UK transphobe Kellie-Jay Keen—aka Posie Parker—was sent packing from Australia and New Zealand last month after her events were dogged, and outnumbered, by protesters.
While her tour was pitched as a series of “women’s rights” gatherings, her events are virulently transphobic, and have in the past featured right-wing speakers and attendees from groups such as the Proud Boys and the fascist British National Party. 
Keen has built her brand by appearing on far-right talk shows and podcasts, and working alongside some of the most sexist anti-abortion political pressure groups. Her events bring together Christian conservatives, fascist groups and transphobic feminists.
Fortunately, a successful campaign of protests organised by the National Union of Students LGBTI Department and LGBTI and socialist activists around the country stymied her agenda in Australia. 
After Keen’s tour was outnumbered by protesters in Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth, a group of twenty neo-Nazis attended Keen’s Melbourne event near the Victorian Parliament. 
In their own words, they aimed to “act as a vanguard for a protest against the constant paedophilic agenda being forced upon our children and our people”, and declared: “the only solution to this sickness is White Revolution!” The Nazis marched around the edge of Keen’s rally performing the Hitler salute.
The fallout was substantial. The presence of Victorian Liberal MP Moira Deeming at the event sent the Liberals into a spin. Leader John Pesutto attempted to expel her from the party room, citing not only her decision to stay after the neo-Nazis arrived, but her presence at the transphobic event itself. The right wing of the party managed to defeat the expulsion attempt, but Deeming was still suspended for nine months. 
The rally pulled at internal tensions in the party—between the socially reactionary freaks who now make up a large part of the membership, and the moderates who want the party to focus on supporting businesses rather than fighting the culture wars. 
The ramifications have not been limited to the Liberal Party. 
As recently as the start of this year, there were indications that the Labor state government still intended to pursue its religious discrimination bill, which would entrench the right of employers to discriminate against transgender workers. The future of this bill now seems uncertain.
A fortnight after Keen’s event, Victorian Trades Hall backed a big demonstration for Trans Day of Visibility. This was perhaps the largest ever demonstration for trans rights in Australia, with 5,000 joining the Melbourne rally to oppose the far right and declare their support for trans people.
Initially, a request for union backing for the rally against Keen was firmly rejected. After the success of the protest, the widespread anger at the presence of the far right, and the increased spotlight on Keen, the unions changed their tune and backed a fantastic mass demonstration. Thousands of people who were not at the first demonstration were moved by it to act.
The results for the anti-trans movement were dismal. Keen’s tour went from being described by the press as a “women’s rights event”, to a “controversial women’s rights event”, to, finally, and correctly, a far-right event. Her subsequent appearances in Hobart and Canberra were met with larger protests, and culminated in her being driven out of Auckland by a crowd of thousands. 
Any plausible deniability regarding the link between anti-trans activism and right-wing politics was shattered. It’s clear that anti-trans activists, even those who are feminists, are engaged in a campaign against oppressed people and are organising in connection with the right. 
Importantly, the protests were a galvanising experience for participants. Hundreds of mostly young LGBTI people stood together against the right-wing transphobes and ruined Keen’s tour. 
All these outcomes show the importance of the left continuing to organise protests against the right’s anti-trans bigotry. 
Other strategies were floated—such as teaming up with more conservative forces to try to get Keen’s visa cancelled, organising something non-confrontational and disconnected from Keen’s tour elsewhere, and trying to appeal to some of the bigots not to be bigoted. None would have led to the success achieved by the campaign of protests. 
Rowdy protests around the country, especially in Melbourne, have put paid to Keen’s pretences of being some concerned women’s rights activist, sent the Liberals into a spin, involved many people in protest action, and drawn broader forces into mobilising in defence of trans rights. 
We know that the far right is using transphobia to build its ranks. Often, the lead anti-trans activists couch their project in faux concern for women, gays and lesbians. The events of the last few weeks have shown up that lie, with society’s most virulent sexists backing Keen's tour, and our own domestic anti-trans campaigner Mark Latham spewing homophobic bile on twitter. 
The biggest transphobes are also the biggest haters of women and gay people. Campaigning that takes up transphobia as a feature of contemporary far-right politics, and which links trans oppression with women’s and gay oppression, is effective. The foundation for campaigns such as the one against Keen's tour is the socialist left, and building this left will be essential in the fight against the right.

Grace Hill

How transphobe Posie Parker was defeated

Socialist Alternative and the National Union of Students

With the vibe today being one of corporate promotions, patronising advertising and soulless study spaces, it can be hard to believe that Australian university campuses in the late 1960s and 1970s were noted for their rebellious students and the decisive role they played in the campaign to stop Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War.
The radical mood of the late 1960s came after a period of relative conservatism. The prosperity of the postwar boom was in part secured by a ruling-class onslaught against the trade unions through the 1940s and 1950s, leading to industrial and political defeats for the working class. The Liberal Party dominated federal politics, and this conservatism was reflected on campuses. 
Throughout the 1950s, university administrators accelerated their campaigns of censorship and attacks on dissidents, right-wing religious clubs grew, and the campus left shrunk. Left-wing activists stuck out like sore thumbs against the prevailing mood of conservative apoliticism. 
In September 1966, a poll in Sydney University’s student paper, Honi Soit, showed that 68 percent supported sending troops to Vietnam. A 1968 survey at Adelaide’s Flinders University, in later years a hotbed of radicalism, found that only 8 percent of students opposed the war, 45 percent attended church, and 46 percent were so socially conservative that they opposed premarital sex.
However, conservatism is never permanent nor homogeneous. Tensions built up beneath the surface. The unequal distribution of fruits of the postwar economic boom was highly visible, and low unemployment contributed to increased confidence from sections of the working class to push for better pay and conditions. The youth railed against the suffocating conservative culture, developing a cynicism toward mainstream politics and an attraction to countercultural music and art. 
As Australian capitalists backed expanding the university sector to secure for themselves a larger layer of better skilled workers and managers, greater numbers of students from a wider range of socioeconomic backgrounds flooded the campuses. Old campus facilities struggled with the influx, and students increasingly found themselves chafing against academic and social constraints.
Students’ ideas shifted more widely as the post-WWII vision of a world led by the victorious Allies, without racism and totalitarianism, conflicted with the reality of continued racism and imperialism. Anti-colonial movements, and the civil rights movement in the US, sparked anti-racism campaigns in Australia against South African apartheid and racist discrimination against Asian migrants and Aboriginal people. Through trade union anti-racist activity, students came into contact with militant workers, sometimes for the first time. 
While positive, these early years of student activism had limitations. The prevailing politics were quite moralistic and liberal, sometimes militant but with significant anti-radical sentiments, and mostly aimed at achieving change within the system. Despite these shortcomings, this early activity was important for the future anti-Vietnam War movement, as it began the process of students breaking from the conservative status quo, starting to think of themselves as some kind of social force, and began the process of radicalisation for some participants.
The anti-Vietnam War movement did not begin on campuses. It started with moderate organisations like Save Our Sons—concerned mothers against the war—as well as the Communist Party, some trade unions and various peaceniks. Students started to take it up as an issue in 1964, when Menzies’ National Services Act brought in conscription. The law required all 20-year-olds to register and serve overseas if called up. 
The first student protests were mostly small and relatively passive, but the war became a national campus issue in early 1966 with Prime Minister Harold Holt’s announcement that 500 conscripts would be sent to Vietnam. There were mass demonstrations in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, with heavy arrests, burning of draft cards, and Labor clubs (distinct from ALP clubs, these were home to Labor members but also socialists and communists) collecting medical funds for Vietnam.
That year was a turning point. The 1966 election drew the focus of many activists and campaign groups, with great hopes that a Labor victory would put an end to the war. During the election campaign, Labor leader Arthur Calwell campaigned against conscription and Australian involvement in the war. Save Our Sons and the campus-based Youth Campaign Against Conscription campaigned hard for Labor. But Calwell was smashed in the election, with Labor’s vote falling to its lowest level since the 1930s.
Labor responded to the loss by moving to the right. Calwell was dumped as leader and replaced by the “modernising” right-winger Gough Whitlam, an enthusiastic supporter of the US alliance. At Whitlam’s urging, the 1967 federal ALP conference dropped any call for the immediate withdrawal of conscripts from Vietnam. Jim Cairns, the leading figure in the parliamentary left faction, acquiesced in Whitlam’s rightward shift. 
This shattering defeat shocked activists and proved a turning point for the anti-war movement. Some were demoralised—the Youth Campaign Against Conscription group essentially disappeared—but the futility of ending conscription through elections, as well as the horrors of the war, shifted a minority leftward and opened a space for radical politics.
Student activists grew more radical, Labor clubs and student meetings voting to send aid, or defend the right to send aid, to the National Liberation Front (NLF), which was of course Australia’s enemy in the war. Sizeable protests greeted the visit of South Vietnamese dictator Air Vice-Marshal Ky to Australia at the end of 1966, with open support expressed for the NLF. 
Radical arguments that had been marginal began to be taken up more widely. For instance, at the start of 1965, the Australian Labor Student Federation (a forum for ALP and Communist collaboration) conference in Canberra had debated supporting a protest against the war in which the mood was anti-war, but moderates won the argument against the left not to support the NLF, willing to offer only “conditional” support. 
By the 1967 conference, the terrain had shifted and radical left intervention was more successful, the conference now supporting initiation of war against the US rather than “merely reacting to US offences”. Albert Langer, the spokesperson for the Maoist Worker-Student Alliance at Melbourne’s Monash University, commented that the political climate at Monash had shifted in the late 1960s to the degree that now to be a radical meant to collect money for military aid to the NLF, whereas to be a moderate meant collecting funds only for medical aid.
January 1968 marked a turning point in the war. That month, the Tet offensive, a coordinated surprise attack by 80,000 Vietnamese fighters against more than 100 US-controlled cities and bases, proved to be a humiliating political defeat for the US. While not militarily successful, the offensive made clear that the US and its allies were fighting a mass popular mobilisation. And it added to the sense in the West that the war was becoming increasingly unwinnable. Popular opposition on the streets of the US and inside the US armed forces surged.
Radical events elsewhere fed into the Australian movement. In Europe, student protesters had played a key role in challenging repressive Stalinist regimes. In April, riots broke out in more than 100 American cities after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. In Paris, left-wing students protests sparked what was, at the time, the largest general strike in history.
Australian student papers published articles about the tactics and debates in the student movement internationally, and to many activists, world revolution seemed truly possible. Students engaged in mass occupations, confrontations with police and wild street protests against the war, and to improve their conditions on campuses. 
Despite warnings that radical action would put off the rest of society, support for the war continued to decline. The drawn-out and futile nature of the war, combined with rising industrial militancy and concerted youth resistance, was a potent mix. The workers’ movement drew inspiration from the students, and the politics of the student movement in Australia was informed by rising worker struggle.
Numerically, the high point for the anti-war movement came in the early 1970s, with the mass Moratorium marches. While the radical students were participants, it wasn’t possible for them to wrest political leadership from the more moderate leaders such as Cairns. However, they did play an important role in shifting the terrain leftward—in order to retain control, the moderates had to accept slogans like “stop work to stop the war” rather than simply “stop bombing”, and some groups of workers did leave work to participate in the marches.
Out of this process came the development of a new student left, which included Maoists, Anarchists, Trotskyists and groups like Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and the Revolutionary Communist Club at Monash—a forerunner of Socialist Alternative.
SDS described itself as an organisation with “no ideology” that “operates as a federation of issue-oriented committees, each acting on its own action-programme, relating the particular project to the democratic-humanitarian-individualist philosophy”. Essentially it was a radical liberal group without a coherent, radical critique of capitalist society. While it was positive that many involved in SDS rejected the Stalinist states’ claim to communism, their members swung from seeing students as a replacement for the working class, to overemphasising cultural nonconformity and lifestylism. This didn’t provide the political tools necessary to understand and respond to the eventual decline of the movement, nor the election of a Whitlam government that took up left rhetoric.
Anarchists, who had been most substantial in Brisbane, also had political limitations that hindered how much they could make of the radicalisation. Divergent politics under the anarchist umbrella resulted in lots of small, short-lived groups that had difficulty coordinating their ideas and activities, which eventually led to splits and degeneration.
The Maoists has success attracting student leaders after the 1966 ALP defeat. They had the greatest influence of any current on the student movement, especially in Melbourne and Adelaide. They were very enthusiastic about confrontation with the police, and rhetorically against moderates. However, their support for Stalinist regimes alienated some of their potential audience. Their positions on women and gay rights were also appalling—one newsletter inviting members to a party instructed them to “BYO birds”—and their analysis of Australia as colonially oppressed led them to adopt a bizarre variety of nationalism. The Maoists kept up their macho physical confrontationist tactics almost as a principle, and eventually, through various twists and turns and misadventures, lost most of their membership and, with it, the chance to build a lasting left current out of the radicalisation.
Prior to the upsurge, the Australian Trotskyist movement was very small and overshadowed by the Communist Party. Sydney anti-war activism gave birth to Trotskyist youth group Resistance. Into the ’70s, when the Maoists had declined as a force at Monash, the Revolutionary Communist club eclipsed them to become the main far-left group on campus, leading the long occupation in 1974 around issues of assessment and student control. They radicalised and recruited a small layer of members, laying the basis for Socialist Alternative today. 
This period holds important lessons for activists today. First, despite long periods when radical politics are marginal, politicisations can happen and happen quickly. Capitalism causes wars, racism and economic pressures, which upend people’s expectations and lead them to lose confidence in the system and take left-wing ideas more seriously. 
Secondly, students can play an important role when social upheavals do happen. Having a radical left presence among them is therefore strategically important for any organisation committed to radical change. However, it was inevitable that the student movement would eventually recede, given students’ inability to challenge the capitalist class on their own. This means that only orienting to students is not sufficient.
Thirdly, organisation matters. When the campus mood became more radical, groups that already had a foothold were at an advantage, and the types of political groups built, or not built, left a legacy. The success of the Maoists was, in the end, a negative, as their political problems prevented them from building a lasting student left. 
The independent Marxist and Trotskyist groups went into this period with no or very small groups, which limited the extent to which they could take advantage of the period, although they did recruit key activists who laid the basis for future radical left organisation in Australia. Had a serious, non-Stalinist, Marxist organisation existed nationally before the eruption of the student movement, more could have been built politically out of the radicalisation. 
The colourful history of the Vietnam era should therefore serve not only as a source of inspiration today but also as a pointed lesson about the responsibility of radicals to build up their support in advance of the next eruption of discontent and struggle.

Students in the anti-Vietnam-war movement in Australia

The scale of the climate crisis is driving a renewed interest in anti-capitalist politics, especially among young people. It is self-evident that radical action is needed to shut down the fossil fuel industry and reverse global warming and that, without it, the future of humanity is bleak. 
But not all anti-capitalist politics are created equal. Despite a convincing veneer, anarchism fails to offer a radical alternative to capitalist environmental destruction. It provides no guide to defeating capitalist power, nor an effective strategy for reorganising society in a sustainable way. 
There are many varieties of anarchism. Two that primarily concern themselves with the environment are “green anarchism” and the ideas of Murray Bookchin. 
Green anarchism is famous for its nihilism, primitivism and anti-civilisation perspective. John Zerzan, one of the most prominent anarcho-primitivist authors, argues that civilisation, technology and specialised labour are at the root of society’s tendency toward environmental destruction. Zerzan wrote that human domination of nature was “set in motion 10,000 years ago, when our ancestors began to domesticate animals and plants. In the 400 generations of human existence since then, all of natural life has been penetrated and colonized at the deepest levels”. Civilisation, he writes, “has always been imposed, and necessitates continual conquest and repression”. The solution? “Technology and its accomplice, culture, must be met by a resolute autonomy and refusal that looks at the whole span of human presence and rejects all dimensions of captivity and destruction.”
Zerzan argues that civilisation must be ended, and humans must look back to gatherer-hunter societies in order to restore balance with the natural world and to end human alienation from nature. Undifferentiated human civilisation, not capitalism in particular, is to blame, and as such we all share collective culpability for the environmental crisis. Modern medicine, computers and the production of anything on a large scale: all of it must be destroyed or reversed to save our species. 
The founder of anarchist social ecology, Murray Bookchin, provides a less absurd anarchist perspective. His social ecology theory centres on tensions within modern society as the cause of environmental destruction, but tensions that arise as a result of particular characteristics of society, rather than its basic structure of class domination. These include the oppressive hierarchies of class, sexism or ageism, or the tendency of capitalism to concentrate and centralise production. In Post-Scarcity Anarchism, for example, Bookchin wrote:
“A century ago it would have been possible to regard air pollution and water contamination as the result of the self-seeking activities of industrial barons and bureaucrats. Today, this moral explanation would be a gross oversimplification ... a more serious problem than the attitude of the owners is the size of the firms themselves—their enormous proportions, their location in a particular region, their density with respect to a community or waterway, their requirements for raw materials and water, and their role in the national division of labor.” So it is the scale of capitalist production, rather than its subordination to profit, that for Bookchin is the key problem. 
This reflects anarchism’s tendency towards liberalism. Bookchin builds on the work of the 19th century Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, whose theory of mutual aid put forward an alternative, liberal view of history against Marx’s historical materialism. Rather than history being shaped by class struggle, Kropotkin argued, it was a struggle between hierarchy, authority and centralisation on the one hand, and institutions of mutual aid representing freedom on the other. Kropotkin was a supporter of working-class struggle but saw the roots of domination not necessarily being exploitation and ruling class power, but people’s acceptance of authority and resulting lack of self-reliance. Kropotkin held up the peasant commune as an example of a cooperative alternative, in counter-position to workers’ power.
Marxism has an entirely different view of the causes of environmental destruction and the action needed to end it. In Capital, Marx argued that the relationship between humans and the natural world is mediated by labour: human labour is, “first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces that belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement, he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way, he simultaneously changes his own nature”.
In primitive communist societies, human labour was collective and voluntary. The emergence of social classes a few thousand years ago, which created a divide between labourers and a non-labouring class that controlled the process and products of labour, changed people’s relationship with their labour, and therefore also with nature. Both became alienated.
Human society thus became a more and more destructive force, and with the advent of capitalism, this became catastrophic. Productive powers unimaginable generations ago have been unleashed, creating enormous potential for human freedom. But the subordination of these powers to the profit motive causes terrible harm, both to people and to the environment they depend on for survival. Today, environmental destruction threatens the lives of millions of people.
Marxism identifies the culprits of climate change as the capitalist class, the economically and politically powerful minority that orders society according to the logic of capital accumulation and their own enrichment. Capitalists control the coal mines, the factories and the transport systems, operating them in the most profitable way possible regardless of the harm done to the planet. Competition dictates that they put profit ahead of all else, which, predictably, leads to human and environmental disaster. 
Marxists’ and anarchists’ different understandings of the cause of environmental destruction leads to different strategies to end it. For Marxists, the working class is the only social force with the power to and interest in challenging the power of the capitalist class and defeating it. Capitalism has brought them into a huge global network, in which workers’ labour is linked together in a complex chain. To be effective, workers’ struggle must ultimately be collective and international. 
Workers can’t establish a new exploitative society, because to win power they must take collective control of production. The factories, laboratories and power plants that keep society running cannot be operated by individuals, but require mass cooperation to function. Because of this, workers’ struggle has a tendency towards democracy—collective control ensures collective participation, without which the workers’ movement is weakened. 
Workers’ victory requires workers’ ascension to political power, via the overthrow of the capitalist state and its replacement with a state based on workers’ own democratic institutions. This is required both to combat inevitable counter-revolution and to undertake the task considered impossible by anarchists—democratisation of all human labour. Unlike a capitalist state, which reinforces the illegitimate authority of a minority over the majority, this state is one based on workers’ democratic institutions and exists to impose the authority of the majority—a legitimate authority—over society. 
Contrast this with the solution proposed by the green anarchists: “uncivilising”. To change the world, grow your own food, cease adherence to social norms and give up “civilising” influences on your life. This strategy doesn’t challenge the state or capitalist power. 
Bookchin famously critiqued this lifestyle-ist individualism, but fails to put forward a viable alternative strategy. He regards workers’ revolution as impossible because, in his view, workers have a stake in maintaining capitalism. “The proletariat,” he writes, “like its plebeian counterpart in the ancient world, shares actively in a system that sees its greatest threat from a diffuse populace of intellectuals, urban dwellers, feminists, gays, environmentalists—in short, a trans-class “people” that still expresses the Utopian ideals of democratic revolutions long passed”.
He argued that his experience in the workers’ movement led him to conclude that what Marx saw as the possibility for workers’ power in fact reflected their inability to overthrow the system: “The workers’ movement never really had a revolutionary potential. The factory, which is supposed to organise the workers..., mobilise them, and instil in them the class consciousness that is to stem out of a conflict between wage labour and capital had in fact developed habits of mind of the worker ... that serve in fact to assimilate the worker to the work ethic, to the industrial routine, to hierarchical forms of organisation, and that no matter how compellingly Marx had argued that such a movement could have revolutionary consequences, in fact, such a movement could have nothing but a purely adaptive function, an adjunct to the capitalist system itself”. 
Bookchin rejects the revolutionary role of the working class, a position common to the anarchist tradition. His vision of an alternative society is thus little more than a scaled-down, decentralised series of municipalities, rather than global democratisation of labour and production. The alternative “diffuse populace” he looked to has no comparable social power to that of the proletariat and lacks the characteristics to make it an inherently collective class. While Bookchin correctly critiques lifestyle anarchism, focusing on the “diffuse populace” is itself a version of individualism, the problem that underpins lifestyle-ism. 
Rejection of the working class’s revolutionary role also underpins another common characteristic of anarchism: a fixation on direct action, carried out by relatively small groups. For Marxists, direct action is one tactic of many which can be used to achieve an objective, ultimately workers’ power. For anarchists, it’s both tactic and objective. By refusing to acknowledge authority, and expressing that through direct action, you deny it legitimacy and build your own strength.
One of the most active green anarchist groups, Earth First, made its name scaling trees to prevent logging, even sometimes driving metal spikes into the trunks, injuring workers who cut and processed the wood. The masses get the privilege of watching the spectacle and maybe being radicalised by it—if they aren’t caught in the crossfire. This action is as important as mass action by workers, as far as most anarchists are concerned. Even those anarchists who support unions and strikes, without an orientation to achieving workers’ power, frequently alienate potential allies and provoke state repression without any means of defence. Their orientation encourages a tendency to dismiss the mass of workers as hopelessly conservative or in need to enlightenment from above. Anarchist luminary Emma Goldman expressed it best: “Always, at every period, the few were the banner bearers of a great idea, of liberating effort. Not so the mass, the leaden weight of which does not let it move ... the majority cares little for ideals or integrity. What it craves is display”.
The features of the climate crisis include huge deforestation, the dependence of all essential production on the fossil fuel industry and rising sea levels threatening hundreds of millions of people. The profits of every capitalist, even the “green” ones, depend in some way on fossil fuel energy, fossil fuel-powered transit and on every part of the natural world being treated as an exploitable resource. 
Once the capitalists have been defeated, a huge feat of global cooperation will be necessary so that people’s needs can be met in a sustainable way. We’ll need to redistribute existing resources to the world’s poorest, and also reorganise and rebuild agriculture, transport, energy and construction on a whole new basis. This means using the existing global production capability, but for a different purpose. Nothing short of global proletarian cooperation, and subsuming the whole world under proletarian control, will suffice to make this a reality. Marxism is the politics of working-class power that provides a road map to this goal. Anarchism can offer only the non-solutions of localism, elitist minority action, rejection of the possibility of democratising the human relationship with nature on a mass scale and, most damningly, opposition to the democratic rule of the workers.

Marxism vs anarchism: how can we save the environment?

Students already forced to contend with online learning, teaching staff cuts, and the loss in many cases of their own jobs, are now being threatened with the cancellation of government support for their university places if they struggle academically. 
Under Liberal education minister Dan Tehan’s proposal, those who fail half of their subjects in their first year of a university course will either have to abandon the course, switch degrees, or pay full fees, the latter being impossible for most students, even before Tehan’s June announcement of massive fee hikes for many courses. 
As any student will tell you, it is not uncommon to have a semester that is a write-off due to factors beyond your control. Whether it’s having to work long hours while studying in order to make ends meet, or being forced to enrol full time in order to access the pittance that is Youth Allowance when a part time load would be more appropriate, study often suffers because of the lack of adequate financial support for students. Added to this are the extensive pandemic-related job-losses, high rents and low wages that students are subject to. These students will be faced with being booted out of university unless they have rich parents who are willing to fund them to finish their degrees. 
Tehan argues that this is for students’ own good, as it will stop them accruing large debts for unsuccessful study. But it’s hard to take those concerns seriously, coming from the guy who plans to more than double the debt burden for arts students from next year. If he wanted to reduce unecessary student debt, he could start with reversing these attacks.
The university system functions primarily to serve the needs of industry, by churning out graduates with skills that are required by businesses. The Liberals have used the COVID-19 crisis to force univerisities further down this road, by increasing the cost to students of courses deemed undesirable by industry. 
Penalising students who are at risk of not graduating on time or who are struggling with their studies is part of the same process of cutting all possible fat out of the education system and producing a leaner, meaner, neoliberal machine. And a performance-based funding model is part of the long-term Liberal dream of a fully individualised market system with more up-front fee payers.
The obvious solution to student debt is to cancel it, and stop creating more. Education should be provided by the government, funded through taxes on the corporations that benefit from the skilled workforce universities provide. Students should also be supported during their time at university – both academically and financially – so that they can make the most of their education and so that poor students aren’t disadvantaged as they are in the current system. But while these solutions might be obvious, they won’t be a reality because the run counter to the logic of profit-obsessed capitalism. 
To defend ourselves against these attacks, and to push for more funding and better student welfare, we’ll need an uncompromising campaign against the Liberals’ attacks as well as the attacks on students carried out by university administrations at the local level. We’ll need campus student unions and the National Union of Students to adopt an activist orientation, and to commit to mobilising as many students as possible in defence of their rights. We’ll need a combative political strategy, as hostile to the Liberals and bosses as they are to us. The first small step in this direction is the national student protest against Tehan’s reforms on 28 August. Details can be found <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/709465449817701/">here</a>.

The Liberals' latest university reform: one more attack on students

Despite all the gains of the women’s liberation movement, sexism remains widespread. The latest act of bastardry is the awarding of an Order of Australia to right wing sex therapist and honorary incel Bettina Arndt. Arndt bemoans the “myth” of gendered violence and advocates for its real victims: men. She argues it is young women’s responsibility to “behave sensibly and not exploit their seductive power to ruin the lives of men” by objecting to sexual assault. She recently claimed a university dating guide, which supports women’s right to say no to men, was teaching women to be “uncaring, demanding bitches”. Far from being condemned by our supposedly enlightened, modern society, Arndt has been honoured for her “significant service ... to gender equity”.
Arndt’s veneration attests to the fact that sexism is not gradually slipping away as society inevitably advances and becomes more enlightened. Degrading sexist treatment and second-class social status continue to pervade every aspect of women’s lives, from birth to death. This is no accident; it is part of the capitalist system.
At the most basic level, sexism is very profitable. Hundreds of millions of dollars are made every year by industries that exploit women’s insecurities. The beauty industry is worth $6.5 billion annually in Australia, and Australians are expected to spend $452.5 million on weight loss products this financial year. Women feeling anguish about their appearance is, for capitalists, not a social problem but a lucrative business opportunity.
The profit motive goes deeper than this. Capitalism functions because most of us go to work each day and make or do something for a boss. Workers are paid less than the value of what they produce, and bosses keep the rest, some of which becomes profit. Inevitably then, capitalists are interested in people working as cheaply and as hard as possible. A compliant and subservient workforce is the holy grail of capitalist profitability, and a workforce in which half the workers accept lower pay and worse conditions – as women do – is better yet. 
The systematic underpayment of women saves capitalists billions. According to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, full time working women earn 14 percent less than their male counterparts, or $241.50 per week based on average full-time earnings. This means, on average, capitalists make $12,558 more per year from each full time woman worker than from the equivalent male. 
Women’s lower wages are in part due to the concentration of women in low-paid industries, such as cleaning, child care, education, health care, retail and hospitality. But even across a variety of qualifications and at a relatively equal stage of life, like the end of formal education, women are worse off. Starting salaries for women university graduates are still 4.8 percent less than for men, and 14.6 percent lower for those with postgraduate (coursework) qualifications.
The caring responsibilities that disproportionately fall on women, including child care and care for the elderly, mean that women are more likely than men to be in casual or part time work. This means the gender pay gap between all employed woman and all employed men is considerably larger than that between full time workers. 
Women are also more likely to take time off work after the birth of a child, which has significant implications for their long term earning capacity. Women end their working lives in Australia, for example, with an average 42 percent less superannuation than their male counterparts. 
Women’s unequal position at work has another advantage for the capitalist class: it creates a division within the working class. Historically, the idea that women don’t belong in paid work, that they’re taking men’s jobs, that they are less reliable or competent than men or that they are willing to accept low wages and bad conditions, has generated hostility to women workers and caused many women to stay out of paid work. This has changed, but the idea that women are responsible for both paid work and child rearing or other domestic demands in a way that men are not, still persists. 
However it is justified, the existence of inequality between any groups of workers undermines the potential of workers to unite and use their collective power to challenge their boss and win better conditions. Where it doesn’t foster outright hostility, it creates a social reality that obscures class position and identification with other aspects of social and economic status. 
This is why divide and rule has been the stock in trade for the powerful throughout the history of capitalism. Sexism both undermines the strength of the working class as a whole and makes women workers less confident to demand a pay rise or otherwise stand up to the boss, both of which benefit the capitalist class. 
Sexism at work connects with and reinforces another major capitalist institution responsible for women’s oppression: the family. The family has an important economic function, which is to ensure a healthy and willing supply of labour power to the factories, mines and call centres of capitalism. Capitalists want workers to be educated, trained to respect authority and to accept the power bosses and the state have over workers’ lives. They also want workers to reach adulthood without coming to harm so severe it would prevent them from working. The family structure, with the associated responsibilities of its various members, is a reliable mechanism for this.
The family also largely takes responsibility for the care of its elderly, very young or disabled members, which takes the pressure off governments to provide proper care services for those who need them. A 2017 study by PricewaterhouseCoopers found that women perform 72 percent of unpaid labour in Australia, most of which is child care. Measured by time, the study found that unpaid child care is the largest industry in Australia, three times the size of the financial and insurance services industry. A large and essential part of the capitalist economy operates entirely informally and at no cost to those who share in its benefits, the capitalist class. Unpaid labour in the home is equivalent to around 50 percent of GDP, according to New Zealand economist Marilyn Waring.
Low quality or run-down services create a pressure on people to care privately for children or other relatives, or else pay high fees to for-profit providers. This either directly makes money for the capitalist class or enables more tax revenue to be directed away from social services and toward subsidies for business, both of which are a win for business. Without women feeling a sense of obligation, this situation would be untenable or lead to social decay that could threaten stability and profits. 
The family is also key for initiating people into the gender roles that they will be expected to conform to throughout their lives, both in their personal lives and at work. Children are socialised to accept the unequal division of labour between men and women as natural and the expression of innate inclinations. They are expected to fulfil these roles and gain a sense of satisfaction from doing so. For women, this means being attractive to men, not being too pushy or ambitious, and being willing to perform selfless, unpaid caring labour in the home and endure the economic disadvantage and dependence that comes with it. The gendered expectations of women, that they will be non-threatening, deferential and objects of sexual desire before all else, means women have extreme difficulty asserting themselves and achieving what for men is relatively easy. This translates into disadvantage in every area of life, from education to securing employment to negotiating relationships. 
Key though it is to maintaining women’s oppression, the family is a contradictory institution. In an inhuman, profit-driven society, it offers the best chance of meaningful personal fulfilment for men and women alike. This is the case even in situations of abuse and violence, which are common in the private, largely unaccountable and tense pressure cooker environment of the family. This is an important part of the family’s longevity as a social institution. 
The family ensures a high level of social stability and inculcates a sense of responsibility in people, which is desirable from the point of view of the capitalist class, dependent as they are on a willing and reliable workforce. This is also why politicians of all stripes are so keen to promote it. 
Importantly, inequality in the home and workplace interact and reinforce each other. Low wages mean that women are more likely than men to stay at home with children. Women being at home shapes children’s understanding of women’s role and expectations about their own futures. And it makes it more difficult for women to re-enter the workforce, condemning them to part time or casual work, which in turn reinforces their subordinate position in the home.
Because it is so central to the process of profit making, sexism manifests through nearly every social institution and cultural practice of capitalism. This means it is deeply ingrained, and therefore difficult to resist or counter at an individual level. 
There are no life choices you can make that enable you to escape sexism. Whether women have kids or don’t, marry or not, live without any relationships with men, dress in skimpy clothes, gender neutral ones, or a sack – there’s no avoiding the reality of sexism. Worse still, sexism frequently causes women to blame themselves for this reality, including feeling chronically under-confident, negative about their bodies and shame about harm done to them by others.
So while it is important to be conscious of sexism and attuned to its many subtle and not so subtle manifestations, to have a society without it requires more than just awareness. The material basis of gender inequality needs to be destroyed, and those with a social and economic interest in the subordination of women need to be overthrown.
The most common view on how sexism should be combated – that of putting female faces in high places – is simply inadequate. More women world leaders and CEOs have not and will not lead to a world without sexism. Women should hold high office on a par with men, but that isn’t a strategy for liberation. For that, the causes of women’s oppression must be eliminated. This means the wider system of profit making must end, along with all its instruments of social control and oppression.

Louise O'Shea

Why sexism persists

The new year was welcomed in Canberra amid orange and grey air and a red sun so dimmed you could stare right at it. Those who had no choice but to venture out did so wearing masks, while others without masks used their arms and shirts to cover their mouths. Walking through the city centre, the wail of multiple fire alarms was incessant, almost drowning out the sounds of people coughing and vomiting in the haze. Other than that, silence.
Only upon entering the air-conditioned shopping malls was it possible to appreciate how much smoke has permeated clothes, hair and airways. These centres were full, the din of fire alarms preferable to breathing smoke. But the reprieve didn’t last long – many of these centres closed during the worst of the smoke. Multiple public places that could have provided refuge for people, including the Portrait Gallery, Questacon, Australian National University, University of Canberra, post offices, and public pools – were closed. Hospitals had to cancel medical procedures because of the effect smoke was having on their buildings and equipment. The health effects of the smoke are impossible to quantify, and may take many years to manifest. One woman has already died after going into respiratory distress shortly after arriving by plane in Canberra.
If it was any other summer, the government may have been able to weather this crisis, even benefit from it, by appealing to “national unity” and praising everyone’s bravery or stoicism. Not this year. Not in an age when the impending climate catastrophe has become undeniable, and its effects no longer simply a matter of speculation. What this summer also shows is that the effects of the climate crisis will not impact us all equally. Capitalism’s inequality permeates everything, even the air we breathe.
The logical thing to do when a city’s air quality rapidly becomes the worst in the world and dangerous to human health is to evacuate people to where the air is breathable. But leaving the city is not feasible for most people. We don’t all have the necessary money, holidays or work arrangements that permit us to take off to Hawaii whenever the mood takes us. Nor do we have second homes to retreat to or friends with large houses in far flung parts of the country.
The next best thing after evacuation would be to protect people from the smoke. But somehow in spite of the God-ordained laws of supply and demand, masks have been in short supply, with most shops running out weeks ago. On 1 January at 1am, Canberra’s air quality reading index reached 7,700, more than 38 times what is considered hazardous. Advice from ACT Health read, “Everyone should avoid all physical activity outdoors. Sensitive groups should temporarily relocate to a friend or relative living outside the affected area. If this is not possible, remain indoors and keep activity levels as low as possible”. It wasn’t until 6 January, almost a full week later, that the government deigned to send masks. A mass poisoning was taking place, but getting protective masks to Canberrans was not a priority.
Staying indoors was no protection for many people, especially those in Canberra’s infamous rental properties. Many rentals in Canberra have no insulation, do not seal, and have no air conditioning. They’re so inadequate that an estimated 42 people die in them each winter because of the cold. There’s no chance of keeping poison smoke out of houses like that. Air-conditioned public spaces initially offered some refuge, but they too gradually succumbed to smoke. Desperate renters share advice on community facebook pages, including suggesting putting wet towels over holes, vacuuming the air if you can’t afford an air filter and keeping pets inside overnight so they don’t die.
Rightly, some workplaces have shut down due to the risk posed by working in the toxic air. So far this has been driven by the companies, not the unions. But with poor air quality likely to be the new normal, businesses will not be willing to forgo profits in this way for long periods. Workers need the pro-active backing of their unions if they’re to be properly protected at work.
Fire itself is also a direct risk to Canberra, yet ACT firefighters are under-resourced. Since 2015, the union has been asking the government for 94 more firefighters, new fire stations, trucks, and upgraded training.
This is the battleground of the climate crisis – smoke, fire, flood, storms, and drought will increasingly impact major cities. Businesses will not willingly pay for safety equipment for all workers, nor close every time there’s poor air quality and continue to pay wages. Landlords will not pay for high-quality air purifiers to be installed and maintained in every home. Everywhere we turn, there will be a capitalist, landlord, or politician standing in the way of real environmental justice.
The fossil fuel companies who have made their billions from creating this hell receive $29 billion in government subsidies every year. And in the face of this deadly chaos, they are pursuing new environmentally destructive projects like the Adani Carmichael mine. This money should be used to fund renewable projects, pay volunteer firefighters, fully equip the fire fighting force, modify homes to make them fit for habitation in heat, cold, and smoke, supply masks for all, rebuild the homes lost in the fires, and much more. For a response to the crisis that isn’t a dystopic nightmare, we need to reject the politics of national unity, of “we’re all in this together”, and revive the politics of knowing and fighting our enemy.

Canberra chokes on toxic smoke

Nick Xenophon and his party, the Nick Xenophon Team (NXT), is the third force in South Australian politics, and looks set to outpoll the ALP and potentially hold the balance of power in the Senate.
As enthusiasm for the two major parties has declined, Xenophon has gained popularity by presenting himself as an alternative to traditional politics – an option for the voter who is sick and tired of professional politicians and sick of the ALP, which has been in government in South Australia for years. 
But Xenophon is every bit as much a politician as his competitors. From his start in student politics as a member of the Young Liberals, the rigged election by which he became editor of the Adelaide University student newspaper On Dit (his good conscience led him to reveal the fraud – directly after his tenure), to his lawsuit against the national student union for promotion of women’s and gay rights – Xenophon came into politics a staunch conservative. A political resumé like this is a dead giveaway that there’s nothing progressive in his “independence”. 
Though now more adept at disguising his right wing positions than in his student days, Xenophon remains right wing scum. He’s voted against marriage equality and voted to restrict the right of union reps to enter workplaces. His much lauded opposition to fee deregulation was merely on the basis that the Liberals did not yet have a mandate to implement it. He told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2015 that, for his support, the government would need to take fee deregulation to an election. 
Should the Liberals win this election, don’t expect Xenophon to oppose $100,000 degrees. Things don’t get much better when it comes to workers – the NXT praises the Fair Work Commission and supports the reduction of Sunday penalty rates for small businesses. Xenophon also supported the Liberal government’s unsuccessful effort to reintroduce the anti-union ABCC. 
Far from the picture painted by both him and his rivals of being the populist outsider, Xenophon couldn’t be more similar to his fellow parliamentarians. He’s a political insider committed to the same attacks on workers and the same worship of business. 
He had no qualms about the Liberals when they were rigging a student election to guarantee him office and he has no qualms about them now. Under vague statements about supporting South Australia and being fair lies a hardened conservative politician, itching to attack workers to deliver for his small business-owning base.

Xenophon is just another right wing politician

Workers in the South Australian public health sector have been bargaining with the state government since the middle of 2014. The workers, represented by United Voice, are demanding job security and no further hospital privatisations or outsourcing.
The state Labor government’s stalling has provoked industrial action. More than 100 workers at the Royal Adelaide Hospital braved the rain to participate in a stop-work meeting and rally on 17 April. Staff at the Repatriation General Hospital and the Flinders Medical Centre (FMC) followed suit, with 200 workers walking off the job and meeting outside FMC to demand secure work.
The Weatherill state government has given these workers reason to be worried, recently announcing the privatisation of the Repatriation Hospital and the relocation of the FMC neo-natal intensive care unit.
While crying poor as it privatises the Repatriation Hospital – which specialises in care for the elderly – and rebuffs public hospital workers fighting for pay increases, the government has announced that $10 million will be spent on a new commemorative ANZAC walking trail around Government House.
But hospital workers aren’t about to give in. They plan to take further industrial action until they get the enterprise agreement they want. One worker remarked that their strikes were about protecting the whole sector. “It’s about everyone who needs to use the hospitals.”

SA hospital workers strike

Student Voice – a coalition of students from the Flinders University Socialist Alternative club, Indigenous Students Association, Indonesian Students Association, Film Society and Social Work Society – won several key positions in a decisive victory over the combined forces of the Labor left and right in the university’s student association election, which was held in the second week of October.
The election took place in the context of the heightened Islamophobia of the past months. At Flinders, a number of Muslim women have been attacked or abused. Student Voice was the only ticket in the election that clearly stood against this. Much support for the ticket came from Muslim students on campus, who recognised Student Voice campaigners for our anti-racism activism throughout the year.
Student Voice candidates won the key positions of president, general secretary, environment officer, Indigenous officer and international student officer. Three of the six National Union of Students delegate positions were also won by Student Voice activists.
The Labor students’ campaign focused on free giveaways. By contrast, the Student Voice campaign was focused on political questions, standing against racism and the need for strong opposition to deregulation and education cuts.
It was clear that students responded positively to our argument that we need a strong, campaigning student association to stand up to the government’s attacks.

How transphobe Posie Parker was defeated

Socialist Alternative and the National Union of Students

Students in the anti-Vietnam-war movement in Australia

Marxism vs anarchism: how can we save the environment?

The Liberals' latest university reform: one more attack on students

Why sexism persists

Canberra chokes on toxic smoke

Xenophon is just another right wing politician

SA hospital workers strike

Left wins student elections at Flinders

Other Media

Shop

Manage Your Subscription

Contact Us