Results of the government’s French Review into campus free speech were published in May. “Claims of a freedom of speech crisis on Australian campuses are not substantiated” was its conclusion. Nonetheless, education minister Dan Tehan has used the review to campaign for the enforcement of a new “model code” for free speech on university campuses, which he accuses of “failing Australia”.
The notion of a university free speech crisis has revolved around two absurd arguments. The first is that student protests are destroying civil liberties. But rallies by students against hard right figures like Bettina Arndt and conservative politicians who have been responsible for slashing their universities’ funding are an expression of free speech, not a violation of it. The draconian proposals mooted by Tehan, on the other hand, such as imposing fines or stricter disciplinary measures on students for engaging in activism, are the real threat to freedom of expression. They involve the use of state power by politicians to intimidate some of their most vocal opponents. It simply does not compare to students protesting against those with power and influence over their lives. 
The second absurdity is that a progressive ideological consensus on campuses has stifled the capacity of conservative ideas to gain a hearing. In a recent think piece in the Australian, Tehan painted a picture of a witch-hunt atmosphere on campuses, forcing those who are holders of right-wing views to become “self-censoring out of fear that they’ll be shouted down or condemned for expressing sincerely held views and beliefs, or for challenging widely accepted ideas”.
Notably, this argument is advanced not only by those on the right, but has been echoed by sections of the liberal commentariat. Age journalist Julie Szego recently vented her exasperation at the supposed over-saturation of campuses with progressive ideas, writing, “Anyone who seriously doubts leftist groupthink is stifling campus debate, especially in the humanities, has either avoided hanging around universities or come to love Big Brother ... Is this where we want to be? Devoid of empathy and collegiality? Palpitating in the vaguely menacing silence that descends on a classroom after an edgy joke misfires?”
This characterisation of campus life is ridiculous. Universities are increasingly corporatised entities where chasing profits has led to massive staff cuts, resulting in enormous classes in which there’s often little space for anyone to engage in much debate or discussion at all. 
On top of this, funding cuts have led to the serious depletion of departments that espouse a more critical attitude to the existing order. The main growth area in the humanities over the last generation is in “counter-terrorism studies”, hardly a discipline inclined towards leftist group think. And when new funding does appear, it usually comes with political strings attached, such as in the case of the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, which has just been approved by Wollongong University.
But even leaving this aside, the argument that academia is being fettered by progressive ideology is deeply reactionary and anti-intellectual. The development of fields of inquiry that seek to understand and document the experiences of women, LGBTI people and those subject to the horrors of colonialism, slavery, and apartheid, were not just achievements of monumental social struggles, but were also objective markers of progress in human knowledge and understanding. To argue that such endeavours detract from areas that have traditionally ignored these aspects of human experience is akin to accusing a geology department of neglecting the theorists of the Flat Earth Society.
And it is to distract from the draconian incursions on academic freedom that are taking place, and which are a consequence of the embedding of corporate interests in higher education. The National Tertiary Education Union has long raised concerns about “political and funding interferences” in universities, especially relating to research into pharmaceuticals and, increasingly, the arms industry, which is a major commercial player in higher education. These relationships are siphoning universities’ resources away from critical inquiry and into corporate research and development. Melbourne University, for instance, is an official sponsor of the International Mining and Resources Convention, a cornucopia of billionaire tycoons plotting how best to profit from the destruction of the planet. The University of South Australia has just hired former defence minister Christopher Pyne and former Labor premier Jay Weatherill as “industry professors”. Both spent their time in office giving billions in arms contracts to the same private weapons companies that now act as the university’s key industry partners. 
The legitimate cause for concern which exists, then, is the powerful corporate interests and their political lackeys, which increasingly determine which avenues of research, inquiry and understanding are open for exploration. This aligns perfectly well with the conservatives’ idea of freedom, but is a development that must be resisted by students with all the incivility and free speaking we can muster.

Con Karavias

Free speech on campus

The question of organisation is a crucial one for socialists. Capitalism divides us and isolates us from one another. It encourages us to think that only the rich and powerful have the right to decide anything. At the same time, it breeds resentment and anger, and a desire for change. The status quo is held together in no small part because those desiring change feel powerless to effect it.
This feeling reflects a reality. As individuals, our capacity to challenge things is severely limited. Approach your boss alone and demand a pay rise and you’ll be laughed out the door. Refuse to repay your student debt because you think education should be free and you’ll soon find yourself in trouble. And this is to say nothing of colossal issues like climate change, the refugee crisis or global inequality. 
To effect change, workers, students and the oppressed need to get organised and act collectively. This has always been true, though it’s not the way history is usually taught. More often, emphasis is put on the role of significant individuals like Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela, while the actions of the thousands of activists they organised, learnt from and led are glossed over. 
There is a reason for this: mass action poses a potential threat to capitalism. 
Marx argued that “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves”. This means that to achieve socialism, the mass of workers need to take collective control over society’s resources and reorganise them according to the needs of the majority. This is not a task that can be undertaken on behalf of workers by any organisation or individual. It can only be done by the mass of workers themselves. But revolutionary organisation is nevertheless essential. To understand why, we have to look at how capitalist society is organised, and how the powerful secure their privilege and protect the status quo. 
Capitalist power
The capitalist class is the most well-organised and powerful ruling class in human history. It has a stockpile of weapons that could destroy the world several times over. It has a state apparatus that maintains an incredible level of discipline over the population. In the workplace, this discipline is reinforced by strict corporate hierarchies that keep workers constantly under the thumbs of their managers. 
This is backed up by an extensive ideological apparatus. The mass media flood society with ideas that reinforce the status quo. Public spaces are saturated with advertising and corporate logos that make it feel like our lives revolve around consumption. In our formative years, our thoughts and beliefs are shaped by an education system that does little more than prepare us for the workplace by normalising discipline and forcing students into competition with one another.
There are other less obvious but just as significant means by which workers are conditioned to accept the status quo. Workers’ very real lack of day-to-day control tends to reinforce the idea that it’s necessary or inevitable for a minority to be in charge. Similarly, the ruthless competition of the marketplace makes it seem as though human beings are inherently selfish and greedy. In these and many other ways, the experience of living under capitalism inevitably leads to ways of thinking that accord with and naturalise the inequalities and prejudices of the system.
If this were all that there is to it, then the prospects for socialism would be bleak. But workers’ lives and attitudes are not shaped solely by these structures, or by the efforts of the ruling class to disseminate pro-capitalist ideology. Working class life involves many experiences that are at odds with the received wisdom of capitalism, and which therefore call it into question.
The fact, for instance, that work requires a high degree of cooperation between people, and that the whole world economy would be unable to function without the routine cooperation of millions of workers, undermines the idea that people are hopelessly individualistic, selfish or in eternal competition with one another. 
Struggling to survive on a wage, dealing with mistreatment from despotic bosses, being betrayed by politicians and having the fruits of your labour sold back to you for a profit, likewise create a sense of commonality among workers that is contrary to the individualised ideology of capitalism. 
A consciousness of this shared experience tends to break down the artificial divisions of gender, race or religion that are imposed on people in dog-eat-dog capitalism, and that the bosses rely on to turn workers against each other.
On top of this, the incessant pressure on workers to work harder and longer for lower pay routinely drives workers to act against their employers, whatever their beliefs are. Such resistance forges bonds between workers and creates an awareness of the need for collective organising.
Contradictory consciousness
Workers then are subject to pressure both to accept and obey the capitalist system, and to challenge it. A consequence of this is that most workers have a mixture of ideas about the world they live in. Some ideas back up and normalise the capitalist system, others lead in the opposite direction. The Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci called this “contradictory consciousness”. It is an inevitable part of living under capitalism.
The mixture of ideas that workers hold varies throughout the working class. Some workers, because of strong traditions of union organising or political engagement, or for a variety of other reasons, can have a particularly strong sense of class consciousness. On the other hand, workers who lack these traditions, or are more isolated from one another, can be more susceptible to capitalist ideology and have less of a belief in their own capacity to shape the world around them. 
The different organisations that exist within the working class movement also play a role in shaping consciousness. Trade unions, reformist political parties and revolutionary organisations, depending on their respective sizes, histories and orientations to the class struggle, can profoundly affect the degree and nature of working class consciousness.
The complex array of influences that shape class consciousness is an important argument for socialist organisation. For workers to unite and effectively exercise their power against their rulers, they need to have a high level of class consciousness. Workers have to understand clearly their common interests, and feel confident to act on them. They need to do this not only in defiance of the common prejudices of capitalism, but also in spite of those who would seek to undermine such action, or persuade them that another course is preferable.
The most confident, class conscious workers therefore need to act to build the confidence of the weaker sections of the class, to draw them into unity with their fellow workers and help them organise to realise their power. This is true also of the middle ground of workers who may be confident to organise and fight and may also hold a profound sense of solidarity with other workers, while still being unsure about whether compromise with the old order is possible or a more radical solution is necessary.
A socialist organisation is the key means by which the most radical workers can act to build class consciousness and maximise the possibility that workers’ struggles become a challenge to the system rather than an isolated episode. 
In an organisation, socialist workers, students and activists can come together to clarify their political approach and educate one another about working class history and politics. In doing so, they can vastly improve their capacity to build the strength of the working class movement, win other workers to a socialist world view, and build contemporary struggles against the injustices of the system.
This can happen in a number of ways. By pooling the experiences of workers across a wide variety of workplaces, an organisation not only enables its members to develop a broader understanding of the class struggle, but also enables them to sharpen and clarify the arguments that need to be waged to convince more people of socialist positions.
An organisation also enables younger radicals to learn from those with more experience. And a socialist organisation can act as a counterweight to the barrage of propaganda and distortion that the ruling class uses to write the working class out of history or check its momentum. Through publications and public organising, socialist organisations preserve the history and achievements of the working class movement, and use that knowledge to strengthen future struggles. 
Socialist organisation also enables its members to coordinate activism on a large scale and in a much more effective manner than they would be able to as atomised individuals. The enormous benefits of this are evident in Australian history. 
In the early 20th century, the revolutionary Industrial Workers of the World led the first mass struggles against racism and war, defeating conscription and building unity between white and immigrant workers. In the great radical movements of the 1960s and ’70s, it was the strenuous organising of Communist Party members that made the Australian working class among the most militant and socially conscious in the world.
Socialists are not the only people who recognise the power of workers and seek to win influence within the class. Trade union leaders and even politicians can at times pay tribute to the achievements of the labour movement. But the loyalties of such figures are always extremely limited. They may bring workers together to help bargain with an employer or win an election, but they are hostile to workers themselves taking control of society (which might threaten their parliamentary seats or cushy jobs in the bureaucracy). At best, they combine partial support for workers with an insistence on compromising with capitalism.
Against this, revolutionary socialists must organise their own current in the workers’ movement that argues to strengthen the confidence, unity and capacity of workers to fight for their liberation, not settle for compromises.
Building for the future
Winning better pay and conditions, or stopping monstrosities like the Adani coal mine or the incarceration of refugees, are vitally important. But even if won, these are only partial victories against the system. So long as capitalism remains, there will be more atrocities, injustices and environmental destruction. 
Rather than start from scratch each time, consolidating from these struggles a bigger layer of socialists committed to thoroughgoing social change helps to strengthen future campaigns and tips the balance of forces away from reformists and other apologists for the system and towards revolutionaries. The experience of fighting various injustices is a key way in which larger layers of people can start to see the connections between different forms of oppression, the importance of solidarity and the need for radical change. 
All this means that socialist organisations must be built before struggles or revolutions take off. During revolutions and mass struggles, ideas and politics shift rapidly. Through mass assemblies, strikes and occupations, workers take up political questions usually confined to their rulers, and become open to ideas they may have previously dismissed, or thought of as unrealistic.
In such situations socialists can win millions to their world view – but not without an organisation that workers are already familiar with, and which is capable of giving a lead and providing a viable way forward through the challenges of any campaign or struggle, even as the storm of conflicts and struggles that a revolution creates rages around them. Without such an organisation, more conservative forces will enter the fray unopposed, and exploit the uncertainties of workers in order to contain them and preserve the status quo. 
Socialist organisation is a vital element in the struggle for working class revolution and socialism. As the carnage of capitalism accumulates around us, we urgently need to win more people to this project so that we are better positioned in the battles to come.

Why we need to be organised

The video starts with the words “some may find the following disturbing”. A rapid-fire montage of visceral rebellion follows. A black-clad anarchist punches neo-Nazi Richard Spencer in the face. Protesters clobber riot police shields. Palestinians fling rocks, and demonstrators flood Australian cities.
Juxtaposed with this are images of corporate power, poverty, famine and environmental devastation. The crescendo is reached as suited men enter limousines to the words “big bucks in the business of blood”. A shot of concrete covered in blood and bullet shells follows. 
No, this is not a Rage Against the Machine film clip. It is a promotional video for Monash University.
The video made quite a splash when it was released. Federal education minister Simon Birmingham called for it to be pulled from circulation. Conservative alumni bemoaned their alma mater’s turn to extremism. And the expected commentators went ape, with the Institute of Public Affairs asking, “Is it Monash or ‘Marxist’ University?”
Yet rather than bucking the trend, Monash’s edgy pastiche reflects a growing trend in the public relations of Australian universities. Take Melbourne University, which recently commissioned a series of murals by radical artist Sam Wallman. The murals show militant struggles dating back to the strikes for the eight-hour day in 1856, and celebrate Communist icons Zelda D’Aprano and Guido Barrachi.
La Trobe University went one step further last year, hosting public forums with the “La Trobe three” – former students who were locked in Pentridge Prison (at the behest of the university) for campaigning against the Vietnam War. 
Sydney University this year celebrated the 1978 riot that kicked off the annual Mardi Gras celebration. Its “Unlearn” branding urges students to “challenge the established, demolish social norms and build new ones in their place”.
What should be made of these celebrations of rebellion? To some, they are unsurprising. In the conservative imagination, universities (or at least their arts departments) are assumed to be hothouses of radical indoctrination, crucibles of dissent corrupting the youth.
The reality is quite different. Across Australian universities, left wing students and other dissenting campus voices are routinely targeted by draconian administrations. 
Take the University of Wollongong. Last year, socialist students won the student union elections in a landslide. In response, the university immediately overturned the result and sacked the student president, replacing her with a conservative who had gained only 6 percent of the vote. The basis for this decision? That the president-elect had made a political speech in a lecture theatre.
Or take Sydney University, where a student was fined and issued with a severe reprimand on their academic record due to allegations that they had thrown a miniature Israeli flag in the bin. No proof was ever presented that this took place, and in a hearing the accusers confessed to lying about having witnessed it. Nonetheless, the fine and the reprimand were upheld, and the student attributed with “moral delinquency” by a board appointed by the university.
In a similar vein is the case of Roz Ward, who was suspended by La Trobe University in 2016 for criticising the Australian flag on her personal Facebook account. 
Ward’s case reflected another worrying trend on campuses: the erosion of academic freedom and the union-bashing agenda of university managements.
Melbourne University is at the forefront of these attacks. While the administration pays tribute to striking stonemasons on its sandstone walls, it has no compunction about driving down staff conditions, including mass sackings, wage rises that barely keep up with inflation, increasing casualisation and dividing academic and professional workers. It is also proposing to remove intellectual freedom as a fundamental principle from its staff agreement.
Then there is the case of Murdoch University in Western Australia, which last year took the unprecedented move of unilaterally terminating its staff agreement.
Linking the crackdown on dissent with attacks on staff working conditions is the profound corporatisation of modern universities. Universities are important institutions of ruling class power in Australian capitalism. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, they functioned almost exclusively as training grounds for the born-to-rule. 
Today, universities are massive corporations, churning through tens of thousands of students, charging exorbitant fees and in some cases making tens of millions of dollars in annual profit. They operate with the same ruthless pragmatism as any other giant corporation.
Yet they sell a commodity more highly valued than most: education. Hundreds of thousands of students who do not come from the ranks of the wealthy attend university in the hope of improving their own lives and often of making a positive difference to society. 
University administrators recognise in this an opportunity to make a buck. Hence the appropriation of the legacy of campus protest and resistance to promote their products and institutions. That universities do this while simultaneously repressing actual dissent is rank hypocrisy. 
Perhaps most abhorrent is the appropriation of anti-war movements. This is occurring at a time when Australian universities are aggressively pursuing joint research and investment projects with some of the largest weapons manufacturers on the planet.
Such duplicity is typical of the powerful, whose privilege depends on presenting ruthless profit-making as a social service. We need to expose their lies, but also understand the truths they manipulate. Student rebellion and protest have been vital to changing the world for the better. Their legacy lives on in the activists challenging corporate power today, not in the transparent cooption by university administrations.

Protests used as marketing by hypocrite universities

The Liberals are crowing. Twenty-five million dollars of public money will be spent on a university research deal with the US military. “This is a great outcome”, defence industry minister Christopher Pyne said.
The deal is part of the Defense Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative, a US military program using international universities to develop US weaponry. Five Australian universities are reportedly participating. 
They’ll pursue research, dictated by the Pentagon, to create, in Pyne’s words, “game-changing military capabilities” (in case you didn’t know that killing people is a game).
That Australian universities could become henchmen for Donald Trump’s army may seem shocking, but it fits with the increasing militarisation of higher education. Across the country, universities are being harnessed to feed the booming war industry. 
Take South Australia. The state’s three main universities now collaborate on what’s been called a “golden moment” of $90 billion in weapons investment. Adelaide University chancellor Peter Rethjen, a former rear admiral, is also the chair of military manufacturer APC Technology.
Such ties are common. Sydney University chancellor Belinda Hutchinson is chairperson of the Thales Group, one of the largest arms companies in the world. Fittingly, before becoming the voice of arms manufacturers in parliament, Pyne was minister for education.
Thales Group and other companies with a stake in Australia’s higher education system, such as British Aerospace Engineering and Lockheed Martin, are among the most opportunistic vultures of modern capitalism, fattening themselves from death and misery.
That the arms industry is increasingly partnering with universities is heinous. The National Union of Students is organising the Books not Bombs campaign to break the ties between universities and arms manufacturers.

More arms industry ties to universities

Even Christmas couldn’t keep the Liberals from attacking higher education. In the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook, the government announced $2.2 billion in university funding cuts over the next two years.
The cuts will take the form of a freeze in Commonwealth grants for teaching and learning. This will reduce the number of Commonwealth supported places available for students.
The Liberals argue that this is about ending the “demand-driven system” of university funding introduced by the Gillard Labor government. This system uncapped the number of university places available, enabling institutions to enrol as many students as they wanted, and incentivising them to do so by linking government subsidies to total enrolments.
This did not benefit students. For quality, accessible university education, we need a substantial increase in base funding to universities. Under the ALP, base funding was never increased to match increased student numbers – in fact, before being voted out of office, the Gillard government proposed cuts on the scale that the Liberals are now trying to implement.
The increasingly stretched higher education system laid the basis for the Liberals to propose massive increases to student fees to fill the funding gap created by governments. This is the inevitable trajectory of all “demand-driven” systems, which link “service provision” to a capitalist market.
The Liberals’ cuts will be disastrous for students who rely on Commonwealth supported places. Student debt has quadrupled in the last 20 years and is already predicted to rise further. These cuts will only increase the level of debt.
On top of this, the Liberals are not proposing to better regulate higher education. Their plan is the opposite – by continually lowering government funding, they intend to lay the basis to completely deregulate university fees, allowing campus administrations to charge whatever they want for a degree.
This agenda remains deeply unpopular. But this funding freeze does not have to pass through the Senate.
On top of the cuts, the government still wants to lower the HECS repayment threshold. It aims to force students to repay their debt once they earn $45,000 a year, the equivalent of a full time worker making $21.60 an hour. It also proposes to cap the total amount that the government will pay to subsidise individual degrees.
That the Liberals would try to sneak such a vast swathe of attacks through while everyone’s getting ready for summer holidays says a lot about what a bunch of sour, greedy miscreants they are. It also demonstrates that higher education continues to be a key target of fiscal “savings”.
That deregulation has largely been averted is thanks to serious student protests over the past five years.
The Labor Party initially proposed the cuts that the government is trying to implement, but has since backed away from them due to popular opposition. Tony Abbott’s push to introduce fee deregulation in 2014 was thwarted by thousands of students protesting around the country.
We will need to work to build such protests again if we’re to see off the latest round of attacks. The National Union of Students just had its national conference, planning and organising campaigns for the year to come. The left in the union moved and passed policies endorsing a protest campaign against the government, and building towards free education, with the first National Day of Action scheduled for 21 March.
These campaigns will have to confront attacks on multiple fronts. Across Australia, students are facing university administrations determined to cut courses, fire staff and restructure education in the name of profitability.
University vice-chancellors have been some of the most outspoken supporters of increased fees and corporatising university programs. These tycoons of higher education are no less obsessed with their bottom lines than the likes of Gina Rinehart and Rupert Murdoch. Taking them on will be an important priority for those fighting for students’ rights in 2018.
We also need to fight for a vision of education that goes beyond the profit-driven confines of capitalism. In Australia, we can afford free, quality education and an improved student welfare system. The government is still trying to pass $65 billion in corporate tax cuts, while every year tens of billions are spent on mining subsidies, refugee detention, military expenditure and surveillance. Even a fraction of this money redirected towards education would allow everyone who wanted to attend university to do so.
Student unions have led struggles to transform education from a privilege into a basic right. With a Liberal government on the warpath, and vice-chancellors around the country determined to bleed us dry, 2018 will be an important year to get organised and raise our voices again.

Government goes Grinch on higher education

For more than five years, refugees have been subjected to horror and abuse on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. With the government’s decision to permanently close the detention centre on 31 October, the horror has descended into absolute barbarity.
Water, food and power have been cut off. More than 600 refugees have been reduced to filling bins with rainwater and mixing it with sugar and salt to sustain themselves. Sympathetic members of the local PNG community have been blocked from providing them with food. A protest sign in the centre in early November read, “If the air was in Australia’s hands it would cut it on us”.
Behrouz Boochani, an Iranian refugee on Manus, talks of “a mood of death, climate of death” pervading the camp. Writing on 2 November, Behrouz described the horrendous conditions and the refugees’ incredible resilience:
“Starvation, thirst and terror slowly but surely dominate the prison. Gradually these factors impose their power over the incarcerated refugees. Bodies are weak, muscles are fatigued, spirits are weary. It has been nearly five years full of anguish – anguish that has ground everyone down. During this last week in particular, no one has slept properly.
“Everyone is weary out here, but the one mantra continues to reverberate: ‘We will never retreat and leave this hell of a prison. We will never move to another prison. We will never settle for anything less than freedom. Only freedom’.”
The next day, one refugee suffered from epileptic seizures, another from severe heart pain. Behrouz wrote:
Death is always ever so present.
Death.
The breath of death.
The scent of death.
The reign of death over Manus prison.
This is the reality of living out here.
This humanitarian catastrophe has not come from nowhere. The Manus Island detention centre has been a furnace of torment and abuse since it was reopened by the Gillard Labor government in 2012. Baptised under Tony Abbott’s mantra, “Stop the boats”, the centre is a symbol of the relentless war on refugees waged by both sides of parliament.
Initially, families were sent to Manus Island. Gillard’s immigration minister, Chris Bowen, touted the centre’s suitability for children. This continued until a 2013 Four Corners report revealed extremely under-resourced medical facilities, with no places for children. After this, the families were relocated to Nauru, and more than 900 men were transported to Manus.
Later in 2013, a report by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees found that every single person imprisoned on Manus was suffering from anxiety and depression. Further reports found that rates of mental illness among detainees were higher than among any other population ever recorded.
The Rudd Labor government dismissed these findings. The Department of Immigration and Citizenship responded: “All people transferred and accommodated in the Manus Island RPC are being treated with dignity and respect and in accordance with human rights standards”.
Simultaneously, Rudd announced that no man, woman or child who fled persecution by boat would ever be settled in Australia.
Within months, widespread sexual assault and torture were being reported. In February 2014, a riot broke out led by PNG locals and Australian security personnel. They broke into the detention centre, wounded more than 60 refugees and murdered 23-year-old Reza Berati. Another refugee survived after having his throat cut and being kicked repeatedly by Australian G4S security personnel.
This was just the beginning. In August 2014, Hamid Kehazaei sought treatment for an infected wound. Staff sought his immediate evacuation, but it was denied for two days. Within a week he was brain dead, and three days later his life support was turned off. He had contracted a bacterial infection that in normal conditions would have been easily treated. He was only 24 years old.
Behrouz, who has been speaking out for years against mistreatment on the island, wrote of their feelings in the wake of Hamid’s death:
“Hamid’s death was totally different from any other death. It was beyond human nature. It could have been easily prevented and resulted from incalculable cruelty, and so our emotions were beyond those a person usually experiences as the result of losing a friend.
“Great fear gripped each of us in Manus prison. Was our destiny the same as Hamid’s? Was it to be that sooner or later everything would be destroyed and finished by a simple infection? This fear was most notable in those who were sick.”
Since Hamid’s death, four other refugees have died on Manus Island, including two in the past three months. These deaths have punctuated continual reports of physical and sexual abuse. On Good Friday this year, the PNG navy fired live ammunition into the detention centre, wounding nine. This same navy is now being employed to remove the refugees forcibly.
Successive governments have responded to these atrocities with intensified cruelty and by demonising the refugees publicly. After the refugees were shot at, Peter Dutton defended the navy by insinuating that the refugees were paedophiles. This year, the Liberals moved to ban resettled asylum seekers from even being allowed to visit Australia.
Simultaneously, governments have attempted to spread a veil of silence over what is taking place. In 2015, the Border Force Act was passed, criminalising the reporting of abuse. An amendment from the Greens to create an exemption in the case of child sex abuse was voted down by the two major parties.
The opening of Manus and Nauru was purposefully undertaken to abuse and demonise refugees with impunity, keeping them out of the reach of activists, journalists and legal representatives. The government has spent upwards of $10 billion on maintaining the prisons over the past three years, an investment in racism and the creation of a scapegoat for popular discontent.
In enforcing this barbarism, the government has become an icon for fascist and Nazi movements across Europe and North America. Policies that were once the sadistic thought bubbles of Pauline Hanson are now the formal positions of both major parties.
The Greens have spoken out strongly against these atrocities. Immigration spokesperson Nick McKim called Peter Dutton “a racist, a proven liar, a fascist and a serial human rights abuser”. At a protest to support the refugees in Melbourne, Adam Bandt labelled Dutton a terrorist. He later reiterated the charge, tweeting on 3 November: “If terrorism is using violence to threaten lives for political purposes, then yes, Peter Dutton is a terrorist”.
These denunciations are welcome and should set the tone for resistance to the government’s policies. Supporters of refugee rights can also take inspiration from the refugees themselves, who have protested daily since late July and have an incredible history of defiance.
In 2015, more than 500 men undertook a two-week hunger strike against their prolonged detention and the conditions on the island. Protests, marches and calls for solidarity have continually flowed out of the detention centre. At times, desperation has made self-harm, including the sewing together of body parts, a form of resistance.
Substantial protests to support the refugees have taken place around the country. Now, more than ever, we need mass resistance to free the refugees.

Politicians on both sides are responsible for Manus horror

Cory Bernardi moved in the Senate to condemn the Australian National University Socialist Alternative club for celebrating the centenary of the Russian Revolution.
On 18 October, he drew attention to the event and called on the Senate to “reject any assertion that the teachings of Lenin and Marx should be celebrated in a liberal democracy”.
By a slim margin, this motion got up, thus staving off the collapse of Western civilisation until at least 3 November next year, when the German revolution will be commemorated.
Bernardi toasted his victory, tweeting “wiser heads prevail” and “teachings of Marx/Lenin unwelcome in Australia”.
You may marvel at the notion that the upper house of the Australian parliament would condemn a student activist club for hosting a political meeting at a university.
But there is historical precedent for parliaments wasting time and energy whingeing about the left.
In 1907, Russia’s parliament, the Duma, censured the Bolshevik Party for advocating a revolution to overthrow the absolutist monarchy. Like Bernardi, the Russian regime had a disapproving attitude to socialist literature, forcing radicals to smuggle the works of Marx and Engels into the country in suitcases with false bottoms.
The socialists’ leaders, including the notorious Lenin, were forced to live in exile. The teachings of Marx and Lenin were certainly unwelcome in tsarist Russia.
This all brought years of peace, prosperity and stability. Well, peace – except for the four-year slaughter the country entered into in 1914; prosperity – except for the millions of people at the bottom of Russia’s vast class divisions; and stability – until the revolution a decade later, when the Russian people arose with world-shaking consequences, those same ostracised socialists at their head.
So maybe there’s something to be taken from Bernardi’s latest venture out of his own derangement and into the mainstream of Australian politics (it’s incredible how seamlessly that happens). The nightmares of the powerful can be prescient. Here’s hoping.

Hey Cory. The Tsarist Duma condemned the Bolsheviks in 1907. Look how that worked out

More than 2 million people fleeing wars or persecution have been added to the ranks of the world’s refugees in 2017, according to a report presented to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR).
The largest increases come from South Sudan (650,000), and Muslim Rohingya (500,000) forced to flee ethnic cleansing in Myanmar over the past five weeks.
“[Refugees] often arrive sick, traumatised and hungry, in remote border locations, in communities affected by poverty and underdevelopment”, high commissioner Filippo Grandi said. “Many have urgent protection needs – children separated from their families, men, women, girls and boys exposed to sexual and gender-based violence.”
This latest increase comes after the UNHCR estimated in June that the number of people displaced globally – almost 66 million – is now the highest in human history.
Yet political establishments around the world continue to close the doors. The number of resettlement places has dropped by more than 40 percent in the last year. In September, the US government proposed limiting its refugee intake to 45,000 in 2018, the lowest cap in the United States for decades.
As the crisis has deepened and the security of refugees has deteriorated, politicians from Australia to Europe have become more brazen in their refugee bashing and fear mongering, as they militarise borders and clamp down on civil liberties.

World refugee numbers increasing

The scale of the global refugee crisis is unprecedented. According to a new report by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, 65.6 million people have been forcibly displaced from their homes.
The report, “Global Trends – Forced Displacement in 2016”, details unimaginable tragedy and devastation. Throughout 2016, 20 people were forced to leave their homes every minute. Children make up a majority of those displaced, and by even the lowest estimates there are almost 100,000 children who have fled with no other family members or guardians.
The number has grown significantly over the past two decades and is the highest in recorded history. It is almost twice the figure of 33.9 million people in 1997. In large part this is due to the Western occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the savage repression of the Arab Spring. More than 20 million of those displaced and seeking refuge come from Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria.
That this crisis calls for enormous amounts of material assistance and compassion for those affected goes without saying. Yet as the crisis has worsened, the global war on refugees has been accompanied by the closing of the borders of Western nations.
<a href="http://socialismsydney.com/"><img alt="Socialism Sydney" src="https://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/inline-images/RF%20-%20Socialism%20ad_4.jpg" /></a>
“Border security” has been a relentless focus across the West since the early 2000s, but “security” doesn’t begin to describe it. Far from merely being fortified, borders have become militarised and laced with high tech surveillance operations, and all the guns are pointing at asylum seekers.
Australia has long been a trailblazer in this regard. Beginning with the imprisonment of asylum seekers in 1992, Australia’s borders are now patrolled by naval ships and aerial drones. People seeking asylum are forced at gunpoint back to the terror they’ve fled, distress calls and drowning refugees are ignored, and the Australian Federal Police has paid to have boats scuttled in Indonesia. Detention centres have become island gulags of unspeakable brutality.
These conditions are replicated across the globe. In Europe, from Denmark in the north – where refugees have their possessions requisitioned before being locked away – to the Mediterranean in the south – a graveyard of capsized asylum boats – to the jungles of Calais in France, and Viktor Orban’s fascistic Hungary, the same savage project is under way. Trump’s USA is the most bellicose incarnation of a common barbarity.
Of course, none of this is a secret. Politicians around the world pride themselves on their inhumane treatment of asylum seekers and love of borders. From Trump’s “Build the Wall”, to Tony Abbott’s “Stop the Boats”, refugee bashing has been a call to arms for the political establishment everywhere.
Coupled with this has been the systematic slandering of refugees, bordering on the pathological. Every racist trope is trotted out to smear refugees as anything from job-stealing welfare bludgers to serial rapists. Indeed, the more desperate and heart-wrenching the trauma that refugees are subjected to, the more relish the politicians seem to take in abusing them. Take Australian immigration minister Peter Dutton’s smearing of Manus Island detainees as paedophiles just days after they were shot at by Papua New Guinea Defence Force personnel earlier this year.
All of this is meant to be a big vote winner, especially among the poor and disenfranchised. Yet the politics of refugee bashing is deeply averse to the interests of working class people. Workers’ security and standards of living are being eroded by the same political establishment that grinds refugees into the dirt and sinks billions into policing the borders. That establishment seeks to use refugees and migrants as scapegoats, and neuter any resistance to a deeply unjust status quo.
Beyond this, refugee bashing has been key to ruling class attempts to configure politics in its own favour. It has enabled not only massive amounts of spending on weapons, surveillance and prisons, but has helped to undermine the politics of social solidarity and welfare, while normalising a highly authoritarian and unaccountable state. Such a state of affairs better enables governments to attack unions, welfare recipients, Indigenous people, the elderly and the disabled.
In this fashion, politicians circle like sharks around a staggering humanitarian crisis that continues to get worse. In South Sudan, a quarter of the population is now displaced. In Syria, this figure rises to almost two-thirds. Meanwhile, new conflicts continue to emerge. Their victims will face political establishments more determined to oppress and demonise them.

Global refugee crisis continues to worsen

The Australian government is escalating its attacks on refugees. On 20 May, immigration minister Peter Dutton announced that 7,500 people would face immediate deportation should they fail to complete asylum claims by 1 October.
Clearly taking inspiration from Donald Trump, whose administration has escalated the deportation of migrants across the US, Dutton slandered the 7,500 people residing here as “fake refugees”, who are trying to “con the Australian taxpayer” and take the government for a ride.
While bullshitting about the government’s “generosity” in accommodating refugees, Dutton’s comments demonstrate his desire to reject as many applications as possible. The imposition of an arbitrary deadline highlights this, as does ridiculous bureaucracy and cynical politicking surrounding asylum claims, which have rigged the system completely against refugees. 
In the first place, Dutton claims that many of the 7,500 have been here for years and should have completed their applications already. Yet all of them have in fact been barred from doing so by the federal government. In August 2012, the Gillard Labor government ended the processing of all asylum claims for those who arrived by boat, insidiously naming the change the “no advantage” rule and placing more than 30,000 people in legal limbo. 
In the small window that has opened since, refugees have been locked into a labyrinth of bureaucracy. Asylum application forms run to 41 pages, with more than 100 questions, all steeped in legalese and requiring extensive supporting documentation. A single error results in immediate failure and protection being denied. 
Navigating all of this is impossible without legal assistance. Yet the government has gutted funding for refugee legal services over the past few years. Of the few organisations remaining, many have waiting periods of up to a year. The Refugee Advice and Casework Service alone has more than 1,000 people on its waiting list.
To add insult to injury, senior Immigration Department sources have told the Guardian that the department is incapable of processing the number of case loads being demanded anyway. All the government bluster is a transparent ploy to clear people out.
Even for a government as abusive of refugees as ours, the cynicism of this defies description. The next few months will be a period of psychological torture for thousands of people, enormous numbers of whom will be unable to escape being forced back to the persecution they fled from. With this deadline, Dutton has literally set a date for Border Force to begin rounding up and shunting innocent people off to arenas of torture and genocide.
Dutton of course has the support of every Liberal MP and senator. Labor has said that it will quiz the specifics of the deadline, but has endorsed rushing the applications through and has shown no qualms about deporting thousands of people to danger, in line with the party’s longstanding despicable record.
Australia’s brutal anti-refugee policies are obtaining a sadistic edge in the Trump era. Now more than ever, we need resistance against this parliament of racists and cynics.

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