Across the country, tens of thousands took to the streets to protest on Invasion Day. Five thousand in Adelaide, 10,000 in Brisbane, 15,000 in Sydney and an unprecedented 20,000 protesters in Melbourne turned out to mark 26 January as the bloody anniversary of colonial invasion, expropriation and genocide.
In Melbourne, the official Australia Day parade was abolished. After years of mass protests, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews was finally compelled to <a>“shelve”</a> the decrepit event, which has been triumphantly commandeered by protesters ever since<a> they first broke through police lines in 2015</a>.
According to <a>City of Melbourne statistics</a>, attendance at Australia Day celebrations has plummeted in recent years—from 72,000 in 2018 to 12,000 in 2019 and a measly 2,000 in 2020—reflecting a dramatic shift in public attitudes.
Elsewhere around the country, parades, citizenship ceremonies and fireworks displays were either relocated, postponed or cancelled altogether to make way for massive rallies in support of Indigenous rights.
“Australia Day is dead, just like Queen Lizzie”, announced activist and Dunghutti, Gumbaynggirr, Bundjalung woman Lizzie Jarrett, speaking at the Sydney demonstration.
Key demands raised at this year’s rallies included the immediate initiation of treaty negotiations, an end to Aboriginal deaths in custody, the implementation of all recommendations of the Bring Them Home report, reparations for members of the stolen generations and raising the age of criminal responsibility.
“It is disgusting that we are the most incarcerated people on Earth”, said young Mununjali man and Socialist Alternative member Will Sim, speaking at the Brisbane rally. “It is disgusting that over half of youth in detention are Indigenous ... Youth detention centres are child torture chambers. This was shown at the infamous Don Dale detention centre, where children were subjected to spit hoods, the banned fold-up restraint and solitary confinement for over 24 hours. How the fuck is Don Dale still open?”
In Melbourne, activists painted their hands blood red—a symbolic accusation of murder against the Australian state. Crowds could be heard chanting: “Too many coppers, not enough justice!” and “No justice, no peace, no racist police!”
This year’s Invasion Day rallies took place during a moment of significant media coverage and social commentary around Indigenous politics. The prospect of a renewed, punitive state intervention into Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory fuelled cynicism towards Labor’s proposed referendum on an Indigenous Voice to parliament.
Speaking at the Melbourne rally, a veteran Black Power activist and stalwart of the 1972 Aboriginal Tent Embassy, Gary Foley, called out the Voice for being purely cosmetic:
“Like lipstick on a pig. It will not address the deep underlying issues that still pervade Australian society.”
In Brisbane, Will Sim called on protesters to see beyond the empty symbolism of the referendum and carry on the grassroots struggle against Indigenous oppression:
“I think we deserve so much more than a voice. I think we deserve liberation. And to get there, we’ll need to fight!”
Australia Day might be dying, but Indigenous oppression is alive and kicking. So is the struggle against it.

Emma Black

Tens of thousands protest on Invasion Day

The scale of the climate crisis has driven a new generation of radical young activists to demand “system change, not climate change”. This is a welcome leftward shift within environmental politics—away from a focus on individual consumption and towards confronting the capitalist system. However, many of those making this demand lack both a coherent analysis of how a system like capitalism might be changed and a strategic orientation toward those who have the power to change it.
You don’t have to be a revolutionary to recognise that addressing climate change entails the total transformation of our society. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—a body not known for hyperbole—argued in a 2018 report on global warming, avoiding ecological catastrophe means implementing “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society”.
Faced with this scientifically established existential threat to human society, our rulers appear complacent at best, and at worst—as is the case with the Australian government—they’re actively stoking the flames. Under the guise of taking action, global leaders occasionally interrupt their carbon-intensive pursuit of economic and imperialist interests to attend international conferences, like the upcoming COP26 summit in Glasgow, where they set long-term emissions reduction targets. Meanwhile, as Greta Thunberg argues, “The gap between what needs to be done and what we are actually doing is widening by the minute”.
In recent years, climate activists have attempted to close this gap by making more provocative appeals to politicians and the public. In 2019, Extinction Rebellion (XR) activists attracted international attention by engaging in mass disruptive actions in major cities around the world. While this initial burst of activity gained widespread public support, it was soon pushed back by state repression and mainstream media spin. Around the same time, millions of school-age activists—inspired by Thunberg—flooded city streets in protest, only to be condescended to by politicians, who told them, in effect, to “get over” their anxiety about the future.
Political progressives eager to appeal to public sentiment on the climate question have adopted Green New Deal (GND) style policies for state-led reform. In a recent <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/09/australia-greens-green-new-deal-gnd-elections">interview</a> in Jacobin magazine, Australian Greens leader Adam Bandt celebrated the GND’s growing appeal. “Whether you call it a GND or not, key elements of the proposal are gaining in popularity”, he said. “Even conservatives such as the UK’s prime minister, Boris Johnson, are saying that some form of Green Industrial Revolution will be crucial in the next twenty to thirty years.”
While some of the demands associated with more radical versions of the GND—such as raising corporate tax rates and increasing state investment into renewables—are supportable, the GND “brand” is fast becoming green cover for government stimulus policies designed to bolster the status quo.
US President Joe Biden provides an example. His election campaign <a href="https://joebiden.com/climate-plan/">website</a> described the GND as “a crucial framework for meeting the climate challenges we face”. And much has been made of the supposedly “green” aspects of his infrastructure plan. But it appears certain now that the majority of that will be junked in negotiations with Republicans, and what’s left will largely be the kind of infrastructure investment (roads, bridges and so on) that will encourage ongoing dependence on fossil fuels. Meanwhile, his administration is presiding over a <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/07/13/1015581092/biden-promised-to-end-new-drilling-on-federal-land-but-approvals-are-up">record pace of approvals</a> of new oil and gas wells on public land.
Talk by the likes of Biden and Boris Johnson of a Green New Deal or a Green Industrial Revolution simply can’t be taken seriously. Thunberg was right when, in a recent <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2TJMpiG5XQ">speech</a> at the Youth4Climate summit in Milan, she dismissed such rhetoric as just more “blah, blah, blah”—empty words designed to greenwash an ongoing commitment to the status quo of a fossil-fuelled capitalism.
It appears then, that the climate movement is stuck in a bind. Lobbying and the kind of peaceful street marches that the school strikers engage in are ignored. The direct, disruptive action of minorities of committed activists—as with XR—runs-up against the overwhelming repressive and ideological forces at the disposal of the state. And attempts to bring change through state reforms—to the extent that they go beyond merely “on paper” proposals by minor parties like the Greens—are appropriated into the arsenal of rhetoric deployed by those in power to greenwash the status quo.
Given all this, it seems the prospects for any genuine “system change” are dim. For Marxists, however, there’s a way out. The first step is recognising that at the core of the climate crisis—both in terms of what’s driving it, and what can overcome it—is class. In short: it’s the global capitalist ruling class that’s responsible for the climate crisis and for blocking attempts to address it adequately, and it’s the global working class that’s best placed to win the radical change we need.
Addressing the climate crisis means confronting some of the most powerful sectors of global capital. This includes the mere 100 companies that—according to the <a href="https://www.cdp.net/en/articles/media/new-report-shows-just-100-companies-are-source-of-over-70-of-emissions">2017 CDP Carbon Majors Report</a>—have been responsible for 71 percent of carbon emissions since 1988. The owners of the fossil fuel industry and other carbon-intensive sectors (e.g. steel, chemicals and cement) won’t simply stand by while revolutionary transformations render their business models obsolete.
To pose a real challenge to such powerful and entrenched economic interests—which are connected to the capitalist state by a thousand threads—we need to look outside the spheres of political action that liberal climate activists focus on. And this is where the working class comes in.
If workers withdraw our labour, we can bring workplaces and even entire industries to a halt. This kind of action, which cuts off the flow of profits that are the lifeblood of the capitalist system, is vastly more disruptive and hard for the capitalist state to deal with than traditional forms of protest. And not only do workers have the economic power to shut down environmentally destructive industries, but we also share a political interest in pushing back against the destructive “business as usual” of the capitalist system. No member of the working class benefits from the environmental damage wrought by the capitalist class in pursuit of profit. In fact, it’s poor and working-class people who always suffer the worst effects of ecological crises. 
If this is the case, however, then why are environmental and working-class politics so commonly pitted against each other?
To answer this question, we have to look at environmentalism's origins. The rise of the modern environment movement—beginning in the late 70s and early 80s—coincided with a period of historic defeat for the left. The subsequent evolution of environmental politics—away from confronting big business and “the system” and towards a focus on individual consumption—was symptomatic of this defeat.
From the late 1970s onwards, the ruling class unleashed a series of ruthless attacks on workers. Under the guidance of neoliberal economists, those in power gutted living standards and bulldozed working conditions. What followed were decades of wage stagnation, increasing debt, eroding job security and longer working hours.
At the same time, environmentalists began criticising the “hollow materialism” of “consumer society”. Middle-class recriminations about supposed “overconsumption” aligned well with state-driven austerity measures slashing public spending. Whereas working-class politics always aimed to improve overall living standards, many in the modern environment movement promoted individual asceticism to save the planet.
The middle-class elitism implicit in this political framework was made explicit by Rudolph Bahro of the German Greens in a 1984 interview published by New Left Review. “The working class here [in the West] is the richest lower class in the world”, he said, “I must say that the metropolitan working class is the worst exploiting class in history.”
For many activists of the older generation in the Greens and in movements like XR, sentiments like this no doubt retain some currency. Fortunately, however, the new generation of high school and university-aged environmental activists seems largely to have moved past the moralistic focus on the consumption patterns of the “plebs”—on proselytising about carbon footprints, keep-cups and so on. As the evidence for the capitalist roots of the environmental crisis have grown, the need for collective action to disrupt the system has gained new currency.
For this movement to go forward, we must fight for a perspective that sees environmental and working-class politics not as antagonistic, but as inextricably and powerfully linked. Only a mass social movement with a substantial base in the working class has the power to force major concessions from capital. And fortunately for us, one of the best historical examples of this kind of movement happened in our very own backyard.
At its high point in the early 1970s, the New South Wales Builders Labourers Federation (BLF) was easily the <a href="https://redflag.org.au/index.php/node/6510">most radical union in Australia</a>. The activity of the union, which was led by Communists like BLF secretary <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/7175">Jack Mundey</a>, went well beyond the “bread and butter” issues of wages and conditions. The union sought to act as a tribune of the people, campaigning around a broad range of political issues that impact on the working class—from racism, homophobia, and women’s rights, to public housing and the Vietnam War.
The BLF’s most famous campaign, however, was a series of actions known as the “green bans”. These were bans on union members doing work on any proposed development which was considered socially or environmentally irresponsible by local residents. Interestingly, the term “greenies” was coined by the press at the time to refer to supporters of the bans, only later broadening out to encompass environmentalists in general.
Not only did BLF members refuse to work on “green banned” sites, but they also actively defended them against developers by threatening additional strike action on other sites if work went ahead. By 1975, the BLF had managed to block more than $5 billion worth of development—saving parkland, heritage buildings and working-class neighbourhoods all over Sydney.
According to Meredith and Verity Burgmann, authors of <a href="https://www.newsouthbooks.com.au/books/green-bans-red-union/">Green Bans, Red Union: The saving of a city</a>, the green bans “contained both an environmental element and a social element: they expressed the union’s determination to save open space or valued buildings and to ensure that people in the community had some say in what affected their lives.”
For Jack Mundey, environmentalism was a working-class issue. “It’s not much good winning a 35-hour week,” he argued, “if we’re going to choke to death in planless and polluted cities where rents are too high, and where ordinary people can’t live”. The union didn’t engage in environmental struggles for purely altruistic reasons. As class-conscious workers, they saw the exploitation of the environment and the exploitation of people as two sides of the same coin.
For the BLF, workers’ living conditions—including access to open spaces as well as clean air and water —were as important as wages and working conditions. “Workers had to look further ahead than wages and conditions and ensure that the environment was protected”, Mundey insisted, because “developers would do irreparable damage if they were allowed to go unchecked”.
The green bans movement shows what can be achieved when environmentalism and militant working-class politics walk hand in hand. By arming environmental struggles with industrial power, the BLF helped force concessions from capital that would have otherwise been impossible. As the Burgmanns write, “environmentalists everywhere, and others who had felt powerless to halt destruction, realised that there did exist an organised strength in the trade unions whose help they could invoke to bring effective force to their cause”.
Expecting those at the top of our society to address climate change on our behalf is a death wish. Avoiding ecological catastrophe means pulling the brake on the entire capitalist system. The only force capable of doing this is the working class.
As such, environmental activists must treat climate change as a class issue. In the short term, this means raising class-conscious environmental demands. For example, alongside the necessary demand for a rapid shutdown of the fossil fuel industry, demanding that workers impacted by the closures be given full support to retrain where necessary and find secure jobs in alternative areas. Or foregrounding, when discussing other sustainability measures, things that will result in clear improvements in working-class living standards—such as massively expanded public transport, more green space in cities and so on.
At the same time, we need to fight to rebuild the radical traditions of socially and environmentally engaged unionism exemplified by Jack Mundey and the BLF. Only a class-conscious environment movement, equipped with the industrial strength to confront capital, can actually achieve the “system change” we need. Environmentalists and workers unite: we have a world to win!

Why the climate movement needs the working class

“Net zero by 2050” (or 2060 in China’s case) has become the new mainstream political mantra on climate change. However, this ambitious-sounding, yet still <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/net-zero-2050-means-disaster">far from adequate</a>, goal is premised on a series of new technologies that remain untested at best and completely hypothetical at worst.
The name dropping of an array of these high-tech “solutions” to the climate crisis was a feature of US President Joe Biden’s Earth Day summit in April. Among those in which Biden has promised to invest US$35 billion as part of his proposed <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/03/31/fact-sheet-the-american-jobs-plan/">American Jobs Plan</a> are carbon capture and storage, hydrogen, nuclear, floating offshore wind, biofuels and electric vehicles. 
While the disappearance of the outright climate denialism of the Trump era might seem cause for celebration, the new trend for spruiking the magical power of technology to solve the climate crisis is cause for serious concern. When you look beyond the headline-grabbing announcements of increased long-term ambition, the Earth Day summit amounted to little more than another case of government greenwashing of the business as usual of fossil-fuelled capitalism. 
Instead of detailing the changes to be made in the here and now to reduce emissions, Biden and other world leaders instead promoted faith in the capacity of science and technology to come to the rescue at an indeterminate point in the future. 
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison was among them. While the media highlighted the supposed gulf between a progressive, “green” Biden and the conservative, fossil-fuel-loving Morrison, they both promoted the same faith in the powers of technology. Like Biden, Morrison has vowed to invest tens of billions of dollars in developing carbon capture and storage technologies, “clean” hydrogen, “blue” carbon and “green” steel—among other colourful innovations. 
In May’s federal budget, the Coalition allocated more than half a billion dollars to developing the first two of these technologies—$263.7 million for carbon capture and storage (CCS) and $275.5 million for “clean” hydrogen. 
CCS mostly involves capturing C02 emissions at their source—in mines, power stations and so on—and pumping them deep underground (so the theory goes) to be permanently stored in appropriately porous and stable rock formations. But despite politicians and business leaders spruiking CCS as an easy fix for the climate crisis for decades, it has never been shown to work on anything near the scale required.
Australia already boasts the world’s largest, supposedly functional, CCS facility at Chevron’s Gorgon gas project in Western Australia. However, according to the <a href="https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/what-is-carbon-capture-and-storage/">Climate Council</a>, “the Gorgon CCS trial has been a big, expensive failure ... capturing less than half the emissions needed to make CCS viable”. In what is only the latest in a series of problems since it became operational in 2019, Michael Mazengarb <a href="https://reneweconomy.com.au/sand-clogs-up-australias-only-operating-carbon-capture-project/">reported</a> in Renew Economy earlier this year that pumping equipment required to clear water from the undersea formation into which the C02 is to be injected had become clogged with sand. 
However, while CCS may be useless for addressing climate change, it remains an extremely useful political tool for the government—providing it with green cover while it continues to funnel money to Coalition supporters in the coal and gas industries. And of course, it’s also useful for those companies on the receiving end of the government’s “green” largesse. 
Bernard Keane was right in <a href="https://www.crikey.com.au/2019/11/20/carbon-capture-storage-fossil-fuels/">his assessment of it as a scam</a> in Crikey. “Fossil fuel interests”, he wrote in 2019, “sense the opportunity to extract some taxpayer funding from a government worried it might have to pretend it believes in climate change”. With this year’s budget, they hit the jackpot.
But if CCS is a scam, what about “clean” hydrogen? In his <a href="https://www.pm.gov.au/media/remarks-leaders-summit-climate">speech</a> to the Earth Day summit, Morrison vowed to rival US innovation by investing billions in high-tech “hydrogen valleys”. “In the United States you have the Silicon Valley”, he said. “Here in Australia we are creating our own ‘Hydrogen Valleys’, where we will transform our transport industries, our mining and resource sectors, our manufacturing, our fuel and energy production.” 
Hydrogen is potentially a clean energy source, but only if it’s produced using renewable energy. And to be produced at the scale required to transform the economy in the way Morrison is implying would require a lot of electricity. 
In his recent <a href="https://www.quarterlyessay.com.au/essay/2021/03/getting-to-zero">contribution</a> to the Quarterly Essay, Australia’s former chief scientist, Alan Finkel, calculates that to produce the equivalent volume of hydrogen to what Australia currently exports in liquefied natural gas would require “approximately 2,200 terawatt-hours” of electricity. This, Finkel notes, “is about eight times Australia’s total electricity generation in 2019”.
If Morrison genuinely believes the “hydrogen boom” he envisages will be based on production of renewable energy on that kind of scale, the government would have provided increased funding for renewables in the budget. None was forthcoming.
The reality is that Morrison sees the talk of “hydrogen valleys” as a way of greenwashing the same old “gas-fired recovery” he was promoting last year. The government doesn’t envisage producing hydrogen with electricity from renewables, but rather from gas. The focus on CCS gives the game away. The “hydrogen valleys” of the future will be criss-crossed with pipelines and peppered with gas-fired power stations with (we’re supposed to believe) the magic of CCS ensuring that the whole operation can nevertheless be run green and guilt-free. 
“Clean” hydrogen then, just like CCS, turns out to be just another technological chimera designed to greenwash capitalism’s continuing addiction to fossil fuels.
What then of the other technological solutions being touted? Perhaps the most headline grabbing of them has been Biden’s proposed US$174 billion investment in the infrastructure for electric vehicles and their production. On the surface, again, this might sound like a good idea. Who wouldn’t want to live in a world in which we can all drive around in sleek, silent, powerful and “green” electric vehicles like Teslas?
Again, however, this is just another fake technological “fix” to the climate crisis that will help perpetuate the environmentally destructive status quo. A genuinely sustainable society won’t be built around the kind of car culture that exists today. What’s needed, among other things, is a massive investment in public transport and the transformation of cities to reduce the need for long commutes.
The promotion of electric vehicles as part of a technological “green” utopia is designed to forestall this kind of change, to protect as much as possible the car makers and other big business interests that profit from the status quo.
Elon Musk personifies this. In his authorised biography, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, Ashlee Vance revealed that Musk’s California “hyperloop” proposal was aimed at quashing plans for a high-speed rail link between Los Angeles and San Francisco. “Musk had dished out the Hyperloop proposal just to make the public and legislators rethink the high-speed train”, wrote Vance. “He didn’t intend to build the thing ... With any luck, the high-speed rail would be cancelled. Musk said as much to me during a series of emails and phone calls leading up to the announcement.”
For those who can afford it (a base-level Tesla will set you back an eye-watering $73,900 in Australia today), driving an electric car might make you feel like you’re doing something to help save the planet. This is an illusion. 
Even if your car is charged from electricity produced by renewable energy, you also have to consider all the emissions produced in the construction and maintenance of the roads and freeways on which you drive. Then there’s the material of the car itself, and the lithium needed for the battery. Already, the skyrocketing demand is <a href="https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lithium-batteries-environment-impact">causing major environmental problems</a> for major lithium producers like China, Chile and Bolivia. Tellingly, Musk has already devised the ultimate escape plan for himself—moving to Mars. This is not an option for most people.
The long list of fake technological fixes to the climate crisis is nothing more than a delaying tactic, designed to create the impression of change to ensure the profits bonanza of the fossil fuel economy can continue for as long as possible. Only a total transformation of society, in which technological production is rationally designed and democratically organised and controlled, can ensure that we are able, in Marx’s words, “to bequeath the Earth in an improved state to succeeding generations”.

Capitalism’s fake solutions to the climate crisis

Federal government welfare cuts will push an extra 330,000 Australians into poverty in the new year, bringing the total number of people impoverished since September to 1.16 million, according to one of Australia’s top economic policy analysts.
Ben Phillips, who works at the Australian National University’s Centre for Social Research and Methods, called the cuts “a bit stingy”. In a letter to the editor published in Melbourne’s Age, Vince from Glenroy painted a more vivid picture—likening the government’s phased withdrawal of the coronavirus supplement to a medieval torture rack, which pulled on the sufferer’s joints excruciatingly slowly, snapping each of his ligaments with a loud pop before dislocating his limbs altogether.
Earlier this month, Prime Minister Scott Morrison <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/nov/10/jobseeker-covid-payment-extended-till-march-but-will-be-cut-to-150-a-fortnight">announced</a> an additional $100 cut to the supplement. This comes on top of the $300 slashed in September. The tapered down $150 payment—which has been extended until March 2021—reduces the income of a JobSeeker recipient to an unlivable $715 a fortnight.
The Coalition’s impatience to abandon Australia’s poorest in the middle of a crisis is repulsive. According to Phillips, the January reduction will dramatically elevate the poverty rate “well above” pre-pandemic levels. In March, the level of poverty will likely jump again.
Earlier modelling by the Australia Institute, a think tank, estimated that the coronavirus supplement lifted <a href="https://www.tai.org.auhttps://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/P949%20Poverty%20in%20the%20age%20of%20coronavirus%20%5BWEB%5D.pdf">425,000 people</a> out of poverty when it was rolled out earlier in the year. A series of wage subsidies and welfare supplements kept approximately <a href="https://csrm.cass.anu.edu.auhttps://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/docs/2020/8/Impact_of_Covid19_JobKeeper_and_Jobeeker_measures_on_Poverty_and_Financial_Stress_FINAL.pdf">2.2 million people afloat</a> throughout the first few months of the crisis. The number of people living in poverty dropped by one-third. 
While the programs may have appeared altruistic, the aim was not to reduce inequality, but to stabilise the economy for business. Now that the government is confident that it has achieved that goal, it is happy to throw people back into poverty. 
Yet the government intervention annuls decades of excuses for keeping unemployment payments at poverty levels. It shows that the money can be found—it’s just a question of priorities. 
It’s an absolute disgrace that sections of the working class will again be consigned to poverty and humiliation, while the wealth we produce lines the pockets of politicians and business executives. Rather than capitulating to the coalition’s cruel and unusual punishment, we must fight for permanent increases in welfare, a living wage for all, paid for by higher wealth taxes. We need a society that puts people before profit.

Morrison throws 330,000 more into poverty

Before mobile phones and social media became ubiquitous, it was virtually impossible for ordinary citizens to document police brutality, let alone share it with the rest of the world. Yet, more than 50 years ago, a small group of young Black activists from the San Francisco Bay Area in the US state of California succeeded in doing just that. 
Only a few years after its formation in 1966, the Black Panther Party was distributing more than 250,000 copies of its newspaper every week. Aside from its fiery rhetoric, what made the Panther’s paper distinctive was its bold imagery. Unable to capture state violence on camera easily, party members had to be creative. The iconic woodblock-style images of Panther artist Emory Douglas became a key means to convey the Black experience of police repression.
The Black Panther Party was formed in the wake of the 1965 rebellion in the Los Angeles suburb of Watts. An altercation between police and a pregnant Black woman triggered an unprecedented outburst of pent-up anger among the city’s Black residents in August of that year, many of whom had “escaped” the Jim Crow south only to encounter a similarly racist system in the north. 
As they watched events unfold, future Black Panther Party leaders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale observed community leaders in Watts “patrolling” police—witnessing their encounters and recording their badge numbers in order to prevent violence. Inspired by this initiative, the young activists decided to coordinate their own “Cop Watch”, but with one crucial difference—the Panthers’ patrols were packing heat. 
Soon after joining the party in 1967, Douglas began accompanying Newton and Seale on these neighbourhood patrols. Carrying a loaded shotgun in one hand and the US Bill of Rights in the other, the Panthers weren’t out merely to monitor the cops. By so flagrantly exercising their constitutional right to self-defence, the Panthers hoped to instil in Black people a sense of empowerment and inspire them to rise up.
Emory’s earliest party art celebrates this provocative militancy. It depicts ordinary people (unskilled workers, housewives, even children) proudly taking up arms against “pigs”—a popular epithet for police, politicians and landlords. 
<div class="full_width_image article_inline_image"><img alt="" src="https://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/inline-images/douglas-big.jpg" />​</div>
Douglas’ signature woodcut style was a gesture to aesthetics of national liberation struggles in Asia and Africa, with which the Panthers identified and from which they drew inspiration. Accompanying the images are revolutionary slogans, violent death threats and even declarations of civil war. 
By the spring of 1971, severe state repression had put an end to the party’s militant phase. Members were forced to give up armed patrols in favour of community outreach. Throughout this period, the combative urgency of Emory’s earlier images gave way to celebrations of community solidarity. 
Over time, the party splintered, some members going underground, others being coopted into mainstream politics. While its existence was short lived, the party’s revolutionary legacy lives on in Douglas’ powerful imagery. “If we wait for someone else to tell our story”, said Douglas of his art, “they’re going to paint a picture of us that doesn’t reflect our values, doesn’t reflect our agenda. So we have to lead the charge”. Douglas recognised that art, like everything else, becomes a battleground in times of intensified struggle.

Emory Douglas: artist of the Black revolt

In March, COVID-19 breached the considerable defences of the USS Theodore Roosevelt. The colossal nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, which has played a central role in defending the US’s imperialist interests over the past three decades, proved no match for the virus, which infected more than 1,000 crew members in a matter of days.
Unlike other supposed threats to national security, COVID-19 cannot be eliminated by air strikes. Pandemics have little regard for national borders or military firepower. In the face of this threat, some world leaders have made a show of internationalist cooperation. In the lead-up to a virtual summit on 4 May hosted by the European Union, the European Council issued a statement calling for the development and production of a vaccine “by the world, for the whole world”.
“None of us is immune to the pandemic and none of us can beat the virus alone”, it read. “We will need to protect each other to protect ourselves.”
The $12.5 billion raised at the summit by nations such as Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and Spain, will be used to accelerate the development and equitable distribution of a COVID-19 vaccine. Yet the conspicuous absence of pledges from the US and China exposed the speciousness of this solidarity.
Both US secretary of state Mike Pompeo and Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian have spent the past month undermining the possibility of international cooperation.
The Trump administration has accused the Chinese government of launching cyberattacks in order to pilfer information from US vaccine researchers. “China has long engaged in the theft of biomedical research, and COVID-19 research is the field’s holy grail right now”, said John Demers, US assistant attorney general for national security. “While its commercial value is of importance, the geopolitical significance of being the first to develop a treatment or vaccine means the Chinese will try to use every tool – both cyber intrusions and insiders – to get it.”
For its part, China has been using its economic power to retaliate against countries, including Australia, that have joined calls for an inquiry into the origins of the virus and more openness from the Chinese regime about its nature.
The COVID-19 arms race initiated by the US and China highlights that behind the niceties of global summits attended by middling powers, the reality is that the hunt for a COVID-19 vaccine is a war of all against all.
As early as March, German officials intervened in order to prevent the Trump administration from luring local biotech company CureVac AG into relocating to the US. More recently, a furious French president Emmanuel Macron summoned the CEO of French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi, Paul Hudson, to the Élysée Palace after the latter declared that the US government’s funding contributions granted it preferential access to any vaccine. Meanwhile, in a decidedly nationalist pledge of allegiance, AstraZeneca’s CEO, Pascal Soriot, has promised to provide any potential vaccine to Britain ahead of other nations.
More than 100 different vaccines are currently in development, with at least 10 being tested on humans. Five of these are being produced in China, where state-run media report preference will be given to Chinese nationals. British and American funding for local drug makers has come with similar stipulations. In India – one of the world’s largest vaccine producers – exports are likely to be curbed so that Indians can access the drugs first.
In response to international pressure, countries with large pharmaceutical sectors, such as the US, Switzerland, Britain and Japan, provisionally agreed to sign the World Health Assembly’s (WHA’s) voluntary patent pool resolution (which involves companies voluntarily giving up their monopoly rights over particular drugs). But this was on the condition that references to the Doha Declaration be removed.
The 2001 Doha Declaration was born out of the AIDS crisis of the 1990s. Back then, AIDS medication was prohibitively expensive. When, in the mid-1990s, a newly democratised and disease-riddled South Africa proposed to produce generic HIV medicines in order to combat the virus, the US threatened it with trade sanctions.
In response and after years of campaigning, activists succeeded in amending the relevant World Trade Organization agreement to stipulate that governments do not have to honour intellectual property protections in the event of a public health emergency, known as the Doha Declaration
 Of course, imperialist nations have ignored the declaration, resulting in tens of millions of needless deaths in the poorest parts of the world. In the end, both the US and Britain boycotted the WHA’s resolution, on the basis that a patent pool “sends the wrong message to innovators who will be essential to the solutions the whole world needs”.
Then as now, profits have always trumped human lives for big pharma. In April, it was revealed that at least three SARS vaccines that might have prevented COVID-19 had had their funding cut as they were about to go to clinical trials. As it stands, vaccines are far more expensive to develop than other drugs, and many of the potential customers are the global poor, making pharmaceutical companies reluctant to invest.
Unlike medicines that treat chronic conditions, vaccines cannot be repeatedly sold to a base of long-term customers, making them relatively unattractive investment prospects. “There is just not enough profit margin in it for pharma companies”, according to Nobel laureate and immunologist professor Peter Doherty. “They live by profits and the rules of capitalism. And capitalism has no interest in human beings other than as consumers.”
One of the most effective Ebola vaccines – developed in Canada, produced by a US company and manufactured in Germany – for some represents a counter-example. “That’s how science is done, and we really ought to follow that paradigm”, said doctor Seth Berkley, chief executive of the Gavi Alliance, which is a philanthropic vaccine fund started by Bill Gates. “Covid-19 ... is a global challenge that requires a global response.”
But the reality is that the first nation to manufacture a COVID-19 vaccine at scale will not only be able to revive its productive capacities months ahead of the others but will also single out strategic allies for express shipments – thereby gaining a competitive economic advantage at the same time as it shores up its own imperialist interests.
The hope for genuine international cooperation in this context is painfully naive. At the end of the day, global capitalism’s priorities are fundamentally incompatible with saving lives. As Berkley more astutely observes, “We have enough land-based nuclear missiles to destroy the world. And in case that does not work, we keep air-based missiles and submarines. And that’s to prevent something much less likely than the evolutionary certainty that is a pandemic virus”.
The crew of the Theodore Roosevelt were made painfully aware of this when the Trump administration refused to allow them to disembark earlier this year. Beseeching his superiors to allow the sailors into Guam, the carrier’s commander insisted, “We are not at war. Sailors do not need to die”.
But in the face of the pandemic, US imperialism is very much at war. After his subsequent sacking, the crew gave its captain a tumultuous send-off that bordered on mutiny. His action had cut across a policy of military aggression in which US soldiers’ lives are of no more consequence, in the final analysis, than those of the Iranians, Venezuelans, Yemenis, Afghans, Iraqis or Somalis they are sent to kill.

Vaccine imperialism

After rattling off a seemingly endless list of skills acquired throughout decades of piecemeal employment, Ricky proudly proclaims to his prospective employer, “I’ve never been on the dole. I’d rather starve first”. Opening with a wry reference to I, Daniel Blake – which bagged the long-revered filmmaker his second Palme d’Or in 2016 – Ken Loach’s latest film, Sorry We Missed You, is another scathing critique of the UK establishment’s Thatcherism. 
Like Daniel Blake, the unemployed ex-carpenter who was the protagonist of Loach’s previous film, former builder Ricky is a working-class fish out of water. Having lost his bearings in an increasingly de-industrialised society, he finds himself in a barren neoliberal landscape, where all regional ties and class-based institutions have been eroded. While Daniel – older, widowed and unable to work – falls victim to the Kafkaesque brutality of the UK social welfare system, Ricky and his partner Abbie – younger, healthier and with a family to feed – confront a different beast: the gig economy and the tyranny of the zero-hour contract. 
Two sides of the same coin, I, Daniel Blake and Sorry We Missed You capture the impossible dilemma facing poor and working-class people in the UK today: either starve in food banks, attempting to navigate the humiliations of a hostile social welfare system, or accept work at any cost, no matter how inhumane the conditions might be. What’s truly terrifying is that millions of people in the UK are compelled to do both. In fact, Paul Laverty – Loach’s long-term collaborator and screenwriter – first concocted the idea for a film dealing with the gig economy when the pair started visiting food banks as part of their research for I, Daniel Blake: “What struck us was the number of people there who were working. The working poor. People on zero hours contracts or other precarious contracts. Three in four children in poverty have a working parent”.
After losing their main source of income and their mortgage in the midst of the housing crisis, Ricky and Abbie are thrust into a relentless routine of 14-hour days, six days a week. Ricky, a heavily surveilled delivery driver for an Amazon-like corporation, is forced to urinate in a plastic bottle in order to meet his quota, while Abbie, an in-home aged caregiver, must reapply mentholated ointment under her nose as she hastens from house to house, lest one of her routinely neglected clients has soiled themselves. As a result of their ruthless schedule, the fabric of their family begins to fray. Alcoholism and exhaustion give way to domestic violence. In the end, both protagonists break down as the brutality of their existence, combined with the complete absence of social safety nets, eventuates in their psychological, physical and financial ruin. 
A master of social realism, Loach avoids both spurious romanticism and propagandistic didacticism. His films present the indissoluble connection between the subjective inner turmoil of the individual and the objective political struggles of the community. Ricky and Abbie represent the lives of millions of UK workers post-GFC. Having lost everything, their only concession is the newfound “freedom” to be their own boss. This supposed win-win scenario for both worker and employer is exposed as the same old one-sided exploitative relationship. The only difference is that employers gain maximum flexibility without having to provide a minimum wage, unemployment insurance, overtime, family and medical leave, disability insurance, collective bargaining rights or any compensation for injuries or expenses accrued during a day’s work.
While there is little to be hopeful about in the film itself, Loach’s recent mainstream success has been attributed to a political turning of the tide. A long-term critic of New Labour’s “caring capitalism”, Loach became a fierce advocate of Jeremy Corbyn in 2015, directing a documentary in support of his leadership campaign. The freak election of Corbyn and sudden resurgence of the Labour left no doubt kindled Loach’s hope that the appalling conditions facing the working poor in the UK might begin to be addressed. This hope was not entirely unfounded, Corbyn’s 2019 Labour Party manifesto calling for a ban on zero-hour contracts. Speaking in October, at the Cannes premiere of his latest film, Loach said “The only bright spark on the horizon in the last few years in Britain is that we’ve had a left leadership in the Labour party, Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell ... and they promise to cut back the power of capital”.
For those watching Sorry We Missed You in Australia in 2020, that “bright spark” has been extinguished. The politically charged play on words in the film’s title – no doubt originally intended as a reference to the decades of neglect suffered by working-class people under successive Tory and New Labour governments – now carries with it the added pang of an apology for Corbyn’s complete failure to turn things around. 
Notwithstanding Loach’s admiration for the left wing leader, his latest film is a brilliant analysis of the factors that ultimately led to Corbyn’s defeat. For decades, the Labour Party took much of the north, the Midlands and Wales as its birthright. However, as mines in these constituencies gave way to warehouses, steel mills to call centres and manufacturers to care work, with them went the culture of Labourism: the Bolshie shop stewards, the self-organised communities and the local papers. Bullying bosses, zero-hour contracts and poverty pay became the new norm. Meanwhile, New Labour’s neoliberal think-tankers found safe seats, cushy careers and holiday homes for themselves. Set amidst the ruins of the class-based institutions that once provided the Labour Party with an organic base, Sorry We Missed You depicts the horrific consequences of neoliberal capitalism’s success: the total decimation of working-class consciousness.
The only way to re-establish working-class consciousness in the UK is to rebuild these institutions from the ground up. That means inciting the self-employed poor to exercise their working-class power. If I have one criticism of Loach’s film, it’s that he offers no inkling of this as a future possibility. While there is ample opportunity in the film to rekindle the embers of class struggle, the only reference to workers’ solidarity is a throwback to the 1984 miners’ strike, in which one of Abbie’s aged clients played a part. In what is meant to be a particularly poignant scene, she confronts Abbie with the question, “Whatever happened to the eight-hour day?”
Yet, at the same time the film was being made, thousands of Amazon workers across the US, the UK and Europe, led by Somali immigrants in the Minneapolis suburb of Shakopee, were defying trade union bureaucrats in order to walk off the job, demanding an end to zero-hour contracts, impossible quotas and invasive surveillance technologies. 2019 hosted a swathe of mass uprisings around the world, including the longest general strike in modern French history, with workers continuing to fight back against neoliberal attacks on state pensions. 
If Corbyn’s defeat has taught us anything, it’s that what we need right now is revolutionary, rather than parliamentary, socialism. The passivity, isolation and despair represented in Loach’s recent films are both products of, and serve to reproduce, a feeling of collective powerlessness and dependence on enlightened politicians rather than working-class self-organisation. In the absence of that belief, films intended to strengthen the case for socialism can turn into implicit arguments for surrender. But socialist viewers of Loach’s latest film should dispense with false hopes in parliamentary reform and channel their outrage into mass working-class mobilisation against the inevitable attacks that are yet to come.

Ken Loach, Sorry We Missed You, and the death of Corbynism

In the wake of the Russian revolution, while Bolshevik masses were preoccupied with putting down the White Army and extricating themselves from the ongoing imperialist war, the provincial outpost of Vitebsk (in modern-day Belarus) was home to a different battle. 
In the classrooms of its short-lived art school, a small group of resident professors and students constructed competing visions of a utopia yet to come. Colour-saturated compositions of airborne goats and cows collided with a geometric storm of sharp-edged red wedges and solid blocks of black as Fauvist folk dreamer Marc (Moishe) Chagall and avant-garde eccentric Kazimir Malevich vied for the imaginations of a new generation of young artists.
Born to Jewish Hassidic labourers in a traditional town of the Pale, Marc Chagall was empowered by the new revolutionary era, which placed him on the same legal footing as other Russian citizens. In 1918, he was appointed commissar of art in Vitebsk. Tasked with inaugurating a new epoch of proletarian art, Chagall opened the tuition-free People’s Art College.
His lubok-style paintings were not only ethnically Jewish, but distinctively “folk”, combining whiffs of the European avant-garde with dreamy naturalist imagery that appealed to provincial workers and peasants. In his new role as the artistic leader of the city of Vitebsk, Chagall was consumed “with the prodigal spectacle of a dynamic force which pervades the individual from top to bottom, surpassing your imagination”.
On the eve of the first anniversary of the revolution, Vitebsk was painted in bright colours and festooned with 450 posters and flags. “Throughout the town, my multi-coloured animals swung back and forth, swollen with revolution!”, Chagall wrote enthusiastically in his autobiography. 
Having made “art descend to the streets”, Chagall’s triumph was followed by tribulations with his fellow teachers. The fly in the ointment was self-proclaimed supremacist Kazimir Malevich. Malevich, a deeply theoretical artistic maverick, combined theosophy and semiotics to create his endpunkt for painting. To Malevich, Chagall’s naturalism and reverie-infused folk paintings seemed neither revolutionary nor advanced.
A political chasm soon emerged between Chagall’s dreamlike, floating figures and Malevich’s red and black squares – and their students’ reactions spilled out of the school and onto the streets. Kids plastered the sides of Vitebsk’s buildings and streetcars with geometric forms and wore black squares sewn on their jackets. In response to Chagall’s “regressive” art, Malevich and his followers established a collective called UNOVIS, or “Affirmers of the New Art”. They designed posters, stage sets and practical materials for the revolution such as a speaker’s rostrum in the form of a diagonal elevator, topped by a billboard shouting “PROLETARIANS”.
On one level, the quarrel between Chagall and Malevich was just another parochial and internecine joust among academics. On another level, the burning question of how to spark people’s imagination of an emancipatory future continued to consume artists, who found themselves increasingly at odds with the Soviet government’s expectations. When Chagall emigrated to France in 1923, he left behind the beginnings of a war against the avant-garde: a counter-revolutionary levelling of society. Malevich soon lost his teaching positions; his works and manuscripts were confiscated, and he was banned from making art.
The vibrant clashes and butting of heads that took place between 1918 and 1922 should be remembered, not as a battle of egos, but as an unprecedented unleashing of artistic creativity that obliterated the elitism of the academy, encouraging workers to engage in radical experimentation both inside the classroom and out on the streets. Despite being short lived, this unbridling of revolutionary artistic energy has not been forgotten and will continue to inspire new generations to visualise a utopia still yet to come.

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