Progressive legislation allowing nurse practitioners and midwives to prescribe medication abortions has passed in the NSW parliament. Yet the debate over these laws illustrated the abject refusal of the Labor Party to challenge proactively the politics of the right.
The new bill, introduced by Greens MP Jenny Leong and MLC Amanda Cohn, was moved as a response to the postcode lottery that is abortion access in NSW. The 2019 legalisation of abortion has done little to make it more accessible in practice. Only three of the state’s 220 public hospitals are currently providing routine, open access to formal abortion services, according to researchers at the University of Sydney. 
A particularly egregious example of the barriers facing NSW women was brought to light by the ABC’s November 2024 investigation into abortion access at the Orange public hospital in regional NSW. Hospital staff were sent a flow chart explicitly banning them from providing abortions where there was “no identified pregnancy complication”. All women seeking abortions for non-medical reasons were to be directed to private providers like GPs or the nearest Family Planning clinic—neither of which provide surgical abortions. Staff reported to the ABC at the time that they believed this was part of an “unspoken ban” on abortion for non-medical reasons due to anti-abortion attitudes “high in the health bureaucracy” of the Western NSW Local Health District. 
The new legislation will help provide wider access by allowing a greater variety of healthcare providers to prescribe medication abortions. But that’s no substitute for widespread, free, on demand access to surgical abortions. Medication abortions are generally prescribed only up to nine weeks of pregnancy—there will inevitably be cases in which people either don’t realise they’re pregnant in time or simply change their minds about continuing a pregnancy. 
The Greens’ original draft of the bill acknowledged this and included other measures to boost abortion access. The two most important were a requirement for local health districts to ensure that public abortion is accessible to everyone in NSW within a reasonable distance of their homes, and stricter obligations for “conscientious objector” doctors to transfer patients directly to a provider who will give them an abortion. These measures were stripped out of the bill by Labor and Liberal MLCs backing up amendments moved by right-wing crank Rob Borsak of the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers. 
Of course, this still wasn’t enough for the anti-abortion right, who mounted a repulsive sexist campaign against the bill. Leading the charge was Tony Abbott, who had the backing of all the usual suspects: the Catholic Church, alongside other ideologues from the religious and secular far right. But the campaign drew attention because of the addition of far-right “anti-abortion influencer” and Labor member Dr Joanna Howe, whose self-proclaimed goal is to “make abortion unthinkable”. 
It can seem as though abortion is a settled question in Australian politics. Polling repeatedly finds that a strong majority of people support unconditional abortion access. Attempts to wind back abortion rights are unpopular, as illustrated by the desperation with which Liberal leaders like Dutton and Queensland Premier David Crisafulli ducked the question during recent election campaigns.
But unpopularity has not deterred the right from campaigning stridently to chip away at abortion rights whenever they get the opportunity. As the US illustrates, we cannot be complacent about gains for progressive politics. They must be vigorously defended and strengthened in the fight against a right that show no signs of giving up on their reactionary agenda.
Many in parliament and the media decried the campaign against the bill as an attempt to bring Trump-style politics to Australia. It’s true that Trump has given a fillip of confidence, and something of a political role model, to many far-right ideologues. But sexist, anti-abortion politics and the religious right have a longstanding political home in Australian politics, not only on the fringes, but also in the mainstream parties of capitalist rule.
Labor’s pandering to the religious right is particularly shameful. Labor has a tradition of allowing a conscience vote on laws relating to abortion, meaning parliamentarians are not bound to vote with the official party position. This policy only legitimates anti-abortion politics as a spiritual belief that is above political challenge, rather than what it is: run-of-the-mill bigotry. No comparable exception exists for left-wing opposition to Labor’s line on morally pressing questions like the plight of refugees or Australia’s complicity in the war on Gaza—as Senator Fatima Payman found out just last year. Bigoted and sexist ideas can be tolerated because, unlike left-wing opposition, they do little to disrupt Labor’s enthusiastic commitment to ruling for the rich. 
Labor parliamentarians not only worked with the right-wing parties to strip the bill of important measures; even when the bill passed the lower house in this reduced form, five Labor MPs voted against it. 
Why does hard social conservatism have such a safe home in the Labor Party? In part, it’s about electoral opportunism. In certain conservative electorates, pandering to right-wing religious institutions by parroting their regressive social politics can help win votes. But it’s also about the political weight conservative religious institutions, particularly the Catholic Church, enjoy in Australian capitalism. The Catholic Church on its own is a massive, wealthy landowning institution, a bastion of conservative politics, and runs a vast network of private schools, hospitals, shelters and charities that function (poorly) to patch holes in the social safety net that Labor and Liberal have taken turns defunding and neglecting. 
In the case of the NSW abortion laws, there has been an unholy coalescence of Labor’s internal anti-abortion right with the party’s unanimous, bland, neoliberal unwillingness to spend on making public health care better for ordinary people. Just as despicable as the open bigotry of Labor parliamentarians like Greg Donnelly were the cynical speeches made by the likes of Penny Sharpe, who claimed “[Labor] realise there are issues for women” in accessing abortion, while at the same justifying her vote to strip the bill of its strongest provisions on the basis that cancer and heart attack treatment are not also mandated in legislation.
In the wake of a federal election result that Labor are trying to sell as the victory of the “sensible centre” over “extremism”, we would do well to draw the lesson that Labor governments are no bulwark against the bigoted politics of the right. Indeed, on questions like abortion, the call is coming from inside the house.

Eddie Stephenson

Debates on NSW abortion legislation show Labor won’t fight the right

Socialists want to overthrow capitalism, a system characterised by the buying and selling of commodities to generate profit. As such, some people find it confusing that your average socialist information stall sells a variety of things—radical newspapers, socialist literature, conference tickets, left-wing badges and the like. 
Much like your right-wing uncle pointing out that capitalism made your iPhone, or online trolls telling you to leave Australia if you’re not happy with it, critics of socialist organisations selling stuff wonder how it’s possible to be against capitalist commerce, when we clearly seem to participate in it.
It’s a shallow and hackneyed enough “gotcha” that it’s even become a meme. But the question of how different political organisations fund their activities, and the effect it has on their political practice, is an important one. It deserves more serious unpacking.
Until we succeed in overthrowing it through a workers’ revolution, every individual and every political organisation has to operate within capitalism. This means navigating the reality that the capitalist class owns the means of production and all the commodities and services that are produced by them, including those needed for political activity. 
The source of the capitalists’ power is precisely that there is no “outside” of, or alternative to, this set-up. What we need, they control. So we can either give up on political activity altogether, or find the most principled way to operate within the system that we seek to overthrow. 
Just as individuals are forced to purchase clothing, food, housing—even, notoriously, smartphones—on the capitalist market, every political group needs to figure out a way to pay for the things it needs. Take a leaflet for a Palestine protest. It’s a simple tool that any activist will tell you is needed to get the word out about the next rally. And there’s no way of producing one under our own steam—the capitalist class own the trees and pulping machines that make the paper, the pigment and medium that goes into the ink, the mines that dig the metal that makes the scissors to cut the printed sheets. 
The same applies to producing posters for different activist events, printing publications, creating spaces for political discussion or organising a rally. Essentially, all political activity more substantial than a social media post or a conversation between friends involves financial costs. Where and how activists or political organisations get the money to pay those costs reflects their politics. Revolutionaries, in order to operate in a way consistent with our politics, want to maintain our financial as well as political independence from capitalist institutions and individuals.
This sets us apart from most other political parties and progressive organisations. For NGOs, which rely on government funding, UN grants and/or wealthy donors for the bulk of their funding, the need to keep these financial channels open is frequently, and deliberately, a moderating influence.
Dependence on the capitalist state for essential funds, or on the generosity of a Bill Gates-style billionaire benefactor, creates a built-in limitation on how much truth you’re prepared to speak to power. Rock the boat too much, or make too trenchant a criticism of the status quo, and you could lose your funding. This is part of the reason, for instance, that Oxfam can observe that “corporate and monopoly power...is an unrelenting inequality-generating machine” in its 2024 report on global inequality, but offer only tepid reforms that don’t seriously challenge wealth inequality. Its financial ties to numerous capitalist states and institutions require and reinforce an acceptance of the basic reality of capitalism and the inequality that is intrinsic to it.
Or take the Labor Party. The large corporate donations Labor receives every year to finance its election campaigns don’t on their own explain the party’s pro-business, anti-worker politics, but they’re certainly one of the more brazen manifestations. The party receives millions from the gambling industry, the banks, consultancy companies and the fossil fuel industry. Indeed, in the 2021-22 financial year, Labor received more of the fossil fuel industry’s combined $241 million of political donations than the Liberals and Nationals combined. Labor’s financial integration with all the giants of Australian capitalism reflects the party’s adaptation to the system. The fact that this means the party can give away posters, leaflets and other political paraphernalia for free doesn’t make it more principled or anti-capitalist. Quite the opposite. 
Even the Greens, which are largely dependent on state funding to carry out their political work, are compromised by this. It means the prospect of losing parliamentary representation is also a threat to the party’s continued activity, profile and, ultimately, existence. This means pragmatic considerations and electoral expediency become important considerations, not just political principle. 
Genuine socialists reject dependence on these corrupting and distorting means of financing political activity. Instead, we rely on our members and supporters to fund the bulk of the work that we do, which means we can take principled stances and challenge the wealthy and powerful without financial pressures getting in the way. 
When you break it down like this, it’s clear that money is no different to any other way people engage in politics. It’s an expression of sympathy and some level of commitment to a set of ideas, and it’s a necessary part of putting those ideas into practice. 
Buying something can also be an indicator of a higher level of political engagement. You’re less likely to throw away a radical newspaper like this one without reading it if you’ve been convinced it’s worth spending a few dollars on.
Where different groups source funding from tells you a lot about their politics. Revolutionary socialists’ political independence and commitment to activism doesn’t appeal to everyone. For some people, it can make them uncomfortably conscious of the compromises they’ve made, or the people and institutions they’re beholden to. For others, like your passive aggressive uncle, it’s merely a convenient way to couch their underlying hostility to the politics of working-class revolution. 
But for those who don’t fall into either of those categories, I’d encourage you to think differently about being asked to pay for things at a socialist stall—actually it’s evidence of a commitment to grassroots working-class struggle and independence from the powers that be, not a capitulation to capitalist commerce.

Why socialists sell stuff

Barbie, Mattel and Greta Gerwig’s multi-million-dollar confection of nostalgia and hot pink, is a blockbuster hit and a bona fide cultural phenomenon. The film has taken in more than a billion dollars at the box office and inspired scores of breathless articles, everywhere from the mainstream press to the far left, extolling it as an artistic and political masterpiece. 
But Barbie’s tale of the famous doll grappling with real-life sexism and the complicated world of human feelings left me cold. The film’s plot was frequently directionless and overly saccharine. I developed a grim respect for Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling (Barbie and Ken) who work hard to carry off the script. But outside of a few satisfying gags, I found much of the humour over-reliant on a stale self-reflexivity and nostalgia factor for the little plastic doll. Opulently detailed and faithful set design, some impressive dance numbers and a too-brief car chase are entertaining, but not enough to save the two-hour runtime from dragging.
That’s this humble critic’s opinion. But this review wouldn’t exist if Barbie’s only crime was being a bit crap. Barbie is worthy of criticism because it has succeeded in making controversial what once was such a basic observation as to be virtually hackneyed amongst progressives: Barbie is a sexist toy. For at least 50 years the doll has been seen as the embodiment of the pressure to fulfil impossible beauty standards imposed on women; playing with Barbies is associated with <a href="blank">increased negative body image</a> in girls as young as five. 
But thanks to the Barbie movie, she’s back in business, with a progressive facelift that has made it positively uncool to point out the misogyny behind the pastel dreamworld. 
The film’s genesis lies in a concerted campaign by Mattel to rehabilitate Barbie. Between 2009 and 2016, <a href="blank">Barbie’s market share decreased</a> virtually year on year. Mattel’s focus groups indicated this was in part due to a younger generation of parents refusing to buy Barbies for their children because she peddles sexist stereotypes. Mattel saw the writing on the wall and decided it was time to revamp her image. They released a line of dolls with different body types and ethnicities, alongside an overhaul of Barbie’s advertising. The strategy worked: in 2022, Barbie reclaimed her top spot in the dress up doll market. 
It says a lot that the brand’s most progressive credential in the last two decades is the release of a “curvy” Barbie whose waist measurement, contra original Barbie, would just about allow for a complete liver. But Barbie’s new “inclusive” range of body types, skin tones and career ambitions haven’t in fact cleansed her of sexist content. The point of Barbie is that you can be a doctor, a head of state, a vet, or a teacher—you can even be “curvy”, or not white, or disabled—and still be an attractive object for others to look at. (As it happens, the main Doctor Barbie currently sold by Mattel isn’t, in fact, called “Doctor Barbie”, or even “Paediatrician Barbie”—she’s “Baby Doctor Barbie”, complete with two infants to care for and a pink bedazzled stethoscope.)
Regardless, the main character is still “Stereotypical Barbie”, with shiny blonde hair, blue eyes and long tanned legs.
Producing a Barbie movie that slyly pokes fun at the brand and makes descriptive observations about the sexist double standards women face is congruent with this new marketing strategy. It’s a conscious tactic for rehabilitating the toy with an audience Mattel has struggled with, by convincing us that it’s okay to love Barbie even if you hate sexism. 
Most of the media coverage and online discussions of the Barbie movie celebrate its digs at Mattel as a profound and nuanced—even anti-capitalist—critique of the Barbie brand. But the movie’s in-jokes and winks to the camera about the sexist stereotypes built into Barbie, the corporate nature of Mattel and the obvious vacuousness of releasing new versions of a plastic doll as a strategy for fighting real-world sexism, are exactly what enable it to function as a Barbie ad for the 2020s. Because you know that I know that Greta Gerwig knows that Barbie knows that Barbie is a sexist consumer product, we’re freed up to set all that aside while the film does its best to convince us of its core argument that she can be whatever you want her to be.
Most of the film’s Barbie-critical sentiments are delivered via dramatic irony. The effect isn’t to imbue them with clever subtlety. It’s to soften them, to push them to the side. The only time an anti-Barbie bit of dialogue is delivered directly and straight faced, the audience is intended to regard it as a bit ridiculous: the character, cynical teenager Sasha, escalates from saying Barbie perpetuates sexist beauty standards to calling her a fascist. “I don’t control the trains or the flow of commerce!” Barbie wails. So, criticising Barbie to her face is way harsh and over the top.
The character arc of Sasha, played by Ariana Greenblatt, is worth narrowing in on, because it’s one of the more egregious examples of Barbie’s sexism and a metonym for the broader argument the film is making. Sasha is introduced as a smart and self-assured young woman, furious at the sexism society heaps on her. As far as the film is concerned, this is reflective of an unfortunate rigidity on Sasha’s part, which has driven a wedge between her and her mother, America Ferrera’s Gloria. 
It’s resolved by Sasha and Gloria travelling to Barbieland, where Sasha learns to relax a little and fall back in love with the magical potential of Barbie. To underscore this transformation, each time she appears on screen, Greenblatt’s hair, makeup and costume is more elaborate, more feminine and more pink. The relationship between mother and daughter is healed, and Sasha returns to the real world all the better for having embraced the Barbie within. 
Being a jaded teenage girl with a rage against totems of sexism like Barbie is great. I would recommend it to anybody who asked. This adolescent feminist anger can be an early step on the way to arriving at a more worked out set of politics. One of the worst moments in the film is when Sasha is used to impress on its audience of mostly young women that our best chance of being liked and happy is instead to walk back down its pink-dream-house-lined political and cultural cul-de-sac.
Another line of defence for Barbie argues that attacks on the film by sexist internet ideologues like Ben Shapiro are evidence of its left-wing content. Frankly, a lot of not particularly left-wing things upset the far right, including Target selling rainbow T-shirts, Hillary Clinton’s presidential run and Mars switching the green MnM’s high heels to sneakers. 
Beyond this, the main conflict of the film, in which Gosling’s Ken and his counterparts transform Barbieland into Kendom and dupe the Barbies into accepting a patriarchal order, effectively rests on talking points that would hardly seem out of place in Shapiro’s videos. The reason the Kens seek domination over the Barbies is that they’re unfulfilled; they don’t get enough attention from the Barbies, they’re treated dismissively, and all the jobs are taken by women! By the time the saga has reached its conclusion, via a musical number about these long-oppressed men becoming self-actualised, Robbie’s Barbie is made to apologise to Ken, acknowledging that she is at fault for failing to care about his feelings.
This dramatic arc mirrors Barbie’s prescriptions for women in the fight against sexism: just change your mindset around gender roles, reclaim #Barbiecore or declare yourself “Kenough”. Empowerment is achieved as an individual, and it can be whatever makes you feel good, regardless of its political content or social impact. It’s a version of anti-sexism that centres on finding self-fulfilment through an enthusiastic embrace of the gender stereotypes imposed on you—it’s subversive, don’t you know.
The film hits us on the head repeatedly with the notion that Barbie is an “open-ended” idea, including through a ghostly visit by Ruth Handler, original Mattel capitalist and inventor of Barbie, played by Ruth Pearlman. Between gag-inducing lines like “I do all my best thinking at the kitchen table” and “mothers stand still so daughters can see how far they’ve come”, Handler informs us that Barbie has evolved with the times and transcended her sexist origins.
At one point, during a monologue that’s clearly meant to be the film’s major anti-sexist statement, Barbie tips into suggesting that it’s for the best that these dolls are designed as flawless, pretty objects; if she had room for a complete large intestine, she’d just remind women of their own struggles in a sexist society. Barbie isn’t just redeemable, she’s inspirational, a welcome window of escapism. Mattel executives everywhere weep with joy. Now that it’s uncool for Barbie to be a misogynistic cash grab, better for her to become a plastic-fantastic, O-T-T, so-bad-it’s-good idea that will help you unlock your fun, pretty, authentic self in a world of harsh realities. 
It’s easy to feel cynical about the moral that Barbie is a creative canvas for us modern women to do with what we will when we see that the movie has come into the world saturated with brand tie-ins (the marketing budget outstripped production spending). You can buy Barbie-branded everything from eyeshadow and nail polish to thistle tea, which tabloid magazines will tell you Robbie drank on set to “detox her liver” and achieve flawless Barbie-like skin (here’s to authentic self-expression!). Perhaps we’re meant to think all these products are also just empowering creative ideas. Let’s not buy it.

The Barbie movie—how we were told to stop worrying and love the doll

We met them at the door, boys, 
We met them at the door. 
At Newtown and Bankstown 
We made the cops feel sore. 
We fought well, 
They got hell, 
And we met them at the door.
During the 1930s Great Depression, the above lyrics were put to music by unemployed workers to pay tribute to two of the biggest battles against landlords and police in Sydney’s history. 
Eviction was a constant threat for working-class people. As early as 1929, the unemployment rate had jumped to 11 percent; by 1932 it had reached 29 percent, with no sign of economic recovery on the horizon. Abandoned by the system, masses of unemployed workers were left to figure out how to make ends meet.
While state governments set up relief programs to stave off mass discontent and social collapse, the standard of living they provided was very low. The new welfare system in New South Wales saw the authorities give out coupons for staples such as tea, flour, and meat rather than cash; without cash, the unemployed could not pay rent. 
To obtain even these meagre rations, the unemployed were required to fill out a 32-item questionnaire designed to make accessing welfare payments as difficult and humiliating as possible. 
Questions included, “Can you grow vegetables in your backyard? If not, give reasons” and “Do you own any ducks, geese, livestock, dogs, pigs?” These were absurd questions to ask workers living in Sydney’s industrial slums. But they served a purpose—to imply that the unemployed were lazy and to make it clear that the entitlement to rations would be strongly policed.
As Communist activist Jocka Burns recalled in Weevils in the Flour, Wendy Lowenstein’s remarkable oral history of Depression-era Australia, dole officials would “come round, knock at your door, go round the street, ask questions, talk to your neighbours ... You had to be absolutely destitute ... The police came round to have a look first before you got a blanket”.
Workers responded in different ways to poverty. For many, surviving became the main focus—taking odd jobs and finding a landlord prepared to accept dole tickets in lieu of rent. Some gravitated towards radical left-wing politics, which blamed the profit-driven chaos of capitalism for the destitution facing millions. 
Though a minority, these radicalising workers numbered in the thousands. Organised in the Communist-led Unemployed Workers’ Movement (UWM), they became a serious political force, particularly in Sydney. 
The UWM made its mark with stormy soapbox orations and demonstrations against the conditions imposed on the unemployed. Later, it coordinated strikes and protests of “relief workers”—a work for the dole scheme. Perhaps the most widespread form of activism was counter-protests against evictions of working-class households. 
The main anti-eviction tactic was to mobilise workers from surrounding areas to block police from carrying out an eviction order and moving residents’ belongings back into the house after bailiffs took them out. Protesters were often persistent and numerous enough to win in these back-and-forths with the cops.
The account of Daisy McWilliams, whose eviction the UWM prevented, captures the mood when working-class resistance could hold the cops and landlords at bay:
“When the place was empty of everything, the bailiffs called the children and myself to come outside. Then something happened. The members of the Anti-Eviction Committee each grabbed a piece of furniture on the street, pushed the bailiffs aside, and dashed into the house. 
“The people surged forward, and women and children all helped to put the things back. It had taken three men hours to evict us; it took less than ten minutes to return the furniture into the house ... We waited for something to happen, and looked through the window, and to our surprise we saw the police and bailiffs walking away to their cars. So their bluff was called!”
Anti-eviction actions like this happened across Sydney. Sometimes, they developed into occupations lasting for weeks; neighbours would take in the household under eviction orders while crews of locals and UWM activists took shifts staking out the homes. Occupied houses would be decked out with red flags and became venues for UWM public meetings on capitalism and the housing crisis. 
These actions could not turn the tide on the housing crisis—that would have required the abolition of the whole profit-first logic of the market. But they were an important marker of resistance in a period of retreat for the working-class movement. Certainly, they were terrifying examples for Sydney’s landlords and real estate agents, who organised a delegation to Premier Jack Lang demanding that the state government and police take more aggressive action in carrying out evictions in UWM stronghold suburbs.
The growing hostility of Sydney’s wealthy and the Lang government to the UWM and the working-class radicalism it threatened to unleash was the backdrop to the city’s most famous anti-eviction riots in Bankstown and Newtown. 
The Bankstown eviction fight took place at 92 Brancourt Avenue, where Alfred Parsons, a casual labourer and former soldier, rented with his family. Parsons had been a member of the UWM for a month when he was first served an eviction notice in May 1931; his fellow activists quickly moved in, sandbagging the house and rigging barbed wire defences against police. A 24-hour picket of the property was established, and political meetings and sing-alongs were organised on the vacant lot next door.
When police moved in on 17 June, they did so brutally. Arriving by the truckload in the early morning, they hurled stones at the house, charged through the front and back entrances and even fired live rounds into the building, injuring two UWM activists, Richard Eatock and Murray Cleveland Lavender. 
Seventeen men were arrested and held in Long Bay jail to await trial. The treatment of the protesters generated outrage, with over 300 people attending a meeting to support the “Bankstown Boys” just hours after the riot. The NSW Trades and Labour Council declared its support for the activists. The arrestees were sentenced to hard labour for “resisting the police in their duty”. Eatock, an Aboriginal activist with family links to the Communist Party, and Communist organiser John Corbett received the longest sentences.
The day after the Bankstown riot, a second anti-eviction battle was fought at 143 Union Street in Newtown. The two-storey terrace was defended from within by 18 UWM activists, while 40 police officers fired on the building and attempted to force their way in. This time, they were met with a volley of stones from the activists within the building, putting fifteen cops out of action. The UWM also organised a mass protest involving several thousand locals who flooded the street until police pushed them back with batons and established a cordon on the road. 
“[A]t times the huge crowd threatened to become out of hand. It was definitely antagonistic to the police”, the Sydney Morning Herald later reported. “When one patrol wagon containing prisoners was being driven away, people standing well back in the crowd hurled stones at the police driver.”
The Bankstown and Newtown riots were the high point in the anti-eviction campaign. Under pressure, the Lang government introduced tenant protection legislation and a moratorium on evictions, and the movement declined. Yet the anti-eviction fights were remembered by workers across the state. While they never held out the prospect of halting evictions entirely, the battles of Bankstown and Newtown, and the broader UWM campaign, were a stand for working-class people's dignity. 
They were fighting not just for a roof over their heads but for the chance to grasp, for a moment, a world in which the whims of landlords and capitalists could no longer smash the hopes and needs of ordinary people. When we remember them today, it should be in that spirit: we don’t win every campaign, but we should always fight to be able to say that we met them at the door.

We met them at the door: resisting evictions in the Depression

In May 1968, over the course of not much more than a month, student protests against police repression in Paris sparked off a general strike of millions of workers, consuming French society for weeks and shattering the notion that capitalism could not be challenged in advanced industrial economies. 
It began with a protest of university and high school students in Paris’ Latin Quarter on the evening of 10 May. Over the preceding two months, the police, collaborating with university heads, had been engaged in a crackdown on student protests against the Vietnam War. Students had developed their own strategies for dealing with this repression, so when police descended on their protest at 10pm, they knew what to do. 
The students rapidly set up barricades using any material available, rigged with red flags and barbed wire, and prepared for a street battle. While protesters dashed out to pick up unexploded stun grenades and cobblestones ripped from the paving, lobbing them back towards police lines, local residents showed their solidarity by carrying injured students into their houses and tossing buckets of water from their balconies to disperse tear gas. Police were unable to regain control of the area until the following morning.
By that time, word of the Battle of the Barricades had spread. Many young workers had spent the night glued to live radio reports of students giving hell to the same police who smashed up their strikes and harassed them in their neighbourhoods. Representatives from the national student union and the two main trade union federations, the Communist-dominated CGT and the CFDT, met to call a general strike in opposition to police brutality. In response, 9 million workers stopped work, immobilising the country for 24 hours.
Left to the moderate leadership of the trade union federations, this might have been the final act of the French May. A one-day general strike of this size was certainly momentous, but didn’t threaten to burst the boundaries of French capitalism. In the Sud aviation factory in Nantes, however, workers had other ideas. For weeks, they had been holding 15-minute stop-works every Tuesday in opposition to wage cuts. When the 15 minutes were up on the Tuesday following the general strike, the Sud workers didn’t head back in to work as usual. Instead, 2,000 workers marched out of their departments, blockaded their manager in his office and set up an occupation of the factory. 
Within days, factory occupations like that of the Sud workers had spread to Renault Billancourt, a union stronghold considered the most influential workplace in Paris. Once that domino fell, strikes sprung up in aviation, textiles, metalworking, railways, the postal service and beyond. One witness described the transformed mood in the factories: “The new strikers were euphoric. No more bosses, no more bullying, total freedom”. 
More than 10 million workers were on strike, this time indefinitely. French society was upended: no part of the economy could move without labour. A new mood of confidence took hold. Teachers and students occupied Paris’ main fine art school, turning it over to the production of thousands of posters supporting the movement. 
Repression became impossible: where the police had been prepared savagely to beat back even large student protests, they were impotent in the face of a millions-strong workers’ movement holding the reins of industry. Many police complained of having to conceal their badges and helmets to avoid being heckled in working-class neighbourhoods. 
Ten years of apparent stability for French capitalism under the authoritarian government of the right wing ex-general Charles de Gaulle had been completely ruptured, with de Gaulle himself forced to flee the country. The still-very-real power of the working class was plain to see on the streets and in the occupied factories.
This explosion of radicalism, however abrupt it may have appeared from the outside, did not come out of nowhere. The student movement in France had been developing since the late 1950s. It drew from two main wellsprings. One was the condition of the universities themselves. Between 1950 and 1965, the proportion of university students in the population tripled. French universities were becoming mass institutions in which huge numbers of students were trained for their future roles in a sophisticated capitalist economy. Yet this transformation occurred with only pitiful injections of funding and resources from the government. Students with grand illusions in intellectual life were confronted with underfunded and overstretched universities, and soon protests broke out at campuses like Nanterre and the Sorbonne.
The other wellspring was anti-imperialist activism. Many students were first involved in activism through opposition to the French government’s brutal colonial war in Algeria in the 1950s. This tradition of anti-imperialist protest continued with French students’ involvement in the international movement against the Vietnam War. Students around the world were moved by Vietnamese resistance to the US’s criminal war, and in 1968 the Tet offensive by Vietnamese forces electrified the French anti-war movement, drawing thousands of students into protests and confrontations with the police.
These movements underpinned not just the sense of defiance and audacity that characterised the May events, but also some of its most influential student leaders. Student revolutionaries played a key role in attempting to link the struggles of workers and students.
As the mass strikes gained steam from 15 May, revolutionary students sought out young workers, eager to discuss and debate politics and strategy for the revolt. Hundreds of action committees were set up for this purpose: improvised groups that brought together students and rank-and-file workers to hash out political issues and try to deepen the strike movement.
Alongside the action committees, daily mass meetings took place in the occupied Sorbonne and the French national theatre, the Odeon. Here, the ideas of the revolutionary left could get a hearing amongst workers, who were already proving their own social power to themselves by shutting down French society. More and more, they sought out ideas which could connect their grievances at work and experiences on strike with an analysis of capitalism, and an argument to overthrow it. 
One older Renault worker explained the impact of the student movement on his co-workers:
“In the first few days of May, every evening I took five or six workers in my car to the Sorbonne. When they returned to work the next day they were completely changed people... When a worker went to the Sorbonne he was recognised as a hero. Within Renault he was only a thing. In the university he became a man. This atmosphere of freedom in the sense of being considered human gave great combativity to the young workers.” 
Tens of thousands of students and young workers came to identify themselves as revolutionaries of various stripes through the experience of May ’68.
At the same time that workers were gaining experience in struggle and militancy, the leaders of the major trade unions were preparing to lead their struggle into retreat. The French Communist Party in particular had for years put a lid on workers’ resistance. Shaped by the politics of Stalinism, the party had adapted to capitalism. Its strategy for change relied on running in elections with the even more moderate establishment Socialist Party, and organising token industrial actions as a supplement to polite negotiations between bosses and union officials, giving vent to the frustrations of workers without risking too much disruption to the economy. May ’68 was so remarkable in part because of how the student movement acted as a circuit breaker to this pattern, starting with the transformation of the toothless 15-minute strikes at Sud into an indefinite factory occupation. 
Yet connecting workers’ struggle and student militancy was not enough on its own to dislodge totally the right-wing influence of the PCF leaders, who had built a mass organisation over decades and commanded the residual loyalty of many workers. In the absence of a comparable organisation to fight for uncompromising revolutionary politics, the moderate leadership of the unions could not be prevented from winding up the strikes.
This was not accomplished without a fight, however. CGT officials learned this when they presented the “Grenelle agreement” for a vote at Renault Billancourt, a deal that offered concessions to workers’ demands in return for an end to the general strikes. The key element of this deal was a 35 percent increase in minimum wages—less than the 600 francs workers were demanding. It offered nothing on other key demands like limits to working hours and improved pensions. At Billancourt, radical workers heckled the officials, and at most workplaces workers voted to continue striking until their factory-specific demands were met.
At this point, de Gaulle played his trump card. On 30 May, he called for the dissolution of parliament and a general election. For the Communist Party, securing parliamentary influence was an overriding priority. It was necessary, in their eyes, to end the strike movement as quickly as possible, proving their credentials as a reliable restraint on workers’ radicalism and clearing the way to focus on the elections. 
To do so, they resorted to appallingly divisive tactics. Throughout the strike, the CGT had attempted to cut off contact between students and striking workers, even physically barring the gates of factories like Renault Billancourt to student activists. The votes on whether to accept the Grenelle concessions and end the strikes, meanwhile, were deliberately put to each factory individually. In some factories Communist Party newsletters were published and circulated reporting that the factory had voted to return to work—before any vote had actually happened! 
Isolated from workers in different enterprises and industries, and from the student movement, individual workplaces were left vulnerable to pressure from the union leaders and were led back to work one by one. As a result, despite everything, de Gaulle was able to cling to power. The movement had ended in an uneasy stalemate although at one point the fate of French capitalism had seemingly hung in the balance. 
The legacy of ’68, however, could not be totally erased. The de Gaulle government limped on for less than a year following the events of May. A generation of revolutionary activists, meanwhile, was shaped profoundly by the experience of the revolt. May ’68 stands as a testament to the possibility of revolutionary struggles, to the power of the working class and to the capacity of students to act as a social detonator, able to shake even the most seemingly stable capitalist society.

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