Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group: Statement of Shared Positions

This document is to be read as a supplement to the Aims & Principles of the Melbourne 
Anarchist Communist Group. Agreement with the positions in this document is a condition of 
membership. ---- 1. The social revolution will be the act of the working class, organised 
in the workplace. Other classes (e.g. the peasantry) and social strata (e.g. students) in 
society may support the workers in this struggle, but cannot substitute for them. ---- The 
workers have a unique role because of their numbers, their role in production which means 
that they are able to remove the economic power of the capitalists by organising under 
their own initiative, and the fact that the experience of social co-operation in 
production tends to produce the values that promote solidarity in the struggle against the 
employer.

One corollary of the fact that the struggle will be decided in the workplace is that it 
will not be decided by street brawls with the cops. While it is certainly necessary to 
defend ourselves against police attack, capitalism's achilles' heel is in the workplace 
and our strategic orientation must be there.

2. We stand for the complete equality of the sexes and oppose all forms of oppression of 
women. The liberation of women from patriarchy will not be achieved without the overthrow 
of capitalism and the destruction of class society. The overthrow of capitalism will not 
be achieved without the full participation of working class women in the struggle. It is 
therefore in the interests of male workers to support all struggles for equality and 
freedom for women, even if these are at the expense of male privileges.
The solidarity of the male and female halves of the working class can only be built on the 
principle that an injury to one is an injury to all. We support the right of women to 
organise autonomously within the wider working class movement and also within Anarchist 
organisations.

3. We oppose the oppression and dispossession of indigenous people in Australia. This 
means that indigenous people have the right to equal treatment within Australia (i.e. no 
racial discrimination, whether from the State or in society) and have the right to remain 
indigenous (i.e. retain their lands and culture, without pressure for assimilation into 
the dominant culture).

Indigenous people in Australia have never ceded sovereignty and have never sold their 
land. We acknowledge the desire of indigenous people in Australia for a treaty to 
recognise their prior occupation and continued rights, but believe that no such treaty can 
be negotiated on just terms for indigenous people while capitalism and its State endure in 
Australia. We believe a just settlement for indigenous people can only be achieved after a 
revolutionary transformation of society, including crucially the abolition of capitalist 
real estate.

4. We are internationalists, opposing the division of humanity into conflicting nation 
States and supporting working class solidarity as the one force which is capable of being 
an axis of effective counter-mobilisation against nationalism and racism. We therefore 
support open borders as a principle that will be implemented under Libertarian Communism 
and in the meantime will support struggles which provide opportunities to move in that 
direction.

In particular, we support the struggle of refugees for asylum in Australia and oppose both 
immigration detention and deportation.

5. We oppose both pacifism and terrorism. Instead, we support the right to use reasonable 
force in self defence. Pacifism is the principled refusal to meet physical force with 
physical force. Terrorism is the strategy of using violence, or the credible threat of it, 
in order to create a climate of fear for personal safety in the civilian population of a 
society, or a definable sub-group of it, to achieve a political end.

The problem with pacifism is that it assumes that there is a degree of humanity at work 
amongst the capitalist class and its State and that there are limits to their ruthlessness.

The history of the last hundred years, however, provides plentiful evidence to the 
contrary. In the face of totally non-violent resistance, a sufficiently ruthless force, 
even if a tiny minority, could impose its will on the rest of society.

The problem with terrorism is that it is a strategy which marginalises the mass of the 
working class politically and drives it into the arms of the State for protection. Even if 
used in the pursuit of supportable goals, therefore, its political effects are inevitably 
reactionary. The callous and instrumental attitude to humanity necessary to use terrorism 
is completely antithetical to the principles of Anarchism and thus to resort to this would 
be to betray our philosophy.

Our position is that we recognise the right to use reasonable force in self defence. We 
are consistent on this point and thus we repudiate the State's proclamation of a monopoly 
on the legitimate use of force. Rather, we insist that we do not lose the right to self 
defence when we enter the field of political struggle.

Workers thus have the right to use reasonable force to defend themselves against police or 
thug attack on the picket line or on demonstrations. We oppose the use of force beyond 
what is reasonably necessary for self defence. This would contradict the humanitarian 
values of the society we wish to create.

The working class, being the immense majority in industrialised societies, has the 
advantage of the weight of numbers and the ability to use economic force to press its 
cause. We therefore have no need of violence, beyond what is necessary to defend ourselves 
against those who themselves would use violence to prevent us achieving our goals 
non-violently. We also believe that the use of unnecessary violence would alienate 
sections of the working class and make it harder to break them from authoritarian 
ideologies. In particular, it would strengthen the position of authoritarian groups active 
within the working class. We believe that Fascism provides an example, unique in advanced 
capitalist democracies at present, of a specialised application of the principle of 
reasonable force in self defence.

A Fascist group is not a debating society, but a permanent conspiracy to murder. It is an 
open threat of violence against women, immigrants, indigenous people, all other minorities 
and ultimately, to the working class and its organisations. Defence against Fascism is 
therefore necessarily, in many cases, pre-emptive. Fascist groups should be defeated and 
broken up, if possible, whenever they show their faces. We emphasise that this position is 
unique to the issue of Fascism and does not apply to Right wing populists, where the 
ordinary use of the principle of self defence would apply when fighting them. We recognise 
the possibility that, in revolutionary situations, self defence may require pre-emptive 
action against forces of the State. This is not a pretext, however, for abandoning a 
principled opposition to offensive violence.

The situation must still be assessed using the criteria of whether the use of force is 
both necessary for defensive purposes and of a reasonable degree given the threat. We 
reject any attempt to equate property damage with violence. Property has no rights and 
damage to it must be assessed in the light of its impact on people. Damage to nuclear 
weapons, therefore, is the complete opposite of damage to a worker's home.

6. ?Free thought, necessarily involving freedom of speech & press, I may tersely define 
thus: no opinion a law ? no opinion a crime." ? Alexander Berkman

We therefore oppose State bans on any opinion, even ones with which we passionately 
disagree. Any such bans would end up being used, in the end, against the working class and 
its organisations. We also, therefore, recognise complete freedom of conscience. We 
support the right to believe in any religion or none, to practice any religion or none and 
to preach any religion or none. In the Australian context, this includes a special 
responsibility to defend the right of people to be Muslims.

In addition, freedom of conscience is a right of every individual person and is not 
restricted to religious leaders. Adherence to religious precepts must therefore be 
entirely voluntary. Attempts by religious leaders or denominations to compel adherents to 
conform to their teachings or discipline must be resisted and we resolutely reject any 
attempt to give them State backing.

7. A libertarian communist society will be one that is ecologically sustainable. Even if 
capitalism were just and supportable on other grounds, it would fail the test of 
sustainability. We need to reject the instrumental thinking inherent to capitalism and 
realise that part of nature ? a conscious and creative part, but a part. As such, nature 
is not something to be dominated, but to be protected ? and particularly to be protected 
against human damage. In building a sustainable society, it is essential to end the use of 
non-renewable resources ? or develops ways of making them renewable. In the short term, 
this means a rapid transition away from burning fossil fuels and towards renewable energy.

In the medium term, we need to restructure our existing cities for a preponderance of 
medium density living and decentralise into a considerably larger number of smaller 
cities. And in the long term, we need to phase out mining before the exhaustion of 
accessible mineral deposits at practical grades forces us to abandon it involuntarily. A 
commitment to ecological sustainability does not, however, mean enforced poverty in living 
standards and even less so does it require a return to a hunter-gatherer society. We 
therefore reject Malthusians of all varieties and especially in their primitivist 
manifestation. Production of a wide variety of goods and services needs to be increased, 
not decreased, in order to abolish poverty and want from the face of the Earth. We hold 
that it is capitalism, not human nature, that is responsible for the wanton environmental 
destruction which has occurred in the last two centuries and is threatening the very 
liveability of the planet which we inhabit.

Further, the fact that technology has been developed under capitalism does not 
irretrievably contaminate it. Different technologies have capitalist relations embedded 
into them to different degrees and in some cases development of a particular technology 
has been slowed because it doesn't fit well with contemporary capitalism. Nuclear power is 
an example of a technology which will have to be abandoned as anti-social, while solar 
power is an example of a technology which, on the whole, undermines the power of the great 
capitalist corporations. A libertarian communist society will resolve the current conflict 
between the need to increase production and the need to limit the environmental damage 
that capitalist production imposes by:

(a) Producing for rationally determined needs, rather than for wants generated by 
advertising;
(b) Producing quality goods which last, rather than shoddy ones which break down quickly;
(c) Using only renewable energy;
(d) Using closed loop manufacturing processes, with 100% material recycling and zero waste;
(e) Rationally planning the satisfaction of social needs in the most energy and resource 
efficient manner;
(f) Using the most modern technology to institute efficient small-run production of a wide 
variety of goods, thus eliminating a large part of the need for long distance transport and
(g) Planning cities, and the means of transport within and between them, on ecologically 
sustainable and energy efficient lines.

Finally, we believe that the current so-called ?population crisis? is an illusion caused 
by the inefficient, unjust and unsustainable practices of capitalism. While there is a 
natural limit to the carrying capacity of the planet, we believe that this limit is 
impossible to determine until after capitalism has been abolished and its destructive 
practices eliminated. If population reduction is called for after the planet's carrying 
capacity is established, it can be achieved gradually through social consensus.

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