BY NICK EVERETT
SYDNEY — "We must work together to build a wall of public opinion against corporate greed and exploitation", Cuban Communist Party member Abelardo Cueto Sosa told the biggest meeting of left activists to be held in Sydney's western suburbs for decades.
Cueto was one of the speakers at the January 8 public meeting in the Parramatta Town Hall organised by Democratic Socialist Party (DSP) and Resistance. The other speakers who addressed the more than 150 people who packed the hall were Anom Astika from Indonesia's People's Democratic Party (PRD), a representative of the Power of the Working Class group in South Korea, Ruth Ratcliffe from Resistance and Lisa Macdonald from the DSP.
The meeting provided an opportunity for radical activists in Sydney who had not been able to attend the 19th congress of the DSP — held the previous five days — to hear about the international campaign against neo-liberal globalisation. What shone through most of all was participants' optimism about the growth of popular resistance to corporate tyranny in both the First and Third Worlds.
Astika talked about the economic basket-case that Indonesia has become since the 1997-98 economic crisis. He spoke of the PRD's campaign against President Abdurrahman Wahid's capitulation to IMF-dictated structural adjustment programs and against the remnants of former dictator Suharto's regime, which still have considerable influence in Indonesian politics. He outlined the complex tactical decisions confronting the PRD in this two-fold struggle.
The PRD may again become a target of severe state repression, Astika warned, and said that international solidarity was still vital, both to push back the IMF's plans for the further mass misery of the people of the Third World and to defend those groups resisting exploitation.
XXX, of the Korean group the Power of the Working Class, described the left's struggle against pro-capitalist reformism within South Korea's powerful trade union movement. She outlined the trade union bureaucracy's partially successful efforts to derail the large march and rally against the summit of Asian and European governments held in Seoul on October 20, but also the huge potential for a mass working-class movement against capitalist exploitation in South Korea.
Resistance's Ratcliffe, a participant in the S11 blockade of the World Economic Forum meeting in Melbourne last September, emphasised the importance of internationalism in strengthening the First World movement against corporate tyranny. Successful radical movements have always been internationalist, she said, and the outrage among young people in the North today at the obscene levels of poverty and exploitation in the South is a sound basis upon which to build broad, well-informed, anti-nationalist movements strong enough to win against the corporate rich.
Building on the successful mass protests against corporate tyranny in Seattle, Washington, Melbourne, Prague and Nice, the next major focus for anti-capitalist campaigning in Australia should be "M1" — May Day —, Macdonald argued. Planning for peaceful, mass civil disobedience actions targeting stock exchanges in all major cities on M1 is underway, she said. M1 committees have been established in many places and there are plans for more to be set up. The DSP congress voted to make building M1 one of the party's highest priority.
Calling on everyone to get involved in M1, Macdonald said: "Indigenous people and other people of colour, feminists, trade unionists, environmentalists, unemployed people, artists — all those who are suffering under the blows of the Howard government and big corporations — have many good reasons to join the M1 protests. Working together we can build the 'wall of public opinion' against corporate tyranny that Abelardo talked about and, by involving masses of people in many different ways in the campaign, defeat the boardroom exploiters' plans for more poverty, disease, wars and injustice."
Meeting attendees donated $300 to the Green Left Weekly Fighting Fund and many signed up to get actively involved in solidarity with the Cuban Revolution, the people's struggle in Indonesia and the M1 committees. Several people also joined the DSP and Resistance.