn the privatisation of aged care services, which was pushed through by both Labor and Greens councillors, to massively expand public housing and make sure that planning decisions put working-class residents first, and to defend the green spaces and cultural heritage of the west.
“I have spent my whole life in the west fighting for the rights of migrant communities, children, young people and ordinary working-class families”, Jorge says. “I hope to keep fighting for working-class families in the west as part of the Maribyrnong Council.”
Darebin
Darebin, in Melbourne’s north, is the site of the Mantra Hotel, where refugees are imprisoned in dangerous conditions under a mandatory detention policy that no major party will challenge. The Greens-dominated council has been happy to privatise services and ignore the needs of working-class residents.
<a href="https://www.victoriansocialists.org.au/darebin">Victorian Socialists candidates in Darebin</a> include LGBTI activists Roz Ward, founder of the Safe Schools coalition, and Ali Hogg, one of the best-known leaders of the campaign for marriage equality. The Darebin ticket also includes activists who’ve led rank-and-file resistance to job losses in universities—like Steven Chang, a library worker at La Trobe University. Voting for union militants and activists will be a way to send a strong message to a council that has defended the status quo of pro-business, neoliberal politics.
Hume
Hume covers some of the outer-northern suburbs plagued by dodgy companies that are to blame for regular chemical and waste fires that spew toxic smoke across our suburbs and put workers’ lives in danger. 
<a href="https://www.victoriansocialists.org.au/hume">I’m our candidate in Hume</a>. I’m a front-line healthcare worker, and I’ve seen how these polluting companies profit off the back of the ordinary people that live in suburbs where the air often isn’t safe to breathe. As far as these criminal companies are concerned, the people who living in working-class and migrant communities like Hume are disposable if it helps boost their bottom line.
Victorian Socialists have been on the side of local activists in the No Toxic Incinerator for Hume campaign that recently defeated a proposal for a dangerous waste-to-energy incinerator after months of tireless campaigning.
Vote Victorian Socialists
On 14 September, some of the campaign restrictions were lifted and our volunteers hit the streets to distribute fliers via letterboxes. There are only a few more weeks until ballots start arriving. <a href="https://www.victoriansocialists.org.au/volunteer">Every single volunteer</a>, yard sign, donation and vote will matter in this campaign. If we can get even one socialist candidate elected, it will be a step forward for progressive causes in Melbourne.
This crisis has made the longstanding problems of inequality and privatisation into urgent questions. Let’s make sure that socialist voices are represented in the debates about how we build a better world, and that activists and fighters are shaking things up in the councils that will be making decisions. If you want to help, <a href="https://www.victoriansocialists.org.au">check out Victorian Socialists</a>, volunteer, donate, share our stuff around—and vote for us!

People before profit: vote Victorian Socialists in Melbourne's local elections

In the 1970s, Sweden’s main trade union federation and the social democratic party toyed with a “wage-earner funds plan”, sometimes called the Meidner Plan after one of its architects, the economist Rudolf Meidner. Many view the plan as a tragically untested experiment that could have turned Sweden into a socialist country.
For example, Peter Gowan and Mio Tastas Viktorsson, in a 2017 Jacobin magazine article <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/08/sweden-social-democracy-meidner-plan-capital">“Revisiting the Meidner Plan”</a>, claim that it was “one of the most ambitious democratic socialist policy proposals ever seriously considered in a developed economy. It would confront not only the question of who reaps the benefits of excess profits, but also the question of who owns, controls, and manages the workplace”. That is, the plan gave a glimpse of a managed, parliamentary, road to socialism. Its failure, they claim, was a result of the timidity of Sweden’s social democrats, rather than any flaws in the proposal itself.
The plan was designed to give workers shares in businesses, so that if the companies were profitable, some sections of the working class could skim off a little portion of excess profits through stock dividends. Unions would provide “representatives” for stock-holding workers on corporate boards and control the distribution of these dividends. All corporations would be majority worker-owned within 20 to 75 years.
Meidner assumed that workers’ interests – and even working class democracy – could be harmonised with the imperatives of profit-seeking in the markets. But any corporation competing for profits within a capitalist market needs to exploit its workers as much as possible just to keep up with its national and international rivals. He focused on cooperation between bodies that are supposed to organise workers and those of the profit-making of bosses – essentially, integrating unions into the management structure of capitalist enterprises.
Meidner believed that one of his plan’s great selling points was that it would give workers an economic interest in the success of their employer and encourage them to compromise. When workers controlled more than 50 percent of the shares, the need for class struggle would be eradicated because workers’ interests would be in harmony with those of their bosses. In theory, it was bad. In practice, it was worse. The Meidner Plan was a way to incorporate the trade union bureaucracy more thoroughly into the running of capitalism. Indeed, it was implemented to sabotage a militant working class movement demanding more than the social democratic government and Swedish capitalism were willing to grant them.
Sweden has an impressive history of radical working class struggles. Swedish workers were pioneers of the general strike in the early 20th century. By the time of the Great Depression, the country had the highest level of strike days of any European country. In 1932, the Swedish Social Democratic Party (the Arbetarepartiet–Socialdemokraterna, or SAP), was elected to government and remained in office until 1976. Long before the Meidner plan, the reformist SAP had established a tradition of class collaboration. It formed coalition governments with middle-class parties, sided with the main employers’ federation against workers on strike and concocted an agreement – signed by the bosses and the unions – banning solidarity strikes and “socially dangerous” strikes, and giving the bureaucrats of the biggest union federation the ability to overrule decisions of its constituent unions.
Before and during World War Two, Sweden’s trade with the Nazis protected it from bombing and invasion, and helped its economy stay profitable. Afterwards, Sweden’s mines and factories were intact to produce goods for a devastated Europe during the postwar economic boom. Sweden’s unemployment rate was in effect zero. Labour was in high demand. Workers had good bargaining power, and capitalists could afford to make some economic concessions to maintain their highly exploited workforce. The SAP was able to introduce free child care, public housing and health care – reforms that increased the supply of labour into booming industry.
That didn’t mean the capitalist class, or the politicians managing capitalism, were interested in the wellbeing of workers. Throughout this period, the SAP forcibly sterilised anyone perceived to be a potential “burden” on society. Welfare wasn’t meant to support the existence of non-profitable people, like those with serious disabilities. When general child support was introduced in 1948, authorities argued that the forced sterilisation rate had to be ratcheted up to prevent any growth in the number of social burdens.
During the 1970s, reformist parties across the world found themselves at a critical conjuncture. In Sweden, renewed class struggle emerged in 1968 and was sustained throughout the 1970s. Rank and file discontent led to a resurgence in labour militancy and growing rates of wildcat strikes. This was Sweden’s share of the struggle that was breaking out around the world at the end of the 1960s and throughout the 1970s. At the same time, however, the postwar boom was coming to an end. It was no longer easy for capitalists to make concessions to the working class. Reformist governments had depended on capitalists permitting them to redistribute some wealth to workers. That was getting harder and harder.
The capitalist class began to attack union demands, using their power under the SAP’s decades-old agreement. To maintain union strength, in 1976 the unions withdrew from the agreement. Local bargaining became more important. Industrial militancy and shop floor strike committees flourished. In 1976, Sweden had 276 wildcat strikes – the highest rate in the country’s history. Rank and file workers’ organisation could advance to challenge capitalism itself, but that would threaten the bureaucratic rule of the trade union officials and their reformist allies in parliament. Or the workers’ movement could accept cooption and defeat. The social democrats chose not to confront the capitalist class, but instead to take the teeth out of the workers’ movement by offering a compromise that gave the capitalists wage caps and the demobilisation of workers. In exchange, workers were promised future decision-making power in workplaces. The Meidner Plan was born.
The compromise strengthened the old agreement between the trade unions and the employers’ association, giving bosses extra powers. Company profitability had to be maintained if wage-earner funds were to grow, so fighting bosses with strikes that halted the flow of profits contradicted the plan. Meidner blamed the economic crisis of the 1970s on workers’ high wages. So he tried to convince them that it was in their interests to cap wages and maintain the competitive edge of Swedish capitalists. In his own words: “We were aware of the risk that powerful unions which are guaranteed full employment are strong enough to jeopardize the stabilization policy through aggressive wage claims ... Our preference was for collective self-discipline imposed by the unions’ own wage policy”.
The plan wasn’t to challenge capitalism. It was to force workers to defend the profitability and competitiveness of their boss. As the plan’s implementation drew closer, the SAP did away with references to workers’ participation in decision making because the capitalist class rejected the idea. When the entire point of the plan was to placate and defend the capitalists, such a capitulation was predictable. While some protests were organised to defend the more “radical” parts of the plan, the SAP had no interest in encouraging workers to struggle in defiance of their bosses. From the party’s point of view, if the implementation of the plan provoked workers’ struggle and class combativity, it would have undermined its whole purpose. When the plan was implemented in 1983, it still capped wages, but in exchange it just allowed the unions influence over how new taxes would be invested.
Because the SAP viewed the capitalist state as the means by which society could be transformed, it had to defend and maintain the national state, and therefore the national economy of Sweden. Time and time again, it repressed workers’ self-organisation to defend capitalist production relations – while claiming it was building workers’ power by implanting more reformist bureaucrats into the structures of capitalism. The Meidner Plan was a way of attacking workers’ organisation at a time of capitalist crisis. Social democratic and labour parties across the world found themselves in the same position as the SAP and looked to similar solutions.
In Australia, the Labor Party and its allies introduced the notorious Prices and Incomes Accord in 1983. Union officials agreed to suppress strikes in exchange for promises that wages would be maintained by the state and a few social reforms would be handed down by the Labor government. Much like the Meidner Plan, it was presented as a victory because unions were being incorporated into the decision-making processes of capitalism. Meidner’s plan was a model for the Accord. The Amalgamated Metal Workers Union (AMWU) in Australia funded expeditions to Sweden to study it. Leading members such as Laurie Carmichael upheld Meidner’s plan as proof that the Accord could work.
In 1985, the AMWU’s newspaper, the Metal Worker, carried an article titled “The Accord is essential”. In it, the Meidner Plan was hailed as “the Swedish accord”:
"Like Australia through the Prices and Incomes Accord, Sweden is attempting, with success, to improve economic growth, while reining in inflation ... To achieve economic recovery, Swedish unions have agreed to limit wage rises across the board to five percent a year. But, said Bloomberg [the general president of the Swedish Metalworkers’ Union], restraint by workers had also resulted in a marked increase in company profits but the benefits of this were being distributed in a way to make industry more efficient while improving skills in the workforce."
Australia’s Accord was a disaster. Within a decade, median earnings had dropped by 7.1 percent. Union militancy was crushed: no longer fighting for better wages and conditions, unions instead defended “national competitiveness”. Profits came first. Recalcitrant union militants were persecuted and driven from the movement.
Since the introduction of the Meidner Plan, Sweden’s workers have faced austerity, privatisation of state assets, deregulation of the economy and rising inequality. The richest 10 percent in Sweden own 60 percent of the wealth, and welfare services have been attacked over and over again in the absence of a workers’ movement that could fight to defend them.
The Meidner Plan wasn’t a path to socialism. It wasn’t even an advance in workers’ rights within capitalism. It was a defeat for workers and an attack on their power to organise. It encouraged loyalty to bosses and to the capitalist system that exploits us. It was a surrender masked as a victory. It enshrined the profit motive and tried to convince workers it could be harnessed in their interests. But our goals can’t be advanced by maximising capital’s profit. Our strength isn’t in boardrooms or shareholders’ meetings. Our power comes from the fact that we make everything in society run. When we stop, the world stops, and when we struggle, we can build a new kind of society – one in which the rule of profit has been overthrown.

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