The military ordered hundreds of thousands of people into a designated “safe” zone. On reaching it, they were shelled by the army and the air force. The generals said there was another safe zone; if the people kept moving, respite would be found. It wasn’t. Again they were attacked. The scene repeated, but now, corralled onto a tiny stretch of beach and trapped against the ocean, there was no way out.
The truth, it turns out, won’t set you free: under capitalism it can get you locked up. That’s what Julian Assange discovered when he spoke truth to power.
The year is 2070. A global catastrophe—climate change, nuclear winter, civil war: pick your poison—recently ended civilisation and opened a new chapter in your life. So far you’ve ridden it out smoothly in your luxury bunker, but one day you’re swimming laps in the pool, living out your Bond-villain dream, when an alert blinks on your home security console.
“I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonisers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal. Free Palestine.”
Nachshon Amir looks like a military man. It’s decades since he served in the Israeli military, but with his shaved head, fit physique and rugged demeanour, it might also seem that he has just been demobbed.
South Korea’s Great Workers Struggle of 1987 was an explosive period of working-class resistance. Millions of workers joined rank-and-file strikes, which swept through the country like wildfire. The uprising was sparked by a surprise announcement on 29 June from the chairman of South Korea’s ruling Democratic Justice Party that, after decades of military rule, the country would transition to free elections.
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Israel’s deadly assault on Gaza is not a simple response to the Hamas raids on 7 October last year; the roots of the conflict over Palestine are deep within the history of imperialism and a by-product of the capitalist system of exploitation and competition.
The Shortest History of Economics
Like many people, I’ve been pushed out of the inner city by the housing crisis. I live in Tarneit, in Melbourne’s outer west. Every morning, I debate whether to spend two hours on public transport or try my luck driving across the West Gate Bridge.
Amid extreme social and economic crisis and a brutal austerity package proposed by far-right President Javier Milei, the Argentine working class won an important victory last month: the government withdrew a bill that proposed sweeping privatisations of state-owned firms, budget cuts and attacks on labour rights, among other things.
Big companies are pulling the rip-off of the century. Coles and Woollies, Qantas and Virgin, AGL and Origin Energy, and the Big Four banks are passing on inflated prices and interest rates to consumers, cutting workers’ real purchasing power and boosting company profits to record highs.
The facts are undeniable. Women in 5,000 companies—covering almost five million workers—earn 21.7 percent less than their male colleagues’ median total remuneration. In some companies, the gap is as high as 31.8 percent. This is according to figures released by the Workplace Gender Equity Agency (WGEA) in the lead-up to International Women’s Day this year.
Sexism is so fundamental to our existence that we are not even aware of it much of the time.
Thousands of high school and university students across Australia ditched class on 29 February to protest in solidarity with Palestinians who continue to face severe privation, displacement and murder as part of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.
The Dirty Life of Mining in Australia: A Travelogue
I got an email from my union last week informing me that we’d just had a “union win”. I’m a casual worker at a university, and my union previously negotiated an enterprise agreement locking in pay rises that won’t make up for the last few years’ inflation.
This special supplement of Red Flag newspaper is designed for those coming to socialist politics, and Socialist Alternative as an organisation, for the first time. It contains articles on the fundamentals of Marxist theory and politics, the history of the socialist movement, and how socialists approach questions of race, gender and identity. It can be purchased from our online bookstore here.
From secret police records in Russia just before the First World War: “The most energetic and audacious element, ready for tireless struggle, for resistance and continual organisation, is that element ... concentrated around [Vladimir] Lenin”.