The Interim vice-chancellor of the Australian National University, Rebekah Brown, has announced that there will be no more job cuts as part of sweeping restructures that began in 2024.
This comes as a relief to the remaining 105 staff whose positions were slated to be cut under the proposal to “Renew ANU”. The announcement, made in an all-staff town hall meeting on Thursday, is a testament to the sustained pressure by members of the National Tertiary Education Union and students involved in the “No Cuts at ANU” campaign. It follows the resignation of the former vice-chancellor, Genevieve Bell, last week.
The cuts have left no part of the university unscathed. Renew ANU aimed to slash $250 million in spending across the university, including $150 million on salaries. But five areas still face major overhauls, including the College of Arts and Social Sciences and the College of Science and Medicine. These include substantial cuts to the world-renowned School of Music, which would end the teaching of performance and composition.
According to the latest figures from the union, nearly 1,100 staff have been forced out since last year. Academics who relocated to Canberra for their dream jobs have found themselves competing with their colleagues for a smaller number of positions in Hunger Games-like spill and fill processes. In backing down from further job cuts, Rebekah Brown confirmed that they are no longer needed for the ANU to meet its “savings” target. 
This is partly due to the university’s voluntary redundancy scheme. Touted as a win by the union, the scheme allowed the university to cut jobs on the cheap. Those expressing interest in it have fewer entitlements than those who are made redundant and must have their application approved by senior management. If their position is deemed necessary, it will be rejected. The fact that 175 staff have taken a voluntary separation package rather than wait to be made redundant speaks to the depth of resentment towards the ANU and the desire by many to leave.
The cuts have generated significant opposition from staff, students and the wider Canberra community. More than 2,000 people have signed a petition calling on the ANU Council to stop the cuts and terminate the employment of the chancellor, Julie Bishop (and the now departed Genevieve Bell). This follows staff resoundingly rejecting a proposal to forgo their scheduled pay rise in December last year, and more than 800 supporting a motion of no confidence in the chancellor and vice-chancellor earlier this year.
Students involved in the No Cuts campaign have protested and organised forums against the cuts, including a Special General Meeting of the Australian National University Students’ Association earlier this week. The meeting voted to sack Julie Bishop, reverse Renew ANU, open the ANU’s financial books and fully fund free education.
Although many are understandably celebrating the end of Bell’s reign and the wave of job cuts, there is no indication that the restructures will be completely scrapped. In fact, Brown was clear in her town hall address that she intends to “complete the Renew ANU strategy”, including the decision not to embed performance into the curriculum of the new Bachelor of Music.
This comes as no surprise. As the former provost, Brown, like Bishop, is part of the same management team overseeing the cuts. For her part, Bishop remains chancellor despite allegations in a Senate enquiry that she bullied an academic on ANU Council to “near suicide”.
Forcing a widely hated vice-chancellor to resign in disgrace and ending forced redundancies should give hope and confidence to those facing similar attacks at universities around the country. While it remains to be seen exactly how much of the original plan to disestablish, amalgamate and centralise various parts of the ANU will be implemented, the fight for a university that puts staff and students before profit continues.

Elliot Downes

No more job cuts, but the fight continues at ANU

Around 250 union members and supporters rallied on 16 October against sweeping cuts at the Australian National University, which are set to eliminate 638 full-time equivalent positions.
The university expects to save $250 million between now and 2026, $100 million of which will come from workers’ wages. According to the National Tertiary Education Union, this equals a 12 percent cut in annual salary expenditure.
The proposed changes, which the administration has dubbed “Renew ANU”, involve abolishing the College of Health and Medicine and merging its constituent schools into other colleges. 
So far, 50 college staff have been told they will not have jobs next year. But staff working in other university areas have discovered that rolling job losses are expected to continue. No one knows whether they’ll be next until they receive an email calling them into secretive meetings with senior management.
“Renew ANU” was announced in an all-staff address, which staff were only notified about 24 hours before it happened. During the address, new Vice-Chancellor Genevieve Bell said that the cuts would make the ANU a “smaller university”. 
According to the chief financial officer, the university’s expected 2024 deficit of $60 million has ballooned into a projected $200 million deficit. Exactly how this happened is unclear, which is why the union is demanding that the university open its books. 
ANU is the first university to announce major job cuts since the federal government introduced a cap on international student numbers at Australian universities. The indicative caps will reduce ANU’s total number of international students by 14.5 percent compared to 2019. The university has justified the cuts by stating that it can no longer expand its way out of debt by enrolling more full-fee-paying international students. 
Initially called against the proposed job cuts, the NTEU’s rally came a day after management announced that it would ask all staff to forgo their scheduled 2.5 percent pay rise in December, a move the union was not notified about. Predictably, the winding up of last year’s enterprise bargaining campaign, which involved calling off planned strike action, has emboldened management to sideline the union and unilaterally attempt to slash pay.
During the pandemic, staff at ANU narrowly voted to defer two annual pay rises on the promise that it would save jobs. Months later, the university announced that hundreds of jobs would go anyway. Now, union members are much more suspicious of management. Staff who voted yes last time have said they won’t be doing so again.
In the email notifying staff of the intention to cut their pay, Bell revealed that she would immediately reduce her salary by 10 percent. She failed to mention that this would be a reduction from $1.15 million—far more than the average university worker.
It would be hard for Bell to be a more unpopular vice-chancellor. These unprecedented cuts come after a year in which ANU called the police on student protesters, attempted to privatise on-campus childcare, declared that parking fees will nearly triple next year and announced a new draconian postering and advertising policy that may breach the enterprise agreement.
A majority will need to vote to change the enterprise agreement if the staff are to forgo their scheduled pay rise. After a resounding vote of members at the rally, the union is now gearing up to run a “vote no” campaign. A win for the union’s campaign will be an important victory—not only for ANU staff struggling with the cost of living but also because of the message it will send to any other vice-chancellor considering similar cuts.

Staff rally against ANU cuts

There is a dangerous escalation of transphobia happening right now. The political right in the United States and the United Kingdom are rolling back civil rights for trans people specifically and LGBT people more broadly. This is being driven by an amalgamation of mainstream conservative parties, the far right, Christian fundamentalists and right-wing shock jocks and tabloids.
Almost every US jurisdiction currently has at least one piece of anti-trans legislation before its legislature. According to the website <a href="https://translegislation.com/">Trans Legislation Tracker</a>, 471 bills targeting trans people have been put forward at a state level across the country since the start of 2023. The bills are wide-ranging, aiming to roll back anti-discrimination protections for trans people, exclude them from public life and deny them access to everything from healthcare and legal recognition to education, bathrooms and sport.
Fifteen anti-trans laws have already passed Republican-dominated state legislatures this year. This follows 26 passed last year. The most infamous is <a href="https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2022/1557">Florida’s</a> <a href="https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2022/1834">“Don’t Say Gay”</a> bill, a serious attack on free speech that effectively bans discussion and acknowledgement of LGBT people in public schools. Since then, the <a href="https://www.floridahealth.gov/_documents/newsroom/press-releases/2022/04/20220420-gender-dysphoria-guidance.pdf">Florida Department of Health</a> has issued official guidance that trans children should not be allowed to wear clothes or use pronouns that align with their gender.
<a href="https://legiscan.com/TN/text/SB0003/id/2657437">Tennessee</a> goes even further. The state will now police gender expression in public under the guise of banning drag performances. Its latest bill, which passed into law on 2 March, defines drag performers as “male or female impersonators”—an insidious way of criminalising simply being trans.
Many of the bills aim to criminalise the provision of gender-affirming healthcare, such as puberty blockers or hormone replacement therapy, to trans children. A number of them would open to child abuse charges parents who support their children accessing care. Unless blocked by the courts, an <a href="https://legiscan.com/AL/bill/SB184/2022">Alabama</a> bill passed last year will come into effect on 8 May making this a felony punishable by up to ten years in prison. Health practitioners who provide, or in some cases even just recommend, gender-affirming care also face imprisonment and having their licences revoked. More than a third of trans youth live in states that have already restricted access to gender-affirming care or are currently considering bills that would do so, according to a <a href="https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Trans-Youth-Health-Bans-Mar-2022.pdf">2022 study</a> by the Williams Institute. 
Until recently, most bills restricting transition-related healthcare have applied only to people under the age of eighteen. Republicans are trying to extend these bans up to the age of 21 in several states. An <a href="https://legiscan.com/OK/text/SB129/2023">Oklahoma</a> bill goes the furthest by seeking to ban access to those under 26—well above any commonly accepted threshold for adulthood. Republicans are also attempting to de facto expand these bans to trans people of all ages by blocking insurance coverage for gender-affirming care and preventing publicly funded facilities from providing it. 
The current wave of anti-trans legislation follows the rolling back of legal protections for trans people under the Trump administration and the so-called “bathroom bills” that ban trans people from using gender-appropriate public toilets. More of these bills are being proposed, including one introduced in <a href="https://sdlegislature.gov/Session/Bill/22690">South Dakota</a> last year that would require public facilities to be segregated on the basis of “biological sex”. This is defined by the bill as “the person’s genetics and anatomy existing at the time of the person’s birth”, meaning that an updated birth certificate —already difficult to access in South Dakota—would not provide an exemption. 
In the UK, proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act (GRA), which would simplify the process for trans people to legally change their gender, have also come under attack. In particular, the proposal to move away from a medical approach that pathologises trans people by requiring a diagnosis of “gender dysphoria”, towards self-identification, or allowing trans people to decide their gender without the involvement of medical professionals. 
Since the changes were proposed, sections of the media and new anti-trans lobby groups such as Woman’s Place UK have mounted a vitriolic campaign against them. Other organisations, including Standing for Women, which was founded by far-right transphobic activist Kellie-Jay Keen, are campaigning to repeal the GRA altogether and prevent trans people from being legally recognised as their gender.
In January, the UK government invoked never-before-used power to block Scottish legislation amending the GRA, which would have made it easier for trans people to change their legal gender. The Conservative Party has historically been divided on its approach to the GRA; this unprecedented move indicates a hardening of its position.
The ability of trans people to medically transition has also come under fire in the UK. In April last year, Tory Health Minister Sajid Javid announced an inquiry into the treatment provided for trans children. Speaking in parliament, he claimed that the current approach is “overly affirmative, and ... bordering on ideological”. This came two years after legal action against the National Health Service and a High Court decision resulting in no trans people under the age of seventeen being referred for treatment for almost a year. Aside from the legal battles, gender identity clinics are struggling to keep up with referrals in a health system that is chronically underfunded and in a state of perpetual crisis. 
It’s not surprising that this campaign against trans rights has been taken up with such enthusiasm by conservatives and the far right; transphobia fits with their sexist belief in biologically or divinely determined gender roles.
The right is not the only political or social group that enforces gender roles. Women’s and LGBT oppression play an important role for capitalism as a whole by creating and reinforcing a social system in which the family unit, and particularly the woman within it, takes care of reproducing, socialising and caring for current and future generations of workers. Otherwise, it would come at a substantial cost to the wider economy—the global value of women’s unpaid domestic labour was $11 trillion in 2020, according to an Oxfam report. That is more than the combined revenue of the 50 biggest companies on the Fortune Global 500 list. A complex web of gendered stereotypes, social expectations and economic pressures maintains this system.
But the political right pursue the oppression of women and LGBT people with an extreme ferocity because of its particular vision for what society should look like: strictly hierarchical in all spheres, in which social roles are narrowly defined and with the nuclear family as its foundation. Within the family, parents rule over children, women take care of domestic life and men are breadwinners and “head of the household”. Deviations from this family “norm” are viewed as an attack on the very fabric of society.
Trans rights have become the thin end of the wedge for the right’s broader homophobic and sexist agenda. After voting to overturn Roe vs. Wade, conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas made it clear that he also wants to overturn past decisions that guarantee access to contraception, decriminalise sex between men, and enshrine marriage equality. Since then, more than three-quarters of House Republicans have voted against federal legislation protecting the right to same-sex and interracial marriage. They also overwhelmingly voted against enshrining a right to contraception and abortion access. More than 72 percent voted no to all four bills.
The current attacks on trans rights are being justified on the basis of defending children and women. This has long been a talking point of the right, who have in the past cynically invoked women’s rights in their attacks on other oppressed groups such as Black people and Muslims. The hypocrisy of this is clear. In the US, these are the same political forces that have denied women access to abortion, and criminalised those who try to help them. More recently, the Wyoming Republican Party has even defended child marriage.
Much of the current anti-trans rhetoric is an extension of old homophobic tropes that view LGBT people as paedophiles undermining traditional family values and grooming children. Opponents of LGBT rights generate moral panics around children (because who on Earth is against protecting children?) to gain a hearing and advance their agenda, which has nothing to do with protecting children. They’re finding that this strategy is having some success, especially in the US.
Attacks on trans people have been particularly useful for Republicans such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is trying to cement his position within the party in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election. Republicans are using the issue of trans rights to appeal to their electoral base, capitalising on the conservative “parental rights” movement that emerged in opposition to school policies around remote learning and mask wearing, which were introduced early in the pandemic. 
This movement soon targeted progressive curriculum related to race, sexuality and gender identity, as well as which bathrooms trans students use and their participation in school sports. Many of the current anti-trans bills are framed around parental rights. One proposed in <a href="https://legiscan.com/NC/drafts/S514/2021">North Carolina</a>, for example, would have required teachers to immediately inform parents if their child “exhibits gender nonconformity”.
It’s no surprise that these attacks are increasing at a time when capitalism is getting more brutal and unequal for working-class people. For the ruling class, attacks on trans rights encourage ordinary people to fight among ourselves to distract us from our common enemy. Creating a climate of extreme hostility to trans people encourages people to rage about drag queen story time and worry about the possibility of encountering a trans person in a bathroom, rather than the cost-of-living crisis. 
Although Australia is not facing the same onslaught of attacks as the US and UK, we’ve already seen echoes of it in the transphobic campaign of former Liberal candidate Katherine Deves and the far-right Christians who marched against World Pride in Sydney. Thankfully, extreme anti-trans politics is still the preserve of the fringe right in Australia. The left has an important role to play in ensuring that remains the case.

Trans rights are under attack 

Prominent Sri Lankan trade unionist and Ceylon Teachers’ Union General Secretary Joseph Stalin was arrested in his office on 4 August for taking part in a large anti-government protest in May. 
Stalin’s arrest is part of a wave of repression by the new Sri Lankan president, Ranil Wickremesinghe, against the movement that toppled Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the country’s previous leader. Leftists, trade unionists and student unionists have been targeted by the new government. Activists have been pulled off planes and buses by plain-clothes police. Others have had arrest warrants issued, and their houses and offices have been raided.
Wickremesinghe’s crackdown rivals the authoritarian legacy of previous governments, notorious for the abduction, intimidation and surveillance of journalists and anti-government activists.
Hours after Gotabaya was forced to flee the country, Wickremesinghe, in a televised address declaring himself acting president, ordered the military to “do whatever is necessary to restore order”. Since being sworn in, he has declared a state of emergency. Protesters continuing to occupy the main protest site, Galle Face Green in the capital, Colombo, were attacked on 22 July by police and soldiers, who demolished their makeshift camp and attacked journalists covering the raid.
Stalin is the most high-profile unionist to be arrested since the crackdown began. It is not the first time he has faced reprisals from the government. The Ceylon Teachers’ Union has a history of standing in solidarity with the oppressed Tamil population in the north-east of the country, and Stalin has previously been arrested for protesting against the militarisation of education. 
According to Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka, teachers across the island walked out in protest against his arrest, and hundreds of unionists rallied in Colombo demanding his release, along with all the other anti-government activists who have been arrested in recent times.

Sri Lankan government arrests workers’ movement leader

In 1915, Rosa Luxemburg wrote The Crisis of Social Democracy while in jail for her anti-war activism. In it, she criticised the leaders of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) for betraying working-class internationalism with their support for the First World War. The pamphlet was smuggled out in April that year and published a year later. Distributed illegally under the pseudonym Junius, it’s commonly known as the Junius pamphlet.
The pamphlet remains one of the strongest indictments of war and the system that produces it. Luxemburg describes how the war ripped the mask from the face of capitalism:
“Shamed, dishonoured, wading in blood and dripping with filth, thus capitalist society stands. Not as we usually see it, playing the roles of peace and righteousness, of order, of philosophy, of ethics—but as a roaring beast, as an orgy of anarchy, as a pestilential breath, devastating culture and humanity—so it appears in all its hideous nakedness.”
Junius was also an inquest into the death of social democracy. In the lead-up to the war, the SPD had campaigned against the growing imperialist tensions and declared its opposition to the impending war. Once it broke out, however, the party’s parliamentary representatives—with the exception of Karl Liebknecht—voted for credits to fund the German war effort. “Nowhere has the organisation of the working class been yoked so completely to the service of imperialism”, Luxemburg wrote.
In backing the war, the SPD took up the positions of the ruling class and became enthusiastic proponents of German nationalism. Luxemburg demolished the party’s argument that the war was defensive, fought for democracy and liberty. In reality, the ruling classes of Western Europe had lent economic and political support to Russian absolutism. Instead of supporting the German government, Luxemburg looked to the “revolutionary forces aris[ing] from the womb of the Russian people itself to fight against Russian absolutism”.
By declaring itself in favour of “social peace” during the war, the SPD called for an end to class struggle—on the part of workers. In response to the argument that the war had created a new situation that changed everything, Luxemburg rhetorically asked:
“Have private property, capitalist exploitation and class rule ceased to exist? Or have the propertied classes in a spell of patriotic fervour declared: in view of the needs of the war we hereby turn over the means of production, the earth, the factories and the mills therein, into the possession of the people?”
Junius ends with the prophetic declaration:
“This madness will not stop, and this bloody nightmare of hell will not cease until the workers of Germany, of France, of Russia and of England will wake up out of their drunken sleep, will clasp each other’s hands in brotherhood and will drown the bestial chorus of war agitators and the hoarse cry of capitalist hyenas with the mighty cry of labour, ‘Workers of all countries, unite!’”

Rosa Luxemburg’s 'Junius pamphlet'

Cleaners at Calvary Public Hospital in Canberra have won a dispute with their contractor, Compass Medirest. Calvary, Australia’s 37th largest private company, made more than $1.3 billion last financial year. Cleaners there haven’t received a pay rise in nearly three years, and prior to the strike were paid $3 less than cleaners at the neighbouring Canberra Hospital. 
The workforce are mostly migrant women from Bhutan and Nepal, many of whom are international students working more than one job to cover the cost of their degrees. Their actions have shown that it’s possible for some of the lowest paid workers in Australia to fight for their rights and win, even in the context of an unprecedented economic and health crisis. 
The strike began on 2 November, after workers were offered an insulting pay rise of just five cents per hour. Cibele Webbie, a Brazilian woman who has worked as a cleaner at the hospital for three years, played an important role in initiating the strike. We met her at a rally outside the hospital of striking workers and their supporters organised by the United Workers Union. 
“Most of my friends [at Calvary] are from Bhutan. I don’t think they thought they could protest”, Cibele tells Red Flag. “Most of them pay $17,000 every six months for student visas”, she adds. “All these people have two jobs. They work 80 hours at Calvary Hospital, and then more hours at schools, anywhere they can.” 
According to Cibele, the company does this to these people because it knows that they’re not going to fight back. “They’re scared of losing their visas, they’re scared of losing their jobs. But they didn’t count that I was going to be there, and I’m not scared. I’m a permanent resident, but even if I wasn’t, I wasn’t going to be scared.”
Cleaners at Calvary haven’t received so much as a thank you for the crucial service they have provided during the pandemic. “We were all scared ...We were lucky because Canberra was really safe and nothing happened, but it could”, Cibele tells us. “I was working in the suspect area. You have no idea how crazy it was, and they never even said ‘Thank you, you did a good job’.” 
But it was the insulting pay offer that provided the impetus to strike. “We started [striking] the day they sent the offer to us”, Cibele says. “When they offered us five cents, I remember I said ‘Let’s stop. Let’s just stop! They need us!’ And I saw [my co-workers] were all listening to me, and they believed we could do this because I knew we could. I felt so good, because it’s amazing seeing people feeling that they can fight for themselves.”
Despite her leading role in the strike, Cibele stresses that it wouldn’t have been possible to win alone. “They’re all saying it’s all because of you, but it wasn’t just me—it was us! They just needed someone that had the courage to say things and not be afraid of looking into the director’s face and talking. The only thing I had more than them was courage.”
Cibele’s experience growing up in Brazil gave her the confidence to take a stand in Australia. “I’m a really political person because I have no choice”, she says. “I’m a Black woman, my mother was a single mother. My grandmother was one of the first women to get divorced in Brazil. I had to learn to fight for myself really early in life. My mother is really into politics in Brazil. She’s not a politician, but she has many projects that help Black women and women that work as farmers. So I was born into this sort of thing, fighting for rights and for a better life.”
When the far-right Jair Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil in 2018, protests erupted against him. Cibele joined in, demonstrating outside the Brazilian embassy in Canberra. “When I went to protest at the Brazilian embassy, I went by myself. Many people say ‘I don’t like politics’, but politics is everywhere in your life, you know. I have the chance to show the world what’s going on. So I cannot lose this opportunity. Because I’m nothing, I’m just a cleaner ... But it doesn’t matter, I’m doing my part. I need to express my opinion and show to whoever I can what’s going on in Brazil.”
During the Calvary strike, Medirest deliberately tried to divide the workers, offering the part-time workers an increase to entice them back to work. “I’m part time, it’s me and four other people”, Cibele says. “I was already negotiating with them when they offered [it to] me. It was an online meeting and someone in some big position said to me directly ‘But Cibele, we offered you [a] 19 percent increase, why are you still fighting?’ And I said ‘because I’m not going to leave my friends. It’s for all of us or none’.”
After two strikes in as many weeks, Medirest finally gave in. Despite this, workers nearly walked out again. Cibele explains, “We thought [the pay rise] would be from last Friday, and we were going to get back pay from this period, but they refused. They want to finish all the paperwork, which will take at least three months. They offered us $300 to wait until then, and now they don’t want to offer the $300 any more because we didn't accept that—we want more.”
Days later, the cleaners had won their back-pay demand plus significant increases to penalty rates—all to be paid out in time for Christmas. “I’m so happy! I didn’t think we’d get it all. My friends are so happy”, Cibele says after the offer. “Even the people from the kitchen are getting together to fight for an increase. I think it gave people hope to fight for their rights. Many people joined who weren’t part of the union before. Forever they’re going to see the world from a different point of view.”
Around the world, healthcare workers are risking their lives to get their next pay cheque. At Calvary, those who took on the job of keeping us safe during the pandemic were met with insult and humiliation from their bosses, unwilling to part with even a tiny fraction of their profits. But the workers’ successful action reveals just how important their labour is to the functioning of our hospitals. It’s also shown the importance of individuals like Cibele, and how being fearless can help others to take action and get a taste of their collective power. Their win is a win for all of us.

Kenya Matsebula

‘All of us or none!’: Calvary Hospital strike leader speaks

The real looters in the US today aren’t those smashing their way into Target and scoring themselves a pair of jeans, designer sneakers or some toys for their kids. American capitalism was built, from the ground up, on theft. Not petty theft by the poor, but systematic, everyday theft by the rich, whose immense wealth and power was built on the back of a history of slavery and exploitation. 
During the COVID-19 pandemic and associated economic crisis, the scale of the theft has soared. According to a <a href="https://americansfortaxfairness.org/issue/tale-two-crises-billionaires-gain-workers-feel-pandemic-pain/">report</a> by Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies, America’s billionaires have, collectively, grown US$434 billion wealthier since the pandemic took off in mid-March. While tens of millions of American workers were being thrown into unemployment, not knowing how they’ll make their next rent payment or buy groceries, hundreds of billions of dollars have flowed into the hands of some of the world’s richest individuals.
One of them, Amazon CEO and world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, has increased his wealth by US$30 billion. Those unlucky enough to be working in Bezos’ warehouses during the pandemic have had to strike for paid sick leave as well as basic personal protective equipment and social distancing measures. Already, more than 1,000 COVID-19 cases have been documented by activists in Amazon warehouses – a direct result of the “profit at all cost” business model that has generated Bezos’s billions.
Despite the disruption to global supply chains, Nike co-founder Phil Knight has also been a beneficiary of the crisis, gaining US$10 billion in the last two months. Knight has previously admitted that “the Nike product has become synonymous with slave wages, forced overtime, and arbitrary abuse”. Despite attempts to clean up the brand's image, Knight owes his US$37.7 billion net worth to the very practices he wants to distance himself from.
Heirs to the Walmart fortune, Alice, Jim and Rob Walton, have seen their fortune increase by US$3.6 billion each. When online sales surged, these notorious anti-union crusaders reaped the rewards. Not content with forcing workers to subsist on starvation wages, Walmart has moved to scrap the measly US$2 hazard pay increase it granted to some of its employees at the outset of the pandemic.
The retail empires of capitalists like Bezos, Knight and the Waltons are dependent on those compelled to work in dangerous and degrading conditions in their stores, warehouses, and factories. These parasites have amassed their obscene wealth by looting the surplus value created by the labour of the workers they exploit. 
“Capital”, Karl Marx wrote, “is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks”. When people accuse looters of hurting their own communities, we should remember that Marx’s metaphor can apply both to the individual worker and to the communities in which they live. Capital is a vampire that “lives” by draining the lifeblood of both.
No amount of looting and “violence” from the protesters on the streets in the US today can compare to this everyday crime of capitalism. The looters aren’t destroying their communities – they’re just taking back a small fraction of what has been stolen from them. One day soon, hopefully they’ll take back the rest.

The rich are the worst looters

South Australia became the first state to declare a climate emergency on 25 September, joining more than 1,000 jurisdictions around the world. It follows the ACT and 54 local councils across Australia, including most capital cities.
The push by groups like Extinction Rebellion for governments and institutions to declare a climate emergency has been positive. It provides long-overdue official recognition of the severity of the threat climate change poses to society and natural ecosystems, and the need for urgent action. But without action, these declarations risk becoming nothing more than an exercise in greenwashing. Usually, climate emergency declarations are non-binding, requiring no commitment to lower emissions, let alone achieve carbon neutrality.
For instance, South Australia’s non-binding declaration, which does call for the transformation of the economy to net zero emissions, was passed in the Legislative Council, where the governing Liberal Party lacked the majority to block it. But it has done nothing to stop drilling in the Great Australian Bight, end the destructive mining of uranium, scrap proposals for nuclear waste dumps or put an end to the environmentally and socially destructive arms manufacturing industry in the state.
The largely symbolic nature of these declarations explains why they can attract support from across the political spectrum. The first national parliament to declare a climate emergency, that of the UK, did so under the Conservative Party’s watch. Even the pope has gotten on board, using the phrase in his appeal ahead of the September United Nations Climate Action Summit.
Much of the work behind these declarations has involved lobbying behind closed doors. Unsurprisingly, success has been more easily achieved at the lower levels of government, particularly the council level. Councils have the least capacity to discipline the corporations most responsible for climate change and to ensure global warming stays below 1.5 degrees. Too often, the declarations have involved simply rebranding existing environmental policies. This was the case with the Melbourne City Council, which made use of the language of “crisis” and “emergency” to pat itself on the back for past actions aimed at reducing emissions and protecting biodiversity.
Failing to deliver real action is not the only problem with these declarations. Their wording is often ambiguous and can leave the door open to authoritarian responses to the chaos climate change will create. Climate Mobilization, a US-based group pushing for similar declarations, calls on governments to “initiate a WWII-scale mobilization to reverse global warming and the mass extinction of species in order to protect humanity and the natural world from climate catastrophe”.
War is a common, and understandable, reference point used by supporters to demonstrate that governments are perfectly capable of rapidly transforming the economy when they deem it to be in their interests. However, there is nothing to force governments to deploy such a response only to stop or reverse climate change. Instead, they could use the emergency as cover for authoritarian policies of border militarisation or crackdowns on civil liberties. After all, it’s easier to imagine governments repressing climate movements than tackling capitalism’s dependence on fossil fuels (witness the Queensland Labor government’s response to anti-Adani protests).
Stating the obvious and acknowledging the extent of the crisis through climate emergency declarations is a step forward. But it will not be enough to stop climate change. Meaningful action will require a massive fight. We need to keep organising.

Climate emergency declarations must lead to action

It seems that just about every far right racist with an internet connection is announcing Australian speaking tours these days. 
Riding on the coattails of Milo Yiannopoulos and Jordan Peterson, Canadian alt-right YouTube personalities Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux have announced an Australian tour next month. They’ll be joined by fellow right wing YouTuber Dave Rubin later in the year. Even former UKIP leader Nigel Farage has announced a September tour. 
Yiannopoulos and Peterson both spoke to sold-out events, and there’s every reason to expect big crowds for the next set of speakers. Between them, Southern and Molyneux have more than 1.5 million subscribers and hundreds of millions of views on YouTube. Former libertarians, they’ve radicalised over the past few years and found themselves among the pro-Trump alt-right alongside other self-proclaimed “identitarians” like white supremacist Richard Spencer. 
Like Yiannopoulos, they use their platform to normalise fascist ideas in the hope of radicalising others. In one video titled The Great Replacement, Southern argues that white Europeans are being reverse-colonised by Muslim migrants from the Middle East and North Africa. It’s received nearly half a million views. This is merely a rebranded version of the “white genocide” neo-Nazi conspiracy fantasy that claims white people will eventually become extinct due to unfettered migration and low white birth rates.
Southern and Molyneux are part of a growing far right movement that wants to push the window of acceptable political debate further to the right. When announcing the tour, Molyneux vowed, “We’re going to help move the needle and shift the conversation because people do feel uneasy about the direction of the countries they’re living in”. 
They claim their arguments will shock Australians. 
“Australia is a fascinating situation for both of us, because it really seems that you guys are at a crossroad”, Southern said. “Do you want to retain your culture? … Or, will the boats keep coming?” She’s a bit late to the game. In a country where the official policy of both major parties is to stop the boats, they’ll fit in just fine. 
Their profile is being boosted by the Australian media, including a fawning article by Australian columnist and Institute for Public Affairs director Janet Albrechtsen. 
These figures are finding an audience because some of their ideas are already firmly established in mainstream politics. It’s a wonder they took this long to realise they could be paid to spout their bigotry here.
Who are they?
Milo Yiannopoulos
A former Breitbart editor and one of the most prominent figures associated with the alt-right, Yiannopoulos styles himself as a troll. But a 2017 exposé revealed his links with more open white supremacists, including email exchanges with the administrator of the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer. 
In a video leaked to BuzzFeed, Yiannopoulos is filmed singing “America the Beautiful” while Richard Spencer stands in front of him giving a Nazi salute. Last September, his planned four-day “Free Speech Week” at the University of California, Berkeley, fell apart under the threat of protests. His December 2017 Australian tour sold out.
Jordan Peterson
A Canadian psychology professor who became a right wing internet sensation through his opposition to prohibition of discrimination based on “gender identity or expression” being added to the Canadian Human Rights Act in 2016. 
His YouTube lectures are now watched by 1.2 million subscribers and his book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos has become a bestseller. The book, like his YouTube channel, re-packages standard conservative arguments against “political correctness”, feminism and Marxism under the guise of rational logic and individual self-help. His speaking tour in March sold out in Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney.
Lauren Southern
Southern dropped out of a political science degree to become a military intelligence officer, then dropped that career path when she was offered a job with Canadian alt-right media organisation Rebel Media. 
Now an independent writer, she holds a spot in the White House press briefing room and has half a million YouTube subscribers. In 2017, she participated in the white nationalist group Génération Identitaire’s attempts to obstruct search-and-rescue boats helping migrants in the Mediterranean. 
Her latest work is a documentary on the supposed persecution of white South African farmers.
Stefan Molyneux
Self-proclaimed philosopher who began broadcasting his opinions through his Freedomain Radio website in 2005. His YouTube channel, where he attempts to intellectualise arguments in favour of eugenics, biological determinism and “scientific racism”, has nearly a million subscribers. 
His videos span topics such as “the death of white males”, “the rise and fall of Western culture” and “the ugly truth about cultural Marxism”. Molyneux is also a self-published author, whose latest book is titled The Art of the Argument: Western Civilization’s Last Stand. 
His opinions have received support from former KKK grand wizard David Duke several times over the past few years.
Dave Rubin
Formerly a member of progressive YouTube show The Young Turks, Rubin is now a success story for the right as liberal-turned-conservative. He has more than 700,000 subscribers to his live-streamed Youtube show The Rubin Report and more than a quarter of a million followers on Twitter; he makes $30,000 per month from supporters on Patreon. 
He has interviewed alt-right figures such as Yiannopoulos, Southern and Molyneux and the former head of the far right English Defence League, Tommy Robinson.

More far right dopes heading down under

Around 70 students walked out of their classes at the Bendigo campus of La Trobe University on 9 October to oppose plans to cut the jobs of about 70 academic and student services staff.
Chanting “No cuts, no fees, no corporate universities”, the students gathered outside the student union building to sign a banner with messages to vice-chancellor John Dewar. According to the university, its decision to cut jobs is motivated by the federal government’s proposal for the deregulation of university fees.
First year arts student Vari Farley told Red Flag: “What got me involved in this movement was the cuts to visual arts. We’re losing lectures, we’re losing administrative staff, and elective students are being merged with major students, which is unfair on both the lecturers and the students.”
Physiotherapy student Lisa Honeychurch said: “The thing I hate is that we don’t know what is going to happen. They’ve told me we’re going to lose staff in our department, and we can’t actually afford to. The people they’re talking about cutting already have a full teaching load.”
According to Natasha Joyce, protest organiser, “The university executive kept making these announcements while students were on holiday and students are revved up because they’re only just starting to work it out.
“Staff, on the other hand, have already been banging on about this for 12 months and they’re exhausted, so we’ve got to give them a boost.”
	----------
	Elliot Downes is the La Trobe Student Union education officer-elect

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