With the second election of Donald Trump, the US far right has cemented itself at the apex of world power. That the repugnant billionaire’s ascension to the White House is a defeat for US workers and progressive forces everywhere is nowhere more evident than in the spectacle of the anti-working-class scum celebrating his political resurrection. 
From Gina Rinehart and Andrew Bolt to Nigel Farage and Elon Musk—around the world, a who’s who of the “let them eat cake” set are beside themselves with glee that tens of millions of Americans venerate a wealthy and powerful con artist because he makes outlandish promises of national revival. 
Trump’s victory, they believe, has given them a renewed license for open and public bigotry. They can even say that bigotry and fabrication make for a winning political strategy, which is the only thing that seems to matter in capitalist politics. Their voices will now be amplified: it should be mandatory for any conservative party worth its salt to run like Trump. No more wet Liberals, just hard men and women who aren’t afraid to punch down. 
Anyone displaying the remotest sensitivity to the oppression or exploitation of their fellow human beings can now be publicly mocked, derided, beaten down—and labelled a communist of course—just as the oppressed and exploited ought to be mocked and beaten down for their weaknesses. Welcome to the new world order.
As if to prove the point, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took a moment’s break from overseeing the holocaust in Gaza to gush about the “huge victory” in America. Hungary’s far-right leader Viktor Orbán called it “a much needed victory for the world”.
Wall Street then predictably surged, the Dow industrials index registering its biggest gain in two years on 6 November as the wealthiest 1 percent salivated at the prospect of yet more tax cuts for billionaires and big corporations while women bleed out in hospital parking lots, having been denied lifesaving reproductive care. Maybe Joe Rogan will dedicate a podcast to how these pathetic bleeders ought to toughen up, while he and his buddies banter about how funny a wounded vagina is.
Trump’s victory cannot be written off as a fluke, like in 2016, when he miraculously walked the narrowest of paths through the Electoral College to defeat the second most unpopular presidential candidate in recent history, Hillary Clinton. This year’s race was high turnout—not as high as the last presidential election, but it is projected to be the second highest voter participation rate since 1908. Compared to the results in 2020, Trump gained in many demographics, according to the exit polls, and in almost every geographic area, according to county returns.
He gained among Latinos and in the suburbs, among majority-white counties and majority-minority counties, among the old and among the young. He even gained in the big cities—fortresses of the Democratic vote such as New York City cracked or, in the case of Miami-Dade in Florida, crumbled. In fact, Trump won the popular vote, something considered almost impossible even for “moderate” Republicans in this age. And he won it despite a majority of the electorate openly admitting that they view him unfavourably. 
The Republicans gained control of the Senate. Potentially, they will win the House as well. If so, far-right reactionaries will control all branches of the US government—executive, legislative and judicial—from January next year. 
What of the Democratic Party? No one should shed a tear for that odious billionaire-driven killing machine. Kamala Harris ran the most right-wing Democratic campaign in recent history, first trading on fears of a Trump presidency to mobilise core party constituencies, then strutting her bonafides as a prosecutor, before pivoting to a love fest with the Cheney family in an effort to win over conservatives. 
Like Hillary Clinton, she failed. But like a terrorist bludgeoned by Bruce Willis at Dulles International Airport, she failed harder. 
“We’re not going back”, the vice president said repeatedly on the campaign trail. Well, the US is going backwards. <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/why-is-the-us-election-so-close">As Lance Selfa explained recently</a>, that’s in no small part because of how the Democrats have governed in successive administrations: presiding over the economic ruin of communities and shifting politics to the right by constructing the worst sort of dog-eat-dog society at the behest of Wall Street and the Chamber of Commerce. 
Moreover, in this election, while Harris was parading her war criminal friend Dick Cheney’s endorsement and stumping over tea with his warmonger daughter in affluent suburbs, much of the electorate was pleading for economic relief. If you believe in fairy tales, then all the workers received magic puddings from the Democrats. In the real world, they were left drowning in debt and struggling to buy food while hundreds of billions continued to be siphoned to the military industrial complex and Liz Cheney’s friends.
If there was any positive news on Tuesday, it came with reports that Green Party candidate Jill Stein was challenging Harris in Dearborn, Michigan, where more than 50 percent of the population is of Middle Eastern descent and aghast that their own tax dollars are being used by the Biden-Harris administration to slaughter their friends and relatives in Palestine and Lebanon. Stein reportedly ended with 18 percent of the vote to Harris’s 36 percent, which was down from Joe Biden’s 69 percent—a stinging rebuke for her support for the genocide in Gaza. 
Small consolations aside, there was always going to be a fight after this election, regardless of the winner. While Trumpism might appear a uniquely American phenomenon, it is a symptom of a world in decay­. A tiny number of people living gated from the rest of the population have accrued obscene amounts of wealth while so many live in squalor and struggle. The parasites at the top, like Trump, deliver imperialist wars and increasing military budgets, environmental crisis and global warming, working- and middle-class debt bondage, health crises afflicting billions, migration crises, divide-and-rule politics, and far-right parties that have become normalised on every continent. The entire globe is a shitstorm.
There’s probably no country in which Trump’s victory will have a greater effect on political sensibilities than Australia. Not because this continent is primed for Trumpism, but because no other political class has such reflexively derivative political impulses. The political right here has no ideas of its own, even going so far as introducing the war on “woke” despite the word never having been part of the left’s lexicon. Exhibit A is the Herald Sun’s Bolt, who says that Harris’s defeat “is also a defeat of the horrendous woke army that’s run riot in the West for years” and that “Trump will now be the enemy of the woke”. 
“Woke army that’s run riot” is a euphemism for people having more progressive and accepting social attitudes, being more sensitive to the oppression of Indigenous people, being open to ideas about social solidarity and opposing imperialism and genocide. That’s what Trump and his acolytes globally want to wage war on: decency and working-class solidarity.
So it is utterly sickening, though unsurprising, to watch Labor politicians fall over themselves to congratulate the president elect. At the end of the day, they are all part of the same club. From Washington to Canberra, London to Beijing, competing cabals of rapacious ruling class thugs who ultimately share the same sensibilities: wealth and power for a few, work and drudgery for the rest.
That’s why this wasn’t just an American election, and it won’t be simply an American fight. It’s a worldwide contest for the soul of the societies in which we all will live.

Editors

Return of the beast

If Israel were a person, they would combine the worst traits of Donald Trump, George W. Bush and a bloviating campus progressive: a pathological liar with a penchant for mass murder who weaponises the politics of identity to shut down political challenges. 
Yet arguably worse than Israel is its friendship circle, which repeats every lie as truth and defends, excuses or enables every act of depravity on the part of its obnoxious pal.
In Gaza, more than 41,000 people are confirmed killed, more than 10,000 are missing and presumed dead, and nearly 100,000 have been injured. And now Lebanon is being hammered as well.
The crushing <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/eyewitness-to-genocide">testimony of Dr Mohammed Mustafa in the latest issue of Red Flag</a>, describing the mounting toll of malnutrition and hepatitis A on children, is yet another reminder of the barbarity Israel is inflicting in the territory.
One year into the genocidal offensive, the figures indicate clearly that the entire Gaza Strip is being made uninhabitable.
Most of the 2.2 million residents have now been herded into just 11 percent of the territory—roughly 39 square kilometres. 
Ninety-six percent of the population—2.15 million people—are facing crisis levels of hunger or worse. Almost half a million are in what the World Food Programme defines as “catastrophic conditions”. 
More than two-thirds of permanent crop fields have been significantly degraded or destroyed.
Two in every three buildings are damaged or destroyed.
Two-thirds of the road network has been damaged, and nearly 1,200 kilometres of roads have been destroyed.
Almost 93 percent of schools have been damaged, and 85 percent need “full reconstruction or major rehabilitation work” to be used again, according to a research group led by the UN and British charity Save the Children.
The United Nations and aid agencies have labelled the situation “beyond catastrophic”. In May, the International Criminal Court prosecutor applied for arrest warrants to try Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said in August that blocking humanitarian aid is “justified and moral” even if it wipes out the entire population of Gaza.
Yet not only have Israel’s friends stood by this rogue state, not only have they continued to provide military and diplomatic support (US President Joe Biden denounced the request for arrest warrants as “outrageous”), but they have routinely smeared opponents of genocide as antisemites.
On one level, it’s an indication that Israel and its Western backers have lost the argument. If a position cannot prevail through reason, bring in the censors and try to silence the critics through force. 
Yet it exposes more than a failure of the “Enlightenment values” routinely invoked as the reason for the West’s need to prepare for and wage war. 
As Israel expands its offensive into Lebanon, predictably with zero threat of sanctions from its friends, the true nature of global capitalism has again been revealed: the “rules-based order” is a fig leaf under which economic competition for profits and state competition for territorial influence regularly spill over into conflicts with few rules—just the exercise of brute force until someone emerges victorious.
“It is no longer the liberty, unity, and state-independence of each nation that is the ideal of capitalism, but the subjugation of millions of members of foreign peoples to the rule of one’s own nation”, Otto Bauer wrote in his 1907 work The Question of Nationalities and Social Democracy. 
“Each nation is to arm itself to the teeth in order to be able to maintain its oppression of the subjugated peoples at all times and to keep foreign rivals away from its own sphere of exploitation.”
It is the age of criminals parading as saviours: permanent war, unpunished mass murder and permanent hypocrisy. 
In the competition for power, Israel today is the pre-eminent rogue state. But it would be nothing without its friends.

Israel: a rogue state with many friends

It’s not like anyone thought he’d be that good. The 2022 election was mostly about driving a stake through Scott Morrison’s heart: that Anthony Albanese was the Chosen One to fulfil this prophecy did not mean he inspired enthusiasm. After all, the premise of his leadership of Labor was about correcting the dangerous radicalism of the notorious extremist Bill Shorten. It’s hard to be enthusiastic about a guy who looks at Bill Shorten and thinks: this guy’s vision is too bold.
Albanese had one big advantage: Scott Morrison’s unpopularity. So, naturally, he tried to make Labor as Morrison-like as possible. He banned rhetorical attacks on the “top end of town”. He promised to be a thoroughly pro-business prime minister. His most noteworthy election policy was to implement the Liberal Party’s planned tax cuts for the rich. What a visionary. When he did win government in 2022, it was with Labor’s lowest primary vote since 1903. The last time people were that unenthusiastic about the Australian Labor Party, Chekhov was still drafting The Cherry Orchard.
And yet, the least successful vote winner in a century of Labor campaigning has managed to be worse than expected. Usually, an incoming Labor government will give you something nice before it starts attacking you. It’ll take something expensive and make it a bit cheaper, build something good or knock down something bad, or something like that—so that, in the years to come, after the full horror of the Labor government becomes clear, it can say: but don’t you remember the good times?
What were the good times of the Albanese government? The Voice. Remember those happy days? When the basically harmless, largely pointless proposal triggered a totally predictable wave of anti-Aboriginal racism from Dutton and the right-wing press? And when Albanese refused to call out the extreme racism of the Liberals’ campaign, thus establishing that its anti-Aboriginal rhetoric was a legitimate policy debate? And when he lost anyway, and we all got nothing out of it except a few weeks of ultra-intense racist propaganda? Well, that was the good part.
In the two years since Albanese was elected, Australian workers have experienced the largest fall in disposable incomes of any OECD country. We have become poorer. Albanese’s government has stood firm in defending the status quo, and savaging anyone who proposes real change in the interests of the working class. When the Greens proposed a policy to address the housing crisis by building high-quality public housing, Albanese’s treasurer, Jim Chalmers, complained: “They quite frequently promise tens of billions of dollars for all kinds of causes”. Labor ministers should try it; maybe then people would like them.
Albanese’s government has been so steadfastly pro-business that he has frequently been outflanked from the left, not by the Greens, but by—if you can believe it—Peter Dutton. By judiciously picking a few unpopular big-business targets, Dutton has, quite incredibly, made the Liberals seem more anti-capitalist than Labor.
Dutton has repeatedly combined nationalist rhetoric with reasonable calls for regulation. Albanese then invariably rises to defend big business. When Dutton called for a ban on gambling advertising, Albanese said he was going too far. When Dutton called for supermarket regulation to deal with spiralling food prices, Albanese roasted him in parliament: “Menzies tried to ban the Communist Party. They want to adopt the Communist Party model. They want publicly owned energy through nuclear energy and now they want, one would assume, publicly owned supermarkets”. It is hard to imagine who the audience for this is, except maybe the CEOs of Coles and Woolworths. Yet the ALP was so proud of this performance that it emailed the clip to its supporters.
It’s not like Albanese is a coward. He will sometimes take a bold stance in defiance of peer pressure and group-think. For example, most people agree that genocide is bad and should be stopped. Albanese takes a more nuanced view. He is willing to sit back, let the genocide happen and see how things play out. Of course, Labor governments have been supporting the dispossession of the Palestinians since party legend Doc Evatt first negotiated the formation of Israel in 1948. But now the process is reaching a new depth, as the Palestinians are consumed in unceasing bombardments and pogroms. Albanese is indifferent.
On 24 August, Albanese issued a statement celebrating Ukrainian Independence Day, in which he marked his “respect for the strength and determination of Ukraine”, the “urgency of its quest for freedom” and “the devastation brought by Russia’s illegal and immoral invasion”, and, of course, “a nation’s right to defend itself”. Bad luck if the guy invading you happens to be armed by Albanese’s allies. Then you don’t get a statement.
Not a day passes without Albanese out-Torying the Tories. His planned destruction of the CFMEU would achieve a decades-long dream of the corrupt, violent, union-busting construction capitalists. John Howard couldn’t kill the union, but Albanese is trying. Labor won’t work with the Greens to build houses, but it happily worked with the Liberals to ensure its anti-union law was even more anti-union.
None of this is entirely new. Labor governments are always worse than they are remembered. Whenever the Liberals are in power, the Labor opposition and its campaign auxiliaries in the ACTU and wishful-thinking progressives rewrite history to make the party seem like a great reformer. Bob Hawke and Paul Keating broke the back of Australia’s unions and introduced Australian neoliberalism; now they are lionised as champions of the workers’ movement. Julia Gillard slashed university funding to the bone, pioneered new forms of offshore refugee torture and adopted an intransigent, official pro-discrimination policy on LGBTI rights; she is now remembered as a feminist icon, the title character in a hagiographic play running in Melbourne’s progressive theatre scene.
The ALP was nominally founded to represent the working class. But its goal was to end the class struggle, not to win it. It has spent more than a century trying to stop workers and the oppressed from fighting back. It was one of the first such parties to form government anywhere in the world—which means that it has accumulated a huge amount of training and experience in justifying betrayals and prettifying oppression.
Albanese was trained in Labor politics at a time when militant unionism and anti-war activism were seen as quaint throwbacks at best, and more likely as electorally dangerous extremism. He has come to government at a time when war and soaring inequality have fully exposed the rotten, anti-worker politics of his party. So he and his team should rightly be remembered as among the worst Labor leaders in history. But they aren’t an aberration. They are just a continuation of Labor’s eternal project to absorb the hopes of workers and the oppressed, and to let them down.

Why is Anthony Albanese so fucking shit?

The astounding 21st-century transfer of wealth from workers to bosses continues. In fact, it seems to be gathering pace.
Australia’s richest 200 people now own $625 billion in personal wealth, equal to nearly one-quarter of the national economy—a threefold jump from 8 percent twenty years ago.
The figures were highlighted this week by the Australia Institute, a think tank, <a href="https://australiainstitute.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/P1689-Wealth-and-inequality.pdf">in a new analysis</a> showing that the top fifth of the country’s households are nearly 150 times better off than the poorest fifth. 
The report comes as the latest data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show that real wages fell again in the latest quarter, having finally grown a little in the six months to March, following a <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/australia-class-war">massive decline over the last few years</a>. 
The Bureau’s figures show that working-class households continue to be pummelled. When accounting for mortgage interest rate rises, the cost of living <a href="https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/economy/price-indexes-and-inflation/selected-living-cost-indexes-australia/jun-2024">climbed by 6.2 percent over the last twelve months</a>. That’s well above the official <a href="https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/economy/price-indexes-and-inflation/consumer-price-index-australia/latest-release">inflation rate</a> and nominal <a href="https://www.abs.gov.au/media-centre/media-releases/annual-wages-rise-41-june-quarter-2024">wage rises</a>.
So while the rich are getting monumentally richer, the people who actually do the work to keep society functioning are getting poorer.
People who clean the streets and take away the rubbish, stack the shelves with groceries, transport the goods, build the houses and offices, teach the children, nurse the sick and injured—pretty much everyone who works for a living is getting clipped.
The Institute estimates that the top 20 percent own more than 60 percent of all household wealth, while the bottom 60 percent own less than 20 percent.
Most of the growth in wealth (and the rise in inequality) has come from “large increases in passive, unearned income” drawn from capital investments. 
So not from hard work. In fact, not from work at all. 
Perversely, the tax system treats this “unearned income” more favourably than it does workers’ declining real earned income. That’s one of the not-so-secrets of success the leisure class counts on.
“Currently, capital gains and wealth are either lightly taxed or completely untaxed in Australia”, the report’s authors note. “This results in the overall percentage of tax paid falling more heavily on the bulk of wage-earners, whose income is most visible but who can least afford the higher taxes.”
The government, led by a political machine still claiming to be a “party of labour”, has not proposed any change to the tax code to redress this unearned privileging of the already privileged. 

In part, that’s because Labor MPs are themselves part of the ultra-privileged minority that benefits from a tax system that favours those on high incomes holding capital investments. Federal politicians are in the top 2.5 percent of income earners—the base pay of a backbencher is <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/jun/17/australian-federal-politicians-pay-rise-3-5-remuneration-tribunal-pm-salary">more than $233,000 a year</a>; senior ALP ministers receive more than $400,000. 
It’s also because Labor’s entire approach to politics is to keep the ultra-wealthy onside. The only way it can do that is by governing in their interests. And what exactly are their interests? Getting richer at everyone else’s expense, of course.
It’s not just about making people who are already here richer. It’s about making sure they have more rich friends to huddle with—in their ghettos like Melbourne’s Brighton or Sydney’s Double Bay—and plot the immiseration of the rest of us. 
Indeed, the entire country has become a haven for the ultra-wealthy.
Australia is the 55th largest country in the world by population. But it consistently attracts some of the largest numbers of the world’s millionaires, who flock here in their tens of thousands to take advantage of the red-carpet welcome they receive.
Labor even introduced a scheme when last in government, often called the “golden ticket” visa, prioritising multi-millionaires. Some 100,000 took advantage of the ruse, which was recently scrapped after repeated allegations that it facilitated international money laundering.
Henley &amp; Partners, a private client immigration consultancy that specialises in helping the world’s wealthiest people relocate to the most favourable jurisdictions, includes Australia in what it calls the Safe Haven 8 countries, “which have all positively transformed their economies by encouraging wealthy people to move there”. 
By “positively transformed”, the company presumably means economies in which the wealthy breathe easy while everyone else sucks eggs.
“What is it about Australia that has it consistently mentioned as the millionaires’ migration destination of choice?” asks the firm. Part of its answer is the high-quality private health and education systems, which working-class taxpayers subsidise. 
Then there’s the fact that “unlike the UK and the USA, Australia has no inheritance taxes or death duties”. This means that once wealth is accumulated, it can be more easily retained by the ultra-wealthy. There is no spirit of “giving back” here.
So the billionaires already here grow richer by the day, and more and more of their privileged kinfolk arrive every week to join Labor politicians at the apex of a scam economy ripping off the working class.

Australia, the parasite’s paradise

When people board a train, they don’t check the driver’s race, gender or musical tastes, expecting that any of these might alter the journey’s final destination.
“That old white mumbler was going to take us to the city. Now there’s a Black woman in the driver’s compartment; I guess we could end up anywhere—perhaps a place where life is great and easy and everyone is good-looking.” 
No-one ever said that.
When it comes to US politics and the political vehicles of the ruling class, the same general rule applies: the trains run on tracks laid by the rich and powerful, and the drivers are methodically tested over decades to ensure they know every bend and can deal with unruly passengers if required. 
Whether it’s the Democratic locomotive or the Republican one, the destination is always the same: Crapsville, where wages are low, universal health care doesn’t exist, cops and prisons are everywhere, and money flows upwards into the pockets of billionaires and to fund the military-industrial complex. 
There are occasional exceptions to the rule, such as Donald Trump’s derailment of the Republican Party. But such events are extraordinarily rare, even unique. And even then, Crapsville is still the destination.
The opposite of rare and unique is Kamala Harris. 
A career prosecutor whose professional life was about filling prisons with poor people. A vice president who has gone along with the genocide in Palestine. More than anything else, however, Harris is an establishment Democrat. That doesn’t sound as incriminating as other charges brought against her. Yet it supersedes them.
US politics is often obsessed with the identity and character of potential presidents. Obviously, politics has a moral dimension that cannot be divorced from the records of individuals seeking office. But the myopic focus on whether someone is considered suitably “qualified” for office on character grounds—or whether their racial or gender identity will be a sign of social progress if they are elected—distracts from the core issue: the nature of the ruling class and the character of its political parties.
Over the last several election cycles, the Democratic Party has become the preferred political vehicle of the US ruling class—the country’s most powerful individuals. The party represents most of the richest congressional districts, receives the lion’s share of political donations from multinational capital and is now known as the party most linked to (and supportive of) the intelligence agencies and the surveillance state.
The US ruling class isn’t just a group of people who have done a little better than the rest, by birth or otherwise. It is an interventionist beast that attempted 72 international regime changes, including coups, in the four decades after World War Two (<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/12/23/the-cia-says-russia-hacked-the-u-s-election-here-are-6-things-to-learn-from-cold-war-attempts-to-change-regimes/">according to investigations</a> by Lindsey A. O’Rourke, an assistant professor of international politics at Boston College). 
It’s responsible for tens of millions of deaths worldwide through its military aggression against countless countries, the latest being Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine.
It’s a ruling class that, despite presiding over the most prosperous and productive economy in human history, refuses to grant the mass of its own population basic dignities such as universal health care or a living pension in retirement.
It is one of the most ruthless, violent and selfish social groups ever known in human history.
To the extent that a character assessment of Harris is warranted, it should not be to determine whether she is fit to lead the Democrats. It ought to question the basis of her success in gaining the presidential nomination.
One could ask what sort of character would want to lead the political vehicle of one of the most vile and destructive social strata in the world, would want to lead a party of genocide, would want to take the helm of an institution responsible for gross inequality and poverty across the United States and indeed the world.
The answer to that question is “many people”. And not just sociopaths. Plenty of good-hearted people would like to improve US capitalism and believe that working through the Democrats is a way to do so. Anyone involved in politics long enough knows that there is no shortage of deluded people—on both the left and the right—who think themselves capable of shifting the immovable.
The more pertinent question is what sort of character would be accepted by the Democratic establishment and would have the ruling class emptying its pockets in a funding drive to back the election campaign.
The answer is someone who has already proven that she’s one of them.

It doesn’t really matter who leads the Democrats

A man comes into your house, takes a shit on the couch and looks you in the eyes. “I’ll come back for that in forty years”, he says. “Then I’ll put it in your garage—for 100,000 years. It will be maybe a million years before the stench goes away, though”.
“By the way”, he continues, walking out the front door, “the council is putting up your rates by $100 billion”.
The man is Peter Dutton, and the couch is all of Australia.
The Labor Party is rightly ridiculing the federal Liberal-National opposition for its “plan” to build seven nuclear reactors around the country. It would take well over a decade, consume probably more than $100 billion in government funds, provide power at much higher prices than alternatives and generate tonnes of lasting radioactive waste. 
The Australian Energy Market Operator published an Integrated System Plan in 2020, which estimated that nearly 90 percent of electricity demand could be met by renewable generation by 2035. So Dutton’s proposal is obsolete before it has even been fully outlined or even thought through. 
Well, it would be if it were only about domestic energy policy. But it is about much more than that. 
The ALP, for all its MPs uploading to social media hilarious three-eyed fish memes, laid the welcome mat and opened the door to this proposal. The party’s commitment to the Aukus military partnership, through which Australia is paying more than $350 billion for a few nuclear submarines, already allows for—indeed, requires—the construction of facilities for “managing, storing or disposing” of the radioactive waste produced by the war machines. 
It’s in the ALP’s own legislation.
Dutton at least had the honesty to tell everyone, in advance of an election, where he plans to build the nuclear plants. Labor, by contrast, tied the country to the nuclear cycle and left it to a future government to announce where the waste will go.
Most likely the radioactive materials will end up on, or under, the lands of traditional Indigenous custodians. Labor won’t say it, but its leaders know that’s probably the case.
The federal parliament recently held an inquiry into the government’s plans. In March and April, a Senate committee heard from expert witnesses. One, Robin Townsend, a fellow at the UK-based Royal Institution of Naval Architects, observed:
“All countries are struggling to not just decommission [nuclear] submarines, but ... to deal with the waste. Planning is critical. People who say that you need to plan to store the waste for 100,000 years aren’t wide of the mark.”
One hundred thousand years is about the amount of time elapsed since the Palaeolithic period. That’s the Stone Age, to which our purported “leaders” might have us all sent if we can survive the nuclear age.
With the Aukus manoeuvre already carried out—dumped on the metaphorical couch—it was only a matter of time before the logic of nuclear expansion took hold in the minds of the people running the country. 
Start with a couple of nuclear-powered submarines. 
Then initiate or expand university programs to train nuclear scientists—who will be needed in the navy and the Department of Defence.
Then, out of necessity, establish a waste dump.
What comes next? 
When the nuclear dump is established, and the rest of the world still doesn’t know what to do with its accumulated waste, probably there’ll be a push to make money and “help humanity” by importing radioactive gunk from elsewhere and chucking it in central Australia. (In fact, the late Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke already suggested this as far back as 2005.) 
When there’s a critical mass of expert nuclear scientists and technicians, then we’ll probably be told that it makes no sense to waste them when Australia has some of the largest reserves of nuclear fuel (uranium, for example) in the world.
Since there are already nuclear-powered submarines and waste dumps and scientists and uranium reserves, and because the world is a dangerous place (run as it is by the sort of people who run Australia), there will probably be a case made for obtaining or even producing nuclear weapons.
The case for that will be much stronger if some form of uranium enrichment program is already established, such as for domestic energy. 
Dutton might be put down as Mr Potato Head, but he understands this logic better than most journalists seem to: Australian imperialism is in the business of projecting power, but no country can claim to be a genuine power unless it has nuclear weapons. 
If nuclear path dependency takes hold, it won’t have started with Peter Dutton, even though he is clearly the most public about wanting to follow through with it.
It will be down to the ALP. With Aukus, the party has entrenched Australia as a beachhead for US imperialism in Asia and made a target of the continent’s north if war breaks out between Washington and Beijing.
But if Australia is by then a bona fide nuclear state, that won’t be the end of it—the potential fallout is almost unimaginable.

Nuclear push isn’t just about energy

After eight months of horror in Gaza, Israel’s defenders are finally losing the argument about the Zionist state’s true nature. 
The International Court of Justice is investigating a charge of genocide brought against the country by South Africa. The International Criminal Court prosecutor has issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for crimes against humanity. The United Nations reportedly will include Israel in its annual report listing “parties engaging in violations against children”.
In most Western countries, cracks in the edifice of liberal Zionism have appeared, and there is a greater awareness of the historical injustices perpetrated against the Palestinians. An emerging generational divide is evident: young progressive people are turning their backs on Israel in unprecedented numbers, recognising that it is not the Middle East’s plucky David, but the brutal Goliath of historic Palestine.
While welcome, these developments are Pyrrhic victories.
Gaza is in ruins. The largest Palestinian city in the world has been flattened. By any standard of human decency, it is now uninhabitable and will be prevented from meaningful reconstruction indefinitely. The displacement of people and loss of life dwarf the 1948 Nakba. And, according to satellite imagery analysed by Al Jazeera’s Sanad Verification Agency, Israel has taken over more than one-third of the entire Gaza Strip, creating an expanded buffer zone along the border and splitting the territory into two separate enclaves, north and south, separated by a 1.5 kilometre-wide clearing. 
Across the world, the response has been huge outpourings of rage, renewed activism, direct actions, sit-ins, protests, a global student encampment movement demanding divestment from the Zionist state, among other things. 
Yet Tel Aviv has ploughed on with the offensive regardless of global public opinion and the views of international prosecutors and legal experts. Very few Western institutions or universities have severed ties with the arms companies supplying Israel or moved to sanction the state in any way. Western governments remain united behind Zionism—as they did in the face of Western human rights groups finally concluding in recent years that the state practises apartheid.
Everyone in the global Palestine solidarity movement knows why this is the case. Almost every speech correctly links Israel with the Western imperialist project in the Middle East. Again and again, people point out that the United States provides Israel with almost all of its weaponry and defends it against every perceived threat. It is as clear as day that Israel is not some wholly independent entity—that, rather, it is part of a US-led imperialist world order. 
It is also as clear as day that Israel will not likely be defeated without the defeat of Western imperialism. But how?
Hamas has proven that armed struggle is limited in what it can achieve. We are long past the 1950s and 1960s, when guerrilla insurgencies with popular support had half a chance of success against weak governments that lacked sophisticated weaponry and trained soldiers and which presided over underdeveloped state structures and largely pre-industrial economies. 
The example of the Tamil Tigers fifteen years ago, like Gaza today, is a harrowing reminder that we are in a new area of military sophistication that overwhelmingly favours incumbent regimes. In this regard, Israel is a special case indeed—its Jewish population overwhelmingly supports the war.
Conventional war won’t cut it either. Gaza has been destroyed despite Hamas being no threat to the structural integrity of the Zionist state. The Iranian ruling class and Hezbollah in Lebanon seem to understand that their own countries would be flattened if they seriously moved against Israel, even if they might not be conquered. The more serious military challenge by either would result in infinitely more licence for Israel’s military, probably joined by the US, to unleash hell, destroying the lives of millions.
What about mass uprisings? Marxists have long argued that the road to Jerusalem runs through Cairo. The metaphor suggests that Palestine’s freedom is linked to Arab revolutions that topple the region’s dictatorships, which oppress their own working classes and, like Israel, are supported by the US empire. 
But Arab revolutions in themselves might be insufficient if Western imperialism is not at least prevented from intervening to crush the resistance, as it has across the global south for more than a century. The Arab Spring was ultimately limited by vicious counter-revolutions backed by various imperial powers, not just Western ones. So another revolutionary wave limited to the Middle East would likely face serious challenges from Washington and elsewhere.
What, then, is possible?
In most of the talk about anti-imperialism, one thing has been missing. Imperialism, as Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin wrote more than a century ago, is not simply aggression by big states against oppressed people—it is “the highest stage of capitalism”. It is the era in which world markets are integrated yet economic rivalries have intensified to such a degree that they cannot be contained within those markets. It is an era of permanent war.
Yet imperialism has an obvious weakness. The very people it depends on to function—workers who produce the profits used to wage war—have the power to bring down the entire system. As Jasmine Duff notes of World War One (Issue 256, page 18), revolutionary workers paralysed capitalism to end that war and to liberate themselves from the shackles of exploitation. That remains the model towards which activists in the West should orient.
Everyone in the global solidarity movement of course wants to do something tangible for Gaza. In the West, a key contribution is the building of revolutionary political organisations to challenge the pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist parties and to fight for the overthrow of Australian, American and European capitalism.
The fight for Gaza, like the fight for everyone in the global south, is linked to the fight for workers’ power in global north—the fight to smash the capitalist ruling classes that lord it over the entire planet and wage war on its people. 
That’s why socialists are so determined to build political organisations here and now. If our side is no stronger after all the carnage and suffering of the last eight months in Palestine, then we’ll be in no better position to prevent the next, inevitable, round of imperialist barbarism.

What is Gaza’s lesson for activists in the West?

The “second stage” of Israel’s war on Gaza has begun. The three-week-long aerial bombardment has already killed close to 8,000 people. Several thousand more are reported missing and presumed buried—dead and alive—under the rubble of obliterated residential apartment buildings. 
Now ground incursions—backed by more intensive shelling and the severing of communication in and out of Gaza—are expanding the means of destruction and, inevitably, the number of people murdered in the territory.
“I am shocked by the intolerable level of human suffering”, Mirjana Spoljaric, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross, <a href="https://twitter.com/ICRC/status/1718371781256659423">posted on X on 29 October</a>.
“People are being killed and forcibly displaced from their homes, and water and fuel are running low. The atrocity is on a scale never seen before in Gaza”, Doctors Without Borders <a href="https://www.doctorswithoutborders.ca/msf-immediate-ceasefire-is-needed-in-gaza-to-stop-the-bloodshed/">said in a media release a day earlier</a>. 
In the face of this utter barbarity, Western politicians have at least had to provide lip-service to the idea of humanitarianism. So there have been increasing calls for Israel to abide by international law and to safeguard civilian life by letting aid into Gaza.
But lip-service is all that it is. For weeks, the “civilised world” has greenlighted this genocide, providing moral, diplomatic and military support.
Two weeks ago, when the death toll in Gaza had topped 2,500, when civilian infrastructure was being obliterated and the siege was crippling utilities and hospitals in the territory, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong addressed the Senate, reaffirming that Israel—the apartheid state carrying out genocide—“as ever ... has a right to defend itself”.
The 193-member United Nations General Assembly on Friday passed a resolution calling for “an immediate, durable and sustained humanitarian truce leading to a cessation of hostilities”. Despite everything that has been publicly documented about the horror raining down on Gaza, Australia abstained. This is unforgivable on the part of the Labor government, which again has tied itself to US prerogatives. 
The UN motion was not binding on anyone. It was a gauge of opinion; a very limited test, which simply asked of governments around the world, “Ought this crime continue?” Yet the Australian government could only equivocate. 
If anyone previously took seriously the international posturing of Penny Wong, with all the feigning of concern about other countries’ human rights transgressions, this government now surely has lost all credibility.
Again, the US (which voted against) and Australia have given more moral support to the apartheid regime. Indeed, despite the shifting diplomatic language and broad calls for restraint internationally, there has been no let-up. The Israeli escalation came as the General Assembly was in session.
There is now clearly unease in the West about the geopolitical ramifications of the ongoing mass murder in Gaza. That has resulted in a change of diplomatic language from the UN and from a range of states. These shifts in tone don’t change anything. Nor do they absolve the West of its complicity in these atrocities.
It is notable, for all the purported concern about the humanitarian crisis and killing of civilians in Gaza, that there has been no proposal to sanction Israel. The aid keeps flowing, the trade missions remain open, no assets have been frozen.
The only thing we’re seeing is empty words, a non-binding motion, a bit of increased posturing by some to provide an appearance of balance. 
There may be pressure brought to bear on Israel to pull back in the coming weeks. Australia and the US might at some point flip and call for a cessation of hostilities. That won’t change anything either. 
They have blood on their hands. At every key moment, they have provided cover for these criminal acts.
And it’s not just in Gaza. In the occupied West Bank, <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/10/28/palestinians-in-occupied-west-bank-face-closures-harassment-and-attacks">more than 100 Palestinians have been killed</a> and more than 1,500 have been arrested since 7 October (“arrest” or “administrative detention” is what Israel calls it when it takes Palestinian hostages). The military has distributed arms to Jewish settlers, who have reportedly increased their attacks on Palestinian residents and farmers.
Within Israel, there appears to be a pogromist atmosphere. “Since the war broke out, many Israeli Arabs [“Palestinians”—RF eds.] are afraid to leave their home”, Deiaa Haj and YahiaEden Solomon <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-10-26/ty-article-magazine/.premium/israeli-citizens-cursed-threatened-fired-from-their-jobs-simply-for-being-arab/0000018b-6884-d979-a3bb-ebf7eee40000">report in Haaretz</a>. “They tell of attacks, threats of murder, humiliations and racist curses hurled at them, as well as having their employment in Jewish cities terminated. Many describe the feeling in one word: dread.”
<a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/28/thousands-of-gaza-workers-go-missing-in-israel-amid-wartime-mass-arrests">Al Jazeera reports</a> that thousands of Palestinian workers have been “rounded up by the Israeli army” and taken away—to where, nobody seems to know. 
“At any given point, there are thousands of Palestinians ... held in administrative detention by Israel”, Miriam Marmur, a spokesperson from Gisha, an Israeli human rights organisation, told the news outlet. “But these are the first Palestinians to be held en masse. The nature of their detention, the revocation of people’s permits and the fact that Israel is so far refusing to divulge any information about where they are ... that is not something I have seen before.” 
What has Australia’s “party of labour” said about any of this? Nothing. Zip. Nada. It is the great enabler.

The Western greenlighting of genocide

Red Flag since our inception has stood on the side of the Palestinians in their struggle against Israeli apartheid, ethnic cleansing, colonisation and oppression. We have endeavoured to set the record straight on the conflict. Below is a catalogue of some of our coverage, which we hope will be a useful resource for people wanting to come to grips with the situation.
<a href="https://redflag.org.au/category/palestine"><img alt="War on Palestine" src="https://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/inline-images/War%20in%20Palestine.png" /></a>
The above link will take you to all our current coverage of the war.
Recent reporting
Articles outlining political developments prior to the recent outbreak of war
December 2022: <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/netanyahu-back-israels-war-palestine-intensifies">Netanyahu is back as Israel’s war on Palestine intensifies</a>
February 2023: <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/israels-violent-crackdown-occupied-west-bank">Israel’s violent crackdown in the occupied West Bank</a>
April 2023: <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/pogroms-and-protests-israel">Pogroms and protests in Israel</a>
May 2023: <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/oppression-and-resistance-palestine-today">Oppression and resistance in Palestine today</a> 
July 2023: <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/jenin-under-attack">Jenin under attack</a>
 
General background
Previously published articles outlining the history of the conflict, providing arguments about its nature and the strategies needed to resolve it, and analysing different actors involved
<a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/israel-apartheid-state">Israel is an apartheid state</a>
<a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/5943">Debunking the myths of Israel/Palestine</a>
<a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/nakba-understanding-palestinian-catastrophe">Nakba: Understanding the Palestinian catastrophe</a>
<a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/what-happening-palestine-genocide">What is happening in Palestine is genocide</a>
<a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/how-can-palestine-be-free">How can Palestine be free?</a>
<a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/what-was-israel-supposed-be">What was Israel supposed to be?</a>
<a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/6346">The logic of Israel’s brutality</a>
<a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/7512">There are plenty of Palestinian Gandhis. Israel keeps killing them</a>
<a href="https://sa.org.au/node/3857">Fighting oppression is not anti-Semitic</a>
<a href="https://sa.org.au/node/3810">Why Jews should oppose Israel</a>
<a href="https://sa.org.au/node/214">The case against Israel</a>
<a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/farce-oslo-20-years">The Oslo accords</a>
<a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/6090">The Balfour declaration</a>
<a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/palestinian-authority-nothing-extension-israels-regime">The Palestinian Authority</a>
<a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/palestine-and-arab-counter-revolution">Palestine and the Arab counter-revolution</a>
 
Red Flag Radio
Interviews from our podcast
<a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/2HVGIH2SttkSUbYsZKGHpn">Why socialists support a free Palestine</a>
<a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/46XKIzesOHPBsAFK5j0vmy">A brief history of Palestinian resistance</a>
 
Marxist Left Review
More substantial pieces from Socialist Alternative’s theoretical journal
<a href="https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/the-siege-and-resistance-in-gaza-interview-with-toufic-haddad/">The siege and resistance in Gaza: Interview with Toufic Haddad</a>
<a href="https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/why-the-australian-state-supports-israel-so-stridently/">Why the Australian state supports Israel so stridently</a>
<a href="https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/the-gulf-war-israel-and-the-palestinians/">The Gulf War, Israel, and the Palestinians</a>
<a href="https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/the-social-construction-of-sectarianism-in-the-middle-east/">The social construction of sectarianism in the Middle East</a>

Understanding Palestine: resource list

1. The need for solidarity
Israel is committing genocide. If you’re shocked and angry, you are not alone. Tens of thousands have taken to the streets in Australia, and millions more around the world, to stop the war on Gaza. 
And across the occupied territories, people are watching how the world responds. That’s reason enough to join the protests. They are public displays of solidarity that send a message to Palestinians under siege: “You are not alone; we are with you”. 
2. Australians have a special responsibility
Those of us living in Western countries have a special responsibility to fight against Western imperialism.
Australian governments in particular, both Labor and Liberal, are among the most uncritical backers of Israel in the world. They provide diplomatic and moral support at every turn, for almost every crime and every act of brutality.
More than that, Australia is becoming more and more integrated into the US military industrial complex. The Australian establishment has backed and participated in every US-led war in the Middle East and is preparing for another potential US-led war in Asia. 
Standing up to the Australian government—making it harder for the politicians to be part of these criminal international invasions—is a crucial part of showing solidarity not only to the Palestinians, but to people all over the world who are victims of Western or Western-backed aggression.
3. There are more atrocities to come
The Western powers work 24/7. They never stop thinking about and organising ways to dominate the world and to put down any resistance to their rule. 
So this is not the first time and won’t be the last time that an atrocity like this occurs.
But as the war drags on, it may start to become background noise—normalised as something that just “goes on” in the Middle East. Or people might start to despair that our protests haven’t fundamentally changed anything. The media might eventually lose interest, and the demonstrations might dwindle in number.
Yet the suffering of Palestinians and so many others will not abate. 
We need more people with a long-term commitment to building a movement that campaigns day-in, day-out, to change the world. Just as the butchers at the top work tirelessly to maintain their domination, so too must we work 24/7 to build an ongoing movement against them.
4. Capitalism is the root cause of oppression
The dispossession and genocide of Palestinians is a grotesque crime. But it isn’t an aberration: it is a crime of global capitalism.
It’s not just Israel. And it’s not just the USA and Australia. It’s the ruling elites in the Arab dictatorships, in Europe, Russia and China. If they are not all directly complicit, they carry out their own crimes, their own wars, their own acts of dispossession and genocide. 
They are all part of the same club: the global ruling class, which gets rich off the suffering of the poor and oppressed all over the world. This is the “international community” that humanitarians are constantly appealing to: a cabal of criminals who act only to enhance their own positions of power. 
“From our Nakba to your Invasion Day, we are one in struggle”, reads a mural in the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, Lebanon. 
That is exactly right. If we want a free Palestine, and a world free of oppression, we need to topple not just Israeli apartheid, but all criminal states the world over. 
5. We need socialism
Only a world run by the working class and the oppressed can win liberation for Palestine: a world in which exploitation and oppression are abolished and people live as equals.
So we need to build not just a protest movement, but a socialist political alternative to the pro-capitalist parties that are complicit in the crimes against humanity.
All around the world, there are other socialists doing this, often taking enormous risks to do so. Those living under dictatorships—in Egypt, Myanmar, Russia, China, Iran and other places—risk imprisonment, torture and death.
In capitalist democracies such as Australia, we don’t face such risks. But the task is no less important. To challenge capitalism and imperialism and all their horrors, we need socialist parties in every country. 
That’s why Socialist Alternative, the group that publishes Red Flag, never stops campaigning. We not only help to organise the demonstrations in solidarity with Palestine; we campaign against injustice wherever it rears its head. 
So if you are angry and want to see an end to genocide and oppression, become a socialist activist—join Socialist Alternative. 
Together, we have a world to win.

Return of the beast

Israel: a rogue state with many friends

Why is Anthony Albanese so fucking shit?

Australia, the parasite’s paradise

It doesn’t really matter who leads the Democrats

Nuclear push isn’t just about energy

What is Gaza’s lesson for activists in the West?

The Western greenlighting of genocide

Understanding Palestine: resource list

Palestine: Five reasons to be an activist

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