All out for union rallies on 4 March

10 February 2015
Jerome Small

It’s long overdue. On Wednesday, 4 March, we have a chance to use our most powerful weapon. Around the country, organised workers will be marching against the Liberals’ attacks – past, present and future. Attacks on our health care, our education, our social welfare and our rights at work.

The government is frustrated with its inability to get its way in the Senate. Ministers are demoralised by the series of idiotic “captain’s calls” from their dickhead in chief. They feel besieged by rising public hostility – seen in the popularity of last year’s student protests, in the booing by football crowds and in the sag in opinion poll numbers that not even a terror scare can reverse.

Confronted with this, the Liberals have done a decent job of ripping themselves apart over the past few weeks. Blood sport is never more fun than when it’s Liberals knifing each other.

But it’s not enough. It is our side’s actions, especially those of the organised working class, that can turn the Liberals’ current crisis into a full-blown rout. It’s vital that the 4 March rallies be huge.

The bigger the rallies, and the more stop work action involved, the bigger the impact will be on our rulers’ “business as usual” and – even more important – on their precious profits, which stop flowing when we stop work.

The bigger the rallies, the greater the boost in confidence for our side. Most of the time, we can hate what’s going on – in our workplace and in our society – while feeling that there is no chance of making a change. A huge demonstration can impact on this, potentially letting loose some of the qualities most feared by our rulers – hope for a better tomorrow and confidence in our ability to fight for it.

Big rallies on 4 March will strengthen the hand of everyone in the union movement who wants to see more strikes to blunt the ruling class agenda.

The ACTU, which has initiated the protests, sees them playing a very specific role: the opening salvo in an electoral campaign, modelled on the anti-WorkChoices campaign and the recent Victorian election, which will return Labor to federal government.

Socialists aim higher than this. We want a movement that can challenge the anti-working class agenda of any party and any boss.

The work that we do to build 4 March among our fellow workers – leafleting, signing workmates up to delegations, pushing our unions to build seriously for the rallies and organising other unionists to do the same – can give a crucial long term boost to our organising ability where it matters most: in our workplaces.

Everyone who’s serious about kicking out the Liberals, and keeping on kicking, needs to go all out to build 4 March.


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