The fall of the Assad regime, thirteen years after the beginning of the Syrian revolution, is among the most extraordinary events in Middle Eastern history.
The 2011 Syrian revolution was the most far-reaching of all the Arab revolts, penetrating deep into every crevice of society. Driven by poverty, economic crisis and hatred of a brutal authoritarian regime, millions took to the streets demanding an end to the regime.
But President Bashar al-Assad’s vicious strategy to maintain his rule—slaughtering half a million people, flattening cities, imprisoning and torturing tens of thousands, forcing millions into exile—came to embody the smashing of all the dreams of democracy and freedom that animated the Arab revolution in its first months.
The Syrian struggle for freedom was assaulted from every conceivable angle. Peaceful protesters were mowed down in the streets without mercy, forcing the resistance to take up arms and transforming the mass movement into a civil war. When it looked like the rebel forces might finally overcome the regime, Russia, Iran and Hezbollah intervened to choke the life out of free Syrian cities. 
The US initially mouthed support for the revolution. But Washington was never interested in a genuinely democratic Syria, which it accurately judged not to be in its foreign policy interests. The US refused to provide the weaponry the rebels were pleading for, which would have allowed them to defeat the regime. It also blocked other states from providing those weapons. This betrayal didn’t save the Syrian revolution from being slandered by many so-called anti-imperialists on the Western left, who shamefully dismissed Syrian aspirations for freedom from dictatorship as little more than a CIA/Mossad plot.
Years of devastating civil war, foreign intervention and monumental death and displacement destroyed almost all of the revolution’s civic institutions and fed the rise of groups whose aims greatly diverged from the spirit that drove revolutionaries in 2011.
Yet, despite everything, and seemingly against all hope, Assad is suddenly gone. In less than two weeks, a rebel offensive that began in the northern city of Aleppo transformed into an extraordinary nationwide uprising that routed the regime. As rebel forces swept south, taking first Hama and then Homs, it became clear that the regime would get little support from its foreign backers. Rebel factions across the country joined the offensive.
Instead of the much-feared influx of Iranian-backed militias from Iraq to defend the regime, regime fighters fled to Iraq or ditched their military uniforms and left their tanks and weapons lying in the streets.
The great lie—that the Assad regime had the support of large numbers of Syrians—disintegrated as quickly as the regime itself. Without Russia and Iran slaughtering people on its behalf, the regime couldn’t last two weeks. As Assad fled the country, his forces melted away. Even the coastal Alawite areas fell with barely a fight. 
The coalition of fighters behind this extraordinary chain of events was led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)—an Islamist group originating in Jabhat al-Nusra, which was affiliated with al-Qaeda. However, the group that became HTS broke from al-Qaeda and then re-formed under its current name in 2017. For many years, and especially in the course of this uprising, it has emphasised tolerance of other religious groups and minorities and has disavowed the most reactionary elements that characterised al-Nusra and ISIS.
HTS has for years controlled Idlib in the north-west. During that time, it repressed protests, but nothing remotely on the scale of what either the Assad regime or ISIS have been guilty of. It is far too early to know its role in the coming months. But whatever the sincerity of HTS’s shift to a more inclusive, all-Syrian stance, that stance played a vital and probably decisive role in uniting the country behind the rebel offensive. Unity across religious lines was a crucial part of the initial success of the 2011 revolution and will remain so for its prospects. 
However, with Assad gone, Syria’s free and democratic future hinges on a revival of the extraordinary revolutionary energy that first emerged in 2011. The real hope is that the mass of Syrian people can seize this opportunity to build a society of genuine justice and equality that so many gave their lives for.
The scenes emerging from Syria since the fall of the regime are extraordinary: thousands celebrating on the streets, chanting the slogans of unity and freedom that had been buried under years of counter-revolution. 
All ethnic and religious minorities have been involved. Christians in Aleppo chanted, “Syrians united, we are one people!” and decorated their areas of the city with Christmas trees. Alawites in the port city of Tartous, traditionally an important base for Assad, tore down regime statues to wild cheering. In Iraqi Kurdistan, people filled the streets carrying the flag of the Syrian revolution and chanting, “One, one, the Syrian people are one!”
Multi-coloured Druze flags filled the streets alongside the green and black flag of the revolution. Palestinians in Raml refugee camp in Latakia held a nighttime demonstration, lit up with lanterns, protesting against Assad right before he fell. 
Across the country, statues of Bashar and his father, Hafez al-Assad, came crashing down. In one case, a gold one was used as a sled. People mocked Bashar by ostentatiously walking along the red carpet in his Damascus palace and filming themselves saying banned words. It was a nationwide carnival of celebration.
An extraordinary reversal of the mass displacement of the last thirteen years has also begun. Thousands are returning to cities they were forced from in the war. From Lebanon and Türkiye, enormous convoys of former refugees are streaming back into the country.
Nothing has captured the momentous but also heartbreaking nature of this moment more than the liberation of the prisons. As each city fell to the rebellion, the doors of the regime’s vile and vast jails were broken open. “Hellholes” does not adequately convey their nature. Every Syrian knew the reality of these places. They were no secret—the whole point of them was to instil terror in anyone who thought of resisting the regime. But to see the videos of people emerging from them—people who had endured years of torture, physically and mentally broken; to see toddlers, whose mothers had been raped in prison and who had lived their whole lives in these pits—is devastating beyond words. 
The joy of seeing these prisons empty must be accompanied by rage that they were allowed to endure for so long. There are those in the Palestine solidarity movement who laud Iran or Russia—because they purportedly fight against tyranny—and who defended the regime as a heroic part of the “axis of resistance” right until it fell. 
But Assad did nothing for the Palestinians except massacre them and lock them up. Among the thousands released from the notorious Sednaya Prison were 67 members of the Al-Qassam Brigades and 630 other Palestinians, according to reports. Bashar al-Assad, like his father, never fought Israel, either to defend the Palestinians or to take back occupied Syrian land. 
Even if Assad had supported the Palestinians, it wouldn’t have justified his regime or made the revolution illegitimate. You can’t tolerate one genocide to oppose another.
And while there was support for Assad among some activists in the West, Palestinians themselves sympathised with the uprising from the start. And why wouldn’t they? Who knows better than the Palestinians the meaning of genocide, dispossession and exile? And how could anyone watch the beautiful scenes of Syrian refugees returning to their country and not dream of the day the Palestinians will end their long exile?
In any case, whatever short-term geopolitical benefit Israel might now gain (which is not at all clear), the past year has demonstrated, yet again, that there is no hope for a free Palestine in a Middle East ruled by dictators. The hope that dictators in Tehran and Moscow, any more than those in Cairo or Amman, would liberate Palestine was a fantasy. The only hope for Palestinian liberation is an Arab world with the Arab people themselves in charge.
Overnight, Syria has gone from being the most despotic state in the Middle East to the freest. This is not to say that the country’s problems will be resolved simply. There are enormous issues to be worked through and obstacles to be overcome. After a long dictatorship and civil war, the country is deeply scarred and controlled by militias, many of which have fought each other in recent years. The Israelis have already invaded from the west, the Americans have troops in the country, Turkish-backed forces are fighting the Kurds in the north, and ISIS is still active. The struggle ahead will be long and difficult, with no guarantee of success. 
Nevertheless, the precondition for achieving any of the goals of the Syrian revolution was the overthrow of the Assad regime. This is now done; he is gone. The future can start to be written.
Jasmine Duff contributed to this article.

Corey Oakley

Hope returns to Syria

If we don’t want Australia to be drawn into a devastating war with China that could cost tens if not hundreds of thousands, or even millions of lives, we need to break the military alliance with the United States.
That should be the obvious conclusion drawn from the last few weeks of feverish discussion in the press and among the political establishment. 
But the idea of breaking the US alliance is not raised anywhere in the mainstream debate—even though it is the basic element driving us towards war.
If we abandoned the US alliance tomorrow, the chance that China would launch a military attack on Australia would reduce to almost zero. 
As Paul Keating made clear in his appearance at the National Press Club, the idea that China poses an existential threat to the Australian state—which, short of annihilation courtesy of nuclear armed ICBMs, could only be carried out by a land invasion—is virtually nil.
A land invasion of Australia by the Chinese military would be doomed to failure. It isn’t remotely on the agenda. Keating was right to ridicule the squawking imbeciles of the press gallery—who with the earnest tone of private school debating society types who probably couldn’t find the South China Sea on a map, insisted that he take the “China threat” more seriously—by pointing out how idiotic the idea of a Chinese threat to Australia actually is.
In World War Two, an expansive and aggressive Japanese imperial state occupied much of south-east Asia. But it was never able to subjugate China, the huge but politically fractured landmass on its doorstep. Partly because of its incapacity to subdue China, Japan—a state so belligerent and reckless that it was prepared to wear the risks of a full-frontal assault on the US at Pearl Harbour—never even attempted an invasion of Australia. 
Even then, before the advent of radar and satellite surveillance and instant communication, Australia’s geography made it, possibly aside from the US, the most militarily unassailable political entity on the planet. 
But that isn’t to say—and it’s a point Keating avoided—that there is no possibility of major military conflict between Australia and China. 
The “Red Alert” series in the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald was on the one hand precisely the warmongering hawkish propaganda that was, as its many critics pointed out, among the most egregious pieces of war propaganda in the history of an Australian press that has for more than a century been among the masters of the form.
But on the other hand, the danger it pointed to is real. A major military conflict between the US and China is not written in the stars, but it is increasingly possible. We are entering a new era of inter-imperialist rivalry that is making the possibility of conflict between the great powers more likely in the next few decades than at any time since 1914.
People in Australia should be worried about war with China. The Age/SMH headline writers are right about that. But their war-fever articles miss the crucial point. The only reason there is any chance of Australia being a part of such a war is because of our alliance with the United States.
As things stand at the moment—and the AUKUS deal means this will only become more the case in coming years—the outbreak of a major war between the US and China would draw Australia in almost immediately. The US military installation at Pine Gap in central Australia would be an obvious target in the first days of a US-China Pacific war. US bases in northern Australia would be a safe-haven for US troops retreating from Japan or Guam, and as a result a target for Chinese intercontinental and submarine missiles, and air attack. Naval bases in Queensland, Western Australia and New South Wales would be major targets. And as an ally of the US, Australian civilian cities and infrastructure would be obvious soft targets for Chinese bombs and missiles. 
All of these threats would disappear overnight if Australia ceased acting as a loyal outpost of the United States military in Asia. It is a statement of the bleeding obvious to say that there is no reason for China to attack Australia outside of the context of our alliance with the US. 
So what points are put forth in opposition to the argument that Australia should withdraw from the US alliance? Well, in one way, hardly any. Even Paul Keating, who has so upset the press gallery lemmings-parade over the last week, doesn’t question anything fundamental about the US alliance. Indeed he says (correctly!) in his defence that he has spent most of his life warring with the left in defence of the US military industrial complex.
The fact that Keating is the only major figure in the Labor Party willing to take a stand against the insanity of the AUKUS deal—he says that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong make him and his mates from the Tammany Hall NSW right look like Bolsheviks—is an utter indictment of the party in general and its laughably termed “left” in particular. 
But the Keating position, echoed by Hugh White and others in and around the “China dove” wing of the security establishment, is essentially the “eyes closed tight” position. Don’t argue for the US alliance, but don’t attack it either. Ignore or downplay the increasing hostility between the US and China and hope it goes away, or, at best, can be managed. We can be friends with both of them and hopefully it will work out. This was the position of the Australian ruling class as a whole until a few years ago.
But what of the people who want to really defend the US alliance? There is no “defence of Australia” argument in favour of it. The closest that anyone comes to that is a vague thing about Australia needing access to sea lanes because of our dependence on imports. But if we weren’t aligned with the US, why would China close off any sea lanes to ships going to and from Australia?
The real argument is that there is a contest between the US and China for control of the western Pacific, and Australia should side with the US because it is a historic ally and, though no one says it, because it is “like us”, i.e. mostly white and English speaking. We might have liked peaceful coexistence, but we have to take sides, and there is no way a white colonial society like Australia is going to side with China against the US, so the US it is.
There’s no moral justification for the US to control (sorry, “have a presence”) in the western Pacific. You don’t need to have any sympathy for the Chinese state (and for evidence that we at Red Flag don’t have any, read Ben Hillier’s extensive coverage of the uprising in Hong Kong in 2019) to understand that there is no question that the US, not China, is the aggressive imperial power in the region. 
US bases in Guam, the Philippines, Japan, South Korea and elsewhere all threaten the Chinese mainland and its core shipping routes. The US Pacific Fleet constantly conducts provocative “freedom of navigation exercises” just miles from the Chinese mainland. This is the equivalent of if China installed military bases in Cuba, Jamaica and Mexico, and routinely sent its warships on missions that took it within miles of the California coast.
Of course, this has happened in history. German submarines did patrol the US coast in the early part of World War Two. The USSR did try to install nuclear weapons in Cuba during the Cold War. In the first instance, the German subs were an important part of the US decision to join the war. In the second, we got the “Cuban missile crisis” that, before the USSR backed down, brought the world closer to nuclear Armageddon than perhaps any other time in history. 
Why would anyone expect China to be more understanding when it responds to the only power in the world to have ever used nuclear weapons?
We shouldn’t. That doesn’t mean we should give China a free pass. It is the new great capitalist power, as much imperialist in ideology and in form as the US empire it opposes. In the coming great conflagration between the old and the new, we should remember that in momentous struggles of the past, it was the United States that defeated and eclipsed the old empires, and the world that gave us is the world we have today. 
Socialists and leftists of all kinds in Australia should oppose and resist this drive to a new imperial war. We are internationalists. Our enemy is all the imperial warmongers—whatever their country, whatever side they fight for. But we in Australia have a special responsibility in the global struggle against war. We need to get our country out of it. That means, immediately here and now, fighting our own ruling class and getting Australia out of the US alliance.

Get us out of the US alliance

Across the eleven lower house seats contested by the Victorian Socialists in the north and west of Melbourne, more than 22,000 voters gave us their first preference. With counting ongoing, this is easily the largest number of votes for a socialist electoral project in many years in this country.
Once again, the party’s hundreds of volunteers (700 on election day alone) showed that a socialist message of hope and resistance, which for decades has been pushed to the margins of Australian political life, can strike a chord with many thousands of people in some of the key working-class heartlands of Melbourne.
It’s important to put the 2022 results in context. In the 2019 federal election, Victorian Socialists contested just three seats. We were pleased with our results—4.6 percent in Calwell, 4.5 percent in Wills and 4.2 percent in Cooper. In 2022, campaigning in eleven seats, we were always going to be stretched. We had significantly fewer campaigning resources in Calwell, for instance—both on the booths on election day, and in advance to knock on doors.
So it’s a terrific achievement that the first preference vote recorded for Jerome Small in Calwell is currently at 4.3 percent. At a couple of booths in Roxburgh Park, we won 10 percent of the vote. At the large early voting centre in Westmeadows, where the Electoral Commission banned pretty much all meaningful campaigning for the first week (and called the cops on our campaigners when we insisted on our legal right to hand out electoral material at a polling place) we won 6.5 percent of the vote.
Other results in the north also held up well. Kath Larkin in Cooper is currently on 3.8 percent, Emma Black in Wills on 3.1 percent and Colleen Bolger in Melbourne on 3.7 percent. In Scullin—where we didn’t have the resources to do much beyond letterboxing and a presence on some booths—Cameron Rowe is on 2.9 percent. The Scullin result includes booths such as Lalor North, where 7.4 percent of people voted socialist, and Thomastown West, where we won 5.8 percent of the vote.
In the western suburbs, Victorian Socialists has never run a candidate in a federal or state election. Though our local councillor Jorge Jorquera has raised the profile of VS with his consistent work, in most areas we’re starting from scratch. So it’s great to see Catherine Robertson currently on 5.2 percent of the vote in Fraser, a really good result for all the work put in by our campaigners. Two booths in Footscray reported more than 10 percent for Catherine, with another five booths reporting more than 7 percent.
Most of our campaigns in the west consisted of letterboxing and a small presence at the polling booths, engaging with voters who had never heard of us before. Belle Gibson in Gorton is on 2.3 percent, Andrew Charles in Gellibrand on 1.5 percent, Jack Hynes in Hawke on 1 percent, Claudio Uribe in Lalor on 1.7 percent and Daniel Dadich in Maribyrnong on 2 percent.
In each of these electorates, our campaigners could find a sympathetic audience for a socialist project when we could engage with voters. For instance, about one in ten people at Deer Park voted for Belle Gibson, while nearly 6 percent of everyone who voted at Tarneit West voted for Claudio Uribe. The sheer scale of the task meant that duplicating this kind of vote across the west was always going to be a challenge, however.
Of course, these raw numbers tell only one part of the story. In those numbers are the airport workers, aged care workers, students, construction workers, retail workers, warehouse workers and all sorts who have heard a socialist message, often for the first time in their lives, and who have responded by voting socialist.
Victorian Socialists members and supporters should be proud of our efforts. We’ve put socialist politics on the map through large sections of the working-class suburbs of Melbourne’s north and west for the first time in decades—or for the first time ever, in the case of the massive growth suburbs. We’ve done this through putting hundreds of thousands of leaflets in letterboxes, through knocking on tens of thousands of doors and through countless thousands of conversations on doorsteps, in shopping malls and especially on the voting booths.
In particular, the contribution of the more than 100 campaigners from Tamil and other refugee communities who were part of Aran Mylvaganam’s Senate campaign needs a very special mention. Most of these campaigners are systematically pushed to the margins of Australian society—but over the course of the election, they played an inspirational role.
Importantly, all of this work has built a platform for the Victorian state election on 26 November, when we’ll be aiming to achieve a breakthrough for the socialist left by getting a socialist elected to the Victorian upper house. Though we have plenty of work to do in sifting through the results and planning our campaign—and an enormous amount of work in the lead-up to 26 November—the results from our federal campaign give us confidence that it’s possible to achieve this task.
Of course, though we’re proud of our efforts, Victorian Socialists is under no illusion about the state of politics in this country. We’re celebrating the appalling Morrison government being tossed out of office. And it’s great that the Greens have picked up three lower house seats in Brisbane. But with a drab Labor government under Albanese determined to look like a pale imitation of the Liberals, and a surging far-right vote, the urgency and importance of rebuilding a socialist current in Australian political life is clearer than ever.
Corey Oakley is the secretary of the Victorian Socialists.

Putting socialist politics on the map in Melbourne

Scott Morrison has dragged out this term of his inept, reactionary mess of a government until the last possible moment. But next month we finally have the chance to boot him and his band of billionaire-loving, climate-change-denying Neanderthals out of office.
It should be a moment of great excitement. An opportunity for a fundamental shift in politics, a turning of the page that ends all the policies that have led to climate catastrophe, out of control inequality and a vile politics of racism and victim-blaming that has so poisoned Australian politics for the last two decades.
But the official opposition—Anthony Albanese’s ALP—is hardly an alternative at all. Labor’s essential promise is to govern with more administrative competence and a bit of progressive rhetoric, but other than that be pretty much the same as the Liberals. In a time that calls out for fundamental change to our whole society, Labor is promising that it can be trusted not to rock the boat.
The boat needs to be rocked, and Victorian Socialists are here to rock it. We are running in this election on a transformative platform that is about taking the money and the power from the rich and the corporations, and using that money and power to build a society that works for all of us, not just the billionaires.
You can read our policies and platform at victoriansocialists.org.au. We think they are a great framework for the kind of change our society needs. But if we are going to get a socialist vision out to hundreds of thousands of people, we need your help.
We need readers of Red Flag to put a campaign sign in their front yard or on their fence. To have the impact we want, we need thousands of homes across the northern and western suburbs of Melbourne to put these signs up. 
You don’t have to live in one of our target areas in Melbourne. Aran Mylvaganam’s Senate campaign is state-wide, and we would love to have signs in every regional town in Victoria promoting the idea of putting a victim of Australia’s refugee detention system into the parliament to fight for today’s refugees, and to fight for all of us.
We need donations. We are in the final stages of working out how much social media advertising we can afford, how many campaign signs we can print and how many posters we can have plastered across Melbourne. Every dollar counts. If you have been thinking about donating, today is the day to do it.
We need letterboxing volunteers. Last week, half a million campaign leaflets were delivered to our office at Trades Hall. We need hundreds of people to stick them in letterboxes across the northern and western suburbs of Melbourne in the coming weeks.
If you don’t live in Melbourne, you can still help. We want leaflets for Aran’s Senate campaign distributed wherever they can be. If you live in Bendigo or Shepparton, or anywhere else in regional Victoria, and want to letterbox for a socialist Senate candidate, we will send you the materials you need.
The same goes for election day and pre-poll voting. Victorian Socialists are targeting eleven electorates that are home to more than 1 million voters across the north and west of Melbourne—from the CBD to Wallan in the north and Hoppers Crossing in the west. We need volunteers to staff more than 350 booths on election day, plus all the early voting booths that more than half of all Victorians are predicted to vote at in the two weeks before election day.
But wherever you live, you can help on election day. We can send How To Vote material for Aran’s Senate campaign anywhere in Victoria.
We are realistic. We know we have an uphill battle getting one of our lower house candidates elected in this campaign. Even in the case of Aran Mylvaganam, possibly the most righteous candidate ever to stand for election as a Victorian senator, it would be remarkable if he was elected.
But even if we can’t get anyone over the line, this election is still crucially important, to both Victorian Socialists and to the broader society. This is an election that counts for everything, but where none of the major parties stand for anything. 
In any sane society, it would be a turning point. But all the major parties have to offer is more of the same. We may not win this time, but we will plant a flag. A flag for what should happen, for what politics should be about. 
Please, support our campaign, in whatever way you can.

Rock the boat: back the Victorian Socialists in this election

After a rout of Russian forces in the first week of its Ukraine invasion, Vladimir Putin abandoned his initial strategy of overthrowing the Zelensky government with minimum casualties. He ordered the Russian military to revert to what it knows best— imposing its will through the slaughter of thousands of civilians.
The coming days and weeks will be horrific. Crimes against humanity, like the bombing of a maternity hospital in Mariupol, will continue. When you adopt a policy of achieving victory by pulverising civilian populations, such barbarities are not accidents, they are the point. This is what the Russian military did in Syria. It’s what it did in Chechnya. The death and destruction in Ukraine are not yet on that scale, but all the indications are that this is what is coming.
In the West, we will know all about this unfolding crime. We will see the corpses of children carried out of rubble. We will hear the terrified cries of people unable to find loved ones, or worse, who have found them dead, victims of the unspeakable machinery of death that only a sick society could conceive of, let alone unleash.
The truth of this war will be beamed into our homes not because such crimes demand attention, which they do, but because this time those doing the killing are the enemies of our rulers, and because the people dying look like the white collective “us” of the Western imagination.
We don’t see the children dying in Yemen, victims of a nearly decade-long war by a regime just as brutal as Putin’s, because the Saudi autocrats are Western allies. And the Yemeni children? They are from the Middle East. Parents don’t grieve their children the same way there.
We don’t hear the cries of Palestinians who have lost brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, because they are not freedom fighters like the Ukrainians. They are terrorists, driven by some obscure religious hysteria. Nothing to do with decades of occupation and subjugation. Nothing heroic.
In 2004, in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, a whole population rose in revolt against military occupation. But the faces of those heroes were not beamed around the world, nor hailed as fighters against tyranny. And when the US responded in exactly the same way Russia has responded to the Ukrainian resistance, the newspapers of the supposedly humanist and democratic West did not plaster this atrocity across their front pages.
The fact of Western hypocrisy does not lessen the severity of Putin’s crimes, however. The socialist movement is the mortal enemy of imperialism whether the imperial power in question is in “our” camp or not. We leave the shameful practice of selective outrage to our rulers, and to those in the press and political establishment who pick and choose which atrocities to be offended by.
The devastation now being unleashed against Ukraine is one of the great crimes of modern history. Millions have been displaced, and a whole society has been traumatised. And not just on the Ukrainian side. Thousands of Russian soldiers have been killed, not in defence of any worthy cause, but simply in the service of an odious dictator who doesn’t care about them and denies them rights in the society he rules.
But even worse could come of this war than the destruction of Ukrainian society. The Western left is used to our rulers inventing bogey men. Remember Saddam Hussein, whose nuclear weapons could hit London within 40 minutes? It was all lies, cheap propaganda for what became, in every sense, a very expensive war.
Putin, though, is no Saddam Hussein. The Russian state does have the capacity to obliterate life on our planet. Between them, the US and Russia control the overwhelming bulk of the world’s nuclear weapons. The destructive potential of the US/Russian nuclear arsenal is largely undiminished from what it was at the height of the Cold War. Then, the world lived under the shadow of nuclear apocalypse. We still do. The only difference is that we’ve stopped talking about it. The mass movements demanding disarmament evaporated, but the weapons and the military industrial complexes remained.
We may be about to pay the price for that shocking failure. The US establishment— the Pentagon, the State Department and the political and economic wings of the US ruling class—do not want this conflict to escalate into nuclear war. That’s why they are intransigent, for now, in their resistance to the demand for a “no fly zone”, which is essentially a demand for a hot war between NATO and Russia that could quite possibly escalate into all-out nuclear confrontation.
The Ukrainian government is calling for a NATO-enforced no-fly zone. Like every national liberation movement in history, they have a right to demand armaments. But they do not have the right to demand World War III, which is what the call for a no-fly zone fundamentally is.
It might be uncomfortable to say, but socialists have to agree with two propositions from the Pentagon and the White House. One, the Russian war on Ukraine is criminal, and the resistance should be given material support. Two, direct intervention into this war by Western powers could lead to a wider European war, or even a direct conflict between the US and Russia, even a nuclear conflict, and this would be so disastrous it should be avoided at all costs.
That’s not to say that we should give any political support to Western governments or that they are not themselves a dire threat to humanity. The very existence of nuclear weapons, and all the elaborate “theories” to justify them, are an abomination. The fact that after the Cold War ended the world didn’t abolish these horrific weapons is sheer madness from any human perspective. What kind of society successfully ends a half-century power struggle between two armed-to-the-teeth blocs capable of destroying all humankind, and then proceeds to keep all the weapons from that war active and intact, and allows the proliferation of such weapons?
The world is rightly sickened by the intentional bombing of a single hospital. But the governments of the nuclear powers and their allies should check their outrage. All of them have people at the core of their government bureaucracy whose job is to plan and prepare for a nuclear war.
The existence of nuclear weapons would represent an existential threat even in the most harmonious system of states. Accident, miscalculation, misunderstanding: even if these things could mostly be averted, the apocalyptic potential consequences make abolition the only sane option.
But we do not live in that best of all possible worlds. Not by a long shot. In our world the “sane”, “rational” power—the one that wants to avoid nuclear war this time—also happens to be the only power that has ever launched one. And why did the US drop nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? To prove it could and would do anything to impose its will.
The US was rewarded with half a century of global domination. Now the US—like the British and the French at the beginning of the world wars—can afford to wage mainly “defensive” wars (though tell that to the Iraqis). The US has an interest in preserving the current order, not creating new fissures.
But for Putin, the situation is not so clear. This has become an existential battle for him. If Russia is defeated in Ukraine, it is hard to see him leaving the Kremlin in anything other than a box. Would a person who has already proven to care so little about human life be willing to accept military defeat in order to avoid nuclear war when the stakes for the state he rules and for him personally are so high?
We don’t know. But the fact is, as long as nuclear weapons exist, as long as they are in the hands of rulers concerned only with holding onto and expanding their power, the possibility of nuclear war cannot be ruled out.
Capitalism is not the first form of organising human society that has produced war. Ancient slave societies, the feudal system of the Middle Ages and other forms of pre-capitalist class society all had their share of bloody conflicts. But the rise of capitalism, and particularly the modern form that arose at the end of the nineteenth century, has led to more bloodshed than all prior human history combined.
The first half of the last century was dominated by conflict and preparation for conflict between the great powers. Combined, the two world wars killed something in the order of 85 to 100 million people. The “peace” of the Cold War that followed was the peace of a world with a gun to its head that could at any moment go off and destroy all human life. And even the Cold War was not cold in much of the colonial world, where millions died in Korea, Vietnam and elsewhere.
Today, three decades after the end of the Cold War, we live in a multipolar global system that in many ways resembles the world in the first half of the 20th century. Now, as then, multiple powers, some rising, some declining, are all jockeying for power and influence. The difference today is that nuclear weaponry is now in the hands of every major power bloc. The future we face is the great power competition that led to two world wars, but where every power has nuclear weapons.
That reality forces us to do more than just oppose the horror Putin is unleashing on Ukraine. We need to fight for a world without nuclear weapons, and without the endless competition between states which gives rise to them. And that means, in the final analysis, fighting for a world without capitalism.

Threat of WWIII an indictment of capitalism

Everything about Australian electoral politics is grubby as hell. For the most part, politicians are either slavish defenders of the status quo (Labor and the Libs), mild-mannered reformers who doff their cap to power at every opportunity (the Greens), or self-promoting idiots (most of the micro parties) out to game the system for their own personal gain.
Victorian Socialists want a total overhaul of Australian politics. We stand for taking power from the bosses and putting it in the hands of the workers who make society function. We want a government that is beholden to the people, not to the rich. We want a new economic system, the abolition of class divisions, a radical reorganisation of society to deal with the climate emergency and end systemic racism.
We know that campaigning for socialist candidates in elections helps only a little in fighting for that. The truth is that the electoral sphere is only one battleground of politics. But elections in a system like we have in Australia do matter. If the socialist left can intervene on that terrain effectively, that will put us in a better position to pursue our goals more generally.
And if we can get one person, or even a few people, elected, they will have the opportunity to prove to people that we aren’t bullshitting when we say socialists are different to other politicians. A socialist in parliament will be a megaphone for every righteous struggle. They will be not just a voice for the voiceless, but provide a vehicle for anyone fighting for justice to be heard. 
Imagine if we had had a socialist in the Victorian parliament this last year. We could have had a voice in the mainstream debate defending Dan Andrews from all the lunatic attacks from the “let COVID rip” right, but also challenging him on issues like hotel quarantine from the left. It could have totally changed the nature of the debate.
Imagine if we’d had a socialist in parliament at the end of 2019, when Andrews sent riot cops in to smash the heads of climate protesters at the IMARC blockade. They could have used their platform as an elected politician to be on the radio and TV denouncing police brutality and rallying support for the demonstrators; they could have used the parliament itself to demand accountability from the so-called “progressive” Labor government.
We are going to run a big campaign—more ambitious than those we ran in 2018 and 2019. We will be standing candidates in all ten of the seats in Melbourne’s northern and western suburbs, as well as for the Senate. 
We have run three solid campaigns in the north since we set up in 2018—the 2018 state election, the 2019 federal election and the local council elections last year. In both the state and federal campaigns we won more than 4 percent of the vote where we stood. That’s still small, but it’s well ahead of any other Australian socialist electoral campaign in recent memory. 
We feel we’ve started to establish a solid support base in Melbourne’s north. We’ve proved we can do well in the Greens-voting inner-suburbs. And we’ve shown we can also do well in the Labor strongholds in the outer suburbs. For example there were a number of booths in and around Broadmeadows where we got more than 10 percent of the vote in both 2018 and 2019.
So we want to build on that, but the results we got in the council elections last year also showed us we can do well in the western suburbs. In our first campaign there, we got 8 percent to 10 percent of the vote in the three Maribyrnong wards we contested, and managed to get one of our candidates, Jorge Jorquera, elected to the council. He’s now doing great work there, campaigning on every issue from recognising “Australia Day” as Invasion Day to opposing the current reactionary campaign against safe injecting facilities in the area. 
We think that we have a real shot at getting a candidate in the west elected to the upper house of the state parliament in 2022. A good showing in the west in the federal election can lay the basis for that campaign.
But the federal election campaign matters in its own right, even though it’s unlikely we can get someone elected. The pandemic has raised big questions about the fundamentals of how our society is organised. It demonstrated that the “that’s just how things are, nothing could ever really be different” mentality that dominated politics for so long was rubbish. In an emergency, the state can throw aside all the mantras about how you can’t interfere with the free market and intervene decisively. For a while, we even had a Liberal government providing a living income to people without work, and free childcare for every parent!
The truth is though that we are still in an emergency—a climate emergency, an inequality emergency, a racial justice emergency—and that’s on top of the pandemic, which is still with us. But the government, and Labor is no better, wants to go back to business as normal: treating the unemployed like dirt, giving handouts to their corporate mates and deflecting demands for real climate action with meaningless platitudes.
In this election, we want to put forward a radical, transformative socialist agenda. We want to get out there arguing that if we can close the borders for two years to keep out the coronavirus, why can’t we do other big things?
For example, how about guaranteeing every person in this country a decent home to live in—paid for by the government, funded by tax hikes on the rich? We temporarily abolished homelessness in Victoria last year, as part of the public health response to the pandemic. But homelessness isn’t just a problem because it might lead to the spread of COVID-19. It’s a permanent emergency for the people living it, and a blight on our society. We need decisive government action to fix it. We know now that this can be done, the politicians just don’t care enough to do it.
There are plenty of other federal issues we want to talk about as well. Like saying no to war against China. The hysterics from the warmongers in the government and military over the last few weeks have been a wakeup call. We need to start organising to stop our government dragging us towards a totally unnecessary and potentially devastating war.
So if you live in Victoria, sign up to the Victorian Socialists and get involved in the campaign. We are having a conference on 17 July, when we will be selecting our candidates and putting our election campaign in motion. All members are encouraged to come and be a part of it. 
And wherever you live, please donate to Victorian Socialists. The scale of the campaign we want to run is huge. The electorates we are contesting have a combined total of more than 1 million voters in them, so it will cost a lot of money to get our material and our message out. Unlike the big parties, we don’t get corporate donations—and we wouldn’t accept them even if they were offered. We rely on people who believe in what we are doing to get behind us whatever way they can.

Victorian Socialists gearing up for federal election

What is the moral judgement you make of someone who stands by and allows children to be massacred in their beds? What kind of monster, even if they could not hope to stop the limbs of those children from being ripped apart, would not even try? Not even protest? An even harder question: How should we characterise an even worse kind of person, the kind who had the power to stop it, but refused? 
It is hard to think of the word. But we know who the person is. It is Joe Biden. Forty-sixth president of the United States. Saviour of the republic. Leader of the #resistance against Trumpist fascism. The “lesser evil” that every leftist who opposed him was berated for not voting for.
Joe Biden is not a fraud. He is the person he has always been. The fraud is the people who have argued that he is something different, the most progressive president in US history, as he promised to be in his election campaign and as some liberals are still calling him. No, he is just like all the rest of them: a willing instrument of imperial power, a justifier of any crime, any injustice, as long as it serves the empire.
“My expectation and hope are that this will be closing down sooner than later”, Biden told reporters at the White House at the beginning of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. “But Israel has a right to defend itself when you have thousands of rockets flying into your territory.”
Translation: a whole bunch more kids might be murdered—and their fathers and mothers too—but it won’t go on forever. And in the meantime, Israel has the right to murder whoever it wants. When pushed by reporters as to whether Palestinians as well as Israelis had a right to defend themselves, White House press secretary Jen Psaki refused to answer the question directly.
At least 254 Palestinians were murdered in Gaza, including 66 children, by the time Israel’s murderous bombing campaign ended. Biden admitted quite openly that he had no problem with this horrifying death toll. “There has not been a significant overreaction”, he said, in response to a press question about the gross asymmetry of the conflict.
There are lots of people—a shrinking number, but still a lot—who won’t side with the Palestinians because they are bamboozled by the media’s misrepresentation of the battle, or because they know that Jews suffered horrifically in the Holocaust and accept that this gives Israel the right to act with impunity against Palestinians. 
Those people are terribly wrong. But on a scale measuring affronts to human morality, the problems with these views pale in comparison to Joe Biden’s reasons for uncritically backing Israeli terror. In the US establishment, support for Israel is pure politics. 
Biden knows that all the rhetoric about Hamas rockets is a pack of lies. He knows that Israel is an occupying power that has ground the Palestinian people into the dust for three quarters of a century. He knows that this latest blitzkrieg started only because Benjamin Netanyahu couldn’t form a government, was facing jail for corruption charges and desperately needed a way out.
Biden knows that the US supports Israel because it has proven itself the only truly reliable outpost of US power in the Middle East. He knows that every US government protects Israel when it commits crimes against humanity not only because, as long as Israel is strong, US power in the Middle East is also strong, but also because the US military industrial complex makes billions of dollars supplying Israel with its weaponry of death, and because the Zionist lobby—Jewish, secular and Christian—is closely interwoven with the upper echelons the US ruling class, so much so that no establishment politician can succeed if they do not prove their fealty to Israel.
 Biden knows all this, and he thinks it good reason to allow the massacre of children. Say what you will about Trump—at least he was more honest about these sorts of things.
If Joe Biden had wanted, he could have stopped it. A single phone call on the day the bombing started, saying that US military funding and political support for Israel would stop if the killing did not, would have silenced the rockets and the bombs in an instant.
But Joe Biden—the man Americans were told they had to vote for as the last line of defence against fascist authoritarianism and violent nationalism—did nothing. Worse than nothing. He defended the murderers, justified the slaughter. His words may be more civil, but how can anyone say Biden is less of a monster than Trump?

What do you say about a man who lets children be massacred?

Today, for the first time since the USSR developed its own atomic arsenal to challenge US nuclear hegemony, the world faces the realistic possibility of a war between great powers that might not immediately end in the mutual destruction of both sides and the end of all human civilisation. If anything, that makes the war more likely. We have to do whatever we can to stop it from happening.
For nearly half a century, the world lived with the knowledge that the rulers of both the US and the USSR could, in the space of a few minutes, make decisions that would wipe us all out in a global cascade of white flashing death. It was a strange horror. The threat was not the prolonged suffering that the two world wars and centuries of colonial barbarism had inflicted – year upon year of accumulating loss and death and grief – but instant annihilation, the erasure of a whole world of civilisation in a matter of hours.
The Cold War was not always cold. Localised wars in Korea, Vietnam and elsewhere left millions dead. But these conflicts, terrible though they were, didn’t seriously threaten to transform into a direct confrontation between the superpowers. Regardless of the fever-dreams of unhinged presidents like Richard Nixon, who, Trump-like, fantasised about a nuclear strike on Hanoi, the logic of the Cold War built a wall between proxy skirmishes and the main game: the prospect of total war between the US and the USSR. And on that front, in spite of some enormous scares – like the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, when Kennedy and Khrushchev brought the world as close as it has come to war between nuclear powers – neither party ever passed the point of no return.
The macabre logic of the “deterrence” policy pursued by both sides assumed that direct major confrontation between the superpowers would inevitably turn into a full-scale nuclear war. It was all or nothing. 
Today, this assumption has been junked. The military strategists of the US, China, and other countries including Australia, are planning for conventional war between the great powers, or “limited” nuclear conflicts that do not involve the flattening of Beijing or New York.
The official US Cold War policy of “deterrence” was the logic of the lunatic asylum. Peace, according to the doctrine, could only be assured if the other side was convinced you were insane enough to destroy the world, even if it meant your part of it was obliterated as well. But while it was an unhinged policy that risked the annihilation of all life on the planet in the hope that no-one would make any miscalculations – that no false alarm would precipitate an Armageddon – it actually represented the more moderate opinion among Pentagon strategists. The war-hawks bristled at deterrence. From their point of view, all it meant was you couldn’t have proper wars.
In the 1980s, US military strategists put considerable effort into figuring out how they could win a full-scale war with the USSR by taking out Soviet nuclear missile sites before they were able to send their deadly payloads towards US cities. It was never really feasible.
Today, the idea of winning a total war has been replaced with the argument that it is possible for great powers to fight a partial war. Such a prospect is terrifying, not only because such a war could easily spiral into a total nuclear confrontation, but because even if this did not happen, a regional war between the US and China would mean death and destruction on a scale unseen since the world wars.
What makes the idea so dangerous for humanity, but also so alluring for the warmongers, is that it makes war – real, large scale war between armed-to-the-teeth powers in possession of the most terrible weapons – possible. If the only kind of war with China possible was a total war – a nuclear confrontation in which every major city in the combatant countries would likely be obliterated – no one would be for it. But a medium scale war in the South China Sea? It sounds serious, but not unthinkable.
This is what Peter Dutton is warning us about, and it’s what the military is actively planning for. So let’s think through what it would look like.
China has been preparing for an invasion of Taiwan for at least two decades. Over the past 20 years, it has significantly modernised its military. While it still lags behind the US, it is now streets ahead of any other power in terms of military capacity.
According to the 2020 US Department of Defence report to Congress, “China has already achieved parity with – or even exceeded – the United States in several military modernization areas”, including shipbuilding, land-based conventional ballistic and cruise missiles, and integrated air defence systems.The Chinese ground-launched ballistic and cruise missile systems are designed to take out US bases and naval assets scattered across Asia and the Pacific. Its sophisticated anti-access/area denial system could now have the capacity to neutralise US bases in Japan and South Korea, and the previously unassailable US Pacific fleet, in particular its aircraft carriers.
There is no guarantee at all that the US military would win a war in the South China Sea. That’s why there is currently an intense discussion in US policy circles about whether the US should contemplate fighting such a war in the eventuality that China invaded Taiwan, or carried out some other provocation.
If such a war did take place, it would be horrifically bloody. Hundreds of thousands of Taiwanese and Chinese soldiers could be killed in the fight to determine whether China could occupy Taiwan. If the US intervened, China would likely attack US bases in South Korea, Japan and Guam. The death toll could be astronomical. The US military is used to winning its wars. If the core of its Pacific fleet was destroyed by Chinese land-to-sea missiles, or by China’s extensive submarine fleet, the pressure to respond with overwhelming force – which means, in a situation where geography and geopolitics put the US at a profound strategic disadvantage, intercontinental nuclear weapons – would be enormous.
What is Australia’s role in this situation? Some Australian policy analysis suggest that because the US is in a weak position militarily, Australia needs to fast-track its own military development, and establish a fighting force that could play a serious role alongside the US in a future war with China.
There is already considerable pressure to increase Australia’s military capacity. Josh Frydenberg’s 2021 budget allocated a staggering $270 billion in military spending over the next 10 years. “We need to be prepared for a world that is less stable and more contested,” he said in his budget speech.
Australia is used to fighting its wars on a minimum casualties, maximum flag-waving-opportunity basis. That is not what Australian involvement in a US-led war with China would be like. The approach Australia took in Afghanistan – committing a tiny number of elite special forces who had overwhelming technological superiority over their opponents and thus a very low casualty rate – would not be at all viable.
Australian warships and submarines, even if remote from the actual battleground, would be prime targets, especially in the build-up to war. From China’s point of view, attacking Australian military assets would be a way to send a message of intent which, even if risky, is still less likely to lead to inevitable escalation than attacking US forces directly. In the event of a war between the US and China, Darwin, a base for substantial US as well as Australian forces, would be a likely target for Chinese attack. Large civilian as well as military casualties would be eminently possible in such an eventuality.
This can seem like it’s painting a picture of Australian self-defence in the face of Chinese aggression. Like all rising powers in history, China’s ruling class wants to assert itself, impose its will, expand its sphere of influence and control. But it is also the case that a future conflict with China will be entirely a war of choice on Australia’s part. China poses no threat at all to Australia itself. Even in the most belligerent versions of China’s future there is no prospect of it invading the Australian mainland. An Australian war with China would be entirely about defending the status quo of US hegemony in Asia. 
Even before the “pivot to Asia”, the Obama-era policy that Biden looks finally set to implement, the US encircled China’s shores. With major bases in Japan and South Korea, a close ally in Taiwan on China’s doorstep, bases in Guam and Hawaii, and a permanent naval force roaming the Pacific, it is the US, not China, that by any objective measure is the malevolent power in the region. If China had bases and military assets scattered throughout Indonesia, PNG and New Zealand, if the Tasmanian government was its heavily-armed close ally, if China had aircraft carriers stationed in the Great Australia Bight and regularly sent warships through Bass Strait in the name of “freedom of navigation”, then there might be some basis to claim it was the aggressive party. 
In fact all the hype about the supposed “Chinese threat” is not about any threat to Australia, but about the threat that China poses to US domination of Asia. If Australia was not firmly on the side of maintaining that domination, there would be no tension with China, no prospect of war, no argument to build up Australian military power.
The prospect of a major war between the world’s two main imperialist powers is a horrifying threat to humanity as a whole, and an argument to dismantle the deranged system of global capitalism that divides the world up into competing blocs and drives them towards bloody conflagrations. But we need to be clear that Australia is no hapless victim in this situation. Our leaders are banging the drums of war not out of fear of some threat to our national sovereignty: there is no such threat. If Australia really does go to war with China alongside the US, it will be entirely because our political leaders want to be involved in such a war. 
It is time that we started organising to keep us out of such a calamity. We need to raise our voices and say no to war.

We have to stop the coming war with China

I was cleaning up after breakfast in an Airbnb in Hawaii, about 30 kilometres from Honolulu, when my phone started beeping. It was 13 January 2018. My then 2-year-old daughter was playing with her mum. It was our second day there but the first sunny one, so we were off to the beach. I ignored my phone for a bit, but it kept beeping. So I picked it up and had a look.
BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.
Lol, some smart-arse was having me on. But I should just check Twitter. It’s on Twitter. Fuck. I should check the TV. The TV breakfast hosts seem oblivious, talking about some inanity. But then the clunky government override alert started running across the screen: The US Pacific Command has detected a missile threat to Hawaii. A missile may impact on land or sea within minutes. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. If you are indoors, stay indoors. If you are outdoors, seek immediate shelter in a building. A few seconds later the breakfast hosts are in meltdown. Jesus. Fucking Trump, what has he got us in for?
It wasn’t real, of course. The Hawaii Emergency Management Agency had sent it out by mistake. Thirty-eight minutes later we got an SMS saying “There is no missile threat or danger to the State of Hawaii. Repeat. False Alarm.” It was the kind of surreal fake emergency that epitomised the early Trump years; when you were never quite sure if you were living through a colossal joke or the first days of the end of times. 
Trump’s cartoon cut-out madman image—the lunatic with his finger on the nuclear button—was not all illusion. He was a lunatic and he did have his finger on the button. It could have ended a lot worse than it did. But in the end Trump didn’t give us nuclear apocalypse or fascist authoritarianism; just a washed-up Married at First Sight-style series of unfulfilled threats.
Now he’s gone, the situation is incalculably worse. The climate crisis, the pandemic, and the staggering levels of economic inequality that are tearing apart the global political system at both a national and international level, are all still with us. The Biden presidency offers a few soothing words that at best acknowledge the existence of these problems, but does nothing fundamental to solve them.
But perhaps the greatest threat to human civilisation, obscured by the false alarms of the Trump years, is that ultimate expression of capitalist competition—the prospect of war between the great powers. 
In the Trump years, the threat of a sudden major military confrontation between nuclear powers seemed plausible. It’s why when I got that message in Hawaii I panicked, in spite of being a child of the 80s who was bought up to believe in the doctrine of MAD—the apt acronym for Mutually Assured Destruction—which taught us that nuclear war would never happen because of, well, MAD.
The idea that great powers would pursue their interests rationally was thrown out of the window by the Trump presidency. Anything seemed possible with a deranged president who had the power to override all the checks and balances in the system. 
But now that he’s gone, we are back to capitalism as normal, and are getting a rapid-fire education as to exactly what that means. And the terrifying reality is that the dangers to world peace that seemed to come from the profound illogic of the Trump era are actually inherent to the logic of the system.
War between the US and China has never been closer. That’s not to say war will break out next week or next month or next year—although it might. But the relentless logic of global capitalist competition—the economic rivalry between corporations elevated to strategic and territorial rivalry between armed-to-the-teeth states—is once again dragooning the world towards a deadly conflict.
The anti-China rhetoric that under Trump seemed like the unhinged ravings of a demagogue now forms the overarching framework of the Biden administration. After nearly two decades of paralysis following the Iraq debacle, the US political and military establishment have cohered behind a policy of determined resistance to any threat to the status of the US as the world’s dominant power.
Here in Australia, anti-China warmongering has sharply escalated. It would be easy to see the militaristic posturing of new defence minister Peter Dutton and right-wing Liberal MPs like Andrew Hastie (who is campaigning about how the military is too “woke” and needs to refocus on it’s core business of the "application of lethal violence") as simply the latest inane salvos in the culture wars. 
But the alarming truth is that the anti-China posture of the Liberal government is deadly serious, and is backed by the overwhelming majority of Australia’s political class and military and intelligence apparatus. It was only five years ago that Tony Abbott welcomed Chinese President Xi Jinping to the Australian parliament and lavishly praised him for his supposed democratic aspirations. Today, a decisive section of Australia’s ruling class has seen the writing on the wall and abandoned the idea that it can avoid taking sides in the looming US/China conflict.
Australia’s involvement in the last two US-led wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, was almost entirely about posturing. The country’s role was symbolic, involving a minimal military contribution and very few casualties. Joining a US war with China over Taiwan or some other flashpoint would be vastly different. The current aggressive posturing by Dutton and his supporters is about laying the basis for wider acceptance of the horrific consequences of such an engagement.
If the Trump era was defined by cartoonish threats and false alarms, the Biden era is shaping up to be a time where we have to confront the hard reality of just how insanely disastrous a capitalist system with the adults back in charge can be.

The logic of capitalism is worse than the madness of Trump

Just over a year ago, Bernie Sanders won the Nevada Democratic caucus and became—if you believed the betting markets at the time—the overwhelming favourite to become the Democratic presidential nominee. The liberal media went into instant meltdown. On CNN and MSNBC, incredulous hosts lost their minds. Forgetting all the usual decorum of the liberal rich, they spat out raw class hatred at those ungrateful plebs who had dared to defy their betters by refusing to vote for who they were told to.
For the left, it was a moment of euphoria, and of nervous belief that just maybe, this time, change was really coming. The US leftist website Jacobin led with an article headlined “It’s Bernie’s [Democratic] Party now”.
But soon, the dream would be splattered across the pavement by the Democratic establishment, which proved once again that, however pitifully inept it was at standing up to the Republican Party, it was still a merciless assassin when it came to putting down challengers from its left.
A week after the Nevada caucus, in the final days of the South Carolina campaign, Congressman Jim Clyburn—Democratic Whip in the House of Representatives and controller of the South Carolina party machine—endorsed the seemingly hapless Joe Biden, rocketing him to victory. Days later, on the eve of Super Tuesday, almost the entire field of moderate candidates simultaneously dropped out of the race and endorsed Biden. 
The fix was in. At the very last minute the Democratic machine—in a stunning operation almost certainly orchestrated by former-president Barack Obama—moved to crush Sanders and unite behind Biden, a man that until that moment many (including Obama) thought too senile and inept to stand for president.
Biden didn’t sweep the board on Super Tuesday—Sanders still won in several states, including vital ones like California. But Obama’s gambit had worked. The party apparatus had convinced a critical number of voters that whatever their misgivings about Biden, he was the safe bet as a candidate to unite the party and beat Trump. The Sanders campaign wasn’t mathematically wiped out on that day, but politically, it was the knockout blow.
The events that followed Sanders’ eventual defeat had the feel of the aftermath of a Soviet power struggle. First, Bernie bent the knee and endorsed Biden—not reluctantly, or as a lesser evil, but with the full-throated declaration that Biden (his “great friend”) would be one of the great progressive US presidents(!). Then, Sanders capitulated to the cacophony of hysterical reactionaries and agreed to condemn those among his own supporters who stayed loyal to the ethos of his campaign—those poor fools who continued to consider Biden, the corporate Democrat establishment and their Wall Street backers, to be as much their enemy as the cokehead frat boys in the Trump administration.
In March and April, as the pandemic began to spread across the United States, sucking the life out of even those it spared, the left also seemed defeated, bereft. Then, in the wake of the terrible police murder of George Floyd, life returned. Millions of people took to the streets under the banner of Black Lives Matter, a heroic national movement for racial justice the likes of which had not been seen for two generations.
The Sanders-left though, was not stirred. That’s not to say hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Sanders supporters weren’t there on the streets. But the institutions of the Sanders campaign—the Democratic Socialists of America, the network of pro-Sanders podcasters, online publishers, YouTube broadcasters, campaign spokespeople and organisers—were for the most part lukewarm in their response to this historic uprising.
Why? It was a combination of factors. In some cases, a legitimate critique of the problems of “woke” identity politics led people to disastrously fail to understand or sympathise with a mass uprising simply because it appeared in the form of protest at racial injustice. For others, a myopic focus on elections as the central site of political struggle meant they couldn’t understand the radical potential of the movement. 
What these critics missed is that ruptures like Black Lives Matter, events that erupt independently of electoral cycles and political parties and all the institutional politics that control the day to day, are what moves history. These eruptions don’t always lend themselves to movements to the left (think 9/11). Even when they have the potential to, it is not always realised—that is where the institutions on the left that exist and how they react can be decisive. If a new and genuinely radical left is going to be built in the future, it will by seizing these kinds of moments.
There are plenty of criticisms that legitimately can be made of the Bernie Sanders campaigns in 2016 and 2020. A fair number of them have been made here in the pages of Red Flag. But what can’t be denied is that the Sanders presidential campaigns galvanised an extraordinary number of people behind the idea that the status quo is fundamentally flawed, that the major political parties serve the ultra-wealthy, and that we need an alternative that fights for the interests of working-class people. 
Bernie Sanders’ idea of socialism was only the faintest echo of what real socialism is about, but he did the US people a historic service by establishing in the minds of millions a vital connection: the world we live in is fundamentally unjust, and socialism is the solution.
The Bernie moment has now passed, for good or ill. The most positive element of his legacy—establishing a left alternative to liberal centrism in the popular imagination—has been achieved. But as the events of last year made brutally clear, that is far short of what is required to challenge the Democratic establishment, let alone the power of US capitalism more broadly. 
And the negative legacy of his campaign—entrenching an orientation to transforming the Democratic Party from within, or even, for those who have little faith in the Democrats, framing a strategic approach for radicalism primarily in terms of electoral politics—looms large. 
The first weeks of the Biden presidency have been nothing like the early days of the Obama administration. Large swathes of the left either despise Biden or at best distrust him. Liberals might be crooning over Biden policy announcements, but the left—including the left firmly ensconced in the Democratic Party—is much more critical.
In January, there was a lively debate over whether it was right to demand Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the so-called squad in the Congress “Force the Vote” by refusing to support Nancy Pelosi as House speaker unless she first agreed to put a vote on Medicare for All legislation to the floor. AOC rejected the idea, which led popular YouTube personality Jimmy Dore to denounce her as a “sell-out” a “liar” and a “coward”. “She is standing between you and health care”, he told his viewers. Dore was backed, if with less colourful language, by a range of Sanders supporters, including his former press secretary and now podcast host Briahna Joy Gray.
Scepticism about AOC and other left Congressional Democrats is to be welcomed. Watching AOC wipe the floor with both Republican bigots and Democrat centrists can’t help but make you wish for even one politician in Australia with a tenth of her charisma and determination to stick it to the status quo. But AOC is much more a creature of the Democratic Party than Sanders was—being an intern for Senator Ted Kennedy in college, for example. The Democratic Socialists, of which she is nominally a member, claims to want to build an alternative to the Democrats. AOC has never entertained such a notion. 
She wants to transform the Democrats into a progressive party, or, as she sees it, return it to its pro-working-class FDR roots. As if the most powerful party of capital in the history of the world—and make no mistake that is what the modern Democratic Party is—could ever be a party that champions working-class people in their struggle against the ultra-rich. AOC’s FDR rhetoric is a pitch to the ruling class and the Democratic establishment that mildly redistributive economic policies are not counterposed to the interests of capital, but can in fact serve those interests.
She was viewed as an enfant terrible of the Democrats after defeating senior leader Joe Crowley to become the party nominee and then the congressional representative for New York’s fourteenth district. But within a few short years, and particularly since the defeat of the Sanders campaign, AOC has become one of the party’s superstars. Along with Sanders, she has been one of the most prominent public faces promoting Biden’s economic agenda since he took office. The left Democrats may have been frozen out of cabinet positions in the Biden administration, but they are now the ones making all the running promoting Biden’s agenda. 
Nancy Pelosi may still not like her, but AOC is shaping up as a contender for the 2024 presidential race. And you can be sure that if she gets that nomination it will not be because she has somehow defeated the mafia-like Democratic establishment, but because that establishment has accepted her and is confident that she will do its bidding.
If anything defines AOC’s status as a Democratic loyalist—if a critical one—it is her vote for supposed nemesis and arch right-winger Pelosi to be speaker of the House. AOC might say she would not be in the same party as Biden in any other country, but she put up her hand for Pelosi without a moment’s thought.
And that’s the thing about the AOC critics. The “Force the Vote” debate was over the terms on which AOC should have voted for Pelosi as speaker, not whether she should have at all. It was the same with the presidential election debate. Briahna Joy Gray earned herself the hatred of myriad blue-tick Democrats by insisting the left shouldn’t endorse Biden. A good and courageous stand. But her argument was that the left should use the prospect of its endorsement as a bargaining chip to extract concessions from the Biden campaign, and refuse to endorse if he offered nothing to the left—which of course he didn’t.
Gray is a critic of the lesser-evil mentality that dominates US liberalism and has so paralysed the left. But even though she is hostile to Biden, the hostility is still expressed in an electoralist framework: how can we force politicians to be less awful?
The answer is to find ways to pressure existing bad leaders such as Biden, or to get “good” politicians elected—like Sanders or progressive members of Congress. But even if you ignore the enormous conservatising pressure on any genuine left winger elected to the US Congress (let alone the presidency), the effort required to get someone elected necessarily hinges on a framework for politics that prioritises constructing an electoral majority over building an intransigent or clearheaded left.
In the wake of Sanders’ defeat, the most post-mortems focused on the question of what else Sanders could have done to win—neutralising the effectiveness of the party machine, winning over more Black voters, mobilising more young people or workers to vote, and so on. And many of the arguments the left made against the right wing of the Democrats revolved around the idea that Sanders would have had a better chance than Biden to defeat Trump—an argument that was more persuasive before Biden did in fact decisively defeat Trump.
If the left views its road to power as primarily about constructing an electoral majority, it will inevitably abandon its radicalism long before it wins office. Because while it is true that there is an electoral appeal to a Sanders-style left populism, there are also myriad imperatives that push in the other direction. In 2020, the first of those was presenting an alternative to Trump that didn’t seem so hostile to the status quo as to risk losing support from the large sections of capital and the press, who backed Biden against Trump but would never have countenanced Sanders.
If the left is going to build a movement that presents a challenge to the status quo that is profound enough to meet the existential crisis capitalism has plunged humanity into, it can’t start by obsessing about how to win a majority in the gerrymandered world of electoral politics. It has instead to look to the kind of fissures that disrupt the status quo, that point to a radical reimagining of the possible among the mass of the population. And those will happen—as they have throughout history—far outside the electoral sphere.

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