Indigenous people are treated like rubbish in this country. Beneath all the waffle about reconciliation and recognition lie the brute facts of racism. Last year, states and territories across the country rushed through draconian “anti-youth crime” bills. The result has been an explosive increase in incarceration rates and police violence. In NSW, the Indigenous incarceration rate increased tenfold, and more Indigenous people died in police custody last year than in any other year on record.
In May, the National Native Title Tribunal gave the green light to a huge gas project against the Gomeroi people’s strident opposition. On every metric of standard of living—including education, income, health and housing—the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people is entrenched. The most recent Closing the Gap report was forced to concede that only four of nineteen socio-economic targets were on track.
Why are Indigenous people so oppressed?
The most common left-wing answer is that we live in a settler-colonial society. It is argued that the central cleavage in Australia is an exploitative colonial relationship between Indigenous people and non-Indigenous people. Non-Indigenous people, no matter what class or background, are settlers and colonisers who benefit from the suffering of Indigenous peoples.
“The extent to which settlers benefit from colonization is modified to varying degrees by their skin colour and cultural background (not all settlers are white or Anglo), and by class, gender, sexuality and physical ability”, admits Sarah Maddison in her book The Colonial Fantasy. But she maintains that settlers “are all complicit in sustaining colonial relationships ... We are none of us outside or above these relationships. Migrants are still settlers, white progressives are still settlers”.
For many progressives, slogans such as “Invasion is a structure, not an event” or “Just another day in the colony” are ways to link anti-Indigenous racism to this continent’s invasion in 1788. However, it is a deeply misleading way to understand the real causes of Indigenous oppression. And it avoids the elephant in the room: capitalism.
This isn’t just some semantic point. If we want to change the conditions under which people suffer, then we have to understand why they suffer, not just indulge in moralistic rhetoric. African Americans suffered enormously under slavery. It is at the heart of the origins of their racial oppression in the United States, and its legacy can still be felt. But no-one says that African Americans suffer from a system of slavery today, because “slavery” doesn’t describe the machinery of oppression that they face in contemporary society.
The origins of Indigenous oppression do, of course, lie in the violent colonisation of this continent and the exploitation and marginalisation that Indigenous people subsequently suffered. However, to argue in 2026 that all Indigenous people are being colonised by all non-Indigenous people explains nothing. It obscures the fact that Indigenous oppression is in the interests of the Australian ruling class and is enforced by capitalist institutions that benefit them, not the majority of the population. The working class, who make up most of society, do not benefit from mining bosses overturning land rights, from racist police violence or from the crippling poverty and inequality that plagues Indigenous people’s lives.
The argument that capitalism—not colonialism—is the cause of Indigenous oppression today in no way means downplaying the racism they face. It simply means being clear about who is responsible for the oppression of Indigenous people: the bosses, the state and the capitalist system that enriches a minority at the expense of the rest of us.
Theorising about settler colonialism leads away from an anti-capitalist analysis. The socialist academic Sai Englert ends up arguing in an article for Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, that “even if working-class settlers are exploited by their ruling classes, overthrowing the settler state would mean overthrowing a system in which they share, however unequal the distribution of the colonial loot”.
This is rubbish.
While rarely acknowledged today—particularly by liberal academics who make a living out of writing about other people’s oppression—there are deep links between the workers’ movement, the socialist left and the struggle for Indigenous rights, which are inexplicable if workers are all colonising settlers.
From the Day of Mourning and Protest in 1938 and the post-World War Two strikes of Aboriginal workers in the Pilbara and Darwin to the land rights and Black Power struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, thousands of Indigenous and non-Indigenous working-class activists have fought side by side against the same enemies.
The reasons behind this aren’t that hard to fathom.
The capitalists who drove Indigenous people off their lands in the 1800s and who exploit that land today are the same bosses that workers fought and organised against for more than 200 years. The police who murder Aboriginal men and women are the same oppressors who have frequently broken picket lines, arrested strike leaders and harassed socialist activists. The economic system of capitalism, which prioritises profits and exploits millions of Australian workers, is the same system that creates the poverty and discrimination in which most Indigenous people find themselves trapped.
This doesn’t mean that Indigenous and non-Indigenous people have the same lives under capitalism. Indigenous people are obviously particularly oppressed in specific ways because of the racism directed towards them. The Stolen Generations, the huge levels of incarceration and police violence, the denigration of Indigenous identities and culture and the vicious discrimination and lies about Indigenous peoples are all products of capitalism, but it is Indigenous people who have had to face these vile cruelties. Far too many non-Indigenous people are ignorant or indifferent to the suffering of Indigenous people. And this racism of neglect can undoubtedly help governments and bosses get away with racist crimes.
This doesn’t change the fact that non-Indigenous and Indigenous workers share a common interest in fighting against the capitalist system that exploits them. It is the existence of this common interest that makes solidarity a reality rather than a nice dream or a desperate moral plea.
Proponents of the colonial argument, like Englert, often draw an equivalence between non-Indigenous workers in countries like Australia and the Israeli working class. In Israel, there is compulsory military service. So significant sections of the Israeli working class have direct experience in oppressing Palestinians. There is also a sizeable number of Zionist settlers involved in violent struggles with the Palestinians over land control. The question of the expansion of the Zionist state and the subjection of the Palestinians is the major issue of Israeli politics. Most of what passes as the left and the socialist movement in Israel disgracefully supports the continued oppression of the Palestinians.
There is no real equivalent to the Zionist settler population among the Australian working class. While some racist workers have acted in appalling ways, and others are indifferent, the vast majority of the working class has never been involved in violent conflicts with Indigenous people over their land. The battle over Indigenous rights in Australia is very much contested, but there is not the same hegemonic support for oppressing Indigenous peoples here as there is in Israel. We hold mass demonstrations every year in Australia on Invasion Day to support land rights and Indigenous issues. In Israel, mass demonstrations call for the expulsion of Palestinians.
The focus on Indigenous vs. non-Indigenous people can also lead to other political dead ends. In her book Home Rule, academic Nandita Sharma has shown that it has become common in left-wing circles to argue that migrants are “settlers” or even “colonisers”, that immigration is “conquest” and that Indigenous people need to be centred at the expense of migrants. Migrant populations, including those that suffer from racism, are portrayed as a privileged layer who benefit from anti-Indigenous racism. It is commonly asserted that anti-racist campaigns by migrants merely contribute to colonialism rather than challenging it, and that Indigenous people are the only truly revolutionary group in Australian society.
This is a profoundly conservative worldview that expresses some of the most self-defeating aspects of contemporary identity politics and privilege theory. At best, it downplays the racism faced by migrants; at worst, it apes the racist arguments of the far right. It shows the dangers of leftists pitting the interests of one section of the oppressed against another, rather than looking to what could unite them against the capitalist system.
The argument that non-Indigenous workers and bosses are simply squabbling over the spoils stolen from Indigenous people doesn’t capture the actual dynamics of class struggle in Australia. The capitalist society that has been created on dispossessed lands is filled with exploitation, oppression and cruelty. It is not in the interests of non-Indigenous workers that this society continue to exist as it currently does. Rather, it is in their interests to build a radically different society based upon workers’ democracy, economic planning and genuine equality.
It is notable that when working-class struggle has become more intense, the tendency has been for more solidarity with Indigenous people. If workers’ struggle were about gaining more at the expense of Indigenous people, then the opposite would happen. The conditions for Indigenous people would deteriorate the more workers won. History shows that such a proposition is utterly preposterous. All the periods in which there were serious advances in the struggle for Indigenous rights, in particular the immediate postwar years and the 1960s and 1970s, were times of mass working-class struggle.
If we want to uproot and destroy anti-Indigenous racism, then the anti-colonial lens doesn’t provide us with a strategy to challenge the underlying causes of this oppression. If we want to build a powerful, mass, democratic movement of ordinary people fighting for a better world, then we can’t do it on the basis of settler colonial theories. They provide no framework for uniting workers, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, in a common revolutionary fight against the system. Instead, we should look to the politics of working-class struggle, socialism and Marxism.
