Mo Chara, aka Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, is facing terrorism charges in the UK for the supposed crime of supporting Palestine. Part of the rap trio Kneecap, Mo Chara is one of a new wave of musicians and artists who are using their work to protest the genocide in Gaza, risking their careers in the process. 
Speaking to the Guardian, Mo Chara said of his stand: “Maybe visas get revoked, you’re not allowed in America again, it’s not ideal—but Jesus Christ, there’s people being bombed from the fucking skies, and people being starved to death”. 
This defiant attitude has captured the attention of young people everywhere. Thirty thousand flocked to Kneecap’s set at the Glastonbury festival, waving Palestinian and Irish flags and chanting “Free Palestine” and “Free Mo Chara”. When the BBC refused to stream the set online, “Helen from Wales” stepped in, streaming the entire thing via TikTok. <a href="https://www.thejournal.ie/woman-who-live-streamed-kneecaps-glastonbury-performance-to-millions-says-fans-had-a-right-to-see-it-6748037-Jun2025/">Explaining</a>
why she did it, Helen said, “Anyone who was in that field for that Kneecap gig knows that there was something very special happening there, that people outside of Glastonbury festival have a right to see”. 
In a twist of fate, the BBC instead streamed Bob Vylan’s set. The punk rap duo was not the safest bet. Tens of thousands of people watching were treated to chants of “Free Palestine” and “Death, death to the IDF”, led enthusiastically by Bobby Vylan. 
The response of governments and the media has been hysterical. A torrent of denunciations has followed, along with calls for Bob Vylan’s shows to be cancelled, accusations that they’re inciting hate and violence and calls for sanctions against them. Their US visas have also been revoked. “Foreigners who glorify violence and hatred are not welcome visitors to our country”, wrote Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau. Unless, of course, you’re a violent, hateful foreigner from Israel, like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. 
Kneecap has been attacked as “not appropriate” by UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, while the leader of the right-wing Democratic Unionist Party in Ireland, Gavin Robinson, said, “These gentlemen don't need to be on a stage; they need to be in a courtroom because it is a hate crime what they are doing”. 
Artists like Kneecap and Bob Vylan who are speaking up for Palestine are a bright spot in a dark two years of Israeli genocide carried out under the approving eye of the Western establishment. They’ve linked up with a protest movement that has persisted despite appalling repression and slander, and a broader mood of disgust with a society in which this could happen. 
Fuelling this has been Western governments’ determination to justify the unjustifiable, treating anyone who demurs as a bigot, terrorist or worse. Here in Australia, simply posting a report from a reputable human rights organisation on social media was enough to get journalist Antoinette Latouff fired from the ABC, the broadcaster aggressively defending its actions in court. 
Media outlets everywhere refuse to use words like “genocide” that Israel objects to, while Palestinians are dehumanised routinely. Students have been disciplined by universities for protesting for Palestine. Pianist Jayson Gillham had his performance cancelled by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra after dedicating a piece to journalists killed in Gaza. 
Celebrities, musicians and actors have the ability to give expression to what masses of other people are feeling. This challenges the consensus pro-Israel governments are trying to establish that it is legitimate to do nothing in the face of a genocide. Posting on social media, lead singer of Amyl and the Sniffers, Amy Taylor, pointed out that the repression of Kneecap and Bob Vylan is about “trying to make it look like a couple of isolated incidents and a couple of ‘bad bands’ so that it appears the public isn’t as anti-genocide as it is, and trying to make it look like Bob and Kneecap are one offs, instead of that the status quo has shifted majorly and that people are concerned and desperate for our gov[ernment]s to listen”. 
Artists played a similar role in the movement against the war in Vietnam, as they have in most anti-war and civil rights movements. In the 1960s, actors such as Jane Fonda and Don Sutherland organised anti-war speaking tours across the US and Canada, and even went to Vietnam to speak to US troops. Fonda was targeted by the FBI and arrested on trumped-up drug charges, an order that reportedly came directly from the Nixon White House. 
Their treatment was similar to that of pro-Palestine activists today. Fonda’s phone was tapped, American politicians called her activism treasonous, her films were banned, and William Burkhead, a Democrat, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/09/18/how-jane-fondas-1972-trip-to-north-vietnam-earned-her-the-nickname-hanoi-jane/">said</a>,
“I wouldn’t want to kill her, but I wouldn’t mind if you cut her tongue off”. This all mirrors the outrage directed towards modern pro-Palestinian artists.
Young people today are again at the forefront of challenging the inhuman policies and practices of their rulers, most prominently through the university encampments in solidarity with Palestine. And they are increasingly making connections between forms of oppression, and demanding a different type of society altogether, one in which innocent people aren’t murdered by powerful militaries and, closer to home, billionaires aren’t prioritised over the rest of us. 
Kneecap reflect this: when they visited Melbourne, they made connections with Aretha Brown, an Indigenous artist whose father was in the left-wing rock band Painters and Dockers. Brown painted a mural for the band to take on stage in her striking black and white style reading “Blak and Irish solidarity”. 
Another expression of this is the victory of Zohran Mamdani in the New York Democratic primary race for mayor. Young people voted in the primary in record numbers, helping to deliver Mamdani a resounding victory. It wasn’t lost on many of these people that Mamdani spoke up for Palestine and pledged, if elected mayor, to arrest Netanyahu if he came to New York. 
While it’s not enough to stop the genocide in Gaza or other injustices of capitalism, the fact that young people are increasingly challenging the ideological hegemony of the ruling class is a hopeful sign for the future, and clearly of concern to the authorities. It highlights why taking a stand and attempting to cohere opposition are important, even if you are in a minority. The alternative is resignation to a morally intolerable status quo. 
As Mo Chara has put it, “we knew that the Israeli lobbyists and the American government weren’t going to stand by idly while we spoke to thousands of young Americans who agree with us. They don’t want us coming to the American festivals, because they don’t want videos of young Americans chanting ‘free Palestine’ [even though] that is the actual belief in America. They just want to suppress it”.

Anneke Demanuele

Culture shift: pro-Palestine rappers say what everyone is thinking

Cherry is a British nurse who has experienced a lifetime of sexualisation and objectification. Working in a hospital hasn’t offered an escape, but new worries. Cherry has large breasts, and reports that a lot of her mental energy is spent thinking about them. “It’s a bit pornographic” is how she <a href="https://sussex.figshare.com/articles/journal_contribution/_That_s_just_par_for_the_course_social_class_objectification_and_body_image_among_white_working-class_women_in_the_United_Kingdom/26356876?file=48809890">described</a> it to Jamie Chen, a researcher at the University of Sussex studying the impacts of sexualisation on working-class women. Her work uniform made her feel particularly self-conscious: it was so tight she worried people would think she was trying to look like a “saucy nurse”. Cherry told researchers that because of this sexualisation, she decided against breastfeeding her child. “I didn’t really like breastfeeding because I felt, because they were so big, it looks inappropriate in my mind, that these massive, you know, boobs sticking out in public”. 
Compare this with the sales pitch for Kim Kardashian’s new <a href="https://skims.com/en-au/products/skims-ultimate-pierced-nipple-push-up-bra-clay">push-up bra</a>: “Made to be seen. Our viral Ultimate bra is back, reinvented with a built-in raised nipple detail and removable nylon-coated nipple piercing for an unforgettable statement”. Women can now buy a bra that not only gives them “sexy, natural-looking lift and support”, but also the appearance of pierced nipples under their baby-crop tees. While Cherry feels unable to carry out the natural function of her breasts, Kardashian is cashing in on the business opportunity that sexual objectification represents—her fashion company Skims is currently valued at US$4 billion. 
It is no exaggeration to say that sexual objectification is ruining women’s lives. From childhood, women are made to understand that their appearance is all-important, regardless of any and all other achievements. Their faces and bodies are treated like things, objects primarily for the use and pleasure of others, overwhelmingly men. The unrelenting portrayal of women as sex objects has been shown, in multiple <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2016.1142496">studies</a>, to lead to a “diminished view of women’s competence, morality and humanity”. 
New York University professor and author of Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt, has detailed how predatory tech companies turn this oppression into a business opportunity. When women delete selfies on social media, he says, algorithms are programmed to detect the behaviour and treat the assumed negative self-image as a marketing opportunity, bombarding the woman with beauty product advertisements. This is contributing to a mental health epidemic among young girls, around <a href="https://www.afterbabel.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic">57 percent</a> currently reporting a persistent sadness or helplessness, up from 36 percent in 2011.
Objectification is the reality for women, day in day out, their entire lives. From childhood to old age, the measure of a woman’s worth is their ability to remain young and attractive to men. Margaret Atwood, echoing art critic John Berger’s description of the male gaze, described the effect: “You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur”. Sociologists describe this as self-objectification—when women wake up in the morning and plug in the epilator, they are listening to the voice inside their head put there by the advertising executives who decided making women feel like shit was a good way to make money. 
To add insult to injury, at the same time as women are being sexualised to an absurd degree, ironically, they are getting as little pleasure from sex as ever. Heterosexual sex is most unequal—<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-orgasm-gap-and-why-women-climax-less-than-men-208614">one study</a> found that only 65 percent of heterosexual women usually orgasm during sex, compared with 95 percent of men. 
So while women are pressured to worry about being “sexy”, their own sexual desire and agency are suppressed. Women are taught not to be sexual, but sexy. They have to control what they eat in order to fit the ideal body type, they have to wax and pluck and shave every part of their body below their hairline. Women internalise that as normal, and failure to conform, at least to some degree, has consequences. Their conditioning is always to alter themselves to meet others, mostly men’s, expectations and desires, to the point where they often can’t even define what their own are in relation to sex and relationships.
This is particularly the case for younger women. Most young women’s first experience of sex is likely to be at a party when they’re drunk or because they feel pressured into it. In the words of one of the many teenagers Deborah Tolman spoke to when writing Dilemmas of Desire, which documents the experience of young women and sex, sex was something that “just happened” to them. In her book Consent Laid Bare, Chanel Contos describes the way that, when men’s desires are the centre of sex, women lose out. “This puts an unspoken sense of control in [men’s] hands about whether they want you
or not, and leaves the woman in the heterosexual relationship with no agency.” 
Women are socialised to see their feelings as less important than those of their male partner. From film, TV and seeing their parents interact, women learn the role they are meant to play. They are trained to notice a shift in someone’s emotional state, to push down their own feelings in order not to upset the men around them. 
It’s no surprise, then, that relationships are frequently unequal and sites of abuse. <a href="https://www.casahouse.com.au/resources/statistics-about-sexual-assault-in-australia">One in five</a> Australian women over the age of 15 has experienced sexual violence, according to the Centre Against Sexual Assault. A recent <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jun/03/one-in-three-australian-men-say-they-have-committed-intimate-partner-violence-world-first-research-finds">study</a>
undertaken by the Australian Institute of Family Studies found that one in three men has committed intimate partner violence. One ABS report from 2022 showed that 23 percent of women experienced emotional abuse in relationships. This is likely an understatement given the normalisation of emotional manipulation in relationships, but it is a form of intimate partner violence. Men can create a climate of fear for women in situations where they make their partners feel like they are required to “walk on eggshells” in order not to provoke them, which can be just as damaging as physical violence.
Making matters worse, men are entering relationships with attitudes and expectations shaped by the same extreme sexism that women are. They are encouraged to see themselves as domineering, aggressive and unconcerned about feelings—their own or those of others. They learn the lesson that women are there to provide for them. They also learn to objectify and dehumanise women. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2016.1142496">One study</a> found that men’s frequent exposure to sexually objectifying media was associated with greater objectification of their romantic partners. 
The consumption of porn is an important part of this. Young men are more likely to consume porn than young women, and this is often the major factor shaping both men’s and women’s understanding of sex and sexuality. Jess Hill, in her recent Quarterly Essay, describes the impact of this consumption of porn—which is more readily available today and often extremely violent towards women—as part of understanding the increasing rates of sexual violence among young people. “On average, young people are thirteen when they get their first lessons in sex and intimacy from free online porn ... In much of this porn, degrading and painful sex acts are unremarkable ... In the majority of these clips, women not only go along with degrading treatment but are almost always grateful for it.” 
An outcome of this is that there has been a mainstreaming of violent sex acts, particularly <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07-02/choking-strangulation-sexual-partners-young-people/104043900">strangulation during sex</a>. According to a new study, 61 percent of women have reported being choked during sex. Maree Crabb, a sexual violence prevention educator, told the ABC, “Young women have talked about [how] they have felt like they're genuinely being murdered ... they’re really uncomfortable and feeling very, very unsafe”. Women are being murdered by their male partners. These men then claim it was a “sex game gone wrong”. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/nov/10/rough-sex-excuse-in-womens-deaths-is-variation-of-of-passion-study">According</a> to the campaign group We Can’t Consent To This, there has been a tenfold increase of the rough sex defence between 1996 and 2016 in the United Kingdom. 
All of this leads us to ask: Who is responsible for this sexist state of affairs, and is there any hope that it could change? The sexism that surrounds us and that is constantly being reinforced by social media, pop culture, mainstream media, the entertainment industry, the beauty and fashion industries among others, destroys the humanity and empathy of men, and belittles and endangers women. But it is not ordinary men, and certainly not women, who benefit. Rather, it is ideologically useful and extremely profitable to the capitalist system. 
Advertising companies, the fashion and cosmetic industries directly profit from women’s insecurities—and create them where they don’t already exist as a way to open up new markets. Every part of a woman’s body is now subject to fashion trends and must look “perfect”, and every one represents an opportunity to sell something to help achieve this “perfection”. Exploitative images of women are used to sell anything and everything, and the pornography and sex industry—which could not exist without the oppression of women—are worth hundreds of billions. 
Added to that, bosses in every industry maximise their profits by paying women on average less than men, and rely on sexist socialisation to normalise this inequality. And the whole system benefits from forcing women to do unpaid labour in the home, which maintains the stability and productivity of the workforce capitalism needs. The resulting division between the lives, experience and social standing of working-class men and women has a further benefit—it undermines the likelihood of united working-class resistance to the system. 
Despite all this, it is possible for working-class men and women to see themselves as allies rather than sex objects or potential dominators/sexist creeps and to fight back. Fortunately, this possibility doesn’t rest on every sexist individual being convinced not to be a sexist prick, though this definitely can happen and should. It’s because the conditions of capitalism bring people together as relative equals in the workplace, and give them a common interest that can manifest in collective resistance and struggle. This sort of activity, and the consciousness it gives rise to among those involved, pushes against the degrading and dehumanising way we are usually socialised to see others. 
Women are conditioned to accept sexism, but they are also able to rebel against it in the right circumstances. That which drags people down at one time can fuel resistance at another. The conservative conformism of the 1950s eventually gave rise to the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s—discontent was brewing below the surface and exploded when the general atmosphere of society shifted to one of rebellion rather than resignation.
This has happened before and can happen again. When people go on strike against a bastard boss, or join an anti-war protest, when they stand on picket lines to defend public housing—they become more keenly aware of their joint interests and the benefit of unity. Places that were previously sites of exploitation and oppression, such as the workplace, now become sites of strength and resistance. Both men and women can see each other in a new light—as fighters for their class and equals in struggle. 
Actions like this start to transform mass attitudes. But ultimately, we need a society built on equality to have a world where we are not perennially fighting sexism, but are free from it. This means collective, democratic control over every aspect of social and economic life: a world in which working-class women and men could have real say over the conditions they live in, rather than being dominated by the capitalist class and the institutions and ideology that maintain its power and privilege; a world in which hierarchies of class wouldn’t be justified by hierarchies of gender. 
We need to get rid of this system that denies women their sexuality and treats them as nothing more than little pieces of fat and muscle for the sexual gratification of men. We need women to fight back against the voice inside their head that tells them they aren’t good enough. We need working-class men to join the struggle against women’s oppression and to learn genuine empathy and care. We need women rebels to build the power of our side and smash this sexist system.

The everyday horror of modern sexism

In her 1996 hit song “Ironic”, Alanis Morissette takes us through scenarios ranging from irritating (a black fly in your chardonnay) to downright devastating (a man’s long-awaited flight turning fatal). Ironically though, none of these situations are actually ironic. Much like Morissette, defenders of US singer Sabrina Carpenter’s latest album cover, titled Man’s Best Friend and featuring Carpenter’s hair being pulled like a dog on a lead by a faceless man while on her hands and knees, also seem to have a little trouble understanding the concept. 
For most people, the image of a young woman posing as a dog and being dragged along by her hair by a man would be understood as yet another sexist and demeaning image. It is not even a particularly exaggerated version of the degrading presentation of women that advertising, pop culture and the entertainment industry surround us with every day. 
Some fans of Carpenter, however, say that the cover, and other promotional material like her cover for Rolling Stone featuring her nude but for a pair of knee-length white stockings, are an ironic nod and wink to the “male gaze”. What seems like garden variety sexism is, in fact, according to Carpenter’s defenders, the clever use of sexist imagery to gain attention, “reclaim” her sexuality and sell records. She doesn’t perform sexism for men, she performs it for her own gain. Profiting from your own degradation is therefore not a sad reflection of the state of sexual politics, but boundary-pushing social commentary— subversive entrepreneurism. 
Dr Emma Phillips, an academic at the University of Canberra, author of a PhD on the topic of sexualisation, <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/culture/music/sabrina-carpenter-s-new-album-cover-has-sparked-uproar-here-s-what-you-need-to-know-20250612-p5m6up.html?fbclid=IwQ0xDSwK3tdNleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHp25cnhRbPv1xMqfTPMQocEhy6hSFX-ONMfm57Qa-MxOtitk2t5d8Fhjdxiy_aem_QghJ_BRP4bBTWcdf0PPyDQ&amp;utm_medium=Social&amp;utm_source=Facebook%23Echobox=1749704706">argued</a> in the Age that “we see Carpenter being an active agent in her sexual life, and immediately she’s derided for that”. But Carpenter isn’t being derided for having agency in her sex life. She is being criticised for an album cover that glamorises the abuse of women, with nothing to suggest subversive intent. This is not sexual agency. It is what it looks like: a transparent attempt to sell records through ever-more-extreme sexist imagery. Women are supposed to aspire to look and be like her, and men to have sex with her, and both desires are harnessed to make money.
Another Carpenter defender, Markiel Magsalin, writing in Vogue, argued that the cover is “a masterclass in satire” but one that the “audience [isn’t] equipped to recognise”. It is hard to see this as anything other than the collective gaslighting of women. What seems to be a sexist image that adds to the mountain of sexist and demeaning images women have to endure through every single day of their lives is not what it seems—it is a fellow woman making an ironic statement that you have failed to understand. Your reactions are not a healthy awareness of the sexist rubbish around you and an effort to resist the effect it has, but a reflection of your own stupidity. This trash album cover is powerful social commentary, not the tired cliché millions of women perceive it to be.
We are told that Sabrina is doing all of this in the name of empowerment, or “<a href="https://stellar.ie/trending/sabrina-carpenter-the-power-of-the-female-gaze/137825">for the girls</a>”. In reality, Carpenter is just a reheated version of what the music industry, among others, has been selling for decades. That it is women who are now doing it and making some of the money only makes it more contemptible. 
Carpenter has form cashing in on reactionary tropes. Before the dog thing it was paedophilia. She wears bejewelled “baby doll” lingerie on stage in her Short n’ Sweet tour, harking back to an outfit worn by actress Carroll Baker in the 1956 film Baby Doll, where the adult female lead literally sleeps in a crib. In one less-than-subtle photo shoot with<a href="https://www.wmagazine.com/culture/sabrina-carpenter-cover-interview-2024"> </a><a href="https://www.wmagazine.com/culture/sabrina-carpenter-cover-interview-2024">W</a><a href="https://www.wmagazine.com/culture/sabrina-carpenter-cover-interview-2024"> magazine,</a> she made visual reference to the film Lolita, where a grown man pursues a child. Sabrina is presented as childlike, and as Jade Hurley, a feminist writer on <a href="https://jadehurley.substack.com/p/your-fave-is-selling-a-pedophilic">Substack</a> points out, she more than alludes to this in her “Nonsense” outro: “I’m full grown but I look like a niña/ Come put something big in my casita/ Mexico, I think you are bonita!” 
So just as the official line of society is that sexism is wrong, but there is sexism everywhere because it is profitable, we are told the sexualisation of children is wrong, except when it turns men on and sells records. In an interview with Vogue, talking about the corseted sparkly lingerie she wears on stage, Carpenter described how “there’s a stiffness to the corset, so it’s a little harder to dance in. But my waist is non-existent, so we love her”. Girls, don’t move, don’t breathe—but remember it’s worth it to be thin and sexy. No-one said empowerment would be comfortable after all. Just think of the money someone is making—one <a href="https://touringdata.wordpress.com/2025/04/07/sabrina-carpenter-short-n-sweet-tour/">estimate</a> puts the total likely revenue from Carpenter’s latest tour at $50 million.
All this is nothing new—women have had to be sex objects first and foremost and artists second for decades. Some have eventually spoken out against it, most notably Britney Spears, who describes being uncomfortable about being sexualised and infantilised in the 1990s but being too under-confident to object. But the normalisation of the violent porn and the sexual exploitation of women in the sex industry have only made this more prevalent, and criticism of it more marginal.
Marie Solis, a writer for the New York Times, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/14/style/sabrina-carpenter-album-art-feminism.html">remarked</a> that, despite Carpenter’s latest album cover being so overtly sexy, it is a remarkably “sexless” photograph. Unlike actual satire or irony, it doesn’t make you question received wisdom or the status quo. It just makes you wonder why an adult woman would want to present herself as a sexualised dog. Carpenter is not reclaiming anything. Instead, she is presenting a Hollywood glam version of female sexuality that still puts men firmly at the centre. With this latest cover and like much of Carpenter’s recent work, we are being force-fed sexist imagery in order to make industry producers, men and “empowered” women, big bucks.

Posing as a dog ‘for the girls’: what in god’s name is going on with pop culture?

Today, 2.33 billion of the world’s approximately 8 billion people face food insecurity. According to a<a href="https://docs.wfp.org/api/documents/WFP-0000162840/download/?_ga=2.29482812.227984222.1739075536-913231167.1739075536">
World Food Program report</a>, 200 million more people are acutely hungry and 1.9 million more are facing catastrophic hunger compared with pre-pandemic levels, just in the countries where the WFP operates. Globally, billions of people struggle to meet their daily needs. Almost 700 million people, or 8.5 percent of the world’s population, live on less than $2.15 per day, according to the World Bank. This is not because of a lack of resources—in Nigeria, nearly<a href="https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/nigeria/overview#:~:text=The%20poverty%20rate%20is%20estimated,largest%20poor%20population%20after%20India.">
40 percent of people live below the poverty line</a>, while the country’s richest man has a net wealth of<a href="https://www.pulse.ng/articles/lifestyle/richest-man-in-nigeria-2024072703141057049">
$15.9 billion</a>.
Developed countries are not as different as is usually assumed. In the United States, the wealthiest country in the world, 11 percent of the population live in poverty. In Australia, if you are part of the<a href="https://povertyandinequality.acoss.org.au/inequality/"> wealthiest 20 percent</a>, you have more than 90 times the wealth of the bottom 20 percent. In the course of two decades, the wealth of the rich has tripled, from 8.4 percent of GDP in 2004 to 23.7 percent <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/aug/13/the-rich-are-getting-richer-australias-wealth-divide-continues-to-widen">in 2024</a>. In the United Kingdom,<a href="https://www.jrf.org.uk/uk-poverty-2024-the-essential-guide-to-understanding-poverty-in-the-uk">
22 percent of people live in poverty</a>. 
From the global north to the global south, poverty and inequality are endemic. 
There’s nothing natural about this. In pre-class societies, there was no wealthy elite that flourished while others suffered. In their book The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the State for Monarchy, Slavery and Empire, Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus discuss the Caribou Eskimo society, a community where “as with so many foragers, no one amassed a surplus. No one claimed exclusive rights to the land. Traps and weirs were communal property. During famines, all food was shared with neighbours”. 
Instead of history being a war of all against all, humanity existed for tens of thousands of years in societies like those of the Caribou Eskimo—as a collective and social species. Indeed, this is what marked us out from others. The divisions based on wealth and control of society’s resources that are supposedly so natural emerged only relatively recently, and not without resistance. There are examples uncovered by archaeologists of people overthrowing burgeoning elites and turning their<a href="https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/the-origins-of-womens-oppression-a-defence-of-engels-and-a-new-departure/">
temples into trash heaps</a>. A historian of one, located in neolithic Anatolia, reports: “On a certain day 9,200 years ago the manorial houses were burnt down ... The temple was torn down and burnt, and converted into a municipal waste dump. The slums in the west disappeared for good ... There were no more houses or shacks built to an inferior standard ... All hints to social differences were erased”.
But despite such outbreaks of resistance, ruling classes nevertheless emerged and came to dominate the mass of people. This marked the end of communities based on collective control and egalitarianism, and the beginning of societies ruled by a privileged elite, concerned almost solely with protecting their elevated social position. Jump ahead a few thousand years and a few different versions of class society, and we have capitalism: a society that has spread globally, destroys the planet it relies on to exist, has brought humanity to the brink of nuclear war and leaves people to starve to death while supermarkets destroy unsold food to protect their profits.
Today, corporations and nation-states hold a virtual monopoly on society’s wealth, and their main goal is to accumulate more wealth so as to better compete with rival corporations and nation-states. They best do this by forcing down wages, flouting environmental and safety regulations and reducing the quality of the materials they use. Walmart and Amazon are good examples. <a href="https://www.oxfamamerica.org/press/press-releases/amazon-and-walmart-driving-economic-inequality-in-the-us-oxfam-says/#:~:text=Oxfam's%20analysis%20highlights%20key%20ways,pay%20to%20$14%20an%20hour.">An Oxfam report</a> into how Walmart and Amazon increase global inequality argues that “the companies’ outsized control empowers them to depress average wages, creating a disastrous reality for the American worker at a time when many already struggle to get by”. These are particularly high-profile examples, but every business aims to achieve this sort of “success”. 
The ideology of capitalism claims that, as the wealthy elite become wealthier, the rest of us ultimately benefit. This idea is popularised in cliches like “a rising tide lifts all boats” and in the concept of “trickle-down economics”. This obscures a basic reality of capitalism: that unless the majority of people are denied access to the goods and services they need to survive or an independent means to procure them, they will not be compelled to work for the capitalist class, and there will consequently be no profits. Capitalism cannot exist if the majority of people are not compelled to work for a boss, and the prevailing form of compulsion is relative poverty. 
The people systematically denied access to society’s wealth so that they can be exploited by the capitalists are collectively referred to as the working class. It includes all those who work for a wage and exercise little or no control over their labour or the labour of others, and all those dependent on waged workers for their survival—children, the elderly, sick and those who care for them. The working class exists in every country in the world and includes the majority of members of every oppressed group. It is the majority of the population in most countries in the world today. 
At work, workers are exploited. Not because they wear rags or live in the gutter, but because the value of what they produce at work is far in excess of what they are paid. The capitalists keep the rest, using some of it to cover operating overheads, some of it to expand their production operations and some of it for themselves. This gives them not only enormous privilege in terms of living standards, but also the ability to make decisions about society, what it produces and how, which workers are denied. 
The relative poverty and lack of power and control that characterise working-class life and working-class communities mean they are more likely to experience social problems, like crime and violence. Because capitalism can’t solve these problems, it instead criminalises the behaviour and creates industries, like the prison system, to “deal” with it. The United States’ annual <a href="https://www.vera.org/publications/what-policing-costs-in-americas-biggest-cities">police</a>
and <a href="https://ijrd.csw.fsu.edu/sites/g/files/upcbnu1766/files/media/images/publication_pdfs/Economic_Burden_of_Incarceration_IJRD072016_0_0.pdf">prison budge</a>t amounts to nearly $200 billion. The existence of an extensive criminal “justice” apparatus both serves to intimidate working-class people into submission and to create a profit-making opportunity out of those who don’t submit to capitalism’s authority.
And while all workers suffer oppression by way of poverty and exploitation, poverty exacerbates distinct forms of oppression like racism and sexism, and amplifies them. In his book Not So Black and White, Keenan Malik shows how poorer Black Americans are more likely to experience police violence than their college-educated counterparts: “Studies show, unsurprisingly, that police violence is correlated with poverty—the poorer a neighbourhood, the greater the risk of an individual being killed by the police. African Americans are disproportionately poor and working class; poverty and class location must also play a role in their being victims of police violence”. 
In the United States, 56 percent of those living in poverty are women, and in Australia older women are one of the fastest growing homeless populations. <a href="https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-peoples/aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-life-expectancy/latest-release">Indigenous men</a> in Australia are likely to die nearly nine years earlier than their non-Indigenous counterparts, and in the Northern Territory this balloons out to nearly two decades earlier. Indigenous people live in poverty at a much higher rate than the rest of the population, 43 percent of Indigenous people earning less than <a href="https://www.indigenoushpf.gov.au/measures/2-08-income#keymessages">$500 a week</a>. Refugees in Australia are likewise disadvantaged, <a href="https://asrc.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/ASRC_Policy_Through_Poverty_Finalv1.pdf">82 percent of those seeking asylum</a> having no source of income and relying on charity services to survive. 
The experiences of oppression are different between these groups. But there is a common thread underpinning these marginalised groups, which is poverty and lack of power. All are under-represented in the ranks of the billionaire class and over-represented in those socially disadvantaged and marginalised. All are materially worse off than average.
The capitalist class doesn’t rely on poverty only to exploit people at work. It also helps them ensure cooperation with the worst excesses of its brutal agenda. An example is the military, one of the most savage institutions in the world. The majority of people don’t join their country’s military because of patriotism or a desire to fight, but out of economic necessity or because it is a way to access services they otherwise wouldn’t have access to. Writing in <a href="https://jacobin.com/2018/10/military-recruits-full-employment-welfare-state">Jacobin</a>, Meagan Day argues that the US military provides for poor people what a strong welfare state should: “In fact, it’s a comparatively attractive option for many people, in particular because it offers a steady income, free college and job training, and a lifetime of public health care”. This is often referred to as economic conscription. Instead of drafting people into the military, people are coerced into it through relative deprivation. 
Poverty also functions to keep workers weak and divided. The capitalists want to ensure that a section of the population is unemployed so that workers don’t have too much power vis-a-vis their bosses and so that there is what Marx referred to as a “reserve army of labour” to mobilise in times of industrial action or other labour shortages. For the Reserve Bank of Australia, having around 4 percent of the population denied access to an income is ideal. The real prospect of unemployment also acts as a discipline on workers: concern about losing work can make workers put up with low wages and bad conditions. 
The world we live in seems like a never-ending series of injustices. But there are threads that tie these injustices together, and the most important one is the relative impoverishment of the majority of the population. Relative poverty underpins exploitation and social inequality and is indispensable for social control. Capitalism simply could not function without it. 
If we want a more just and equal society, we need to eradicate poverty. To do this requires the overthrow of capitalism. Charity balls and LiveAid concerts are not going to cut it. The answer to poverty and the solution to oppression are one and the same: revolution and the construction of a socialist society.

Why capitalism needs poverty

The University of Technology Sydney has marked International Women’s Day by banning a poster asking the question: “Why are teenage boys so misogynistic?”. 
The meeting was called to discuss rising sexist attitudes among, and the broader right-wing drift of, young men. Numerous indicators point to this reality, including a recent King’s College London survey showing that young men are far more likely than young women, and even older men, to say that men have it tougher than women today. In the United States, Donald Trump increased his support among young men by 15 percentage points last year compared to the previous election; in Australia, young men support Liberal leader Peter Dutton in much higher numbers than young women. Also, a recent Monash University study found that female teachers are facing a rise in misogynistic behaviour everywhere—and many are quitting the profession because of it. 
One woman who attended the meeting told the audience that in her first-year business tutorial, the tutor had to tell off men in the class because they were rating every woman who spoke in the discussion in the zoom chat.
Most universities have put up posters celebrating women and our contributions to society. But the UTS administration has sided with Andrew Tate and Donald Trump stans. 
UTS was alerted to the poster by at least one male student on campus, who also emailed the UTS Socialist Alternative club complaining that he feels “unwelcome and stereotyped” by the mere presence of a poster advertising a campus meeting about the growth of the far right and its expression in the political attitudes of young men. 
For years, the political right called the left “snowflakes”. People wrote hundreds of books and articles lamenting the “coddling” culture in universities and about how the political left and progressives can’t cope with ideas they don’t agree with. Right-wing provocateurs such as Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson made famous phrases such as “facts don’t care about your feelings”.
How the tide has turned. It seems that young men from the political right, like those at UTS, are now the ones who might start campaigning for safe spaces and trigger warnings. 
The Centre for Social Justice &amp; Inclusion handles complaints relating to sex, gender identity, race and disability discrimination. According to its equity policy, it seeks “diversity, fairness, social justice and ethical treatment of others”. The policy seems to have been written with oppressed groups in mind, so it’s remarkable to see it being used against women on campus. 
The directive to remove the poster is also related to the university fad of introducing policies to protect the “psychosocial safety” of staff and students, which were initially designed to silence Palestine solidarity activists. The feelings and emotions of those in positions of power are being protected while those trying to address injustices face disciplinary hearings. 
A staff member from Activate, which manages campus life, instructed the club to remove the posters during a phone call with Yasmine Johnson, UTS Socialist Alternative club president and the woman who hosted the meeting.
“He said to me, ‘You followed all the correct procedures, but unfortunately you are going to have to take these down. This has gotten around the uni top level very fast—the deputy vice-chancellor, the equity department, everyone knows’”, Johnson recounted to Red Flag. “He even said that the deputy VC instructed that the posters be removed as they violate the UTS equity policy.” 
That university management is worried about some men being distressed because people are discussing sexism tells you something about the political shift that is happening. 
Johnson reported being mobbed by Trump supporters while she handed out leaflets for the meeting. They loudly professed their love for the racist and sexist president of the United States. They were precisely the sort of young men who have been politically drawn to the far right and influenced by the violent misogyny of the sex-trafficker Andrew Tate. They are much more confident to express their bigoted attitudes, which will only become worse as institutions like UTS support them.
By not wanting to trigger any boys on campus who have trouble distinguishing between fact (young men are pretty sexist) and their feelings (a poster made me sad), the UTS administration has silenced the free speech of young women who are trying to fight back against the growth of a global far right.

University of Technology Sydney stands with boys with big feelings

The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights has released its findings and recommendations from the inquiry into antisemitism on university campuses in Australia. They call for an even greater crackdown on free speech and the right to protest.
The inquiry was launched last year in response to the mass Palestine-solidarity movement on university campuses. In the wake of these anti-war actions, university administrations launched a series of attacks on student activists. Supporters of Israel made a string of bogus complaints about campuses purportedly developing a hostile atmosphere towards Jewish students, claims that were then amplified by the media. 
The panel’s recommendations include that universities tighten and expand their disciplinary processes and report complaints to a national student ombudsman. If universities don’t act on the recommendations, the government might launch a judicial inquiry. 
Another recommendation is for universities to adopt the International Holocaust Memorial Association’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which has been criticised by many for its potential to associate any criticism of the state of Israel with antisemitism. The recommendation has been accepted by all universities across Australia, which have agreed on a definition of antisemitism that closely mirrors the IHRA definition. 
A section of the definition reads: “Criticism of Israel can be antisemitic when it is grounded in harmful tropes, stereotypes or assumptions and when it calls for the elimination of the State of Israel ... Substituting the word ‘Zionist’ for ‘Jew’ does not eliminate the possibility of speech being antisemitic”. This means students and staff can be disciplined for calling for a free Palestine or for criticising Israel or Zionism—which is a political ideology. 
As Senator Lidia Thorpe noted in comments about the inquiry: 
“[T]he Special Rapporteur on the right to education, Ms Farida Shaheed, observed that universities in the United Kingdom have used the working definition of antisemitism adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance to ‘silence lawful speech supportive of Palestinian human rights and the right to self-determination’”. 
The National Tertiary Education Union and the National Union of Students have voiced concerns about adopting the IHRA definition because it may restrict pro-Palestine advocacy and limit academic freedom. 
Another recommendation directs the government to investigate whether the Fair Work Act should be altered to allow universities to fire staff more easily. <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/academics-under-attack-for-supporting-palestine">As reported in Red Flag</a>, universities are already unfairly treating staff who stand up for Palestine. Randa Abdel-Fattah, a Palestinian academic, is facing a smear campaign from the press; her own vice-chancellor, who fronted the inquiry, says the Act is impeding his ability to fire her. 
The inquiry was a blatant witch hunt against supporters of Palestine. For instance, one submission’s “proof” of bigotry at the University of Sydney consisted of anti-war posters calling for weapons companies to be kicked off campus, Muslim men praying at the Gaza solidarity encampment and a sign that read “apartheid free zone”. 
According to Dr Noam Peleg, a Jewish professor of law at the University of New South Wales, Zionist organisations advised people on how to flood the inquiry with submissions. He wrote in his submission (which was largely ignored by the panel): “These organisations encouraged individuals to spam the commission with submissions that include so-called evidence about antisemitism on campus by circulating templates ... [They] called this template a ‘Submission Cheat Sheet’”. 
In their submissions to the panel, university administrations said they had already tightened disciplinary procedures, banned encampments and made it easier for people to complain. Nevertheless, the inquiry recommends that universities do more to restrict democratic rights and to act quickly. 
Politicians, the corporate media and university administrators are campaigning hard to conflate Palestine-solidarity activism with an apparent rise in antisemitism. There have been abhorrent acts of antisemitism, such as attacks on synagogues or swastika graffiti. But virtually no evidence is provided to uphold the claim that there is a rise of antisemitism on university campuses. 
Instead, genuinely antisemitic acts are being cynically tied to legitimate protests against Israel’s war crimes—as though the people who oppose today’s genocide are no different from those who celebrate the Holocaust. Equally perversely, many people who openly support Israel’s actions in Palestine claim to be the victims of a broad anti-war sentiment, despite there being no official sanctions or inquiries into their pro-war behaviour and intimidation of Arab and Muslim students. Some Australian citizens have even flown to the Middle East and joined the Israeli military’s offensive in Gaza—yet there is not a peep of opposition to this in the media or among the political class.
If there were a genuine increase in racism against Jewish staff and students on campuses, silencing protests would not be the way to deal with it. In its submission, the Human Rights Law Centre argued that actions curtailing racism “must not come at the cost of silencing critical or dissenting voices”. But that is precisely what is happening at universities across Australia. 
The University of Western Australia administration has banned almost all forms of mass political communication between campus activists and students. Students can no longer put up posters or hand leaflets to other students, affix signs, banners or other displays, or use chalk on pavements. If students want to hold “events relating to the current Middle East crisis”, they must ask for approval ten days in advance and detail how they will “ensure the safety” of attendees. 
Not only are basic activist activities banned, but students also “must refrain from using phrase[s] and slogans that are contrary to the university’s policies (in either written or verbal form) at any time or place on campus”. This is a flagrant restriction of free speech. 
This mirrors the introduction of the University of Sydney’s civility code, which prohibits the use of “contested” phrases unless their meaning is explicitly defined. Slogans such as “from the river to the sea” will require further explanation if students and staff are to avoid misconduct and disciplinary hearings. 
The university recently wrote that “practices such as sit-ins and protests in buildings and classrooms are out of step with contemporary work health and safety standards and our obligations to maintain psychosocial safety on campus”. 
Dr Peleg has described how “frameworks such as cultural safety and psychosocial safety are also used to attack, harass and bully staff and students, Palestinians and their allies, including Jewish staff who oppose Israel’s actions. This is done in the name of combating antisemitism”.
Universities and governments are also introducing policies and legislation to censor and punish individuals and groups who protest peacefully and express critical ideas. Charges of antisemitism are, disturbingly, being weaponised to introduce these measures. We must resist the push to limit free speech and the right to protest. We will need them as the drive to war and the growth of the far-right gains momentum.

Antisemitism inquiry recommends crackdown on free speech

If you walked past Mark McGowan, former premier of Western Australia, and gave him a serve for his role in locking up Indigenous children, you would probably feel pretty good about yourself. If it was filmed and put online, you might even end up in a segment on the Project. If you happened to do it at Curtin University in Western Australia, you’d probably be suspended. This is what happened to a student at Curtin last month, one of many students across the country facing discipline over justified acts of protest. 
<a>Red Flag has covered</a> the increased repression on campuses in the wake of the Gaza solidarity encampments. In response to the Palestine solidarity movement, universities changed their policies and student charters to make it even harder to speak out against the genocide in Gaza. We are now seeing the impact of these changes, as well as the political impact of the parliamentary inquiry into antisemitism on campuses. The historic student general meetings (SGM), in which thousands of students nationwide have voted in solidarity with Palestine, have also kicked off a new wave of repression. 
There are dozens of examples of universities repressing pro-Palestine activism in just the last few months. Here are a few of them. The Students for Palestine club at the University of New South Wales has been suspended in the wake of the SGM. The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology has launched disciplinary proceedings against three students for their participation in a political meeting at that campus. The University of Sydney shut down a bake sale raising funds for Gazans and has brought misconduct charges against students for organising a Palestine solidarity protest on campus, including an anti-Zionist Jewish student. Melbourne University is hunting down students who occupied the office of a pro-Israel lecturer. The vice-chancellor interfered in the student union elections at the University of Technology Sydney to ban mention of the word “genocide”. And at the Australian National University, the spending of elected student union officers is being audited because they promoted Palestine solidarity. Not only students: two academics at the University of Sydney are being accused of racial vilification over their support for Palestine. 
Up and down the country, space for student activism—almost a rite of passage for young people—is narrowing, and those who dare to speak out against the genocide in Gaza are being dragged through misconduct hearings. It’s difficult to grasp the full scale of this, as many universities impose confidentiality clauses that prevent students from speaking publicly about their repression.
The political backdrop for these attacks is a hysterical campaign by the mainstream media, the Labor government, the Liberals and Zionist organisations against Palestine solidarity activism. This resulted, among other things, in a Senate committee about a supposed wave of antisemitism on campuses. Many of the submissions to the committee made the well-rehearsed argument that any criticism of Israel amounts to a racist attack on Jewish people. The purpose here is to accuse pro-Palestine activists of being antisemites who must be stopped.
University of Sydney vice-chancellor Mark Scott in particular was accused of not doing enough to suppress this supposed problem. Submissions and commentators, including opposition leader Peter Dutton, attacked him for not instantly shutting down the Gaza solidarity encampment on his campus. Jillian Segal, the recently appointed special envoy to combat antisemitism, wrote a submission to the Senate hearing which stated that there is a “pervasive hatred” of Jewish people at the University of Sydney, and that antisemitism is an “embedded” part of university culture. Her accusation is based on a few interviews with Jewish staff and students, all of whom support Israel and are opposed to the anti-war movement. In the months after the campaign against Scott began, the university launched a witch-hunt against known Palestine solidarity activists.
In the initial months of Israel’s war on Gaza, there was a more liberal approach on the campuses. Even when the solidarity encampments were established, most universities chose not to shut them down or bring in the cops, as we saw in the United States. Scott even said he wouldn’t ban political expression and respected the right of students to protest. But a hardline approach has since been adopted by the administrations, who have fallen into line with the anti-Palestine campaign.
Universities are some of the country’s largest institutions that help to manufacture the ideological material of Australian society, as well as the literal material of weapons research in partnership with weapons companies and other imperialist nations like the United States and Israel. This is all far more important to administrations than academic freedom and open political expression. Those who run the universities form part of Australia’s elite: they come from it, and they contribute to it. For instance, RMIT vice-chancellor Alec Cameron is a long-term member of the ultra-conservative, boys-only, Australian Club. Sydney University’s chancellor, Belinda Hutchinson, sits on the board of Thales Australia, a major weapons manufacturer. Many vice-chancellors earn more than a million dollars a year. 
So when a hegemonic political line is established by the Australian elite, university management will toe it. There is a common view of universities as oases of open expression, where ideas flow freely, common sense is challenged, and diversity and debate flourish. This is much overstated. Our universities are embedded in Australian capitalism; they are economically and ideologically beholden to it. Ideas deemed too dangerous to the status quo have historically been repressed.
The Australian establishment ardently backs Israel, regardless of the atrocities it commits, because it is a loyal member of the Western imperialist bloc. The Palestine solidarity movement of the last year has threatened the ideological myth of Israel as a defender of democracy and freedom. The federal and state governments, as well as the billionaire-backed mainstream media, have denounced the movement from day one. Universities, which can feel the pressure of upholding their liberal image, took a looser stance to begin with. But now they have fallen into line.
The excuses that universities have used to justify the repression in recent months are astonishing. For instance, in suspending the Students for Palestine club at UNSW, Arc, the body that oversees clubs and student life, alleged that the mere presence of pro-Palestine posters caused damage to the “psychosocial safety” of the university community. It’s pretty jarring to anyone who has watched footage of dead Gazan babies being pulled from bombed buildings to hear that putting up posters advertising a student meeting is a threat to “psychosocial safety”.
Student activists at the UTS in Sydney have also apparently harmed the psyches of staff and students by handing out a leaflet for an event titled “exposing UTS ties to genocide”. Students were informed by security that the vice-chancellor said the use of the word would be “triggering”. 
At RMIT, students who made use of an empty lecture theatre for a political meeting after a Palestine solidarity rally received disciplinary hearing notices that insinuate the students were celebrating terrorist attacks on Israel. They imply that the mere sight of a keffiyeh caused anxiety and threatened the wellbeing of staff and students. 
The phrase “From the river to the sea” has been banned by multiple universities, including ANU, where students were warned that the phrase was “harmful”, and at Monash, where banners and placards with the phrase were seized. Monash has also disciplined two students for putting up pro-Palestine stickers—one was dragged out of class by security. 
As mentioned, some universities have altered their campus policy guidelines to restrict protests by demanding that students first seek approval from management. While they refuse to spell it out, the motive for this is to shut down pro-Palestine activism. For instance, at Sydney University, the new Campus Access Policy has been used only to shut down Palestine-related events, such as a bake sale, or discipline students who organised a Palestine rally. Other non-Palestine-related events that broke the new guidelines have not been touched. 
RMIT is altering its “Property Management Procedure” and the “Health, Safety and Wellbeing Policy”. The changes will give unilateral power to the director of Property Services to bar room bookings or “protest or protest related activity” that might cause “financial or reputational” damage to the university. Like the Campus Access Policy, it also prohibits camping—a clear reference to the encampments. 
According to an anonymous staff member who works in the policy department, an earlier draft of the policy changes was so restrictive and undemocratic that the policy team rebelled against the directives of management, which was forced to revise the policy. This staff member also reported that the emails about the policy included “Palestine protests” in the subject line. 
Last month, Swinburne University in Melbourne’s inner east made the extraordinary move to remove the Islamic Student Society’s chosen prayer leader and replace them with a university-appointed chaplain, and stationed guards at the entrance to the prayer rooms to bar those without a student card. Students feel that this act of religious repression happened because the students frequently make references to Palestinian oppression in their prayers. 
It’s a terrible precedent that a university can interfere with students’ religious freedoms. And it highlights the real social problem in the wake of Israel’s genocide in Gaza: the ramping up of Islamophobia. Jewish students have not had their prayers or events shut down by any university across the country. There has been no enquiry into the impacts of the war on Muslim students. This again speaks to the selective outrage and enforcement of restrictions by university administrations. 
Universities frequently celebrate the struggles of the past. Students learn about the movements against the Vietnam War and South African apartheid in history degrees. Universities use photos of protests from the ’70s and ’80s in their advertising material to future students. UNSW proudly displays a bronze statue of Nelson Mandela. But university managements opposed those movements when they were happening, and they are repressing the students who are confronting the modern equivalents. 
The absurdity at the heart of this issue is that the students and staff who are facing repression are those calling simply for peace, for an end to the war. Yet they are being suspended, expelled, harassed and intimidated. Some staff may even lose their jobs for speaking up for Palestine. The universities are telling us that right is wrong and wrong is right. This is the reality of campus life for socially progressive students and staff. It’s a reality that must be challenged.

Universities are repressing Palestine solidarity activism

Last month, Treasurer Jim Chalmers fronted the media with a gloating smile to announce the federal government was posting a consecutive budget surplus of $18 billion. “Our bigger than expected surplus in the year just gone is entirely due to lower spending”, beamed Chalmers. “A second straight surplus is proof of our responsible economic management.” 
Any normal person observing this “responsible economic management” was probably feeling their stomach turn. We are living through one of the worst cost-of-living crises in generations, and the Labor government has decided to lower government spending rather than increase it in areas that would help the millions of people struggling to make ends meet.
The latest <a>Guardian Essential Poll</a>
shows something that socialists have been arguing for the last few years—that most people, when confronted with a lack of affordable housing and rising electricity and grocery prices, think that the government should intervene to make things more affordable. Seventy percent of survey respondents thought that price caps should be introduced on rent, groceries and electricity bills, and the same number thought that the rich should be paying more tax. 
Seventy-one percent of respondents agreed that the gap between the rich and poor is widening. According to the <a>latest poverty and inequality report</a> from the Australian Council of Social Services, one in eight people in Australia are living in poverty. With rising costs, this number will only increase. 
The latest CoreLogic report from September found that rents had increased by 7.2 percent since last year. These increases are not uniform across the country. In Melbourne, it was working-class suburbs like Dandenong (16 percent) and Broadmeadows (14 percent) that went up the most. The same is true for New South Wales, rents in Roselands, Villawood and other working-class suburbs increasing by 24-30 percent. The amount of money one must earn to purchase a house in Sydney is eye-watering—only those on nearly $300,000 could purchase a property at the median value without incurring mortgage stress (this is $200,000 more than the average annual income), according to financial comparison site Canstar. Unsurprisingly, only 16 percent of people are opposed to removing tax breaks for property investors, according to the Essential poll.
Wages haven’t gone up to compensate for rising prices. In fact, the latest employment outlook from the OECD found that wages in Australia have gone backwards by 4.8 per cent compared with pre-pandemic levels. Bosses in Australia have taken advantage of the economic situation, and wealth is rapidly moving from the bottom of society to the top. Corporations like Coles—which posted an annual profit of $1.1 billion in the last financial year—are laughing all the way to the bank. 
Many people know this situation isn’t right. Forty percent of respondents to the Essential poll said that our political system needs fundamental change, which rose to 49 percent for those who are struggling or in serious financial difficulty.
Capitalism is always going to produce stark wealth inequality, poverty and anxiety for ordinary people. It’s a system predicated on a class divide in which a minority get rich off the labour of the majority. The bosses and the politicians who represent them clearly have no interest in overturning this state of affairs. 
That’s not to say there’s nothing the government could do to alleviate the current financial burdens for millions of people. They just refuse to. The government could raise taxes on companies like Coles and individuals like Gina Rinehart and use that money to pay for public housing. Instead of posting an $18 billion surplus and bragging about cutting government spending, Labor could increase government spending on social services and Centrelink. They could legislate price caps on essential goods and ban greedy landlords from ripping more rent out of young people. 
It’s an indictment on the Labor government that they refuse to implement these measures. It’s also an indictment on the union movement that there aren’t more strikes and actions for wage increases. 
Ordinary people understand the problems and know what the solutions are. I say we should let them be in charge.

Workers know what to do: tax the rich and cap prices

Victoria Police is pulling off the heist of the year, aided by sensationalist (and dumb) reporting in the corporate press. 
In what is being billed as “one of the largest police operations in decades”, more than 1,200 cops from around the state have descended on Melbourne to provide paid security for the <a href="https://landforces.com.au/">Land Forces expo of weapons manufacturers</a>, some of which are involved in providing equipment to facilitate the genocide in Gaza. 
That’s right, masses of cops with guns are being assembled to protect the people with the missiles.
Police say that the Supreme Court of Victoria has authorised “special powers” under the Terrorism (Community Protection) Act for an area surrounding the Melbourne Exhibition Centre, the conference venue. This is not to assist them in monitoring the terrorism facilitators inside but to better target peace activists who will be protesting the event.
The anti-terror legislation allows police to enforce an exclusion zone, search people and vehicles, instruct people to leave the area and arrest them for not doing so. 
The cop mobilisation is being helped by a pliant media that uncritically and repeatedly reports that 25,000 people will lay siege to the conference—a figure seemingly plucked out of thin air but most likely circulated by Victoria Police.
The Guardian, the news site of liberal progressives, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/sep/08/thousands-of-anti-war-protesters-to-disrupt-controversial-weapons-expo-in-melbourne">reported on Sunday</a> that “25,000 activists” are mobilising “as Melbourne braces for the biggest protest in decades”. Anyone with even a passing interest in the Australian left knows two things. First, there aren’t that many activists in the whole country. Second, Melbourne has had protests that were far bigger than 25,000 in the last twelve months. Not that Guardian editors are interested in fact-checking these idiotic claims.
Not to be outdone, <a href="https://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/army-of-protesters-to-cause-chaos-ahead-of-weapons-expo/news-story/25d424b4046e0db12096a8e36fdd43f2?amp">the Herald Sun also reported</a> that “an army” of “up to 25,000 activists are set to cause chaos”. Again, where is this number coming from?
Police clearly want a mass mobilisation—a show of force to intimidate anti-war activists who have sustained Palestine solidarity protests for nearly twelve months. 
Possibly, the cops want an easy ride for the week as well: there’ll be plenty of overtime for everyone, plus travel allowances and accommodation for the country cops. Perhaps a promise has been made to every weary constable and underused riot squad member that they will also get free rein to kick a few vegans.
It looks set to be one giant cop holiday, paid for by the ALP government, which says it can’t afford to properly staff hospitals anymore.

Before the conference even opened, cops were swarming South Warf. 
“Police [are] seen at every entry and exit point of the building. Some police were even seen patrolling the Yarra River nearby on a large boat on Saturday morning as bus loads of police entered the centre through the loading docks at Normanby Rd”, the Herald Sun reported. 
Indeed, one activist walking through the area told Red Flag that she was followed by half a dozen officers, who demanded to know who she was and what she was up to. “They seemed to be looking for an excuse to arrest me”, she said.
Early Sunday, under the cover of darkness, three military helicopters and about 150 police officers reportedly were mobilised as an army tank was brought into the convention centre. One wonders if the heavy cop presence was necessary—surely a tank can take care of itself. 
Inside the Land Forces expo, the tank will be displayed alongside drones and an array of the latest weaponry, which can be perused and purchased. Outside, people might be arrested for littering, loitering or perhaps underage vaping—which is unhealthy.
This expo is an affront to decency. The media, the cops and the state government have a lot to answer for in facilitating this death cult event in the middle of the city. 
We may not get 25,000 people out to protest it. But protest it, we will—along with the ridiculous police mobilisation that now comes with it. 
Students for Palestine have called a demonstration for <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/C_RewJmTMu9/">6am Wednesday 11 September at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre</a> to protest the opening ceremony of the Land Forces expo. Meet near the Clarendon Street entrance across from Crown Casino.
Afterwards, <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/C_eooM9yHEH/?img_index=1">join us for a counter-convention</a> with Rathi Barthlote, a co-founder of Refugee Women Action for Visa Equality and an organiser of the refugee protest camp outside the Department of Home Affairs in Docklands. Dr Binoy Kampmark, an anti-militarist lecturer at RMIT, will also speak.

Guardian fake news helps cops mobilise against anti-war activists

To celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2017, La Trobe University’s advertising campaign featured the slogan “Fighting for change before hashtags” accompanied by inspiring images of student activism. Melbourne University’s long-time promotional branding encourages us to “Dream Large”, and Monash University wants us to “#changeit”. To prospective students, universities market themselves as progressive institutions where “Big Ideas” (Melbourne University again) are debated, and thinking is cutting edge. For current students, it’s a repressive atmosphere where if you dare stand up to genocide, you get threatened with expulsion, dragged through disciplinary tribunals and denied natural justice.
Across Australian universities, a crackdown on the right to protest and freedom of speech aimed at pro-Palestine activism is currently in full swing. At Monash University in Melbourne, nine students have been subject to disciplinary hearings for their participation in the campus Gaza solidarity encampment. At La Trobe University, also in Melbourne, two students have been threatened with disciplinary measures for their involvement in similar activity. At Melbourne’s Deakin University, two students faced drawn-out disciplinary hearings, one resulting in suspension. 
At ANU in Canberra, a student was expelled for publicly stating their support for Palestinian resistance. Curtin University in Perth, ANU and Monash have all banned or restricted the use of the phrase “from the river to the sea”, and Melbourne’s Swinburne University has asked the police to stop students participating in political activity. Melbourne University has used Wi-Fi connections to track students who participated in an occupation of a university building. At Sydney University and the University of New South Wales, administrations have changed their student charters to restrict nearly all forms of protest, particularly aimed at future encampments. 
Universities are a law unto themselves when it comes to decision-making and discipline—students enter a realm reminiscent of post-9/11 repression when they are charged. In most cases, students have been told not to discuss their charges with others. At Monash, students accused of misconduct weren’t allowed to view the evidence against them, outside of a limited window and under the supervision of a university employee. 
Madi Curkovic, one of the disciplined Monash students said of the experience: “We were not allowed to show anybody the emails we received from the university, nor were we provided with the evidence against us and were banned from being on the lawns where our encampment was set up”. 
One student subject to disciplinary action at Deakin University told Red Flag they were treated as guilty before any evidence was presented, and the university official put in charge of their hearing eventually recused herself after concerns were raised about bias. Another said the university failed to provide her with all the evidence they were using against her. That student was later suspended.
The only recourse for students found guilty of misconduct is an appeal to the same institution that found them guilty, or to take the university to court. This is obviously prohibitive for most students. 
This crackdown is not in response to anything “radical” by the historical standard of the Australian student movement. What student activists have done is the basic bread and butter of political activism: talking to fellow students, raising awareness, collecting names on petitions and holding protests.
James Gallagher, a socialist at Swinburne University, told Red Flag
that the police were called to shut down a stall he was staffing, which involved a table with petitions, political leaflets and badges. “First, security came and told us to pack up”, he said. “When we refused, they called the police.” 
Universities are traditionally no-go zones for police, and the right of students to engage in political activity and hold protests is similarly well established. But during the Gaza encampments on university campuses across Australia, the question of whether or not police could break up student camps on university grounds, as the authorities did in the US, became hotly contested. University charters, local by-laws and regulations, criminal law and human rights charters were all consulted, by both sides. In the end, no cops were used against the student protesters. But in the wash-up of these camps, university administrations are trying to intimidate students and prevent similar protests from happening again.
One tactic involves administrations changing the rules of engagement to shut down free speech and restrict the right to protest. At the University of Sydney, the new “campus access plan” restricts the rights of students to use a megaphone, hang a banner, set up a table, or organise a rally on a road for which 72-hours’ notice hasn’t been given. Violating the code can result in disciplinary action. The administration has banned anything that might make for an effective, disruptive political action. The University of New South Wales has also updated its rules and regulations. Deaglan Goodwin, vice president of the student union at Sydney University said: 
“The timing is not accidental at all. It comes after the incredibly successful Gaza Solidarity Camp at Sydney University. The spectre of the encampment haunts the campus access policy—a lot of it targets specifically anything that can be used to set up or maintain a protest camp site on campus”.
Even students going through official channels to show support for Palestine have faced pushback from the universities. Students at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) called a student general meeting through the student union, to take a position in solidarity with Palestine and against weapons companies conducting research on campus. 
The university administration’s response has been to withhold information about how many students are needed to meet quorum, block room bookings and instruct staff to bar students from making announcements in classes. Students holding a stall to promote the meeting were threatened with police involvement. The education officer for the QUT student union, Isabella Foley, described the intimidation tactics by the university: 
“Management have encouraged staff to call security on students ‘delivering a political message or garnering support for protest activities’ to classes. Students have been told that saying ‘QUT supports genocide’ could result in repercussions from the university. Rather than threatening us, the university should be cutting ties with Israel and expressing opposition to its genocide.” 
Pro-Israel students, although a lot less active than pro-Palestine ones, have not been met with the same repression. At Monash University, pro-Israel stalls have attracted no harassment from the university, despite the fact that the Israeli flag would likely cause distress to Arab and Palestinian students. 
Pro-Israel students physically and sexually harassed students at the Monash Gaza solidarity camp, yet not a single pro-Israel activist has been disciplined for this behaviour. In one case, a Muslim woman was stalked on the way to her car, and another has been subject to vicious online attacks. Madi Curkovic, a pro-Palestine activist at Monash, said: “Almost every day we faced down violent counterdemonstrations by supporters of Israel, who were allowed by the university to enter the encampment to harass and assault student protesters”. This double standard reflects the allegiance universities have to Israel.
During the Gaza solidarity encampments, university vice-chancellors wrote to the attorney general asking for legal advice on the slogan “From the river to the sea” and the term “intifada”. Essentially, they were asking the government to provide them with a reason to persecute pro-Palestine activists more viciously. Despite so far receiving no definitive response, administrations have cracked down on the slogan anyway. 
At Monash, security seized banners and placards with “From the river to the sea” written on them, and even snatched a sign off of a Jewish student that said “Jews against genocide”. Students were told they could face disciplinary measures if they chanted the phrase. Students at Curtin University and the Australian National University have likewise received written notices barring them from displaying the phrase “From the river to the sea” on banners. 
Universities aren’t the only supposedly liberal institutions that are cracking down on expressions of support for Palestine. Just this month, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra cancelled Jayson Gillham’s piano performance because it was dedicated to journalists murdered in Gaza. Although they later backtracked, the message to artists was clear: any reference to the rights of Palestinians is not welcome. This is in stark contrast to the stance the orchestra management was happy to take in support of Ukraine in 2022, when they dedicated an entire concert to raising money for the victims of Russia’s invasion, with—rightly—no concern about offending Russians. 
After a Sydney Theatre Company performance of the play The Seagull last year, actors wore keffiyehs, a traditional Palestinian scarf, for the curtain call to display solidarity with Palestine. Management responded by issuing an apology for the actors’ actions after they received complaints from supporters of Israel. At the State Library of Victoria, an event was cancelled due to three authors airing pro-Palestine views on social media. 
On the streets as well as the stage, the right to political expression is under attack. In liberal Melbourne, the council is attempting to restrict the right to do stalls during the weekly pro-Palestine demonstrations. With the threat of fines and police intervention, local Palestinian craft stall holders and political organisations have been hemmed into the State Library forecourt, barred from distributing information on the street. 
As long as Israel remains firmly part of the Western imperial alliance, challenging it will be controversial. On university campuses especially, as long as cross-institutional ties with Israeli universities continue to be cultivated and companies that profit off of the war industry have research partnerships with Australian institutions, challenging Israel will be beyond what university administrations are willing to accept. 
When the right-wing media talk about university students, they paint an image of snowflakes too scared to talk about things they disagree with. It turns out this is actually a description of the bureaucrats who run our universities.
Despite the censorious attitude that abounds on campuses, pro-Palestine activists and socialists are finding ways to stand up for Palestine and are winning support. Thousands of students are showing up for student general meetings in solidarity with Palestine, and in a number of cases, students who have challenged university discipline procedures have been successful. They have also attracted some high-profile support, including from Victorian Greens leader Samantha Ratnam and human rights organisations. 
It is to their eternal shame that Australian university administrations have so far remained silent in the face of genocide and the destruction of every single university and most schools in Gaza. At the beginning of the current war, universities released statements condemning Hamas and largely ignoring the fact that Israel was responding with intense bombardments of the civilian population in Gaza. 
Monash University wrote on 10 October: “We are especially disturbed by the attacks on civilians by Hamas”. RMIT was “greatly saddened” by the “humanitarian impacts” but made no acknowledgement of the fact that Israel was murdering Palestinians. Sydney University “abhors terrorism”. None of these universities have spoken out against the war crimes of Israel. None of them have cut ties with the Israeli government. All of these statements refer to antisemitism and have only a casual nod to the impact on Palestinians and those subjected to Islamophobia.
Writing in the leftist publication Sidecar, Ussama Makdisi refers to this as the “Palestinian exception”. He writes, “Yet the heart of the Palestine exception is not simply the crude denial of Palestinian history and humanity. More significant is the constant overwriting of this history by a different one: that of modern European antisemitism ... With this act of substitution, the ongoing reality of Palestinian slaughter is erased from ethical consideration”. 
Supporters of Palestine continue to face obstacles, repression and accusations of perpetrating harm towards supporters of Israel. But whatever discipline they want to mete out, we’ll fight. Students know we are on the right side of history.

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