Socialist seminar discusses racism
BY SAM WAINWRIGHT
SYDNEY — Mandatory sentencing laws and "zero tolerance" policing were part of a deliberate attempt to catch indigenous people in the criminal justice system, Aboriginal activist Kim Bullimore told 70 participants in a seminar, "Struggle, Solidarity, Socialism", organised at the University of Technology Sydney on May 21.
Bullimore, an activist in the Indigenous Students Network and a member of the Democratic Socialist Party, which organised the seminar, drew a straight line between these latter-day policies and the criminalisation of Aboriginal people which began with colonisation in 1788.
Her fellow panelist, Sean Healy, a journalist for Green Left Weekly, added that similar such policies were being introduced in Europe and North America. Criminalising the poorest and most vulnerable sectors of society was an established policy used by government to divide working people and distract them from the real causes of their growing economic and social insecurity, he argued.
Other workshops at the seminar discussed the fight for democracy in Zimbabwe, Marxist economics, identity politics and the struggle against the International Monetary Fund in Indonesia.
In the concluding plenary, DSP national executive member Dick Nichols, recently returned from Cuba told of the efforts being made by the island-state to survive a concerted US attempt to overthrow the revolution.
A young generation has now emerged that not only has no immediate experience of the US-backed Batista dictatorship, which ruled before the revolutionary government came to power, but has grown up without the expectation of impending revolution throughout the rest of the world, Nichols explained. The challenge for Cuban socialism is to engage and inspire this generation.
Nichols emphasised the ongoing need for solidarity with Cuba, including by promoting working-class struggle and the movement for socialism in the industrialised countries themselves, thereby attacking the system of imperialist exploitation at its source.