Will the Bondi massacre result in a new wave of anti-Muslim and anti-migrant racism? Australia’s right-wing politicians certainly hope so. The murders took place on a Sunday evening. The right-wing response was clear within hours. 
By Monday, Liberal MP Andrew Hastie had published a short video manifesto: “The prime minister has failed this country ... What we need to talk about is immigration”. The same day, Pauline Hanson claimed on Sky News that her decades-long attack on “multiculturalism” had been <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zm6fyDoy98s">vindicated</a>, demanding a “hard look at our immigration”. On Tuesday, she and her new party comrade Barnaby Joyce toured the crime scene like Winston Churchill inspecting wreckage of the blitz. They, two of Australia’s most brazen professional racists, were welcomed as heroes.
Bondi has not been Australia’s Charlie Hebdo, its Bataclan or its Manchester arena. The traditional response to a terror attack—the stifling atmosphere of national unity, in which all dissent is smothered and some kind of patriotic liberalism becomes mandatory—has not been in evidence. Instead, Australia’s broad right-wing political networks have seized the opportunity to supercharge anti-immigrant sentiment and turn it against the Labor government.
The ground was already shifting. Polling indicates a surge in anti-migrant sentiment in Australia in the last five years. For much of the 2000s, only about a third of Australians thought there were too many migrants, but that number is <a href="https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2025/12/immigration-panic-comes-in-waves-data-shows-who-worries-most-and-when">now more than 50 percent</a>, with a steep climb since COVID.
When it comes to racism, Australia is in a peculiar position. Despite the deep roots of racism in official Australian politics, the country has not yet seen the full development of a Trumpian, supposedly “anti-establishment” nativism on a mass scale. For years, Australia’s right-wing politicians have struggled to find a way to initiate a shift like it, and ride it to electoral success.
The lag is sometimes attributed to Australia’s unusual electoral system, which does tend to prop up unpopular but broadly tolerable centre parties. The fact that both major parties, Labor and Liberal, tended to uncritically adopt extreme anti-refugee policies also meant that far-right challenges sometimes seemed superfluous. Trump himself has a strange impact: his success in the USA inspires right-wing co-thinkers around the world, while his conduct in office exposes the disturbing reality behind his demagoguery, as Peter Dutton found out to his disappointment when his Trumpian campaign fizzled after Trump’s second inauguration.
But the biggest factor was likely economic. Australia, almost uniquely in the wealthy capitalist countries, was never seriously affected by the financial crisis. Around the world, the centre-left and centre-right parties alike faced a rising tide of genuine hatred. Australia’s politicians have never faced the same rage that ultimately consumed the Clintons, Bushes and Blairs of the world. Left- and right-wing populism rose throughout Europe and the USA in 2015-16; in Australia, these were the years of Malcolm Turnbull. Australia had neither a Sanders nor a Trump. The neoliberal consensus had a reprieve.
But the logic of capitalism has caught up. The grinding impact of decades of neoliberalism, combined with post-COVID inflation, have created a crisis-like sense of unsustainable pressure on living standards. 
Even before Bondi, right-wingers sensed an opportunity. In early December, polling by the Nine media empire indicated that an astonishing 64 percent of Australians would support a complete ban on all immigration “until our housing situation has caught up”. That poll was, in effect, political research on behalf of the Liberals: the question itself is an anti-immigration slogan, suggesting that housing would “catch up” if migration were stopped. But it proves that a majority might assent to even the most extreme anti-migrant position if they’re told it will improve the housing situation. Around the same time, <a href="https://archive.is/N3EMC">poll</a> after poll showed support for the far-right One Nation surging. At the time of the Bondi massacre, the Liberals were preparing to unveil a new immigration policy focused on “<a href="https://archive.is/EtfiQ">turbocharging deportations</a>”.
Little surprise, then, at the spring in One Nation’s step and the open opportunism of the Liberals in the post-Bondi days. It is a disgrace and a warning that Pauline Hanson, the most consistent extreme racist in the Australian parliament, could claim to be the defender of Australia’s Jewish population when she attended the site of the massacre. Barnaby Joyce—never a model of restraint—felt bold enough to call an anti-migrant rally in defiance of the inevitable calls for calm and national unity.
How far can they go? Joyce’s racist rally, like others called on the same day, was small. It’s less than a year since Dutton’s Trumpian election campaign failed. You don’t need to be a seasoned politico to know that Hanson, Joyce and their gang of creeps are not to be taken seriously.
But whether or not their immediate campaign succeeds, the future is clear. Australia’s conservative politicians want the new brand of ultra-extreme, violent, “populist” racism to dominate political life here, as it does elsewhere. They think the time is near, and they’ll stoop to any low, seize on any tragedy, if it helps them build that project. Whether it’s Hanson, Hastie or some unknown figure who emerges as its leader, the conditions for a hardened racist movement are falling into place.
Around the world, centre-left political forces have collapsed in the face of this onslaught. Yet the Trumpian argument is not hard to beat. Living standards have been run down thanks to decades of policies favouring the wealthy, employers and big corporations. Scapegoating migrants and racial minorities serves those same interests. Anti-immigrant populism can be defeated, but not by mealy-mouthed neoliberal “multiculturalism”: it takes a real attack on the capitalists who make all our lives harder while turning us against each other.
And that is not exactly the Labor Party’s speciality.

D. Taylor

Australia’s right-wingers want a post-Bondi racist movement

It’s a great time to be a neo-Nazi. For fans of the Third Reich, 2025 was probably one of the best years since the battle of Stalingrad. Hitlerian podcaster Nick Fuentes could take to Tucker Carlson’s massive online platform to denounce “organised Jewry” and receive the backing of an august conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation. Elon Musk unveiled the world’s first automated global fascist propaganda publication, Grokipedia, where modern theorists of antisemitism and white nationalism like Kevin Macdonald, David Irving and Jared Taylor are praised in glowing terms. In Australia, underground Nazi organisations led mass marches against immigration, with the enthusiastic support of right-wing media outlets and mainstream politicians. The sects and gurus of the Nazi fringe can now influence, and sometimes even lead, the mainstream right.
For most of the last 80 years, that has seemed pretty unlikely. Hitler’s empire was blown to smithereens, and Mussolini was lynched by his compatriots. The world seemed to move on comprehensively. By the 1970s, biological racism, medieval sexual politics and antisemitism were viewed by many as historical relics that could never be revived in the Western mainstream. 
The programs, methods and doctrines of first-generation fascism seem strictly bound to a particular time and place: a Europe of mass political parties, nascent revolutions and colonial empires challenging one another in open conflict. Fascism’s particular combination of those political elements—building a mass party to repress the revolution and rearm the empire—seemed irrelevant for much of the intervening period.
The ditching of so many distinctive elements of fascism led scholars like Enzo Traverso to use terms like “post-fascism” to describe far-right movements that emerged after the 1950s. Until fairly recently, describing right-wing governments as “fascist” could generate a cringe of embarrassment among liberals (afraid of seeming like overexcited socialists) and among socialists (afraid of seeming like scaremongering liberals). But now even neo-Nazi sects recognise, if not an identity, then a certain common project with the president of the United States. There are no great conceptual gaps in the chain of world views linking Australian neo-Nazi Thomas Sewell to Tommy Robinson, to Musk, to Farage, to Le Pen, and to Trump, the great peacemaker and leader of Western democracy.
The fascist and conservative movements, today merged as a nebulous “far right”, have grown towards each other. Fascist activists have spent decades finding creative, entrepreneurial ways to recast their doctrines and forms of organisation to suit new political periods, and conservative parties have been open to imitating, absorbing and, at times, exceeding those innovations.
Fascism was hardly eradicated after the Second World War. Right-wing dictatorships remained or emerged on the European continent throughout the postwar period, and many ex (or not so ex) Nazis found comfortable positions within the postwar political and business elites. Fascist sects continued to operate underground, sometimes as adjuncts of Western intelligence services. But to rehabilitate it as a mass social phenomenon, or to allow it to influence mainstream right-wing thought openly, would require a series of political manoeuvres and programmatic shifts.
The anti-colonial movement and its aftermath provided an opportunity. Colonialism had been an inspiration for the first generation of fascists: acquiring colonies, preserving colonies and applying the open violence of colonial rule against the domestic left. The rise of anti-colonial movements allowed fascists like France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen to relate to a broad right-wing fury at the impending loss of overseas possessions, and to the humiliation of defeat at the hands of lowly Algerian Muslims. In 1957, his National Front of Combatants organised a nationwide “Caravan for French Algeria”, a propaganda tour rallying support for the crushing of the Algerian independence movement. It was an early step towards the construction of what would be one of Europe’s most successful and influential postwar far-right parties.
But if colonialist pro-war politics allowed the European far right a platform, it did not give it a long-term future. The powers that had retained colonies soon lost them; independence, whether de jure or de facto, became practically universal. There was little to be gained by arguing for the military reconquest of Indochina, Algeria or the Indian subcontinent. By the late 1960s, the far right turned to the issue that would give them a new life and sustain them to this day: immigration.
Opposition to immigration could unite and grow multiple constituencies for fascist-adjacent politics. For extreme reactionaries in Europe, the presence of migrants from former colonial possessions was an insult and a humiliation. For racists, the mere rumour of African, Caribbean, Arab and Asian populations settling in for good was, and remains, an unthinkable horror. But perhaps most importantly, opposing immigration could seem like a simple nationalist solution to almost any economic problem. 
Two years after Jean-Marie Le Pen led his pro-colonial caravan, British fascist Oswald Mosley campaigned in a by-election in West London. Mosley had founded the British Union of Fascists and led their infamous march through the Jewish district of Cable Street. But he was also a former Labour politician and knew precisely how to relate to frustration at wealth inequality; now, he openly directed that anger towards working-class immigrants. In his memoirs, he wrote:
“For nearly two generations, the repeated pledge to rebuild the slums and to house our people properly had been broken. Without lifting a finger to fulfil the forty-year-old promise, the government piled a new population on top of people already suffering from an acute housing shortage and widespread slum conditions ... My proposal was simply to repatriate immigrants to their homeland.”
Mosley was disappointed with the 8 percent he garnered in this election, but he had been one of the pioneers of a strategy that would define far-right politics forevermore. Writing in 1968, Mosley hinted that the full potential of the anti-migrant strategy would become apparent in the future: “An electorate never moves decisively except under severe economic pressure, which is nearly always unemployment”. 
Sure enough, as the postwar boom exhausted itself and unemployment ratcheted up through the 1970s, anti-migrant far-right movements gained momentum. By 1977, Britain’s National Front had become a genuine mass phenomenon, with 15 percent of young men expressing support for it; from Mosley’s 8 percent support in the North Kensington by-election, the National Front polled 8 percent nationwide.
The anti-migrant stance was helped by the economic stagnation of the 1970s. That same stagnation gave rise to the era of neoliberalism: the centre-left parties would more openly embrace privatisation, deregulation and attacks on working-class living standards. The neoliberal era, in turn, supercharged the potential of anti-migrant politics.
It was not only far-right parties that embraced this scapegoating strategy: the right-wing press, mainstream conservatives and even centre-left parties spent the decades since the 1970s directing frustration and resentment towards migrants, even when the targeted immigrant population was so small as to be completely economically irrelevant, like refugees in Australia. 
But for far-right parties, the neoliberal era created a special opportunity to present themselves as the defenders of the redistributive traditions that had been abandoned by the mainstream centre left. The “post-fascists” adopted a stance that became known as “welfare chauvinism”, the 1990 coinage of Danish researchers Jørgen Goul Andersen and Tor Bjørklund. The welfare state should be preserved by banning migrants from accessing its generosity. Immigrants were attacked as the parasitic beneficiaries of a marketised, unequal society.
While railing against the new neoliberal consensus, in the same decades many of the fascist-derived parties sought to “mainstream” and shed the last embarrassing vestiges of their associations with Hitler’s traditions. Antisemitism was deprecated and largely replaced with the fashionable Islamophobia of the War on Terror: the “dédiabolisation” of the French National Front culminated with the expulsion of its founder for his open Holocaust denial; the street-fighting British National Front gave birth to the “respectable” British National Party, which by 2008 was being described as having “one of the most Zionist” stances of any British political party. 
Far from Hitler’s revolutionary calls for bloodshed, dictatorship and war, the far right of the 2000s often presented itself as a defender of democracy, liberalism, civilisation and social welfare. Its Muslim-bashing leaders were women like Marine Le Pen, gay men like Pim Fortuyn and self-proclaimed “social democrats” like Jörg Haider.
This was the rehabilitated, sophisticated and relatively popular “post-fascist” right that entered the political maelstrom of the 2010s, when the aftermath of the global financial crisis led to explosive hatred of the established political elites, and the civil war in Syria led to a new focus on immigration. The new politics provided a template by which right-wingers could convert anti-establishment sentiment into reactionary madness. 
In some countries, such as the United States, the mainstream conservative party, after an internal crisis, largely adopted a far-right framework. In other cases, new far-right parties surged and displaced the old conservatives, as in France. In some, both processes unfolded one after the other, as in Britain, where Boris Johnson’s Conservatives rode the tiger of Brexit only to be consumed by it and replaced by Nigel Farage’s Reform. But as that process unfolded, something changed. In the decade after the Brexit vote and Trump’s election, the “post-fascist” far right has become a little less “post”. Right-wing activists with mass followings now sound less like Geert Wilders and more like Goebbels. 
Having surged, the mass far-right subcultures have also radicalised. Right-wing tech giants have rediscovered the traditional capitalist hostility to democracy and interest in social Darwinism, exemplified by Elon Musk’s musing that the vote should be restricted to “high status males”. Biological racism, extreme misogyny and thuggish 1950s-style homophobia have become normalised. Even Nazi-style antisemitism is increasingly welcome in the global conservative community, the natural and logical conclusion of an ultra-nationalist reactionary world view.
When fascism first emerged, the Communist movement’s leaders were thrown back on their heels. It took some time to understand the seriousness of the threat and the novelty of its methods. A degree of complacency existed. “At first, the prevailing view was that fascism was nothing more than violent bourgeois terror”, Clara Zetkin told the Comintern in 1923—an audience intimately familiar with “violent bourgeois terror” and not inclined to underestimate it. But fascism was “quite different”, with its base “in broad social layers, broad masses, reaching even into the working class”. That required new methods of political combat.
But distinguishing too sharply between fascism and “traditional” reactionary politics can be misleading too. Fascism’s first generation pioneered new tactics—mass parties, revolutionary demagoguery and street violence—that could be adopted as needed by pro-capitalist political forces. The next century was marked by open and hidden collaboration, mutual inspiration and competition between fanatical fascists and mainstream conservatives. The fascist activists who swarmed around Trump, and the post-fascist parties he inspires, have helped to create a broad political movement with few clear barriers separating the underground Nazi sects from the tech CEOs and the think tank chairmen.

From Hitler to here: the journey of the far right

The news of the massacre at Bondi piled horror on horror. As the narrative developed, every awful fear was confirmed: yes, there were deaths. Yes, there was a Jewish festival nearby. Yes, in fact, the festival was the target: the attack was motivated by antisemitism. Yes, the death toll would continue to climb: and yes, at least one child was killed. At that point, it seemed hard to imagine how things could get worse. But then Tony Abbott, Jillian Segal, Sussan Ley and Benjamin Netanyahu opened their mouths.
Right-wingers wasted no time in using this massacre for their political ends, facts be damned. There was no need to understand the worldview or motivation of the attackers—the long-term advocates of anti-Muslim, pro-genocide politics began grandstanding with no concern for empirical reality or political logic. 
Australia’s anti-immigrant right wing flooded the internet with anti-Muslim and anti-Arab propaganda of the vilest kind. Defenders of Israel’s genocide immediately blamed the massacre on the pro-Palestine movement. Many right-wingers did both, like Abbott, who blamed the massacre on “terrible marches ... across the Sydney Harbour Bridge and elsewhere” and declared that “we just have to be much more determined not to import hatred from overseas”.
Abbott knows something about importing hatred from overseas. He and his hard-right faction in the Liberal Party have spent a decade trying to radicalise anti-migrant sentiment, inspired by the models on offer from European neo-fascists and the MAGA movement in the US. It is unsurprising that he and his co-thinkers would imply, or declare, that immigration is to blame. 
Equally unsurprising, and equally unacceptable, is the rapid reemergence of figures like Australia’s discredited “antisemitism envoy”, Jillian Segal, seeking to use this massacre to peddle their anti-Palestinian political agenda. The facts: in the hours and days after the massacre, little was known about the attackers’ worldview except a potential years-long interest in ISIS. That interest long predates the emergence of the large-scale global Gaza solidarity movement—Australia’s spies were investigating the younger attacker in 2019.
ISIS and their international supporters oppose the Palestinian national struggle, have perpetrated abominable crimes against Palestinian refugees in the areas they control, and have an implacable hostility to the worldview and methods of the international solidarity movement. Although they may opportunistically refer to Palestine at times in their propaganda, they do so as part of a fundamentally counterposed project that seeks to expose the solidarity movement as a dead end that must be replaced with militarised sectarianism. They denounce the cause of Palestinian liberation as an “idol” and view even the most religious advocates of Palestinian national self-determination as apostates. So it is rather hard to see how, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims, the Australian government’s symbolic recognition of a Palestinian state has led to the massacre of Jews in Sydney. Likewise, one struggles to understand the relevance of Segal’s Trumpian proposals to tie Australian university funding to political discipline.
Even more absurd are the widespread attempts to blame the Palestine solidarity movement in general, and the epic Sydney Harbour Bridge march in particular. Dave Rich, a purported expert in “left-wing antisemitism”, conceded in the Guardian that “we are yet to discover the detailed motivations of the Bondi attackers”. But this didn’t stop him from directly blaming the Palestine solidarity movement for the massacre: “[T]his movement has generated and sustained a political culture in which violence is both conceivable and enacted”. 
In fact, the political culture of the Palestine solidarity movement is the direct opposite of the sectarian religious violence of the Bondi attack. The Palestine movement transcends religious boundaries and national borders. It is not based on violence, but collective protest. The mass demonstrations in Sydney, the general strikes in Italy, the multinational aid flotilla to Gaza, and the countless peaceful sit-ins and occupations by enormously courageous anti-Zionist Jews in the United States are just a few examples of actions that could only take place on the basis of anti-racist solidarity.
The Palestine solidarity movement is motivated by opposition to racist violence. Its methods are those of peaceful mass action. One of its central claims is the need to distinguish between the Jewish people and the Zionist political project. The Bondi attackers, just like the state of Israel itself, represent the rejection of these ideas and methods.
In truth, many of the publicists and whitewashers of Israel’s genocide know this, and that is why they are so desperate to slander the movement and jump at any opportunity to repress it bureaucratically. Their attempts to reframe the oppression of Palestinians on sectarian lines—the implication that Jews, by virtue of their religious or ethnic background, are effectively identical with the Israeli government’s oppression of Palestinians, and to oppose that oppression is to hate Jews—reinforce the logic of communal violence. 
That many Jews believe that all Palestine solidarity is an expression of anti-Jewish hatred is a tragedy, and one that opportunistic political forces are seeking to intensify and exploit to break down solidarity between Jews and the Palestine movement. But around the world, more and more Jews like me have reacted with revulsion to this propaganda, and have rejected the idea that being Jewish means supporting genocide against Palestinians, and opposing it is antisemitism. 
The reality is that much of the world today is in a death spiral of racist oppression and violence. Western politics is increasingly dominated by a discourse asserting that any and all forms of violence—from arbitrary imprisonment to assassinations—are justified in the struggle against migrants, minorities, drugs and subversion. Some lost souls are drawn to the apocalyptic mirror image of sectarian murder-suicides.
The conditions have been created for sectarian and racial violence in every direction. Jews and Muslims alike have been the victims of massacres by neo-Nazis, religious sectarians, and state actors. Across the world, the forces of reaction are trying to extinguish the principles of internationalist, anti-capitalist solidarity.
The Palestine movement has been a shining light of solidarity and cooperation in a world increasingly darkened by racist and sectarian brutality. Those who opportunistically use the Bondi massacre to slander that movement should hang their heads in shame, and the activists of that movement must redouble their efforts to assert the importance of internationalism, cooperation and resistance to this unending nightmare.

Shame on those using the Bondi massacre to slander Palestine solidarity

Dissent and lose your job. That’s the principle of the campaign to turn Charlie Kirk into a MAGA martyr.
The second Trump administration has always placed a heavy emphasis on the repression of dissent. Almost immediately after his inauguration, he made good on his promise to attack the Palestine solidarity movement, using everything from masked ICE goons to suspension of federal university funding grants. He has campaigned to erase anti-racist ideas from public life under the guise of attacking the hated “DEI”. Even before Kirk’s death, Trump’s second term was the high watermark of the US right’s long war on “cultural Marxism”, which dates back at least to the war on terror, when Kirk’s predecessors like Ann Coulter tried to officially rehabilitate McCarthyism.
Kirk’s death opens a new phase, marked by one Louisiana Republican’s vow to “cancel with extreme prejudice these evil, sick animals”. (The phrase “cancel with extreme prejudice” originated during the Vietnam War in US military and spy organisations as a euphemism for murder.) Anyone who uttered a critical remark about Kirk would now be targeted by a campaign to sack them from their job, endorsed from the top by Vice President J.D. Vance: “Call them out. And hell, call their employer”.
This was not just about people in public life—university professors like those Kirk had targeted with his “professor watch-list” or public figures like Jimmy Kimmel. Academics, journalists and entertainers are important scalps in creating a climate of repression: their downfalls can provide a model for bosses to follow, and a threat for workers. 
But the movement to “cancel” aimed at workers with no real public profile: teachers, airline employees and all kinds of white-collar and retail workers have been targeted and suspended or sacked. Dissent has been punished everywhere from the Nasdaq to Freddy’s Frozen Custard &amp; Steakburgers in Quincy, Illinois, which sacked an employee for posting “another one bites the dust”. 
This is repression that goes beyond state power. Trump’s ICE agents rounded up Palestine solidarity protesters for deportation, and his National Guard has been sent on theatrical tours of major cities. But to repress dissent more thoroughly, the US right is turning to the fundamental form of oppression that defines capitalist society: bosses’ power over workers.
That basic power relation of capitalism shapes the production and distribution of ideas. That’s most obvious in the case of massive, privately owned media conglomerates, like those that organised the disciplinary suspension of Jimmy Kimmel and are currently lining up to purchase TikTok. But it’s about more than the media. Capitalism represses dissent by making it dangerous to speak your mind if you want to keep your job.
Right-wing political activists know it, and they have always taken advantage of it to repress the left while claiming to be the champions of individual liberty. That’s why, immediately after Kirk’s death, the “Charlie Kirk Data Foundation” appeared to centralise the reporting and purging of anti-Kirk workers, and that’s why Vance pointed his MAGA followers to use the power of the capitalist class to control their opponents.
The model is familiar. The USA was never a fascist dictatorship, but up to the 1960s, it was an extremely authoritarian society. Figureheads at the top—FBI directors, members of Congress or conservative activists—would send the signal for repression, set the talking points and issue public denunciations. Intellectuals, artists and journalists could serve as public examples, denounced and blacklisted from public life. But whether it was the Red Scare or segregation, the grunt work of authoritarianism in the USA was often carried out by private employers and property owners. For millions of anonymous workers, their livelihood depended on keeping their heads down, fitting in and staying out of trouble.
What kind of authoritarianism is this? Former Vice President Kamala Harris called Trump a fascist. Then, having lost the election, she just disappeared, unseen until she got a gig at a real estate agents’ conference on the Gold Coast. But the Democrats’ hysteria in the 2024 election, followed by their astonishing passivity, shouldn’t be a cause for complacency. The US state may not experience an overnight transformation into a one-party dictatorship after a Reichstag fire, but Trump’s presidency represents a genuine attempt to establish a less free society.
This is more than a culture war. For socialists, movements like Black Lives Matter and the Palestine solidarity movement are still missing the key ingredients of working-class leadership and anti-capitalist politics that they need to challenge seriously the oppressions they aim to destroy. But for a conservative, they still look like a serious danger: a growing hostility to US foreign policy in elite institutions, mass hostility to the police in big cities. Trump and his allies are on a mission to wipe out basic ideas of social equality and anti-racism, to make them dangerous, to push them to the margins of society.
The truly odious nature of Charlie Kirk helps in that cause. In the aftermath of his death, the slightest scepticism about his far-right ideas has become the litmus test for the right.
In their new era of ascendancy, conservatives and bosses have gleefully adopted small-l liberal ideas. “Psychosocial safety” has become an excuse to attack trade union activists. “Anti-racism” is a major concern for right-wingers only when it comes to crushing Palestine solidarity. Now the Republicans have embraced “consequence culture”. 
Those liberal ideas mostly sidestepped the question of class. Now class must be absolutely central in the left’s response to clarify the repression that is unfolding. Trump’s war against “woke ideology” is an attack on the living standards and rights of workers. Those early days of Musk’s DOGE delegitimised the very idea that the state could ever regulate capitalists or redistribute wealth, and provided models for how to treat workers with cruelty, deliberately humiliating them before mass sackings. Now the sanctification of Kirk has provided pressure—or an excuse—to identify and purge any troublemaking employee.
The response to Kirk’s death is a bosses’ war on free speech, and it’s part of a broader turn in the West towards the silencing of dissent. Bosses’ power to sack and control employees is becoming a central plank of new right-wing authoritarianism. Workers’ power will be central to resisting and overturning it.

Charlie Kirk’s legacy: a bosses’ war on free speech

US President Donald Trump’s first reign ended in flailing catastrophe. He was like a bad comic being booed off the stage. He was beaten fair and square by a demented, basement-dwelling Biden. His attempted self-coup was a discrediting farce: he was supported by no army divisions, but only the QAnon shaman. His cultural legacy was enormous yet seemed to leave little structural trace. 
He is back now, and different. He has already created a climate of fear. Political opponents have been disappeared off the streets, and he has hundreds of victims in a Salvadoran gulag. Universities have rolled over. Big law firms have pledged to give pro bono advice to help him repress the enemy within. His sadistic cuts to state programs aim to call into question the legitimacy of any regulation, any redistribution or any orderly administration of a big bourgeois state. How far can it go? Where can it end? What limits exist to this process?
In some ways, Trump’s first term concealed his true nature. The radical demagogue, who inspired the world’s fascists, was almost immediately bound by circumstance. When he came to power, his own party tried to constrain and control him. Throughout his first months in office, appointees rebelled, or he fired them. Scaramucci, Spicer, Flynn, Bolton—the whole gamut from ultra-Trump spivs to neocon fossils—came and went in a laughable whirlwind. The Democrats took back the Congress. Black Lives Matter was simply too big to repress; it meant that Trump’s first term was defined by a progressive movement of astonishing breadth and persistence, with enormous immediate cultural impact. 
“Trump’s famously sharp instincts, the ones that won him the presidency, have been subverted at every level”, Tucker Carlson complained when Black Lives Matter left Trump and the Republicans passive and irrelevant. COVID exposed Trump’s sheer personal stupidity. He was publicly mocked and deflated by his own scientists. The need for state intervention into the economy was made screechingly obvious. Trumpism appeared to have been refuted by reality.
Yet all this concealed an inner development. On another level, Trump was gaining in power—and radicalising.
Trump didn’t win in 2016 by accident. He had proved himself a campaigner of some genius. He could take power and give it to allies. Over time, more and more ambitious politicians came over to his faction. In 2016, he had few reliable, sophisticated allies; now, he controls the entire Republican Party at every level. In Project 2025, top policy minds provided a program and tactical outline for a radicalised reactionary presidency. Trump showed how a president could win while breaking the rules and defying the norms; for right-wingers, that opened up new and exciting possibilities.
Black Lives Matter made Trump seem weak while the protests were at their peak. But they also inspired a deep, violent racist reaction. In the same screed in which he bemoaned the failure of Trump’s instincts, Carlson explained to his audience of millions: “Our leaders are weak. Predators know it. That’s why this is happening”. What was needed? “American citizens are forced to defend themselves. They have no choice. No-one else is going to defend them.”
At the time, Trump was asking Defense Secretary Mark Esper if the army could be ordered to fire into the crowds. The answer was no. But the idea was there. Soon, the killer Kyle Rittenhouse would become a Republican hero, to be joined by Daniel Penny and even Derek Chauvin, the man who choked George Floyd, and for whom Elon Musk now wants a pardon. The protests at elite universities in solidarity with Palestine gave further drive to this current: use terror to crush anti-racist ideology, or future State Departmentemployees will sympathise with the enemy. Internal repression and imperial violence could come together—just like at the peak of the Cold War.
The pandemic had made Trump seem weak, but that radicalised his movement as well. Huge swathes of capitalists—not just Americans, but throughout the world—lived their worst nightmare: their system was paused to save people’s lives. For many, not least Elon Musk, the lesson was clear. Whatever it took—whatever mad ideas, whatever political alliances, whatever cost in human lives—regulation in general, and disease control in particular, had to be crushed.
The way that COVID radicalised capitalists has been too little discussed. Centre-left parties are embarrassed to mention it, and right-wing ones have largely embraced the insanity. When Trump ran for re-election, he had the support of a business community that had consciously decided to embrace far-right conspiracies and kill by disease if it meant they could wind back regulations and reduce taxes.
Here is the domestic program of Trump 2.0: repress dissent, merge state violence with mob rule and shift the class struggle in favour of the bosses. These factors coalesce against a Democratic Party with little to offer. Trump is not coasting; he is not just kicking the can down the road for another few years. He wants to change the world.
And he has what he needs to do it. He represents a section of the capitalist class that is willing to fight. He has thousands of trained, confident and energetic activists, inspired by a worldview and a vision of the future. He has a political party—though a strange one, in the American model—through which he can coordinate and implement his program. What, then, can stop it?
Don’t look to America’s great traditions. Trump is a radical, but he is also a traditionalist. His terroristic internal program, and the forces that drive it, have deep roots in US political structures—deeper, in many ways, than Biden’s bumbling liberalism. The history of the USA is, in large part, a history of violent state terror meted out at Blacks, immigrants, leftists and the poor. Some of the methods were direct state power: executions, deportations and mass imprisonment. 
The first Red Scare deported hundreds of radical “aliens” from the country in the years following World War One. The Smith Act of 1940 made radical politics a crime, and socialists were jailed under it. A follow-up, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, allowed radicals to be deprived of their residency rights and deported—just as Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are doing now. 
Showpiece executions—like that of the Rosenbergs in 1953—created an aura of dread that could pervade society. In the early Cold War, “loyalty boards” investigated, disciplined and blacklisted employees suspected of radical ideas or simply of supporting the free speech and civil rights of radicals.
However, repression in the USA is traditionally decentralised. Employers and intellectuals can see which way the wind is blowing and play along. Joseph McCarthy’s public hearings could imprison victims if they didn’t provide testimony. But they also gave a signal to private employers about who they should blacklist, and how they should terrorise their own workers. The state “loyalty boards” gave legitimacy to bosses purging “disloyal” or rebellious employees. Anyone who caused trouble—organising a union, denouncing McCarthy or opposing racism—could be denounced for their radicalism and sacked. 
It was a very effective way to crush the trade unions and enforce the bosses’ domination over the working class. In shipyards, dock workers were purged and blacklisted for failing to give correct answers to questions like, “What do you think of the Italian situation?” or “Does your wife go to church regularly?” The purge of the ports was particularly intense: any active trade union militant was a suspect. In another pernicious US tradition, anti-communist union bureaucrats enthusiastically helped management drive out unruly workers, collaborating in investigations and helping to pick targets.
Binding the public and private repression is the US tradition of the private death squad. The roots go deep, at least back to the Klan in the period after the Civil War. It’s familiar to most from the civil rights struggle: the lynchings, the church bombings, the kidnap and torture of Freedom Riders. Racism almost always helped justify the murders, beatings and bombings, even when the victims were white—because white subversives were disloyal to the race. Private killers often knew the state would turn a blind eye. These private killers overlapped with J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which for decades was run as an internal political police—blackmailing, brutalising and in some cases probably assassinating subversives beyond any regular legal framework.
For much of the twentieth century, the US was a deeply authoritarian society. In parts of the country, it was a one-party state. Many of its policies were inspirational to European fascist regimes. Yet it was all established and maintained without any open coup, any apparent “revolution”, or any Nazi-style party in uniforms: it always called itself democracy, not totalitarianism. The American authoritarian tradition, on which Trump draws, operated through a patchwork collaboration of state institutions, bosses, right-wing union officials and private thugs.
Trump draws on that tradition, but it’s unclear if he can completely re-establish it. It’s one thing to maintain a violent and authoritarian society that has existed for decades; it’s another to recreate and reimpose it once it has been largely vanquished. Resistance is likely, and Trump’s institutional capacity to hold the line is unknown.
But the authoritarian history of the US shows that faith in the “democratic resilience” of the US or its liberal institutions is misguided. For most of its history, the country has been nominally democratic but substantially authoritarian. In times of repression, liberal institutions caved, or joined in, seeking their own advantage. Trump’s project is serious. He has a vision, he has activists, he has organisation and he has the backing of an aggressive class that wants to fight. To resist his attacks, our side needs the same.

Trump 2.0 is reviving America’s worst traditions. How far can it go?

Conferences about colonialism aren’t unusual today. Universities host them regularly. But the one that took place in September 1920 was different. When the delegates set off for that conference, they were taking their lives in their hands. 
As boats from the east made their way across the Caspian Sea towards Baku, they were strafed by British Army warplanes: two delegates were killed. Participants travelling from the west through Russia found that anti-Communist militias had ripped up the tracks, burned down the stations, and threatened to besiege their trains. Borders were closed, and delegates had to sneak through.
The British had good reason to worry about this conference. It was called not just to discuss colonialism, but to end it. The participants were representatives of the international Communist movement and the various national and anti-colonial movements, particularly through Asia and the Middle East. 
“The European working class sees now, at every step, that the course of history has united the working people of the East with the workers of the West”, said Grigory Zinoviev, the head of the Communist International. That organisation, which united the post-revolutionary Russian government with Communist parties around the world, had called the conference. Zinoviev spoke of two “streams”: the “workers’ proletarian Communist struggle” and the “movement of the oppressed nationalities” that was challenging British and French colonialism. Those two streams, Zinoviev said, must be united into “one single tumultuous, powerful stream that, like the sea, will sweep all obstacles from its path, clearing the land of all the evil from which we have suffered so long”.
European colonialism existed before capitalism, but the two would become inextricably linked, and the growth of each would drive the development of the other. Precious metals from the Americas and slaves from Africa fed the growth of early capitalism in Europe. By the late nineteenth century, industrial capitalism had driven European powers to acquire colonies around the world. 
The unending pressure to compete and accumulate profits meant there was no end to the need for raw materials, export markets and armed outposts to ward off rivals and terrorise “the natives”. Continents were carved up and “zones of influence” determined by treaties between Western powers: plans for the division of Africa were finally settled at the Berlin Conference of 1884, without reference to the opinions of any Africans themselves. 
In the same period, as capitalism transformed Europe and expanded throughout the globe, the modern anti-capitalist movement came into existence. When Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848, it was impossible to ignore capitalism’s global spread—and its opponents’ necessarily internationalist strategy. 
The capitalist class, Marx and Engels wrote, “compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the capitalist mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst”. In the broad outlines of this foundational document—more a declaration of principles than a worked-out theory—Marx and Engels still emphasised that capitalism had become a world system, and the socialist movement would be a world movement: the workers had “a world to win”.
But it was over the next decade that Marx and Engels would come to fully understand the promise of anti-colonial movements. At the time of the Manifesto, Europe was entering a wave of revolutions, and colonial questions were not at the forefront of Marx’s mind. When those revolutions receded, leading activists like Marx and Engels became political refugees. Marx made a living writing on world affairs for English-language newspapers. Through this work, as Kevin Anderson traces in his work Marx on the Margins, the 1850s became a time of political discovery for Marx.
The European revolutionary movement was in retreat; many of its key leaders were drifting away from their principles. Marx famously spent this time doing the research that would become Capital. But his journalistic obligations led him to study movements in Asia. During this time, he came to see that not only the global spread of capitalism but also the native populations’ resistance to colonialism could be a powerful revolutionary force.
The Indian rebellion of 1857, in which army officers trained by the British mutinied to lead an uprising against colonial rule, made a powerful impression—especially in comparison to the then dormant European socialist movement. “India”, he wrote to Engels, “is now our best ally”. The uprising in India, Chinese resistance to the British and other anti-colonial movements showed the possibility that world capitalism could be simultaneously challenged on two fronts: a revolutionary socialist workers’ movement combined with rebellions in the colonies. 
Marxist anti-colonialism was not simply a matter of supporting the “native” ruling classes, who could try to maintain their own rule under the guise of protecting traditional ways of life. But nor was it a matter of waiting for capitalism to “civilise” the natives and bring them into the world socialist movement. Socialist workers in Europe would have to oppose the oppression wrought by the colonial powers. When, in the 1860s, Marx and Engels helped found the International Workingmen’s Association to bring together the socialist parties of the world, they fought stridently for it to take a position in solidarity with colonised peoples—struggling in particular to encourage English workers to act in solidarity with the Irish national liberation movement.
This strategic position was based on the idea of an international revolutionary movement of workers, which respected no borders and aimed to overthrow all capitalist states. Naturally, such a movement would be the enemy of any nation that tried to extend its state power to rule over colonies and steal their wealth. But over the coming decades, the socialist movement, organised in the Second International, split into two wings. 
On the one hand, figures such as Eduard Bernstein—often described as “moderates”—would argue that revolution was impossible and unnecessary, and that socialists should avoid conflict and work through existing institutions. They would also become supporters of colonial projects. Opposing them were figures like Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin, who put opposition to colonialism at the centre of their revolutionary politics. Both saw colonialism—and competition for overseas influence—as central to the logic of capitalism, its drive to war and its tendency to economic collapse.
When World War One broke out in 1914, these revolutionaries also saw anti-colonialism as central to the strategy for socialist revolution. Luxemburg, writing from jail, condemned capitalism not only for its contemporary war, but for its atrocities in the colonies: “This same imperialism doomed tens of thousands of Hereros to destruction”. 
Lenin—exiled from Russia—wrote to revolutionaries at home, advising them to put this question to the working class: “Are you willing to pay these gentry, the capitalists, hundreds of millions of roubles [the Russian currency] every year for a war waged for the division of the African colonies, Turkey, etc.?” He proposed “workers and peasants’ peace terms” to end the war: “liberation of all colonies; liberation of all dependent, oppressed and unequal nations”.
When the Russian workers seized power at the end of 1917, this program was put into action. Almost immediately, the new revolutionary government published its Decree on Peace, describing “this war over the issue of how to divide among the strong and rich nations the weak nationalities they have conquered” to be “the greatest of crimes against humanity”. To the German state, Russia’s negotiators, led by Leon Trotsky, proposed peace on the basis that “colonial questions” be resolved by removing all troops and organising referendums of the colonial populations to decide their future. 
Unsurprisingly, the terms were not accepted by the German imperialist powers, or any others. Instead, the Marxist movement—which was being reorganised into separate revolutionary Communist parties inspired by the Russian example—would have to reach out to the oppressed colonial populations themselves.
“We do not want to become like the ‘heroes’ of the Second International”, Zinoviev told the anti-colonial conference in Baku in 1920. “We are mindful that in this world live not only people with white skin ... We want to put an end to the rule of capital everywhere in the world. And this will become possible only when we have lit the fire of revolution not merely in Europe and America but throughout the world, and when all the working people of Asia and Africa march with us.”
Of course, this was easier said than done—and even saying it was difficult, when the world’s imperialist powers were trying to eliminate the new Russian revolutionary government using the same techniques of mass slaughter and starvation they had learned in their colonial territories. 
But there were serious political challenges, too. The anti-colonial movements were based in economically underdeveloped countries and could be strongly influenced by local landlords and capitalists. Outside Russia, the European revolutionary movement was still too small and weak to challenge its own ruling classes. The global alliance between socialists and anti-colonial movements was an important strategic goal; implementing it required a level of strength and organisation that had not yet been reached. 
“If the struggle in Persia, India, and Turkey were merely to bring to power the capitalists and landlords of those countries, with their national parliaments and senates, the masses of the people would have gained nothing”, argued a Russian delegate, Pavlovich. “Every newly formed state would be rapidly drawn, by the very course of events and the iron logic of the laws of capitalist economy, into the vicious circle of militarism and imperialist politics.”
This vision of communist anti-colonialism inspired generations of fighters—but it has not yet been realised. The imperialist blockade of Russia had the desired effect: the revolutionary movement was starved out and replaced with the bureaucracy of Joseph Stalin. Zinoviev himself ended up in Stalin’s prisons, as would “all the speakers from Asia at the Baku congress who were within Stalin’s reach and whose fate is known”, according to the historian John Riddell. 
Stalin’s “Communist” movement retained the language of anti-colonialism when it suited its interests. But the idea of a simultaneous global movement to wipe out capitalism and colonialism in “one single tumultuous, powerful stream” of resistance became an occasional rhetorical device, not a strategic reality.
Now, the “vicious circle of militarism and imperialist politics” has absorbed most of the post-colonial nations. Some, like India, are happily supplying arms to Israel. Others, like Iran, collaborate with Russia’s foreign military adventures. China even pursues its own internal settler-colonial project in Xinjiang. The world remains in need of the strategy shaped by Marx: a global anti-capitalist revolution to liberate the oppressed all over the world.

Communists versus colonialism

Everyone used to know which capitalists were the bad guys and which ones were the good guys. Bad: oil, banks, military contractors. They don’t care about climate change, they profit from wars, and they crash the economy. They live in bad places like Florida and Texas and Wall Street. They promote weird right-wing Christian ideas to bamboozle people. They are Republicans. They deserve derision and hostility. 
Good: tech. They make clever websites where you can stay in touch with your friends and see pleasant images of beaches and fancy breakfasts. They solve climate change. They live in California. They run Barack Obama’s campaign. They deserve low taxes, deregulation and invitations to special White House parties.
Yet here we are. Many of those enlightened Silicon Valley capitalists now look like a propaganda cartoon from a Communist Party magazine of the 1930s. They embody all that is awful about contemporary life and use all their power to make it worse. They fund, promote, and grovel before the most reactionary and authoritarian US president in living memory. They run media platforms promoting the most twisted and dehumanising racist propaganda. They celebrate the power of “masculine energy” with Joe Rogan. What happened? What do these people actually want? What do they truly believe?
Democrats are searching for answers. There are probably some contingent explanations. The development of AI depends on energy-hungry data centres. That makes immediate access to electricity more important and climate change less of a concern. The economic stagnation of the “second tech boom”, as well as fuelling the crypto and AI crazes, may have made key tech players more interested in direct corruption and state patronage. 
Some right-wing Democrats, like commentator Matt Yglesias, have suggested that the Biden administration’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/mar/18/joe-biden-has-just-dealt-a-big-defeat-to-big-tech">meek pushback</a> against tech industry power, or his largely meaningless pro-union rhetoric, are to blame for “systematically trying to alienate stakeholders in the technology industry”. But that all came pretty late in the piece, once it was obvious that the big tech players were shifting towards Trump.
Contingent, temporary factors play a role. But so do permanent ones. To quote <a href="https://lbo-news.com/2012/05/22/explaining-what-exists-in-memory-of-bob-fitch/">Robert Fitch</a>: “Vulgar Marxism explains 90% of what goes on in the world”. 
These people are tech capitalists. But what is a tech capitalist? In a way, nearly all capitalists are “tech” capitalists. Most of the important products in the modern economy require complex technology to produce. That privately owned technology is the capital that makes someone a capitalist. Whether they make steel or spaceships, they have the same basic interests. They want to hold back the progress of competitors, protect their position and win special grants and favours from the state. They need to keep costs down: adopt new production techniques, keep taxes low, remove or disregard irritating regulations and keep their employees cheap.
Moment by moment, they may favour different tactics, and accept different compromises. They might be Democrats one day, Republicans the next, and some unknown horror in the future. In the realm of politics, they follow the principle of Lord Palmerston: “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow”.
Seen in that light, the Trumpist tech capitalists are rather traditional. They are defence contractors, car manufacturers, finance capitalists and media barons. Who would be surprised that this crew would swing towards a far-right, ultra-racist, highly corrupt political movement once it looked like it could win?
Thiel and Musk began their “tech” careers with an online finance platform. Now they’re both tightly linked to the US defence and espionage industries. Thiel’s main outfit, Palantir, sells a data analysis tool used throughout the US intelligence and military. It purports to be able to reveal important trends concealed in mountains of data, and it received billions of dollars of military and intelligence contracts to do so. 
As David Runciman writes: “[Palantir’s] business is dispelling the fog of war—define war any way you like, and personal privacy be damned”. Likewise, Musk’s SpaceX has received US$3.6 billion in Defense Department contracts in the last decade—along with $11.8 billion from NASA. So what’s good for business? Civil liberties and global disarmament? Or a militarised, paranoid world in which the population is tricked or forced to accept spying, violence, ultra-nationalism, and the economic prioritisation of war and its associated machinery?
Musk makes cars. It’s big manufacturing. Production schedules are tight. Wages and conditions need to be constrained. Regulations and unions are a danger for him—as they are for logistics titan Jeff Bezos. So, unsurprisingly, he follows in the tradition of the industry’s modern founder, Henry Ford. For Musk, as for Ford, unions, “communists” (like Kamala Harris), and other forms of subversion need to be undermined; extreme racist propaganda is part of the cure. Musk’s anti-migrant tirades and flirtations with fascism on X are exactly in the tradition of Ford, the Hitler supporter who published his antisemitic conspiracy theories in his own personal media outlet, the Dearborn Independent.
It seems likely that Musk’s manufacturing interest first set him on the path to his current interest in fascist politics. In 2020, his Tesla plants were affected by pandemic lockdown protocols. Musk’s profits were temporarily threatened by government regulations aiming to save lives. 
“It will cause great harm, not just to Tesla, but to many companies”, he complained on a Tesla earnings call. He began furiously promoting medical conspiracy theories, tweeting against “fascist” lockdowns, campaigning against “unelected and ignorant” public health officials, and tweeting the “FREE AMERICA NOW” slogans of the conspiracy-addled far right. He ultimately reopened his factory in defiance of a lockdown order. Trump offered him public support. 
Thatis seems to have been the year of Musk’s political awakening, as it was for so many pandemic-era capitalists frustrated by public obsession with health affecting their profits. Musk learned that he could undermine and destroy inconvenient regulations if he promoted demagogic conspiracy-theory politics in an alliance with Donald Trump. Now, unelected and ignorant, he is the president’s “first buddy” and a guest speaker at European far-right party conferences.
Among the capitalist class, the owners of media outlets act as a kind of political vanguard. They try to shape the ideas and set the terms of debate for their co-thinkers. They have their own party-like rivalries and disagreements. Trump’s first rise to power was dependent on an alliance with Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, which had spent decades promoting anti-migrant politics to its TV audience of millions in the US. 
Now, in a way, the torch has been passed. By purchasing Twitter, Musk became a media baron. He quickly converted X into a decisively important outlet for racist conspiracy theories: taking advantage of his rigged algorithm, Musk himself became the platform’s “biggest promoter of anti-immigrant conspiracy theories”, according to an <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-musk-x-election-influence-immigration/">analysis</a>
by Bloomberg Technology. Mark Zuckerberg, always trying to mimic his bolder rivals, would soon adjust Facebook and Instagram to resemble Musk’s outlet more closely.
Old-school “legacy media” could present right-wing propaganda with an air of spurious authority based on traditional signifiers: a suit and tie, hair and make-up, a trained voice with a posh accent or a folksy one, depending on the audience. 
The social media outlets controlled by Musk and Zuckerberg play a similar trick with different methods. They are full of some of the most extreme racist, misogynist and anti-democratic right-wing propaganda you could imagine. But it’s presented as an organic representation of mass opinion. You forget the enormous data centres shaping your feed under the oversight of utterly secret algorithms shaped and guided by Musk, Zuckerberg, and their co-thinkers. The gusher of propaganda is delivered to you as a direct and authentic act of self-expression from people just like yourself.
So a set of ultra-powerful, quasi-monopolistic military contractors and manufacturers are using their influence over media outlets to promote far-right politics. Should anyone be surprised?
Maybe the Democrats. They spent years incubating this group of monsters. Their decades-long alliance with the tech industry, just like their alliance with Wall Street, would make a joke of Biden’s later attempts at populist, pro-union posturing. It’s part of what made people like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama vulnerable to the (basically accurate) attack from Trump that they represented an oligarchy of wealthy elites. But Trump has now made those elites a better offer. 
The offer has not been universally accepted. Subtracting the donations of Musk, who spent $246 million in the 2024 elections, the biggest donors still broadly favoured the Democrats in 2024. As a group, the major tech industry donors gave Harris $121 million compared to $31 for Trump; overall, the Democrats out-raised the Republicans by more than a billion dollars during the 2024 campaign. This may be some comfort to Democrats., Bbut it is no good to the rest of us. After Trump proved he could defeat Harris, many more capitalists switched sides. And the fact that so many remain willing to finance the Democrats simply proves that the Democrats continue to act as loyal and trusted servants of the US oligarchy—not some anti-corporate opposition that can confront the power of Musk and the rest.
The MAGA tech capitalists have evolved in tandem with Trump, as he has proven his ability over time to capture and defuse anti-corporate sentiment more effectively than the Democrats. In 2016, Trump and his supporters raged demagogically against entrenched corporate interests that controlled their rivals. “Across the country, wages are flat”, Peter Thiel said at the 2016 Republican convention. “But health care and college tuition cost more every year. Meanwhile, Wall Street bankers inflate bubbles in everything from government bonds to Hillary Clinton’s speaking fees.”
Little remains of this anti-corporate posturing. Through years of propaganda, Trump captured this energy and converted it into pure, miserable bigotry. But Trump was never more anti-corporate than the Democrats are pro-worker. And the tech industry was never interested in social progress—only profits and power. It would be foolish to expect any better of these forces: the Democrats, the Republicans or the big business interests whose support they crave.

The MAGA tech oligarchy

These French governments just fly past, don’t they? Under the presidency of Emmanuel Macron, the expected lifespan of a prime minister has gone from three years to three months. Michel Barnier, the latest PM to fall victim to the rolling political, social and constitutional crisis that is the Macron presidency, was appointed in September and kicked out in time to spend Christmas with his family. His predecessor, Gabriel Attal, lasted a comparatively Methuselean six months. Projecting this rate of decline forward, some online statisticians estimate that the duration of the next French government will be somewhere below zero weeks, potentially triggering a crisis in the space-time continuum on top of the political disorder.
Macron called a midyear snap election to disorganise the left-wing opposition. The move backfired. Support for Macron’s coalition collapsed. An increase in support for the far-right National Rally was outpaced by anti-fascist and anti-neoliberal sentiment, the election bringing a surprise victory for the left-wing Popular Front coalition.
In response, Macron carried out a typically high-handed anti-democratic stunt. Claiming that “nobody had won” the election, he spent weeks locking the various parties into “consultations”. Finally, he appointed as his new prime minister an aged operative of the right-wing Republican Party—a party that had just won 3.8 percent of the vote.
Michel Barnier’s new government was completely dependent on far-right support. He had previously distinguished himself in politics by endorsing some of the most extreme and unconstitutional anti-migrant politics of the far right, including a five-year moratorium on immigration. Marine Le Pen, leader of the quasi-fascist National Rally party, noted approvingly that the new PM was “respectful” of National Rally and its supporters. Her offsider, Jordan Bardella, noted with pleasure that the Barnier government would operate “under surveillance” from the far right, who could bring it down at any moment.
For the fascists, the Barnier government provided a means to implement aspects of their anti-immigrant, pro-cop agenda while remaining unsullied by formal collaboration with Macron. For Macron, Barnier’s main qualification seemed to be that, unlike most other candidates for the prime ministerial post, he would retain Macron’s hated neoliberal pension reforms. Barnier embodied the symbiotic relationship between Macron’s neoliberal authoritarians and the French far right, for all that those forces denounce each other demagogically.
France’s broad reformist left is unusual: its most influential and biggest part is also the most left wing. Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s pugnacious electoral outfit, France Unbowed, is the main force on the French left. It drags behind it the Greens and France’s ancient, decrepit Socialist Party, whose leaders are constantly tormented by the desire to break with the coalition and return to “respectable” centre politics. When Barnier’s appointment proved Macron’s desire to completely ignore popular concerns, protests broke out throughout France. The left spoke in strong terms: France Unbowed, and others around its region of the left, called the move a “coup against democracy”.
But the reformist left did not rise to the level of its own rhetoric. The midyear elections proved there is strong social support, especially in the big cities, for a left-wing, anti-racist political program. The entire Macron presidency has proven the willingness of workers, students and the oppressed to mobilise in protests, occupations and serious, prolonged strike movements. France faces the real prospect of fascist governments and presidencies. The left-reformist coalition, and particularly France Unbowed, have articulated a pretty coherent anti-racist, left-reformist program, and backed it up with impressive speech making and disruptive parliamentary operations. They have helped cohere and shape a left-wing current in French society that is in better health than what is found in many other imperialist countries. They have scored important victories—including the electoral defeat of the far right this year. But speech making and parliamentary interventions are not sufficient to confront a growing fascist menace in a country experiencing what is effectively a permanent political crisis.
France Unbowed’s main response to the Barnier government was to move repeated no-confidence motions, exposing his dependence on the far right each time the National Rally voted to keep him in power. Now, after Barnier proposed an austerity budget, the far right have decided to bring him down. 
Time after time in France, as social struggles are converted into parliamentary crises, the initiative has passed to the far right. This was true even of the electoral mobilisations, where mass support for a left-wing government was in part defused by Macron’s long procrastination in nominating a new government. It is even more true of the strikes and protests that have been a recurring feature of Macron’s presidency. Both Macron and Le Pen tend to passively wait out the big eruptions of social struggle. It is much easier for right-wing forces—both of the neoliberal and far-right variety—to get away with their political tricks when the streets are empty of protesters, strikers have gone back to work, and the only path to resolve social problems seems to be the state.
The causes of the crisis are not hard to understand. Macron’s commitment to neoliberal austerity politics is confronting a population that consistently rejects his program. Macron’s refusal to back down requires him to engage in more daring experiments with the anti-democratic provisions of the French constitution, and with racist scapegoating. This has fuelled the rise of the far right along with the revival of a social-democratic left. None of these currents can claim a complete social majority. The best weapon of the left is its capacity to mobilise workers and the oppressed in joint struggle, regardless of the rhythm and schedule of elections, and in defiance of the law and constitution if necessary. A significant national strike against Barnier’s austerity budget—a strike that continued even after Barnier had resigned—shows the capacity for resistance to develop and grow remains.
The crisis is likely to deepen. France’s economy is under serious pressure, and not only from the familiar effects of neoliberalism. Last year, the fascist Eric Zemmour, interviewed on Le Grand Jury, analysed the French economy from a different perspective: “France has managed to bring its artillery production from 1,000 to 3,000 shells per month”, he explained. “You must know that Ukraine consumes 5,000 shells a day, and that the Russians produce a million shells a year. Voilà: the balance of forces.” 
Macron, the military-industrial hawk of Europe, sees things in similar terms. Late last year, he spoke of the need for a “long-term war economy” in France. France aims to triple its annual manufacturing of 155mm shells; Russia produces more of its equivalent than all the EU combined. Macron’s project of bringing down the debt and deficit while ramping up military production will require economic sacrifices.
“We have rediscovered what great nations can do: realise the impossible”, Macron said at the reopening of the Notre Dame Cathedral. The ceremony did not necessarily provide the symbolic moment of optimism and hopefulness that was intended. Barnier’s government had fallen, and no replacement had been appointed. Macron’s audience included firefighters and priests. It also included President-elect Donald Trump, whose concept of a “great nation” is largely shared by France’s far right and may define future French governments. With him was Volodymyr Zelenskyy; his besieged nation’s need for artillery shells and air defence systems foreshadows how imperialist war is likely to reshape world politics in the coming years.

On the fall of France’s government

Is the Democratic administration of Joe Biden pro-worker or anti-worker? Opinions differ. Take Bernie Sanders. The day after the 2024 election, the Vermont senator issued a statement denouncing Biden, Vice President Harris and the Democratic Party for having “abandoned the working class”. The language was punchy, direct, withering and accurate. The Democratic leadership, Sanders wrote, has nothing to offer workers. The party, controlled by “big money interests”, does not understand workers’ “pain and political alienation”. As an inevitable consequence of this, workers of all races are abandoning it. 
But there are other currents of opinion about the Harris-Biden Democrats. For example, that Joe Biden is “the most pro-working-class president in modern American history”, with an agenda that speaks “to the needs of the working class”. He is “the most effective president in modern history”, “a good and decent Democratic president with a record of real accomplishment”, who “wants to tax the rich so that we can fund the needs of working families”. These were the words of, um, Bernie Sanders, a few months ago. 
It was easy to lose track of Sanders over the last few years. He has not been worth paying much attention to. But over the last decade, Sanders has gone from being the scourge of the Democratic establishment to one of its most reliable surrogates.
In 2016 and 2020, he stood against establishment Democratic candidates, achieved widespread support, was buried by the Democratic apparatus and then rolled over to campaign for the people who crushed him. Each time he ran, the process embedded him more deeply into the party machine. In 2024, he didn’t even challenge Biden or Harris. His email list has become a Democratic Party fundraising tool—reliant on worn-out catchphrases and in-jokes from his past presidential runs that are only marginally less groan-worthy than the coconut-pilled bratmongering of the official Harris campaign.
Sanders once used hard-hitting, pro-worker language to attack the record of the mainstream Democrats. But throughout 2024, he used the same rhetoric to demand loyalty and obedience to the leader —whoever that leader might be.
When even the corporate liberal press could see that Joe Biden had to step aside, Sanders and his protégés in Congress became the president’s most aggressive and reliable bodyguards. It was a head-spinning role reversal. Establishment mouthpieces like the Washington Post and the New York Times were stating an obvious truth: Biden was past it and would have to drop plans to run for a second term. 
Sanders devoted himself to a transparently dishonest campaign to defend and promote Biden as a champion of the workers. In a major Times op-ed, he <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/13/opinion/joe-biden-president.html">extolled</a>
Biden’s allegedly pro-worker record and demanded that Democrats “stop the bickering and nit-picking”. A couple of weeks later, Biden threw in the towel. Sanders, the loyal mouthpiece of the Biden leadership, was left holding the bag.
I don’t care who leads the Democrats. But the incident proved that Sanders was now officially part of the dishonest, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/07/13/biden-sanders-aoc-liberal-lifeline/">deal-making Democratic machine</a>. Even most right-wing Democrats weren’t as willing as Sanders to burn their reputation in defence of a collapsing Biden candidacy. 
It didn’t stop there—and it wasn’t only Sanders. When Kamala Harris took over the reins, Sanders carried on his role as a key public advocate for a genocide-enabling neoliberal (and former prosecutor). His extra-special <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vf5MThSniiY">Palestine-themed video manifesto</a>, in which he demanded that Palestine supporters swallow their pride and fall in behind the vice president, was a low point. “<a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/4868310-bernie-sanders-liz-dick-cheney-kamala-harris/">I applaud the Cheneys</a> for their courage in defending democracy”: that was another.
His surrogates and allies, now an entrenched Democratic faction, joined in—and went further. Congressional representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke at the Democratic National Convention to praise “leaders like Kamala and Tim [Walz]”. Her speech could have come from the mouth of any careerist Democrat of the Bill Clinton generation. 
Sanders at least acknowledged he disagreed with Harris on Gaza. Nothing like that from AOC. She assured the audience of party officials and donors: “[Harris] is working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bringing hostages home”. (No Palestinians were permitted to speak at the event.) The rest of the campaign brought further embarrassments. American politics moves quickly. AOC is now irrevocably cringe. To paraphrase George Orwell: If you want a picture of the future of the Democratic Party, imagine <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAnKayYSStM">AOC livestreaming Madden with Tim Walz—forever</a>.
As Donald Trump’s election proves, dishonesty is not a decisive disadvantage in capitalist politics. Leftists with functioning memories might roll their eyes to see Sanders suddenly remember that the Democrats are actually quite bad. But many will be grateful to hear someone stating obvious truths and calling for pro-worker politics. Still, there are some lessons to be drawn from Sanders’ brat summer.
First: how quickly, and comprehensively, political “harm minimisation” turns into loyal advocacy. Maybe Sanders thought he’d extracted some concessions from Harris and Biden. Maybe he really believes that Trump is a fascist danger who must be stopped at all costs—fair enough. Either way, Sanders seems to think that a Democrat in power is a necessary condition for social progress. So any doubters must be convinced—even if they’re doubting for good reasons. By this mechanism, “pragmatic” leftists become delusional Biden loyalists. People like Sanders, with authority on the left, devote themselves to justifying—and lying about—the allegedly pro-worker and anti-genocide outlooks of people like Biden and Harris.
But a Democrat in office isn’t necessary for social progress. Yes, America needs a form of politics that is pro-worker, anti-racist and not beholden to the oligarchy. But just as much, it needs a form of politics that operates outside elections—and that can function no matter who’s in the White House, the Supreme Court and the Congress. It needs a pro-worker politics that draws its power from strikes and social movements, not fundraisers and TV advertising. That form of politics isn’t going to come from the Democrats.
If an alternative isn’t constructed, most of the people issuing these broad-left denunciations of the Democrats—no matter how strident and accurate—are going to end up back as captives of a future Harris or Biden equivalent.

Bernie’s brat summer

John Monash was the founding president of the Zionist Federation of Australia. There’s a three-metre-tall bronze statue of him, looking perplexed and unhappy, towering over the lawns of the Clayton campus of the university in Melbourne that bears his name. Monash University’s existence reflects, in part, the fact that Zionism did ultimately become the official policy of Australia’s ruling class. For those who view the success of the Jewish community as synonymous with the unassailable dominance of Zionist politics, Monash University is one of the ultimate symbols of this success.
That history is reflected in the student life of the campus. Monash University is the home of one of the biggest and most aggressive student Zionist outfits: the local branch of the Zionist campaign group, the Australasian Union of Jewish Students. The Monash AUJS section has spent decades mobilising its members to influence student politics and undermine campus-based Palestine solidarity. It has shaped the politics of the student union elections, organised dozens of stooges to disrupt pro-Palestine events, filed false disciplinary complaints and used its media contacts to circulate fraudulent stories about antisemitism.
Throughout these endeavours, it has received the support of the university administration and the dominant factions in student politics. And why not? Over most of that period, it was the campus socialists who led the Palestine solidarity work, and whether you are a university manager trying to give your campus the atmosphere of a shopping centre, or a Labor student trying to win a student union election, it can be very helpful to have a credible “community group” to tell the world that your socialist opponents are antisemitic lunatics. 
This convergence of interests was on display in 2014, when, after the bombing of Gaza in which 2,000 Palestinians were killed over a few weeks, the Monash Zionists were able to get the Socialist Alternative club dissolved and banned—for the antisemitic crime of organising a campus meeting titled “Why you should support the Palestinians”.
So, if there was one place you might reasonably expect a pro-Palestine student general meeting to go a little off the rails, it would be Monash.
Monash’s meeting for Palestine came late in the piece. It was scheduled for 3 September, by which time there had already been meetings of hundreds of students at universities around the country, all of which had voted overwhelmingly—often without dissent—to endorse some combination of solidarity with Palestine and a call for the university to divest from Israel.
Monash’s Students for Palestine group—mostly led by, but not solely consisting of Socialist Alternative members—had been frenetically campaigning to build on that momentum. Most students have never been to a mass meeting to pass a motion on a political question. What did they need to understand? 
First, that they had a chance to vote and be part of making a decision, not just make a moral stand. Second, that their attendance would nonetheless have the moral power of a protest, in part because the size and politics of these meetings was revealing something about the sentiment of young people towards Israel and Australia’s complicity in Israel’s crimes. 
Third, that meetings like this had been successful elsewhere, so Palestine supporters could have confidence and feel they are part of a broader movement. And finally, that the decision of each individual to attend would matter, in particular so the meeting could meet the threshold of 510 votes that would make the vote binding under the Monash Student Association’s constitution.
In a public debate, right-wingers have an inherent advantage over the left. Left-wing politics is about involving and encouraging the participation of the oppressed. You really have to explain things. There’s no point winning a vote from people who don’t understand what’s going on, or who have been bribed or tricked. For the left, a vote is meaningful only if it represents some genuine understanding on the part of those who cast it. 
Right-wingers have it a little easier. Their politics is about the power of official institutions. It doesn’t matter if ordinary people understand what’s going on; in fact, it’s rather better if they don’t. The assumption that because official institutions are backing a position, it is legitimate, and therefore no further inquiry is needed, works to their advantage. You could see this dynamic in the Zionist publicity campaign. Here there was no patient explanation.
On the morning of 3 September, the Zionists’ posters were still up all over campus. One, stamped with the logo of “Students Supporting Israel”—no official AUJS branding, but a big Israeli flag—read: “What are you voting for, MSA? Death to all Jews. Death to democracy. Supporting terrorists”. It is a familiar debating position for Zionists to adopt: don’t talk about what we’re actually talking about, just pretend we’re talking about the Holocaust. Anyone who has any qualms about killing Palestinians is a genocidal Nazi. Keep it in mind when you hear about the rising tide of campus “antisemitism”. 
Another strategy, on another poster: “No genocide in Gaza: Vote No”. Cross your fingers and hope that a few lost souls see your poster and vote the wrong way by mistake. When it is not backed by US military hardware, Zionist political strategy looks a lot less impressive.
The meeting was upstairs, indoors. Around 500 students were packed in, sitting cross-legged on the floor. Speakers were at the front. Stage left was the entrance queue, where for about half an hour after the meeting officially opened, the student union’s bureaucracy was still slowly accrediting registered attendees. Stage right was a giant glass wall looking out onto a student lounge, through which a growing crowd of spectators watched. 
A few dozen Zionists came, some in Israeli flag capes, nervous but excited about a big assignment: they hugged and high-fived each other, then sat in a wedge directly in front of the speakers’ stage. But by the day of the meeting, they’d given up on winning. An official statement denounced the motions as one-sided and biased, and announced that only a small contingent would be sent to argue their point.
The 500 students then sat through—cheering, heckling and chanting—an hour-long formal debate about Zionism, Palestine and Australia’s complicity in the genocide of Palestinians.
It was a debate more serious than almost anything in the Australian media because the Palestine advocates were granted equal time, and were able systematically to respond to, and demolish, each argument presented by the Zionists. What about the hostages? This war isn’t about rescuing hostages: the Israeli government has killed a number of them—not to mention the thousands of Palestinian political prisoners. Why does this motion denounce Israel, but not Hamas? Because the genocide of the Palestinians began decades before Hamas was founded. Why are you antisemitic? Zionism is not Judaism or Jewishness: it is a distinct racist political current.
It is unlikely that any crowd of this size at Monash has ever heard, let alone participated in, such a thorough real-time public dismantling of Zionist propaganda. The debate wound up on a speech about the need for solidarity with all the struggles of the oppressed—brought together in a socialist world view and strategy. It brought the house down.
The vote, of course, carried: 470 in favour, 50 against, with no abstentions. It was ten years, nearly to the day, since the Socialist Alternative club was deregistered for holding a Palestine solidarity meeting.
Much has changed in ten years. A decade ago, Zionist activists could count on the passivity and disengagement of the student population. Palestine solidarity was a fringe issue. A small number of socialists and Muslims would take a stand. Most of the time, others would look the other way. Not so any more.
Much has changed, but not everything. The Labor students who control the student union, politically unable to oppose the meeting openly just before a student union election, nonetheless cut off registrations just in time to stop the meeting from hitting the constitutionally binding threshold of 510 votes. 
Dozens of keffiyeh-wearing students were disenfranchised, forced to cheer through the glass windows. The student union will consequently not be compelled to act on the motion that was passed. 
The Zionists made no attempt to win the room over—one argued strongly for the war continuing until Hamas is eradicated—but they were not without purpose; they filmed their own speeches, and no doubt will use the record of this event to help recruit next year’s load of pro-apartheid activists. 
Despite the moral victory for Palestine the meeting represented, there exist national networks of dedicated advocates and propagandists for genocide, and they retain their institutional connections.
Still. Ten years ago, you’d put on a meeting about Palestine, ten people would come, your club would be banned, and you’d say, “Okay, well, that could have gone worse”. Now, those arguments that once were so hard to make have broken through: that Zionism is racism, and that the West is complicit in genocide of the Palestinians. 
The arguments that Palestine solidarity activists have spent decades publicising and perfecting have become the common sense of the left, and—in some contexts at least and on this particular day—the Zionist propaganda is being rightly drowned out with jeers, heckling and laughter.

Australia’s right-wingers want a post-Bondi racist movement

From Hitler to here: the journey of the far right

Shame on those using the Bondi massacre to slander Palestine solidarity

Charlie Kirk’s legacy: a bosses’ war on free speech

Trump 2.0 is reviving America’s worst traditions. How far can it go?

Communists versus colonialism

The MAGA tech oligarchy

On the fall of France’s government

Bernie’s brat summer

Monash University: a yardstick for how far Palestine solidarity has come

Other Media

Shop

Manage Your Subscription

Contact Us