The Minns Labor government plans to slash workers’ compensation in New South Wales. Unions, as well as legal and mental health groups, have vehemently opposed the changes, which will make it more difficult to claim workers’ compensation for psychological injuries. This will hit essential front-line workers like nurses, teachers, paramedics, firefighters, aged care and transport workers particularly hard. 
NSW Treasurer Daniel Mookhey defended the proposals as essential cost-cutting measures intended to bring down employer insurance premiums. They will do this not by making workplaces safer, but by denying workers the support they need. Mookhey has frozen cash injections to icare, the state workers’ compensation insurer, and issued an ultimatum: either these attacks are passed through the Legislative Assembly, or the government won’t fund its own insurer properly.
Mookhey wants to turn back the clock and de-legitimise workers’ mental health issues, citing the doubling of psychological injury claims in the past six years. 
The most obviously cruel change is to increase the threshold for minimum Whole Person Impairment (the scale used to measure the degree of impairment resulting from workplace illness or injury) to 31 percent for psychological injury claims beyond 130 weeks or for permanent impairment. But people who meet this threshold are “essentially catatonic” according to NSW Unions leader Mark Morey. According to psychiatrist Anthony Dinnen, who assesses workplace psychological injuries, imposing this threshold “would exclude 99 percent of patients from benefits”. 
“The workers compensation system is the only reason I am still alive”, explained a NSW firefighter in a Unions NSW report, <a href="https://www.unionsnsw.org.au/publication/cast-adrift-cuts-to-workers-compensation/">Cast Adrift</a>. “Without being able to access essential mental health services and receive diagnosis, treatment, education and support to begin my recovery, I would have certainly taken my own life. My whole person impairment is 24 percent which is a very significant injury. If the threshold was increased to 30 percent and that affected me by taking away my entitlements again, I would be destitute and would have no hope of survival or recovery.” 
The report shows how prevalent psychological hazards are in NSW workplaces. Of 10,000 workers surveyed, 60 percent had been exposed to trauma, 44 percent had experienced bullying and 22 percent had faced harassment, including sexual harassment. 
The government wants to narrow the definition of compensable psychological injuries. If an injury is sustained due to “reasonable management action”, workers will not be eligible for compensation. This wording provides an easy out for negligent and bullying bosses to argue their conduct was “reasonable”. 
Work pressure and burnout are major causes of the growing rates of psychological injury to workers in NSW, yet these will no longer be eligible for compensation. Workers who face bullying, sexual harassment or racial harassment won’t be eligible for compensation until they have had a court, commission or tribunal ruling in their favour. They will also have to pay their own legal fees. 
This suite of changes constitutes a major attack on the rights and conditions of all workers. Unsafe work conditions will be allowed to flourish if it becomes easier to reject workers’ compensation claims. 
The government and business have argued that workers make frivolous claims that clog up the system. In reality, claiming workers’ comp is already a difficult bureaucratic process in which workers are treated with suspicion and hostility by an adversarial system. Dealing with that system can itself be traumatic. The NSW State Insurance Regulatory Authority had to admit this year that it contributed to the psychological injuries of a group of already injured workers by mishandling their cases. 
It is rich for the government to use the failures of the state insurer icare as an excuse to attack workers. Icare has been plagued by scandal, including chronic underpayment of workers, blatant corruption, intimidation of a whistleblower and outrageous executive bonuses. Between 2012 and 2019, icare underpaid at least 53,000 workers and was forced to pay back $38 million. During that time, the former chief executive of icare, John Nagle, awarded his wife a contract without tender, paying her $800,000 over three years. Icare leaders were accused of the homophobic bullying and harassment of a senior whistleblower, Chris McCann, causing him to be hospitalised, diagnosed with PTSD. 
Despite these scandals, icare still awarded its executives with some of the highest salaries and bonuses in the public service, bringing CEO Richard Harding’s salary to over $1 million. 
The NSW government has done nothing to rein in icare’s mismanagement or its executive salaries. Instead, it is attacking the victims of unsafe workplaces. 
Unions NSW has <a href="https://psa.asn.au/rally-against-changes-to-our-workers-compensation-protections/">called protests</a> across Sydney to respond to Labor’s attacks. It’s important that unionists and supporters stand against the gutting of workers’ comp. We are facing an onslaught of overwork and underpay, and now we’re being denied compensation for the damage done to us. Ultimately, we need to build a movement against the anti-worker Labor government and the business interests it serves.

Emma Norton

NSW Labor government attacks workers’ compensation

NSW police tried and failed to ban a rally and vigil commemorating a year of the genocide in Gaza and protesting the new war in Lebanon. After being dragged through the NSW Supreme Court on spurious legal grounds, organisers in the Palestine Action Group have confirmed that both events will go ahead as planned after police withdrew their application to the court. They include a mass rally in Hyde Park on Sunday 6 October and a candlelight vigil on 7 October.
It’s a victory for anti-war activists that police were not able to ban the protests. But the episode shows the lengths the government and police are prepared to go to in order to clamp down on solidarity with Palestine. 
In court, they threw every possible argument at the Palestine Action Group. A protest at Sydney’s Town Hall would be hazardous, police said, because of “the recent addition of over a dozen planter boxes”. As if dangerous flower beds weren’t enough, police also cited the long weekend and NRL grand final as reasons to ban the events. Apparently, democracy must be put on hold whenever people play rugby league half an hour’s drive from the city. 
Police also argued that the Sunday rally should be stopped because it would be too large. NSW Police Commissioner Karen Webb told the media that the size of recent rallies had triggered safety concerns. In court, Josh Lees from the Palestine Action Group was cross examined over how big he expected the rally to be given the situation. The “situation” is of course that Israel is continuing its year-long genocide while invading Lebanon. There will be huge crowds out on Sunday in response, but the police seem to believe that we only have the right to protest so long as there aren’t too many of us. 
Police attempts to ban the protests were fuelled by a week of anti-Lebanese hysteria. The NSW government and media have waged a dog whistle campaign about the threats posed by Lebanese people at the protests, particularly after a few Hezbollah flags and portraits of assassinated leader Nasrallah were reported. Regardless of what you think of Hezbollah, it is an outrageous attack on free speech that the Australian government has deemed a major Lebanese political party a terrorist organisation and outlawed all its symbols and iconography. This would be like the Lebanese government banning symbols of the Australian Labor Party. Which organisations (and states) are deemed “terrorist” has little to do with the actions they carry out and everything to do with whether they are part of the US-led imperialist alliance. 
Police used these arguments to stoke fear about upcoming protests. Assistant Police Commissioner Peter McKenna told the court: “Since the uptake of the Lebanese community coming into the protest with the Palestinian Action Group, we felt a different undertone within the protest group, it is described to me by the police on the ground as a more aggressive feeling at the moment and we’re very concerned by it”. Police referenced “heightened emotions” in the community that made the protests a “tinderbox”, and cited fears that terrorism supporters will “infiltrate” the rallies. Lebanese people are painted as dangerous extremists, irrationally upset by some “overseas issue”, as McKenna referred to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon with Australian government complicity. 
During proceedings, police concocted yet another way to accuse Palestine protesters of antisemitism. They argued that a synagogue in Sydney, which was not on the planned march route, could be attacked by protesters. We’ve had 51 weeks of pro-Palestine protests in the city without incident, attended by Jewish anti-Zionists and in proximity to the synagogue. The media also ran with the narrative that holding a vigil on 7 October would be “provocative”, and repeatedly asked activists whether they would be mourning the lives of Israelis killed one year ago. As Lees pointed out, no one is asking pro-Israel groups whether their vigils will be commemorating the 42,000 Palestinians murdered by Israel. When Amal Naser, another Palestine Action Group activist, received the same line of questioning on Network Ten’s The Project, she pointed out that Zionist groups have been trying to ban our protests all year, they are not just concerned about the date. “We have every right to gather on October 7 and to mourn the loss of Gazan lives”, she said. 
But activists remained strong in the face of the media barrage. “What happened today was that the police and government, under political pressure, tried to ban our protest, or tried to make it very hard for us to protest”, said Lees outside the Supreme Court on Thursday afternoon. “We have resisted these attempts all along. We always said these events would go ahead, regardless of the court outcome.” 
As the Palestine Action Group said in its post announcing that the protest would go ahead: “They tried to silence us, make sure you get there this weekend to make our voices heard! Stop Arming Israel! Stop the Genocide in Gaza! Hands of Lebanon!”

NSW police fail to ban pro-Palestine protests

Western governments are struggling to imbue Israel with any moral legitimacy. They’re on the back foot ideologically, and they know it. Beyond empty platitudes, slander and hysterical attacks, they cannot muster a convincing moral argument for their ongoing support for Israel. 
Western governments have a long tradition of masking their imperialist adventures in fine moral sentiments to help bring their populations along for the ride. The Afghanistan war was sold as a campaign to liberate women and girls. The Iraq war was promoted, though less successfully, as a war to spread democracy. Unconvincing though they often are, at least some effort is usually made to appeal to humanitarian and liberal principles when the West is carrying out or supporting mass killing. 
Israel and its advocates used to manufacture plenty of moral justifications for the country’s existence. We were told Israel was the only democracy in the Middle East, a beacon of enlightened values in a sea of Islamist reaction. We were told that Israel was a haven for Jews to escape the horrors of antisemitism. And, more recently, we were told that Israel upholds the rights of LGBTI people and women, unlike the Arabs. 
The credibility of these claims is today in tatters. 
The Gaza war has been a major turning point, but the discrediting of Israel began long before that. Media coverage of Israel’s 2008 assault on Gaza, known as Operation Cast Lead, damaged Israel’s reputation among millions of people. It drew criticism from a range of human rights organisations, a UN report describing the war as “collective punishment” of the Palestinians that amounted to “war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity”.
Where it was once seen as scandalous or antisemitic to describe Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank as apartheid, most human rights organisations had conceded the legitimacy of this description well before the current war. This includes the UN, Yesh Din, B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Now, Israel is widely accepted to be committing genocide, an arrest warrant has been recommended for its highest ranking politicians, and there continues to be barely a peep of concern from its allies. 
All this has weakened Israel’s claim to be a democracy upholding liberal values, a claim that was a fraud from the start. When Israel took control of the whole of Palestine in 1967, its leaders deliberately excluded Palestinians from citizenship. This meant millions of people were denied basic rights based on their ethnicity. Israel also maintains illegal occupations of Palestinian land, where it controls every aspect of life for the Palestinians, contrary to international law. 
Israel can hardly be described as a haven for Jews either. Jews living in America, France, Canada and Australia are a lot safer than those in Israel, a country that throughout most of its existence has been in a nearly permanent state of war with its neighbours. Jews in Israel are also subject to attacks by Palestinians legitimately resisting the occupation of their homes and villages. And Israel compulsorily recruits young people into military service, frequently sending them to war. The number of active military personnel per capita in Israel is the highest in the advanced capitalist world. As a strategy to combat antisemitism and keep Jews safe, the wholesale slaughter and ethnic cleansing of another population was never going to be effective. It only serves to perpetuate new forms of bigotry and violence. 
The “pink-washing” of Israel as a defender of gay and women’s rights has also been washed away. It’s obvious how shallow this is when equal rights apply only to the Jewish population, and Palestinian women and LGBTI people are subjected to the same discrimination, dispossession and mass murder as all Palestinians. It is little comfort to them that Israelis enjoy a large gay pride march each year. And it only functions to discredit the cause of gay rights when Israeli soldiers pose with rainbow flags on the rubble of destroyed Palestinian homes and hospitals.
At the same time as these liberal defences of Israel have unravelled, the logic of permanent war against the Palestinians in the occupied territories has pushed Israeli society further and further to the right. State policy has fostered a growing settler population that terrorises and displaces Palestinian communities in the West Bank and has helped to toxify Israeli politics, pushing the government to proclaim the genocidal logic of its project more openly, dropping traditional liberal Zionist justifications. 
At least nine new far-right parties entered Israeli politics in the past 20 years, and older parties like Netanyahu’s Likud have raced rightwards to meet them. The result is that Israeli politics looks like a right-wing lunatic asylum, with politicians from all parties calling openly for genocide, torture and ethnic cleansing, and promoting ideas of Jewish supremacy and ethnic purity. 
A study released in January this year by Law for Palestine detailed more than 500 genocidal public statements made by Israeli legislators, journalists and army personnel since 7 October. These include a statement by the Education Minister Yoav Kitsch, who said of Palestinians: “Those are animals, they have no right to exist. I am not debating the way it will happen, but they need to be exterminated”. Israel’s Minister of Communications Shlomo Karhi encouraged Israeli soldiers to cut the foreskins off the “accursed ... Nazi terrorists”. Such statements provide only a glimpse into the sorts of attitudes towards Palestinians that are commonplace in Israel. Add to this Netanyahu’s power grab against the Supreme Court last year and the government’s criminalisation of Al Jazeera, and the place starts to seem very illiberal. 
Israel is increasingly seen for what it is: a religious fundamentalist state on a mission to wipe out another group and dominate its region. The genocide in Gaza leaves no doubt about that.
This presents something of a problem for Israel’s Western allies, who no longer have a credible moral reason for their ongoing material and political support for Israel. There was never anything noble about this support. It was never about protecting Jews or cherishing democracy and freedom; it was always about power, money and protecting their place in the imperial pecking order. The honeyed lies about liberal democratic Israel no longer work to conceal that fact. University vice-chancellors can’t argue that their partnerships with Israeli universities are about shared enlightenment values, or that they are undertaking humanitarian research with Israeli weapons companies like Elbit Systems. They simply refuse to defend their innumerable ties to Israel, instead playing the victim and threatening students with expulsion or arrest for objecting to them. 
Penny Wong can no longer sing the praises of the “only democracy in the Middle East”. Instead, she blathers vacuous platitudes about our “friend and ally” Israel, with little justification for the alliance. The establishment has increasingly had to rely on the principle of might is right—silencing critics with vicious repression and accusations of bigotry and violence. Israel embodies this principle: it unapologetically continues massacring people in Gaza regardless of moral hand-wringing by the UN or ICC, denouncing all criticism as antisemitic.
This slanderous charge of antisemitism is perhaps the most infuriating aspect of the campaign against pro-Palestine activists. It is deeply Orwellian that a movement against bigotry and apartheid is being accused
of bigotry by infamous bigots like Peter Dutton. But the frantic campaign to discredit Palestine activism should reassure us that the strong moral case against Israel is becoming increasingly obvious to wide layers of people, a fact that scares the ruling classes of the West. 
Liberal Zionism, which for a long time inducted new generations of liberal politicians into unquestioning support for Israel, is struggling to hide its internal contradictions. As Abba Soloman and Norman Soloman wrote for Mondoweiss, “the dream of humanistic Zionism is collapsing”. 
Liberal Zionist groups like J Street have no ideological answer to this problem. Instead, they present Netanyahu and his far-right allies as the only source of Israeli extremism, while conveniently ignoring the nearly unanimous support for the annihilation of Gaza among Israel’s parties and population. They continue to advocate a two-state solution long after Israel’s actions have made a Palestinian state an impossibility. 
Trump is now positioning himself to wealthy Zionists as the solution to this ideological dilemma: abandon liberal Zionist fantasies, back the Republicans, and in return he will crack down hard on Palestine activism. To a room full of donors in May, Trump promised to throw student protesters out of the country and to “set that movement back 25 or 30 years”. 
As Western support for Israel is being questioned, so too is the legitimacy of the parties, politicians and governments that have funded and backed this apartheid state for decades. In the 1970s, when the moral case for the Vietnam War collapsed, parties like the Democrats were discredited in the eyes of millions of young people, many of whom began to question the entire system. We are not at that stage, but with crisis piled upon crisis, from racial injustice to climate change to the rising cost of living, the ruling classes are worried that their ideological hold over the population may be weakening. They themselves sense this ideological frailty and are lashing out at Palestine supporters with increasing venom and desperation. This should bring succour to all those fighting for justice for Palestine: we’re right, and they know it.

Israel’s backers have no moral case

A campaign to crush free speech and Palestine activism is underway in Australia, and two popular pro-Palestine slogans are in the Zionists’ crosshairs: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “intifada”, an Arabic word meaning “uprising”. The systematic misrepresentation of these two phrases, commonly chanted at rallies, is all the Zionists can muster to support their slanderous claim that the pro-Palestine movement is inherently violent and antisemitic. 
Former Liberal politician Josh Frydenberg, who was treasurer in the Morrison government, has skulked out of political retirement to lead the charge on this front. He is set to air a Sky News Australia documentary called Never Again: The Fight Against Antisemitism. But don’t let the title fool you; this piece is not about some brave struggle against bigotry. It is propaganda aimed at shielding a racist ethnostate from criticism, presented by a politician who was part of a government that weaponised bigotry to get into, and stay in, power.
University vice-chancellors have begun to consider a serious crackdown on democratic rights and free speech in response to the Gaza solidarity encampments across Australian campuses. Led by Sydney University’s Mark Scott, the Group of Eight universities have penned a letter to the attorney-general asking for advice on whether the slogans “From the river” and “intifada” are against the law—presumably as a prelude to banning the protests themselves. 
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has condemned the chants, saying he opposes the “From the river” slogan because it rejects a two-state solution. He also features in one of the interviews in Sky’s Never Again documentary. In a surprise to no one, Liberal and Labor politicians are able to reach across the aisle to agree that a genocide is fine, while the people opposing it are portrayed as the real purveyors of violence and bigotry. 
The Zionist objection to the slogan “From the river to the sea” goes something like this: A free Palestine between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea would necessarily involve an end to the ethnostate of Israel. So far so true, but then they make an erroneous leap in logic. They assume that ending Israel would entail the elimination of Jews from historic Palestine. The slogan is therefore, in the Zionist mind, tantamount to calling for a genocide against Israeli Jews. 
But “From the river to the sea” is not about expelling Jewish people from the lands of Palestine. Jewish people have a right to live as equals alongside their Arab neighbours in a free Palestine, as they did before the imposition of Israel in 1948. But an exclusionary Jewish state which aspires to racial purity and oppresses the Indigenous population is not compatible with equality between Jews and Palestinians. Most politicians now accept that Israel’s historical analogues should not have existed, as they were likewise incompatible with social equality and democratic values—from the apartheid state of South Africa to European fascist states. 
Israel is a racist apartheid regime which stamps “Arab” on Palestinian passports, which has built Israeli-only roads and a massive dividing wall between its illegal settlements and Palestinian villages. Israel enforces dozens of discriminatory laws against Palestinians in its own territory, while it occupies the West Bank and Gaza, denying their populations all the basic rights that should come with citizenship of an independent Palestinian state, or of Israel. 
It is Israel that aspires to complete a genocide between the river and the sea, and Israel that is physically attempting to carry this out. The historic rallying cry of Zionism was that Palestine was “A land without people for a people without land” and “A country without a people”, in the words of Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann. The Palestinians don’t—or shouldn’t—exist in the minds of Israel’s proponents, and destroying them is therefore simply a matter of bringing reality in line with Zionist ideology. 
It was, after all, the Zionists who invented the phrase “From the river to the sea” to encapsulate their aim to gain complete and total control of Palestine. According to Robin D.G. Kelley, professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, it “began as a Zionist slogan signifying the boundaries of Eretz Israel [the land allotted to Zionists during the British Mandate in Palestine from 1917 to 1948].” In 1977, Netanyahu’s Likud party used the slogan in their election manifesto, stating “between the sea and the Jordan there will be only Israeli sovereignty”. 
Israel’s eventual political domination of all the land between the river and the sea, finalised when the IDF occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, is precisely what prompted Palestinians to adopt “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as a demand. In the early 1990s, when the slogan became popular, it signified frustration with the Palestinian political leaders who in 1988 made peace with Israel, allowing it to continue its occupation and landgrabs. Today it resonates in cities across the world as a call for freedom and equality for all the inhabitants of historic Palestine. 
“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” does what all great protest slogans do: it represents the aspirations of an oppressed people. For the diaspora, the Palestinian refugees scattered across the earth, it represents their right to return to their homeland, to the neighbourhoods from which they were violently expelled. For the people of Gaza, a concentration camp filled with refugees and their descendants, it represents the hope of breaking free of their prison, moving and living safely without the threat of annihilation. For the people of the West Bank, it represents an end to Israeli military occupation, to checkpoints, walls and aggressive settler violence. For the Palestinians who live within the borders of “Israel”, it represents the desire to not be second-class citizens, to live in a fair and equal society over all of historic Palestine. 
The other contentious slogan, “intifada”, has been proudly adopted by the Palestine solidarity movement globally. It can be heard at almost any Palestine solidarity rally, and increasingly activists speak of a “global intifada” or “student intifada”. This terminology has made the Zionists apoplectic. The Australian Jewish Association’s Dr David Adler told Sky News, “Anyone with the remotest education would know intifada is a violent uprising...It involves suicide bombings and killing civilians in mass stabbings”.
The word “intifada” refers to the long history of Palestinian resistance, in extremely difficult conditions and with very little material support. The First Intifada began in 1987 after Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint killed four workers from Gaza. Sick of this inhuman treatment, the Palestinian people rose up. A wave of workers’ strikes and street demonstrations were followed by a violent crackdown by Israeli security forces. Iconic images of the Palestinian resistance emerged from those years: young Palestinians, heads wrapped in keffiyehs, throwing stones from slingshots at heavily armed Israeli soldiers. Palestinians didn’t have the means of inflicting destructive violence like Israel did, and largely that wasn’t their orientation. As historian Vashti Fox wrote in The Story of Palestine, “They rediscovered the tactics from the earlier period: refusal to pay taxes, the closure of shops, boycotts of Israeli products and mass street demonstrations”.
But given the overwhelming force and brutality of the Israeli military, the Intifada could not avoid violence. Between the end of the First Intifada and the start of the Second Intifada in 2000, Palestinians were sold out by their political leaders and ground down into an even worse situation than before—with Israel using the “peace” of the 1993 Oslo Accords to further expand its settlements and militarisation. 
The result was that the Second Intifada, which began with similar mass demonstrations and civil disobedience, became far more militarised. Much the same can be observed about the history of other struggles against oppression: the “Troubles” in Ireland, anti-colonial independence movements from India to the Congo to Algeria, the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, and even the fight against slavery in the US. 
All involved violence and terrorism by the oppressed against their far more violent and terroristic oppressors. This fact has always been used to try to invalidate the struggles of the oppressed. We must resist the current attempt to excuse Israel’s crimes by constant references to terrorism and Hamas. Supporting Palestinian intifadas isn’t about condoning Hamas’s attacks. Rather, it comes from the belief that ordinary people and their collective struggles are the key to ending the injustices meted out by the world’s ruling classes.
That’s why the word “intifada” has been so effortlessly adopted by millions of people around the world: because it is relevant to all of us. First, because our governments are so economically and politically committed to Israel that only a global uprising, like the one against the Vietnam War, could hope to shake that commitment. Second, because the issue of Palestine demonstrates everything that’s wrong with the capitalist system. It proves that an entire people can be cast aside, dehumanised, murdered and imprisoned because they are in the way of the imperialist machinations of capitalist ruling classes. Such a system has no right to exist, and an intifada is the only appropriate response.

In defence of ‘From the river to the sea’ and ‘Intifada’

“Gaza is becoming a graveyard for children. Hundreds of girls and boys are reportedly being killed or injured every day”, said United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in a statement on 2 November. “We must act now to find a way out of this brutal, awful, agonizing dead end of destruction.”
Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians violates almost every article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Israel has even killed 92 UN staff in the current bombardment of Gaza, the highest number killed in any conflict.
Guterres followed this with another comment just days later in New York: “[The UN has] no power, no money, but a voice and a platform where people can bring together governments, civil society ... and at least try to find ways to address the dramatic problem of our time”.
In other words, the United Nations is a toothless body that can produce statements, not action.
On 27 October, the UN General Assembly passed a non-binding motion calling for an “immediate and sustained humanitarian truce” between Israel and Hamas. The United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, among others, refused to support it. 
But like most UN motions on Palestine, it failed to call out Israel as the oppressor of the Palestinians, perpetuating the myth that Israel and Palestine are simply two warring states that must be brought to the table to negotiate a peace. 
Such motions are common in the UN General Assembly, but the conduct of the UN Security Council is even worse. The Council’s five permanent members—the USA, UK, Russia, France and China—have veto powers over all Security Council decisions. The US has used that power <a href="blank">46 times</a> since the 1970s to block criticism of Israel’s conduct towards the Palestinians and neighbouring states. 
The UN is and always has been a political body, not simply a neutral arbiter of foreign relations. The most powerful nations see the UN as just another arena for their imperialist ambitions, each using the UN as ideological cover for their policies when they can. The US has succeeded in this several times: the UN gave its blessing to the first Gulf War in 1990 and the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. UN Security Council motions provided former US President George Bush with a justification for the 2003 Iraq war by falsely claiming that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. 
But the US and other member states are not beholden to the UN; they simply ignore any motions and decrees they don’t agree with.
Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin once called the UN’s predecessor, the League of Nations, “a thieves’ kitchen” and “a lie from beginning to end”. He probably would have had similar choice words for the United Nations. 
The UN adopted the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” in 1948, the same year it green-lit the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. While the UN espoused the principle of national self-determination, it explicitly denied that right to the Palestinians. Craig Mokhiber called this the “original sin” of the UN when he resigned from his post as director of the New York Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights in October. 
In 1947, The United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) was created to oversee the formation of a new Israeli state on Palestinian land. It comprised people with little experience of the Middle East who were overwhelmingly influenced by the two major imperialist powers at the time: the US and the Soviet Union. Both were promoting a new Zionist state in the Middle East, hoping that in the long run it would serve their interests in the region. 
UNSCOP rejected outright the idea of a single democratic state over historic Palestine, which had been the demand of Palestinian representatives, deciding instead to bisect the country into two states—one Jewish and one Palestinian. 
The plan handed 55 percent of the land to Israel, where Jewish people would be a slim majority. The new Israel conveniently incorporated the best and most fertile land, including the coastal plain and the hilly eastern Galilee. In his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Israeli historian Ilan Pappé shows that in 1947 indigenous Palestinians farmed almost all the cultivated land—only 5.8 percent was in Jewish ownership. The UN’s partition plan would therefore require the mass displacement of Palestinians. This is why, according to Pappé, the UN members who voted in favour of the plan “contributed directly to the crime that was about to take place”: the ethnic cleansing known as the Nakba (catastrophe). 
Despite the generosity of the UN towards the new state of Israel, the plan didn’t go far enough for the Zionist leaders. They appreciated that the “international community” had recognised a Jewish state in Palestine, but they rejected the limits of the UN-drawn borders. David Ben-Gurion, Zionist leader and the first prime minister of Israel, claimed in 1947 that the new borders “will be determined by force and not by the partition resolution”. After the Nakba in 1948, Israel ended up with 78 percent of the land. Zionist militias terrorised and massacred Palestinians, purging the inhabitants of a dozen ethnically mixed cities and destroying more than 400 Palestinian villages. The Zionists described their military operations of 1948 in clearly genocidal terms: Tihur (purifying), Biur (rooting out) and Nikkuy (cleaning). 
What was the UN’s response after its partition plan resulted in such a catastrophe? Did it backtrack, apologise or demand immediate reparations? No. In March 1949, the General Assembly happily admitted Israel, not Palestine, into full membership of the UN. 
Since 1948, the UN has cried countless crocodile tears for Palestine. But it has also whitewashed and aided Israel’s crimes. 
In his resignation letter, Craig Mokhiber outlines the myriad ways in which the UN has failed the Palestinians. “Key parts of the UN have surrendered to the power of the US, and to fear of the Israel Lobby”, he says. He points to the “disingenuous” so-called “peace process” that began in the 1990s. Overseen by the UN and “mediated” by the US, these talks delivered nothing for ordinary Palestinians; Israel never withdrew its occupation; it accelerated the construction of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and tightened its stranglehold over Gaza. The “peace process” legitimised by the UN has contributed to the idea that Israel is the reasonable actor and that Palestinian organisations like Hamas are the only threat to peace. 
The UN slogan of a “two-state solution” only serves to cover up the reality that Israel is a racist ethno-state that has no interest in either coexisting with a Palestinian state or accommodating Palestinians within its own borders. In Mokhiber’s words, it is a state that is “colonising, persecuting and dispossessing an indigenous population on the basis of their ethnicity”. 
The UN can only ever represent the interests of the most powerful states within it, no matter how much its members and staff strive to be the upholders of human rights. The only real defenders of human rights today are the millions of ordinary people across the world standing with the people of Gaza.

Why the UN won’t save the Palestinians

“Should Fascism achieve power it will ride over your skulls and spines like a frightful tank”, wrote Leon Trotksy in a letter to a German communist in December 1931. “Your salvation lies in merciless struggle. And only unity in struggle with the social democratic workers can bring victory. Make haste, worker-communists, you have very little time left.” 
To a modern audience aware of the Nazis’ horrific crimes, Trotsky’s words are painfully prescient. But he was something of a lone voice in his own time. Many among the rich and powerful openly collaborated with Hitler. Winston Churchill sang Mussolini’s praises. Liberal capitalist parties across Europe formed coalition governments with fascists, while social democrats reassured themselves that constitutions would protect democracy against a fascist seizure of power. The Stalinist Communist parties argued that the fascists were no worse than the usual rulers of capitalism, and barely lifted a finger to stop their rise to power.
A theory of fascism emerges from Trotsky’s scattered writings on Italy, Germany, France and Spain, published together as the pamphlet Fascism: What it is and How to Fight it. 
Fascism represents the counter-revolutionary revenge of the ruling class against workers. It arose as a political phenomenon during the 1920s and 1930s, immediately following the workers’ revolutions that engulfed Europe after the First World War. The ruling classes, terrified of revolution, sought comfort in a reactionary movement that would violently repress the working class. “The historic function of fascism is to smash the working class, destroy its organisations, and stifle political liberties when the capitalists find themselves unable to govern and dominate with the help of democratic machinery”, Trotsky wrote in a 1934 piece, “Whither France?”
But fascism is not just a concoction of the bosses. “The fascists find their human material mainly in the petty bourgeoisie [middle classes]”, Trotsky wrote. Subsequent analyses of fascist voting patterns, including Richard F. Hamilton’s Who Voted for Hitler, confirm Trotsky’s statement. In terms of membership and voting base, the fascist parties drew most of their support from the middle classes, including small shopkeepers, artisans, managers, lawyers, bureaucrats and peasants. Workers, who made up 50 percent of the German population, were only about 25 percent of the Nazis’ membership, and fewer than 5 percent of Nazi members were in trade unions. 
Why were the middle classes the social base of fascism? In the 1920s and 1930s, they were “entirely ruined by big capital”, according to Trotsky. They were ruined by the war, which had sent millions to fight and die, and by the Great Depression, which began in 1928. The fascists seemed to offer solutions to these problems, and they diverted the “dissatisfaction, indignation and despair” of the middle classes “away from big capital and against the workers”. 
The fascists directly appealed to the middle classes. Nazi leader Adolph Hitler highlighted the social position and grievances of these “self-made men” in Mein Kampf, declaring that “for people of modest situation who have once risen above that social level, it is unendurable to fall back into it, even momentarily”. It was this fear of social regression that drove the middle classes into the arms of the fascists, who promised political stability, social cohesion and economic salvation for small proprietors. In the years before they came to power, the Nazis campaigned against the large businesses that put economic pressure on small shopkeepers, often using anti-Semitic tropes. 
Fascists also recruited from the completely destitute: the long-term unemployed, ex-soldiers and those driven to petty crime. Fascism gave these men hot soup, a place to sleep and a gun with which to menace the left and Jews, whom they could blame for all their problems.
It was not inevitable, however, that the middle classes would be drawn into the fascist camp. Much of the petty bourgeoisie had been drawn along by the worker-led revolutions and uprisings at the end of the war; this fusion was the most successful during the 1917 Russian Revolution, which was supported by millions of peasants. 
But without sufficient leadership, the revolutions in the rest of Europe didn’t fare as well, and by the early 1920s, the revolutionary wave had ebbed. The various left-wing parties seemed incapable of solving the ongoing capitalist crisis, and so the petty-bourgeois masses turned towards the fascists. Workers largely remained loyal to the socialist parties, but some were dragged towards fascism. As Trotsky put it, “Fascism is a form of despair in the petty-bourgeois masses, who carry away with them over the precipice a part of the working class as well”.
While fascism gained its foot soldiers and numerical strength from the middle classes, it could come to power only at the behest of the real kingmakers of politics: the big capitalists, the military generals and the state bureaucrats. 
The ruling class will bring to power a fascist party with a rabid, plebeian base only when three conditions are met. First, when capitalism cannot continue as before—with unstable political regimes and a large and menacing workers’ movement. Second, the usual methods for keeping the workers’ organisations in check (legal repression or cooption) are inadequate to the task. Third, when bringing the fascists to power will not provoke a revolution in response. 
After taking power, the fascists acted as the strong arm of the capitalists, including against their own middle-class supporters. “After fascism is victorious, finance capital directly and immediately gathers into its hands, as in a vice of steel, all the organs and institutions of sovereignty”, Trotsky wrote. It was the big capitalists, not the petty bourgeoisie, who enriched themselves under the Nazi regime: between 1933 and 1936, corporate profits rose by 433 percent while workers’ wages fell, and half of small businesses went bankrupt. 
The fascists’ rise to power wasn’t inevitable. The political errors of the two main forces on the European left—the reformist Social Democrats and the Communist parties loyal to the USSR—made it possible. 
The stance of the reformists amounted to a servile trust in the institutions of the capitalist state and the capitalist class. They thought that the police could be used to disarm the fascist gangs, despite all evidence that the police were extremely sympathetic to the fascists and that, as Trotsky wrote, the “comedy of disarmament by the police” would “only have caused the authority of the fascists to increase as fighters against the capitalist state”. 
They also believed that the capitalists’ commitment to democracy would halt the fascist march to power. In Germany, the Social Democrats (SPD) formed an “Iron Front” with the capitalist parties, supposedly to counter the rise of the Nazis. Later, the Socialists in France and Spain insisted on the participation of bourgeois parties in their “Popular Front” coalitions against fascism. In this way, they openly cooperated with the class of exploiters. The strategy failed precisely because the bourgeoisie holds no such commitment to democracy.
There was another fatal flaw in the reformists’ attitude to fascism—they were terrified of unleashing the revolutionary potential of workers’ struggle lest things “go too far”. Trotsky ruthlessly mimicked the SPD leaders begging the government: “Please don’t force us to defend ourselves with the might of workers’ organisations, for this will only arouse the entire working class; and then the movement will rise above the bald pates of our party leadership: beginning as anti-fascist, it will end communist”.
For Trotsky, the reformist leaders were politically irredeemable in their unswerving loyalty to capitalism, but the millions of workers who supported them were key to blocking the fascists’ road to power. Along with Communist workers, they could drive back the armed fascist gangs that were now rampaging through working-class districts. Together, they had the power to overthrow capitalism, thereby resolving the economic and social problems that allowed fascism to fester and grow. 
Trotsky held particular contempt for Joseph Stalin’s theory of fascism. “Fascism is the military organisation of the bourgeoisie which leans upon the Social Democracy for active support”, Stalin claimed. “The Social Democracy, objectively speaking, is the moderate wing of fascism.” While it’s true that the capitalist class, in a crisis, leans on both fascism for its violent attacks on the working class, and on Social Democracy for its ability to restrain working-class militancy, it does not follow that Social Democracy is just the “moderate wing of fascism”.
This stupidity formed the basis of the Stalinist theory that fascism is just another face of capitalism, no better or worse than a democratic parliament led by Social Democrats. Therefore, the Communists should not lift a finger to stop the fascists, and would never work with the Social Democrats, whom they branded “social fascists”. Trotsky replied in 1932, just months before Hitler took power in Germany: “The know-alls who boast that they do not recognise any difference between [German Chancellor] Brüning and Hitler are saying in reality: it makes no difference whether our organisations exist, or whether they are already destroyed”. 
The actions of the German Communist Party (KPD) during the rise of the Nazis provide an example of Stalin’s theory in practice. It made a series of terrible tactical decisions that did nothing to stop the Nazis’ rise. But its worst crime was passivity. As the Nazis prepared to destroy every vestige of working-class power and democracy, the KPD leaders smugly sat by, claiming that Hitler’s victory would only hasten the crisis that would bring the Communists to power. They had an idiotic slogan for this attitude too: “First Hitler, then our turn”.
Trotsky could only watch in horror from afar as his predictions came true; fascism ran roughshod over the most powerful workers’ movements in Europe, from Italy to Germany and Spain. But he preserved in his writing the lessons of those terrible failures for future generations. 
It is worth returning to Trotsky’s arguments as far-right and even fascist organisations continue to gain influence. Contemporary politics is not a mirror image of the 1930s, so Trotsky’s arguments are not a simple blueprint for analysing fascism today. The workers’ movement is comparatively weak, there are no mass socialist organisations, and the crisis of capitalism is not yet on the same scale. Because of this, the capitalists feel less need to totally dispense with democracy. 
But Trotsky’s writings on the class base of fascism and the economic and social conditions that allow it to take power should serve as a warning for what the future may hold. His arguments about the need for mass working-class resistance to stop fascism in its tracks are based on an analysis of the same class forces that rule the world today. 
And Trotsky’s anger at the criminal negligence of the two dominant wings of the workers’ movement, reformism and Stalinism, should serve as fuel in the fight for revolutionary Marxist politics today.

Trotsky and the struggle against fascism

Do you ever feel undervalued at work—like you contribute much more than your pay packet suggests? Karl Marx gets you. In the mid-nineteenth century, he argued that the whole working class is exploited by the capitalist class. This isn’t just a hyperbolic flourish, but an economic fact. The entire point of capitalist enterprise is to accumulate more wealth by systematically stealing a portion of the value workers create. This process is called exploitation. 
Mainstream economists claim that workers are paid what we’re worth. Our wages represent our “value added” to production. They occasionally admit that, in distant lands, unscrupulous bosses might exploit workers. But the overall picture is one of freedom and fairness. The free market, they assure us, will take care of any greedy boss who tries to underpay his workers—who can quit and look elsewhere for a better job. Without workers, the penny-pinching boss will go out of business. But if workers work hard and the boss treats them well, the enterprise will prosper, the bosses will make more money and the workers will get their fair share.
This rosy picture doesn’t match the reality of work. In the United States, that pillar of the free market and the richest country in the world, real wages for tens of millions of workers are extremely low. Huge numbers work several jobs to make ends meet. 
In fact, wages can rarely be “fair” anywhere in the capitalist world, because bosses simply cannot pay anything close to the value created by labour without going out of business. Here’s why.
What the bosses are really purchasing when they hire workers is our labour power, our ability to labour. This is the only way to combine machinery and raw materials into a new product worth more than the sum of its inputs. In the production of these commodities (which just means things produced for sale), workers create new value. Some of that value they are paid back in wages. Marx called this “variable capital” (because it varies, increases, the amount of value). But part of the new value created goes to the boss. This Marx called “surplus value”. Company profits are derived from this surplus value created by workers but not returned to them as wages.
Say a barista gets paid $26 an hour, during which she makes 30 coffees, each selling for $4.20. Say also that $1.60 of the sale price covers the costs of everything other than the barista’s wages: the beans, the cup, the lid, the milk, the wear and tear on the coffee machine (what economists call “depreciation”), the power and water, and part of the weekly rent. The revenue gained every hour, after deducting the cost of the inputs, is $78. Subtracting $26 for the barista’s wage, we get $52 in profit. The rate of exploitation is the profit over the wage, which in this case is 200 percent—that is, for every $1 the barista is paid, she also makes $2 for the boss. 
What does this number mean for the barista? It means that after she has made the tenth cup of coffee, she has already earned her hourly wage. She makes the next 20 cups for free, with all the proceeds going to the cafe owner. If we look at her entire nine-hour day, she works the first three hours to pay for her own wages, and the last six are spent producing wealth entirely for her boss. The cafe owner would have to pay her an attractive $78 an hour to match the value created by her labour. 
That’s how exploitation works. No boss, from the smallest cafe owner to the biggest mining magnate, would bother hiring anyone if they couldn’t use this discrepancy to turn a profit. It’s impossible to choose to do otherwise, because the market forces all bosses to compete against one another for profits. Any boss who doesn’t exploit their workers will go bust. Workers can leave a job in which they’re being exploited—but the only alternative is to work for another exploiting boss. 
Our barista example aside, it is hard to measure exploitation. Bosses and mainstream economists don’t acknowledge it, let alone calculate it. However, using some simplifying assumptions and available data, Marxists have approximated figures and demonstrated the basic reality of exploitation. 
For Australia, Marxist economist Tom Bramble used data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics to calculate the rate of exploitation last year in the following industries: construction (85 percent—so for every dollar they pay in wages, the bosses in that industry take 85 cents on top), retail (71 percent), energy (273) percent and mining (661 percent). Despite the relatively high wages that mining workers earn, the industry is one of Australia’s most exploitative, producing more than six times the value of workers’ wages as profits. No wonder Gina Rinehart is the richest person in the country. 
If wages aren’t a reflection of the full value created by workers, what do they represent? Essentially, they are the minimum cost of reproducing the worker: the cost of feeding, housing, educating and clothing us. In practice, all sorts of social and economic factors go into determining the price of labour. For example, the actual cost of food, houses, clothes, education and training differs based on a worker’s location or industry. Then there is the supply and demand of labour power. For example, bosses can take advantage of the desperation caused by high unemployment to lower wages. 
Trade union militancy also has an effect on the rate of exploitation. Strikes have typically been the most effective mechanism for workers to win higher wages. Workers’ struggles have sometimes forced governments to pass laws that limit exploitation, such as limiting the length of a working day. But no amount of jostling over wages can ever eliminate exploitation from the capitalist economy.
Reformers often try to remedy certain forms of “hyper-exploitation” while resisting any criticism of the capitalist system itself. In Marx’s day, for example, liberals demanded a “fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work”, which he called a “conservative motto” because it told workers that the relationship between workers and bosses could indeed be fair. Trade union officials and social democrats have adopted the same slogan to the same effect, allowing them to agitate for reforms but only within the limits of the capitalist system. By accepting the bounds of the system, they accept workers being systematically robbed of the surplus value they create. In practice, that means limiting workers’ demands to what is considered “acceptable” to the capitalist class—an alteration in the rate of exploitation, rather than the abolition of exploitation entirely. 
Revolutionary socialists look at it differently. We support every demand for higher wages by workers to maintain and improve their living standards and to encourage their fighting spirit. But higher wages are insufficient on their own. The struggle for them under capitalism is like the labour of Sisyphus in Greek mythology, condemned for all eternity to roll his boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down again. 
Instead of a “fair wage”, Marx argued that workers “ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword—abolition of the wages system!”

Why workers’ wages will always be too low

Women’s rights in the US are at a critical juncture. A leaked draft Supreme Court judgement indicates that five conservative judges support overturning the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision that established a woman’s right to abortion as a constitutional right.
In the event Roe is overturned, an estimated 25 states are expected to pass laws that restrict this right. Thirteen already have “trigger laws” in place in anticipation of the decision being overturned, many of which involve total abortion bans, including in cases of rape and incest.
This moment is the culmination of decades of campaigning by the US right wing. As recently as 2019, Republican leaders publicly argued that total abortion bans went too far and that they would provoke a backlash from a hostile public. Today, dozens of Republican-controlled state administrations are gleefully preparing to push such bans through, and the Supreme Court decision of nearly 50 years’ standing looks set to collapse. This has been the holy grail of the campaign to roll back the gains of the 1960s and ’70s.
That the right of women to control their own bodies rests so heavily in the US on a Supreme Court decision has always been a vulnerability. It makes the protection of the right to choose hostage to the composition of the nine-person court, which, as the various Trump appointees demonstrate, cannot be relied on to uphold basic rights.
To better secure abortion protection, pro-choice advocates have long argued for federal legislation to codify abortion rights, which would stand even in the event Roe was overturned. But so far, no administration has been willing to do this.
Barack Obama promised that passing a Freedom of Choice Act would be his first act as president. But once elected, he declared abortion rights no longer to be his “highest priority” and proceeded to do nothing about it throughout his two terms in office. Bill Clinton before him likewise failed to legislate despite promising to do so during his presidential campaign, instead popularising the slogan that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare” in what was widely seen as a concession to the anti-choice lobby.
So far in power, Biden has avoided even saying the word “abortion”, despite, like Democratic presidents before him, claiming to support codifying Roe and repealing the Hyde amendment (which bans federal funding for abortions).
Given that the Democrats currently control the House of Representatives, the Senate and the White House, the prospects should be good for passing federal protections. But they are not, in part because of hostility inside the supposedly “pro-choice” party.
In February, a Democrat-sponsored abortion rights bill was defeated in the Senate 48 votes to 46, after a prominent anti-choice Democrat from West Virginia, Senator Joe Manchin III, joined with the Republicans to vote against and other Democrats absented themselves from the vote.
Even if all the Democrats were prepared to vote for abortion rights, a 60 percent majority would be needed in the Senate in order to overcome the filibuster, a procedural rule that prevents a measure being voted on by opponents deliberately dragging out debate. But Manchin and other Democrats have indicated they oppose relaxing that rule, and Biden has shown no interest in pressuring them.
There is a range of other things the Biden administration could do to ensure women have access to proper reproductive services. But so far, the administration seems more interested in using the issue to boost the Democrats’ mid-term vote, even though the mid-terms, scheduled for November, will likely be some months after the Supreme Court’s decision is made official, expected in June or July. Posing as the pro-choice party without having to take meaningful action is an advantageous position for the Democrats, and is further evidence, if any were needed, of the problem with liberals and leftists orienting to the party as a force for change.
The Democrats’ history of capitulation and defensiveness towards the right has put the pro-choice movement in the US on the back foot. Few Democrats say without hesitation that women should be the ones who decide whether or not to proceed with a pregnancy, at whatever stage and for whatever reason, or that it is women and women alone who should make decisions about their bodies—not the state, their partners, religious figures or anyone else.
The right make no such apology for their position. They aggressively pursue it, despite being in a minority, successfully intimidating many of their opponents in the process.
Abortion is such an anathema to the right because it gives women the freedom to eschew their traditional role in the family, a social and economic institution that is indispensable to capitalism and venerated by the right. Even women being able to decide if and when they have children within a family structure is objectionable, because it alters the god-ordained balance of power in domestic life.
Eroding the right to choose is therefore not just about women being forced to have more babies. It’s also about pushing back against the idea that structures of authority should be subordinate to people’s needs and desires, rather than the other way around. The right wants to promote deference and respect for society’s ruling institutions: religion, the family, the economy, the nation, the police, borders. They resent any concession to the idea that people should be free to break from the expectations of tradition, as upheld by society’s ruling institutions. So women feeling they don’t have to defer—the very people who are meant to bind the social fabric together—is seen as an existential threat to capitalist order. Hence the obsession with denying women rights and promoting gender norms. And hence the right simultaneously advocate abortion bans and the death penalty despite the apparent contradiction: both are about individuals being subordinate to a higher power and the ruling institutions of society. 
Despite the general backwardness of US society, there is nevertheless a clear democratic mandate to uphold abortion rights. A large majority of people agree abortion should be legal in most circumstances. But to achieve that, it is necessary to stand up to the powerful anti-choice forces both inside and outside the Democratic Party, as well as the anti-choice Republicans and increasingly triumphant right. What is needed is mass action, civil disobedience and a grassroots movement that turns the anger of millions of women and their supporters into a force that cannot be ignored. In a promising sign, thousands of abortion rights protesters have poured into the streets since the draft ruling was leaked, despite the passivity of the Democrat-aligned pro-choice bureaucracy. This is the hope for the future, and the only way ultimately to secure safe, free, legal abortion for all.
Socialists and the fight for abortion rights
For socialists, support for abortion rights has always been a no-brainer. Socialists support women having as much control as possible over their lives and bodies and fight for a society that ensures women are able to participate fully in social and political life regardless of how many or how few children they decide to have.
Socialists have also long recognised that reproductive rights are a class question. Wealthier women have always been able to pay for contraceptives and abortions and enjoyed the privacy and discretion that accompany wealth, while working-class women have been butchered by back-alley abortionists and poisoned by cheap abortifacients. To be truly a right, reproductive health care must be not only legal and safe, but also free.
In 1917, when the working class of Russia overthrew their rulers and took power, they quickly legalised abortion. Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky called abortion “one of her [women’s] most important civil, political and cultural rights”, and he later condemned the Stalinist counter-revolution that revoked it. Communist parties around the world were also early supporters of women’s reproductive rights, emphasising that it needed to be free and accessible if it was to mean anything for working-class women.
In the 1970s, an explosion of working-class struggle and the rise of the women's liberation movement gave the fight for abortion rights its most radical push yet. In Australia, the Women’s Abortion Action Campaign organised mass action in the streets to “fight the reactionary media, church men and politicians who daily intimidate women into believing they have no right to control their own bodies”. They started with small rallies, but through determined activism and with the help of left-wing trade unions, they pushed the Whitlam government to provide Medicare funding for abortions.
In recent years, even in heavily Catholic countries where the church is highly influential, mass movements have smashed the barriers to accessing abortion. Governments in Colombia, Argentina and Ireland have been forced to legalise abortion. That sort of fight is what’s needed in the US now.

Louise O'Shea

Defend abortion rights!

Here’s a fun game to play in lockdown: guess the name of the current NSW opposition leader. You get three tries. Give up? His name is Chris Minns, and, like the NSW Labor Party, he might as well not exist. Despite the Berejiklian government’s COVID clusterfuck, NSW’s Labor opposition has been virtually silent, having promised to “take politics out of the pandemic” as Minns put it in an interview on 2GB. That means that, despite a crying need for an approach that puts health before profits, what passes for an official opposition has quietly backed the government’s reckless policies.
NSW Labor were already adept at fading into the background, but during the last few weeks they have become totally invisible. “We promised not to score any political points, and we haven’t”, Minns proudly declared in his interview with 2GB’s Jim Wilson. He’s right. Labor have scored precisely zero political points. They should be shouting from the rooftops that Berejiklian has driven NSW to the brink of catastrophe, that working-class people across Sydney are being endangered by the government’s policies. They could condemn Berejiklian’s sadistic call to “learn to live with the virus”. They could push to eliminate the virus by applying a lockdown “marked by uniformity, clarity and strong financial and social support”, as epidemiologists at the Burnet Institute have <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/why-our-covid-ambition-must-remain-close-to-zero-cases-even-as-we-climb-to-high-vaccination-20210817-p58jll.html">argued in the </a>Guardian recently.
Instead, bar a few minor criticisms, they have quietly toed the government’s line.
In the same interview, Minns expressed his sympathy for Berejiklian. He insisted that her decisions were “not political calls” and had “nothing to do with ideology”. That’s easy to say when he shares her core ideology, that the economy and profits are more important than public health. 
Minns complains on social media that the real tragedy in the lockdown has been the loss of profits. In one video, he implored Sydneysiders to buy local when we order Uber Eats. Stop ordering Uber Eats from overseas, people: it’s hurting true blue Aussie restaurants!
Aside from the feeble criticism that the government should be publicising health advice, Labor’s positioning is indistinguishable from that of the Liberals and their media and business backers. They have all pushed the dangerous idea that relatively low vaccination targets can be a “roadmap” out of lockdown even while cases are out of control.
NSW Labor’s sycophantic position contrasts with some of the Labor state governments. In Victoria last year, Labor Premier Daniel Andrews initially fumbled around for weeks while case numbers increased. Eventually, his resolve stiffened by mass support for lockdowns, Andrews implemented and held to a lockdown, overriding intense opposition from business, the mainstream media and the Morrison government. The result was that COVID was, for a time, eliminated in Australia.
Labor Premier Mark McGowan has made himself the most popular politician in WA, and turned the WA Liberals into a minor party, by pursuing a policy of zero COVID, despite recent pressure from the National Cabinet to drop the goal. In these limited, fragile examples, Labor politicians have been pushed to act according to the science and mass popular opinion, against the squeals of the business class. But with the outbreak in NSW out of control, Morrison and Berejiklian are arguing that because “Delta is different”, we need to ease restrictions and “learn to live with the virus”. Neither federal nor NSW Labor have put an argument against this, and Daniel Andrews could easily buckle under the pressure with rising cases again in Victoria.
The Australian Labor Party is a fundamentally pro-capitalist party. Of all its state divisions, NSW Labor are probably the worst. They ruled the state from 1995 to 2009 and were notorious for corruption, privatisations and schemes to enrich property developers. They attacked workers’ rights, beefed up the police state and led racist anti-immigrant campaigns, particularly against Sydney’s Lebanese community. Since they moved into opposition, they have become virtually invisible because they are indistinguishable from their Liberal counterparts. Refusing to “play politics” is simply refusing to criticise the government in a way that might upset wealthy donors, the Murdoch press and, as Labor sees it, voters—although this hasn’t done them any favours in elections. They have rendered the official political landscape utterly barren, giving Berejiklian free rein to drive the state towards total catastrophe without fear of public criticism from her colleagues. 
NSW Labor are in no sense a real political opposition to the Liberals. They have no desire to give expression to mass anger against the Liberals, and refuse to fight for public health over private profits.

NSW Labor are letting Berejiklian get away with it

The word “apartheid” is used today to describe Israel’s racist treatment of Palestinians. But the word, meaning “separateness”, originates in Afrikaans, the language of the white minority who ruled South Africa until the 1990s. In the eyes of the Afrikaners, “apartheid” wasn’t a slur; it was their affectionate name for South Africa’s brutal system of segregation. For decades, children were subjected to pseudo-scientific race examinations and assigned to a “racial category”: “Black” (also referred to as “Bantu” or African), “White”, “Coloured” or “Asian” (mostly people of Indian background). These categories defined everything about a person’s life: what jobs they were eligible for, whether they could vote, where they lived and which toilet they could use. 
South African apartheid wasn’t simply the result of white ideas of Black inferiority. It was a system that allowed a small ruling class of capitalists, who were white, to keep control over the mass of low-paid Black workers. The economic power concentrated in the hands of a few whites was immense: by 1994, six white-owned corporations controlled 90 percent of the companies listed on the Johannesburg stock exchange. Just 5 percent of white South Africans owned 88 percent of the country’s wealth.
In 1948, the National Party formed government and dramatically escalated the oppression of non-white South Africans, particularly Blacks. Apartheid, though a new word in 1948, wasn’t a completely new practice. It was an extension of the migrant labour system first implemented in the labour-intensive gold and diamond mines. 
Most Africans in the region had been dispossessed through wars of conquest and high taxes on the peasantry, turning them into a source of cheap labour for the mine owners. They were treated as “temporary sojourners” in their own land, forced to commute to work in the mines, then herded back into the “reserves”—areas that comprised 13 percent of the land but were home to 70 percent of the population. 
This system was extremely lucrative for the British and Afrikaner (of Dutch origin) capitalists, and led to a boom throughout the early twentieth century. But it came at a dangerous price—the growth of an urban Black working class, which started to get organised in the 1940s. White rulers feared that the Black workers’ militancy could rub off on the unions of skilled white workers. Apartheid was the solution to these problems. Trotskyist Darcy du Toit explains it in Capital and Labour in South Africa: “The massive growth of the African working class called for reinforcement of the measures designed to control it”. 
The measures were extended beyond workers to the Black population in general. Concessions of any sort to the Black masses could, the ruling class feared, be taken advantage of by radical Black workers. What was fundamentally a method of labour control grew, after 1948, into a complex and arbitrary system that disenfranchised the entire non-white population, including Indian and “Coloured” people.
One of the central aims of apartheid was to control the mobility of Black people. Most Black people lived and worked in the urban centres formally declared “white areas”. But they were assigned, from birth, to one of the rural “homelands” or “Bantustans”, regardless of their birthplace or residence. They were allowed to venture outside their Bantustans only if they were employed elsewhere. In practice, the Bantustans became dumping grounds for “superfluous” Africans, including children, the elderly and the unemployed, where they were condemned to miserable poverty. Families were torn apart, forced to live at opposite ends of the country on the whim of the authorities. A set of “pass laws” was enforced. When police found Black people without the correct pass, they were fined, beaten, imprisoned and sometimes killed. Bosses could sack an entire workforce and have them bused back to their respective “homelands”.
The white ruling class justified the Bantustans on the basis of “separate development”, the idea that Black people had some degree of independence in “their” areas. But the Black councils that ruled the Bantustans were mere extensions of the central government, policing the Black population on its behalf—not unlike the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank today. 
The rulers of apartheid lived in perpetual fear of the Black workers they exploited, so an important aim of apartheid was to keep Africans scared, powerless and quiet. Black trade unions and strikes were illegal, and all Black political activity was outlawed. Anyone who defied the state could become a “banned individual” and be prohibited from meeting in groups. Many Black leaders served long prison sentences, most famously Nelson Mandela. Some, like Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko, were murdered in police custody. When masses of Black people resisted, they were met with bullets, tear gas and baton charges. An infamous example was the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre, in which police gunned down a demonstration against the pass laws, killing 69 people.
Apartheid would not be easily overthrown, and it showed no signs of peacefully evolving away. Both the “liberal” and conservative wings of the political elite were committed to the system that underpinned their profits, even if the liberals occasionally criticised apartheid’s excesses. 
Some opponents held out hope that the weight of international condemnation and sanctions would force change. But the “international community” could never be the decisive factor in the fall of apartheid. South Africa’s powerful trading partners—the US, Britain, West Germany and Japan—had no interest in rocking the boat and heartily approved of the National Party’s rabid anti-communism. Like Israel today, South Africa received no more than the occasional slap on the wrist during apartheid’s heyday. Only once the regime was on its last legs did countries like the US impose sanctions.
By contrast, millions of ordinary people around the world were disgusted by apartheid. As early as the 1950s, there were organised boycotts of South African products by unions and progressive organisations. The anti-apartheid struggle grew over the decades, culminating in mass protests in the late 1960s and early 1970s against the touring, white-only Springbok rugby team. In the 1970s, militant workers refused to handle South African goods. Dock workers and seafarers in Australia helped impose an embargo on oil and weapons to South Africa. In 1977, the British Union of Postal Workers refused to handle post to or from South Africa. These actions undoubtedly encouraged the struggle for freedom, but they could not substitute for a mass uprising within South Africa. 
Initially it was the Black middle-class liberals who led the African National Congress (ANC) that seemed to offer hope for change inside South Africa. About 10 percent of the Black population were middle class, including professionals, intellectuals and small and medium business owners. Apartheid limited their careers, denied them educational opportunities, excluded them from power and targeted their political leaders. Despite this, they tended to be moderate, having the goal of ruling over the exploitative system of South African capitalism themselves rather than challenging it. 
The Black middle class was extremely weak in relation to the white ruling class. The ANC’s turn to guerrilla struggle, a suicide mission against the ruthless apartheid state, reflected this powerlessness. The mass of Black workers, on the other hand, could shut down the engines of the economy. As workers’ struggles developed, the ANC increasingly leaned on the strength of organised workers but continued to represent the interests of the Black middle classes. A trade union newspaper, Workers’ Unity, summed up the tension in 1979: “Who will rule South Africa – the workers or the capitalists? Will our revolution against apartheid also bring an end to poverty and exploitation?”. 
In 1973, a massive strike wave began in the eastern city of Durban, at the Coronation Brick and Tile Works. A report by the Institute for Industrial Education in 1974 contains this recollection: “Not one man from the main plant ignored the call to strike ... they were chanting ‘Filimuntu Ufesadikiza’, meaning ‘Man is dead but his spirit still lives’”.
Their fighting spirit spread. Workers on the docks, in manufacturing and in textiles joined the fray. Solidarity developed between Indian, “Coloured” and Black workers in many factories, despite attempts to keep them apart. In the Hammarsdale industrial area, strikes became general, and workers formed a single, unified coordinating body to run the town. Wages were the key issue everywhere; they were so low that workers demanded they be doubled or trebled. The strikes were illegal, so every dispute became a showdown between the working class and the apartheid state. 
Black trade unions continued to grow in the mid-1970s, winning recognition and increased wages. The workers of Durban had sounded apartheid’s death knell, and it rang in the ears of the system’s apologists. “I am not a revolutionary”, said the Zulu chief minister of the Kwazulu Natal Bantustan and a collaborator with the apartheid state in 1976, “but I see a revolution coming”. 
The next conflagration was started by children in June 1976. The school students of Soweto, a township outside Johannesburg, called a demonstration against their schools’ adoption of Afrikaans, the language of the oppressors. Police opened fire on a crowd of more than 15,000 students. The first to die was Hector Petersen, a 13-year-old boy who was shot from behind. 
Hundreds were murdered by police, but the protests didn’t stop; they became an uprising. The students erected barricades, set vehicles alight and attacked government offices, churches and shops. The uprising spread across the country.
A group of workers on their way home to the township of Alexandra were met by student demonstrators. One pointed to the burning township and said, “If you go down there, you will see what Black power means”. Thousands of young workers joined students on the barricades. 
Many students realised they wouldn’t win through street battles alone and began to call for workers’ strikes. Workers answered with huge general strikes in the major cities. The strikes were aimed at overthrowing the whole apartheid system. A Cape Town strike pamphlet read: “The racists do not spare the bullets. Their guns try to cut down our march for freedom. But the march to freedom must not end. Reject all concessions that the racists grant us. Concessions are crumbs. We want freedom not crumbs ... Strike!”
In the following years, the anti-apartheid struggle reached its zenith. Workers struck and formed new unions, including, in 1985, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), which was allied to the ANC. School students boycotted their classes and barricaded the universities, demanding free tuition and an end to educational apartheid. In 1987, Black miners embarked on the biggest strike in South African history.
By the late 1980s, the white ruling class was in turmoil. It faced a choice between transitioning to majority rule and the very real prospect of revolution from below. Better to allow Black elites a seat at the negotiating table than risk further rebellion. 
Negotiations between Mandela and President F.W. de Klerk began in 1989. ANC leaders wanted to use the mass movement as a bargaining chip to squeeze concessions out of the whites in the interests of the emerging Black bourgeoisie. They were willing to trade away parts of the ANC program, which promised workers’ rights, wage increases, nationalisations and wealth redistribution. To them, the working class, whose militancy had forced the government to the bargaining table, were mere pawns. 
The union bureaucrats of COSATU agreed with this approach. In the early 1990s they began negotiating with the government and employers’ organisations to establish a “social contract” that would tie up strikes in state-managed bargaining in exchange for limited reforms. 
But Black workers, sensing victory at last, had other ideas. After Mandela’s release from prison, townships across the country went into open revolt. Workers unleashed their fury on the corrupt Black Bantustan leaders who had spent decades collaborating with the regime. Ciskei’s president-for-life, Lennox Sebe, was overthrown. The president of Gazankulu went into hiding. The northern Bantustan of Venda erupted into a general strike, with workers demanding better pay and that their nominally “independent” state be reincorporated into a free South Africa. On top of the township revolts, the strike rate shot up as workers downed tools across multiple industries.
The government tried to use the negotiations to calm things down. Before he had granted a single concession to the movement, de Klerk demanded that Mandela call off protests and suspend the armed struggle. Mandela agreed without any debate among ANC members. In the same vein, one of COSATU’s affiliate unions, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, called off a planned strike in August 1990 that 80 percent of its members had voted for.
While the negotiations dragged on, the government played its last card: brute force. De Klerk sent the police, army and right-wing paramilitary groups into the townships to put down the rebellions. He collaborated with Buthelezi’s Zulu nationalist party, Inkatha, which slaughtered people in the streets of Kwazulu Natal. The South African Communist Party (SACP), for years the loyal shadow of the ANC, urged workers not to strike lest they contribute to the “violence in the country”. This was a betrayal—a general strike could have disrupted Inkatha and the government forces, by uniting Black workers across the ethnic divisions stoked by Bantustan leaders.
Thanks to COSATU, the ANC and the SACP, the strike wave collapsed by the end of 1990, strengthening the government’s hand. Mandela’s program for post-apartheid South Africa became even more moderate. In July 1991 he assured the US Congress that the ANC “held no ideological position that dictates it must adopt a policy of nationalisation”. He consoled the “monopolists”, reassuring them that “as investors in a post-apartheid South Africa you will need to be confident about your capital and a general climate of peace and stability”. To South Africa’s political elites, he promised a power-sharing “government of national unity” regardless of election outcomes. 
Unfortunately, no organised political force existed to the left of the ANC that could press working class struggle forward and demand serious economic reforms and redistribution. The SACP, for its part, supported Mandela’s sell-outs. 
In 1994, South Africa held its first democratic elections. The ANC won an overwhelming victory, and apartheid laws were scrapped. But 1994 was not a revolution. It represented a compromise between the Afrikaner ruling class and the emerging Black elites: the latter promised not to touch white wealth so long as the ANC could rule South Africa. Despite the decisive role played by militant Black workers in the fall of apartheid, the new government did little to improve their dire economic situation.
Today, most Blacks continue to live in poverty while a layer of Black elites has enriched itself. White faces no longer crowd out the halls of power, but there is still an intense concentration of wealth in white hands. 
The struggle against racism and exploitation in South Africa is far from over. Now, as in 1990, the Black working class remains the only force capable of winning true freedom.

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