Resolution: On the Indigenous Voice to Parliament
Theses
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1. The RCO sees the liberation of the indigenous peoples of so-called "Australia" to be intimately bound up with the cause of freedom and socialism. In order to achieve this liberation, a positive program of self-determination, land reform, decolonisation, and poverty alleviation is necessarily combined with the abolition of the settler-colonial Commonwealth of Capital and the organisation of a socialist republic.
2. The "Indigenous Voice in Parliament" is a project of the liberal-reformer wing of the Australian bourgeois and the corporatist Australian Labor Party. It is an attempt to cultivate an existing layer of indigenous compradors into formal networks of state patronage, as well as massaging potential social conflict related to indigenous oppression and dispossession.
3. Opposition to the Voice comes from two sectors: reactionary social layers, which are opposed on racist, settlerist terms; and radical indigenous nationalists and their activist allies, who oppose it on the basis of it being essentially "tokenistic" in character. While it is true that the movement around the Voice is motivated by a desire from petit-bourgeois liberals to see a token of "genuine representation", it is in reality far from tokenistic: it serves a real purpose for the ideological state apparatus, a purpose that reveals the corporatist character of Australian liberalism.
4. The Indigenous Voice for Parliament is an extension of the corporatist policy of the Australian Labor Party, that seeks to formally integrate potentially subversive social layers into the state apparatus in order to cultivate conservative leadership layers.
5. As such, the Revolutionary Communist Organisation sees the Voice as being opposed to aims of indigenous liberation, freedom, and socialism. We instead call for renewed struggle against the settler-colonial state of Australia, and a renewed struggle for self-determination and a socialist republic.
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