What's wood got to do with Marxism?

What is modern day Marxism and how is it impacting our lives? Im attending Marxism Conference 2024 to find out.

Talk about a coincidence!

Quite recently I was sent a link to a four-and-a-half-minute video ‘pitch’ by Canadian conservative leader Pierre Poilievre. He’s riding high in the Canadian polls with indicators that he’s a good bet to win the 2025 Canadian election, beating long-term Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Poilievre’s political pitch in this video is unusual. He spends a good part of  it talking about the grain in old wood. (Canadians must love wood, it seems!) But then he steers the pitch from wood to draw a connection to the political philosophy of individualism, freedom and so on. Fascinating. He’s very effective. His pitch resonates with common sense!

But then, just as I had finished watching the Poilievre video, my email inbox pinged with an invitation to register for Marxism Conference 2024. What an interesting Internet interface between perhaps two of the great ‘isms’ of the last hundred years and more—Marxism and individualism!

But there’s more! The Marxism invitation included a promo code ‘TAXTHERICH’ to obtain a conference discount. I couldn’t resist and so have registered to attend Marxism Conference 2024. Funny, hey! Marxists hate capitalists but here they are using a typical capitalist marketing trigger to promote their anti-capitalist conference and dogma. I doubt that they are even aware of the behavioural inconsistency in their TAXTHERICH discount code.

So what’s the purpose of this Substack post? It’s to talk more about Marxism. 

If you’ve followed my Substack from earlier last year, you’ll know that I attended Marxism Conference 2023. You might ask ‘why’? Why would I spend three days during Easter at Melbourne University with 1,000 or more eager and very dedicated Australian Marxists? And why would I do this again this year?

The answer is pretty simple. We are in a period in Australia where Marxism is in the political ascendant. This reality needs to be understood. But it’s a Marxism that is different at its core from the Marxism of most of the last century. In the past, Marxists’ core agenda was the abandonment of all private-sector activity. This was to be replaced with the means of production being owned and conducted entirely by the state, the collective.

Hard-core Marxists still adhere to this agenda. This was one of my ‘learnings’ from Marxism Conference 2023.

But the practical application of the Marxism that is unfolding in Australia at the moment is a less rigid derivation of that theme.

The practical application we are witnessing and living through has two elements. First, the ‘smart’ Marxists have, to a large extent, taken control and effective ownership of Australian capitalism. Marxists have become capitalists! They have done this through the Australian compulsory superannuation system. Their brilliance is that they control and, it could be argued, effectively ‘own’, the savings of the workers. And the money now in superannuation exceeds that of money in the banks.

The second element is that the (non-core) Marxists have concluded that they don’t need the state (the collective) to own the means of production. What they do instead is micro-manage the means of production. They do this through state regulation that dictates to firms and businesses how those firms and businesses may behave.

This is witnessed through the overpowering range of regulations and the activities of overseeing regulators who dictate what managers can do, where and when. This is most clearly evidenced in the new raft of industrial relations laws passed over the last two years that impose micro-managing regulation and processes on business managers.

I explained one aspect of this in my last post, ‘Killing casual work is wage theft’. I’m studying the most recent industrial relations ‘Loophole’ Act, all 286 pages of it, and will produce more analysis once I get my head around its massive complexity.

Overall what’s being implemented is a process of reducing, even eliminating, the capacity of managers/owner to manage. In many respects this explains why so many of Australia’s large corporations kowtow to social agendas set by government and ‘community stakeholders’. They feel they have no choice!

Yes, these assertions in the last few paragraphs really warrant several books of discussion. But I did predict a fair bit of this last year following my attendance at Marxism Conference 2023. Here are my main ‘learnings’ from 2023.

·      Reporting from the Marxist Front Line

·      Singing the Communist Manifesto

So, here’s the value of attending Marxism Conference 2023 and the same this year.

By attending it’s possible to became ‘absorbed into’ the inner thoughts and agenda of the hard-core Australian Marxists. These are the people who are intellectually and emotionally committed to the destruction of the private sector and its replacement entirely by the collective. And note that there are comparatively significant numbers of them, and they are exceedingly well-organised and networked.

These are quite different from the lesser shades of Marxist inhabiting the current Labor government/s, the Greens and so on. But by understanding the hard-core Marxists, a better appreciation and understanding of the ‘lesser shades’ of Marxist and Marxism becomes possible. 

Most of us are frantically busy running ‘our’ lives. Family, work, studying and on and on. Politics swirls around our heads with seemingly multiple agendas flying in numerous different directions. The challenge is often how to make sense of this. And to discover if there are core things happening that can give us an understanding of the bigger picture.

Herein lies my interest in attending Marxism Conference 2023/24. It’s a desire to understand. And I’ll report.

But you’ll get a sense of where Australian Marxists want to take Australia from the following list of just some of the presentations/sessions at this year’s conference. Note that these are just some of the presentations.

Here they are:

·      Resisting war and capitalism

·      If we burn: the mass protest decade and the missing revolution

·      Killer cops, racist politicians and culture wars: anti-Indigenous racism today

·      Greedy landlords and rising mortgages: a guide to the housing crisis

·      Prisons, police and parliaments: understanding the capitalist state

·      From overthrowing a government to getting rid of capitalism: political and social revolutions

·      Narco-capitalism: a political history of drugs

·      Workers under attack from ALP and capital

·      Why capitalism leads to war

·      Auto-capitalism: a political history of cars

·      Against colonialism, empire and capital

·      Sexism, homophobia and transphobia Marxist foundations

·      Social class and fascism

·      The roots of racism – Marxist foundations

·      Insurrection and the capitalist state

·      Disrupting the Australian war machine: lessons, strategies, tactics

·      A Marxist critique of settler colonial

·      Why only a revolution can win socialism

·      High school rebellion: from the Vietnam war to the school strike for Palestine

·      Socialist Alternative: our history and perspectives

·      Is revolution possible in the West?

·      The Australian Labor Party: an enemy of the working class

·      Marxism vs Black nationalism: strategies for defeating racism

·      Marxism vs queer theory: fighting for sexual liberation

·      Why socialists need to be organised

·      Gastro-capitalism: a political history of food

·      Are workers’ co-operatives an alternative to capitalism?

·      Climate destruction and crisis: understanding capitalism and the profit motive

Marxism Conference 2024 (and 2023) is sponsored by Socialist Alternative.

If interested I had a series of posts early last year on The New Australian Socialist Experiment. Actually I think my observations have pretty much stood the test over the last year. The details of this New Australian Socialist Experiment seem to be unfolding in detail.

Here are last year’s posts on The New Australian Socialist Experiment.

·      Introduction and Overview

·      The Socialists Capture of Capitalism

·      The Labour market revolution

·      The quasi-nationalisation of business and the re-purposing of key free-market institutions to socialist objectives