In the opening passage of the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx wrote of the “uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight” between rulers and ruled throughout history. Under capitalism, that fight is nowhere more evident than in the battle between bosses and workers over the length and intensity of the working day.
Anyone who has worked for a wage has participated, whether conscious of it or not, in this struggle. As workers, we generally want to limit the time we spend at work and reduce the intensity of our labour while there. Bosses want the opposite: they want us to work longer and faster. Most people have been told off by a manager for running late for a shift, taking too long on a break, going to the toilet too often or talking too much to co-workers.
Bosses don’t tell their employees off about such things just because they’re mean people. Many of them are no doubt arseholes—it is a common trait of those who exploit other people’s labour. However, their overriding concern isn’t to make other people’s working lives difficult just for the sake of it, but to maximise the profits being squeezed from them. Arsehole or not, every boss is, as Marx put it in Capital, “capital personified”. “His soul is the soul of capital ... which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks”.
A brief chat with a co-worker is a short relief from the stress and monotony of the working day. But the manager views it as money down the drain—because when it comes to work, time is money. 
Profit is capitalism’s lifeblood and is derived from the “surplus value” produced by workers’ labour. Surplus value is the value of a company’s finished products or services minus the value of the ingredients or raw materials that went into them and minus the wages paid to the workers (the value of the “labour power” that went into creating them).
For example, take a barista working in a local cafe for $32 an hour. Assume that they make 60 coffees per hour, which the cafe sells for $5 each. For each hour worked, the cafe receives $300 in revenue. Of that, the worker gets $32, and the owner gets $268. Perhaps $220 of that $268 will pay the costs of the necessary inputs: the coffee beans, electricity and water, building rental, depreciation and maintenance of the coffee machine. What remains is surplus value. 
So, of the new value created in each hour, the worker who created that value receives $32 and the boss $48—a rate of surplus value of 48/32 or 150 percent. Further deductions are required by the contradictions of capitalism—such as advertising and supervisors who keep the workers in line. After those bills are paid, what remains is the profit.
Capitalists want to minimise the portion of the total value produced that goes to workers’ wages and maximise the portion that ends up as profit. There are a few ways they can do this. 
The simplest is to extend the length of the working day. The more hours spent making coffees, the greater the absolute sum of value going to the cafe owner at the end of each day. The barista working a five-hour shift will produce only five-eighths of the surplus value they could produce in an eight-hour shift. The longer the workday, the greater the sum of surplus value and the higher the profits after accounting for other costs. (While the owner will pay more for coffee beans and electricity, the rent will be the same regardless of the hours the cafe is open.)
It’s even more profitable for the boss if they can get you to work an extra half hour or so a day without paying for it. A <a href="https://australiainstitute.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Go-Home-On-Time-Day-2023-The-Australia-Institute.pdf">2023 Australia Institute report</a>—Short Changed: Unsatisfactory working hours and unpaid overtime—found that, on average, Australian workers do 5.4 hours of unpaid overtime a week, amounting to $131 billion worth of unpaid labour a year.
Another common way to increase surplus value is by making you work harder or faster. If the barista who makes 60 coffees an hour can be forced to make 66 per hour, the effect is the same as increasing each work day by 10 percent with unpaid overtime.
The methods just described create what Marx called absolute
surplus value. They have obvious physiological and social limits to their increase—people can’t be forced to work 24 hours a day every day.
A more important way to increase surplus value is through relative
surplus value. This involves reducing the real value of what workers receive for their labour. Bosses are obviously always interested in reducing wages, but cutting them directly risks provoking mass resistance. Inflation has the effect of reducing real wages without creating such immediate resistance.
In our barista example, they agree to work for $32/hour because that is the best they can get through their negotiations with the boss. If the wages were any lower, they might look for a different job.
If the economy were to increase productivity such that our baristas could now live at more or less the same standard on a wage of $30/hour, they would have less reason to resist such a reduction. A general increase of prices while wages remain unchanged has much the same effect. It means that the benefits of greater efficiency in the economy go directly to the bosses. If the workers want a share of such increases, they have to fight for it.
Bosses are always trying to increase efficiency and productivity because every business is competing against others of the same type. And every national economy is competing again other economies worldwide. It’s a never-ending battle to maximise the surplus value (and therefore the profit) they squeeze from their workers.
More profitable businesses succeed and grow. They have more money to invest in new, productivity-enhancing machinery, to employ more workers and to organise the labour process to increase efficiency. From a capitalist perspective, it is a virtuous circle. The higher the profits, the greater the new investment, and the more surplus value is squeezed from employees each day. 
These dynamics apply to every business, no matter how big or small. In the Woolworths distribution centres where workers have been on strike, the relationship of an individual worker’s labour to the value of the products they handle appears less direct than that of a barista to their coffee. 
Nevertheless, all workers are part of a chain of production that contributes to the final value of goods—farm workers, manufacturing workers, pickers and packers, transport workers, power station workers and so on. At each point in the production process, the bosses’ goal is the same: maximise profits by getting workers to work as fast as possible for as long as possible.
Each worker in the chain will experience similar scrutiny and pressure from management to perform at 100 percent—or more—of their capacity. As soon as one productivity standard has been met, managers will consider how to increase it even further. 
So, under capitalism, no amount of profit will ever be enough—which is why economists and politicians are always focused on economic growth. If they could get away with it, bosses would have us working like people in Marx’s time, before we won things like the eight-hour day and the weekend that are now taken for granted. It’s already like that in many places, and workers are <a href="https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/trending-china/article/3277316/china-man-30-worked-104-days-1-day-dies-organ-failure-court-orders-compensation">sometimes literally</a> worked to death.
As long as capitalism exists, the battle over the working day will never cease. To reduce work hours and reduce workplace stress, we need to organise collectively. The more we do this, the more we can push back against the bosses’ ceaseless productivity drive—making clear to them that we won’t accept being treated like the robots they would prefer us to be.

James Plested

Why there is a constant battle over the working day

The <a href="https://www.vec.vic.gov.au/results/2024-council-election-results">results are in</a> from Victoria’s local council elections, which took place via postal ballot in October, and there’s some good news for socialists. Victorian Socialists (VS) ran a much bigger campaign than in the last elections in 2020, standing candidates in 78 council wards, mainly across Melbourne but in a number of regional areas too. The party’s candidates received a total of 67,296 first preference votes, up from 20,210 in 2020, with an average vote share of 10.8 percent.
Had VS achieved a result like this under the old, multi-member council ward system, it’s very likely a whole new crop of five or ten socialist councillors would have been elected. This time, though, thanks to changes initiated in 2020 by the then Labor Party minister for local government and subsequently <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/jul/20/ministers-breached-codes-in-blatant-and-extraordinary-misuse-of-public-funds-to-fuel-branch-stacking-ibac-finds">disgraced branch stacker</a> Adem Somyurek, the elections were held in single-member wards across Melbourne (with the exception of Melbourne City Council) and in many regional areas. This change was designed to make things harder for small parties like VS, and the results of this election show it worked as intended.
When two or three councillors were elected from a single (larger) ward, minor party candidates were in with a shot even when up against candidates from established parties like the Greens and Labor. In multi-member wards, two higher profile candidates could be elected, and there would still be space for a third candidate to get up. This is what happened in 2020 with VS’s Jorge Jorquera, who was elected in the Yarraville ward of Maribyrnong Council after receiving a first preference vote of just 8.8 percent.
In single-member wards, victory depends on both a high first preference vote and a decent flow of preferences from other candidates. In traditional strongholds of Labor and the Greens, this was always going to be a tough ask for socialists. 
VS went into this election with Jorquera as its sole sitting councillor. To the extent there is bad news in the party’s result this time, it’s that it couldn’t build on that total. Jorquera, unfortunately, narrowly missed out on re-election. About two hours’ drive north from Melbourne, though, in the regional town of Bendigo, VS candidate Owen Cosgriff <a href="https://x.com/6NewsAU/status/1854407601720885695">was elected</a> as the representative for Whipstick ward in the City of Greater Bendigo Council.
In a three-candidate field, Cosgriff received a first preference vote of 40.7 percent, winning with 52.7 percent after the distribution of preferences. This was a significant breakthrough for socialist politics in an area not known, <a href="https://www.bendigoadvertiser.com.au/story/7290147/inside-the-bendigo-rsls-battle-with-a-communist-trades-hall/">in recent times at least</a>, for its radicalism. 
Cosgriff told Red Flag that the result reflected the fact that “Victorian Socialists was the only progressive option on the ballot” (neither Labor nor the Greens ran a candidate against him). In addition, he said, “I was the only candidate who put forward a program of what I would attempt to do in office ... We promised concrete reforms like undoing the privatisation of aged care [and] lobbying for a commuter timetable for Bendigo trains, and we were rewarded for it”. 
Another bright spot for socialists was the re-election of Socialist Alliance’s Sue Bolton to Merri-bek Council. Bolton was first elected in 2012 off a first preference vote of 9.5 percent (in a multi-member ward) and this year received a first preference vote of 46 percent in a field of four candidates in the (single-member) Bababi Djinanang ward of Merri-bek, which covers the suburb of Fawkner and parts of North Coburg. Bolton told Red Flag that a big factor in her win was the work she has done to promote Palestine solidarity at a council level. In the last census, conducted in 2021, just under 35 percent of Fawkner residents <a href="https://www.abs.gov.au/census/find-census-data/quickstats/2021/210031237">identified as Muslim.</a>
It’s significant that, even with single-member wards stacking the odds against them, VS candidates came within striking distance of victory in several other places. In the Harvester ward of Brimbank Council (which covers the suburbs of Sunshine and Sunshine North in Melbourne’s west) <a href="https://victoriansocialists.org.au/candidates/liz-walsh-council">Liz Walsh</a>, who was the VS candidate for the Western Metro upper house region in the 2022 state election, received a first preference vote of 26.3 percent in a field of four, and ended second on 46.8 percent after the distribution of preferences. This result was particularly encouraging given that VS didn’t campaign in the area.
Other standout results include long-time marriage equality campaigner, local community activist and nurse <a href="https://victoriansocialists.org.au/candidates/cat-rose">Cat Rose</a> getting a first preference vote of 32.4 percent in Darebin Council’s West ward (in the inner-northern suburbs covering Thornbury and parts of Preston and Northcote). In a field of three, Rose finished just 36 votes behind the Greens candidate, and less than 200 votes behind Labor. Had she finished ahead of the Greens, there’s a decent chance she would have moved above Labor on preferences and been elected. At the last council election in 2020, the VS candidate in this ward (Darebin had already moved to single-member wards) got a first preference vote of 7.7 percent.
In the Bulleke-bek ward of Merri-bek Council (which covers the area immediately to the west of Sydney Road in Brunswick), VS candidate <a href="https://victoriansocialists.org.au/candidates/louisa-bassini">Louisa Bassini</a>, a community lawyer in the area of renters’ rights, came in second in a field of five candidates with 23 percent of first preference votes (behind the Greens candidate on 36.9 percent and ahead of Labor on 20 percent). Results in other wards in the area of the Victorian lower house seat of Brunswick were also well above the 8.1 percent that VS candidate Nahui Jimenez achieved there in the<a href="https://www.vec.vic.gov.au/results/state-election-results/2022-state-election-results/results-by-district/brunswick-district-results"> 2022 state election</a>.
No doubt some of the 67,296 people who voted for a VS candidate didn’t pay much attention to party affiliation. Council elections in Victoria are carried out in a way designed to depoliticise things as much as possible and encourage engagement with candidates as individuals, rather than representatives of parties or political world views. Holding elections via postal ballot contributes to this, as it precludes the possibility of party volunteers talking to voters at polling booths. And party affiliation isn’t listed next to candidates’ names on ballot papers.
VS pushed against this as much as possible. Its aim isn’t merely to get socialists elected, but to build the profile of socialist politics and to convince more people to join the socialist movement. Unlike many Labor and Liberal-aligned candidates, who (probably sensibly from a purely electoral perspective) preferred to present as “local independents” rather than associating themselves with their party brands, VS candidates put their political affiliation front and centre. Leaflets delivered by VS volunteers to voters’ homes encouraged them to “vote socialist for a council that puts people before profit”.
The main pitch to voters on these leaflets highlighted how “an out-of-control capitalist system is eroding the economic, social and environmental foundations of our society”. “We need councillors”, it went on, “who will stand up to the destructive, profit-driven agenda that dominates politics. Socialist councillors will fight for our communities, for workers and for those in need”. VS seriously campaigned in only a fraction of the 78 wards in which it stood a candidate. In those wards, which were by and large also the wards in which the party got its highest vote, it would have been hard for people to miss the socialist affiliation.
The results of this election will help to further establish VS as a serious socialist electoral alternative in Victoria. Heading into 2025 and the next federal election, the party has a growing membership and a higher profile than ever. In addition to the council campaign, VS members have this year kept up a hectic schedule of activism and organising in the Palestine solidarity campaign, rank-and-file unionism and many other areas.
In recent weeks the Murdoch press has run several hit pieces targeting the party. Most recently, the Australian <a href="https://x.com/vic_socialists/status/1857577253590401530">published an “exclusive” </a>in which it revealed that the lead VS Senate candidate, renters’ rights advocate and well-known socialist radical Jordan van den Lamb (aka <a href="https://www.instagram.com/purplepingers/">purplepingers</a>), had—in a post on the social media platform X—shockingly labelled police as “pigs” and “Nazis”. Melbourne’s Herald Sun <a href="https://x.com/vic_socialists/status/1847044199021240510">earlier called out</a> VS council candidates for, among other things, speaking at rallies in solidarity with Palestine and “calling for revolution”. This kind of attention from Murdoch’s attack dogs can only bode well for the future.
James Plested is the Victorian Socialists communications manager.

Big vote for socialists in Victorian council elections

The US election is symptomatic of a new, gloomier political reality facing those concerned with global efforts to avert climate catastrophe. Since the issue of climate change first gained widespread attention in the early 1990s, it has never been far from the centre of political debate in most Western countries. As the pace of warming has increased, and its impacts have become more visible, you might expect that it would retain that place or even gain in importance in the minds of politicians and the voting public. In the US this year, the opposite has happened.
Not even the multiple weather-related disasters the country endured during the presidential campaign could shift the dial. Hurricane Helene roared out of the Gulf of Mexico and slammed into the southern Appalachian mountains in late September with devastating winds and catastrophic flooding. Entire towns were swept away, and more than 230 people were killed. Two weeks later another major hurricane hit Florida. It didn’t matter. The climate crisis didn’t rank as highly as it previously had in <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/09/09/issues-and-the-2024-election/">polls of voters’ concerns</a>, and it was barely mentioned by Joe Biden, his replacement as Democratic Party presidential nominee Kamala Harris or Donald Trump during their campaigns.
The lack of discussion of or concern about climate change in this election wasn’t a sign that efforts to limit warming are going well. Quite the opposite. The decades of green rhetoric by politicians and the never-ending round of global climate summits have got us nowhere. Total global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, and the rate of increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere (which are the most accurate measures of lack of progress) is accelerating. 
Over time, the gulf between the rhetoric used by politicians hoping to establish their green credentials and the grim reality of a society still well and truly hooked on fossil fuels has become harder and harder to ignore. This is, no doubt, part of the explanation for the growing phenomenon of “climate apathy”. For many years now, every time an election comes around we’ve been told by supposedly progressive parties like the US Democrats and Labor in Australia that climate change is a major challenge demanding urgent action. Again and again, though, when these parties come to power they fail to do anything more than the bare minimum about it.
You might object, in the case of the Biden administration, that the green rhetoric was matched to a degree by action. To the extent that Harris sought to draw attention to climate policy at all during her campaign, it was to highlight Biden’s “trillion dollar” investment in clean energy. At the same time, though, she made clear her continuing enthusiasm for fossil fuels. She was proud, she said, that the administration had “increased domestic gas production to historic levels” and that during her time in office the US has carried out “the largest increase in domestic oil production in history”. On both counts, she had every right to brag: in the 2010s the US overtook countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia to become the largest oil and gas producer in the world, and it hasn’t looked back since.
Taking climate change seriously demands finding ways to wind down the fossil fuel economy. With something like this, you can’t “have your cake and eat it too”. However much you might invest in clean energy (and it’s true the Biden administration invested a lot), if that investment is being directly counteracted by significant increases in the production and consumption of fossil fuels, then what’s the point? 
We’ve had years of “climate wars” and “climate elections”. This time it was different. This was, when it comes to the climate, a “what’s the point?” election. We shouldn’t be overly surprised. When—despite what the scientists have been saying for decades and despite their own green rhetoric—those in power continually send the message that it’s not only okay but commendable to continue to expand the fossil fuel economy, it’s only natural that some would start to question whether climate change is really worth worrying about.
Donald Trump, of course, was only too happy to capitalise on this sentiment. Unlike the Democrats, Trump has always been very open about his enthusiasm for fossil fuels and disdain for climate science. During his campaign <a href="https://x.com/KamalaHQ/status/1852547593873526930">he promised</a> to “terminate the green new scam, one of the great scams in history”, and scoffed at the prospect of sea level rises, saying “Who the hell cares?” and joking, in <a href="https://www.rev.com/transcripts/elon-musk-and-donald-trump-interview">an interview with Elon Musk</a>, that “you’ll have more oceanfront property”.
Trump sought to link the Democrats’ climate initiatives to the inflationary wave that hit the US and much of the rest of the world in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Biden administration, he said in July in his <a href="https://www.nbcboston.com/news/national-international/read-donald-trumps-full-rnc-speech-accepting-gop-nomination/3432055/">speech to the Republican National Convention</a>, has “spent trillions of dollars on things having to do with the green new scam, and that’s caused tremendous inflationary prices”. He promised to “drill, baby, drill” to lower the cost of energy for US consumers.
The Democrats had no real answer to this. Having established that they too were enthusiasts for the “drill, baby, drill” mentality, they could hardly turn around and denounce Trump for it. So, by and large, they remained silent. This strategy, predictably, didn’t work well. While Trump supporters were thinking “What’s the point of action on climate change?”, many potential Democrat supporters were thinking “What’s the point of voting?”. Millions of those who had voted for Joe Biden in 2020 stayed home this time. The Democrats’ promise of a “Trump-lite” administration inspired few.
Last time he was in power, Trump implemented a range of policies favourable to the fossil fuel industry—including reversing or rolling back almost 100 environmental regulations related to things like carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and cars. He also withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement, a (theoretically at least) legally binding international treaty committing countries that signed up to it to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. His second term in the White House is likely to bring more of the same.
“That things ‘just go on’ is the catastrophe”, Walter Benjamin once wrote. “It is not that which is approaching but that which is.” Another four years of Trump is no new catastrophe for the planet. The catastrophe was already here. The terrifying thing is that this election will reinforce the tendency for people in countries like the US and Australia to think “What’s the point in trying to do anything about it?”

‘Drill, baby, drill’: Climate change ignored in the US election

One of the core activities of any even vaguely serious socialist organisation is recruiting people. The reason should be obvious. You can’t change the world with ideas alone. To think that you can is to be like the “valiant fellow” Karl Marx refers to in the <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/preface.htm">preface to the German Ideology</a>, one who “had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of gravity”. 
Just as you can’t protect yourself from drowning by fighting against “the illusion of gravity”, so too is it impossible to overcome capitalism with the idea of socialism. Capitalism, like gravity, exists as a reality independent of our individual ideas and intentions. We could spend our whole lives imagining, writing and talking (or, these days, creating Instagram reels) about how things could or should be different, but if we leave it at that, we’re unlikely to make even the smallest dent in the edifice of the status quo.
Ideas are important. Marx himself famously spent many years of his life researching, thinking and writing about the dynamics of capitalism and how it can be overthrown. He realised early on though that, as he put it in 1844 in his<a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm">
draft introduction to his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right</a>, “The weapon of criticism cannot ... replace criticism by weapons”, and that “material force must be overthrown by material force”.
How then to create the kind of “material force” that could pose a challenge to the capitalist system? Theory, Marx went on to say, “also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses”. If your anti-capitalism is restricted to the inside of your own head, it’s useless, but if you can join together with enough people of a similar mindset you can start to do things like organise protests, strikes and other potentially powerful “material” expressions of socialist politics.
Socialist ideas, in other words, become a material force through socialist organisation. And the bigger the organisation, the more powerful the force.
Organisations can draw on the collective knowledge and experience of their membership to educate and train new layers of activists (hence <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/britain/wibg/ch08.htm">Leon Trotsky’s comment</a> “the memory of the working class is in its party”). They can debate and test political strategies and coordinate actions to maximise their effectiveness. They can pool resources and skills to increase the reach of their organising, publicity and recruitment efforts (the capacity to regularly produce a publication like Red Flag is an example). 
It’s because they understood this that Marx and his long-time collaborator Friedrich Engels were serial joiners, and builders, of organisations. In 1847 they joined the London-based group the Communist League. The league, Engels wrote, “consisted of communities, circles, leading circles, a central committee and a congress”. It had a set of rules and produced socialist publications. Most famously, as of February 1848, it had a manifesto, written by Marx: the Manifesto of the Communist Party (more commonly known as The Communist Manifesto).
Later in their lives, in 1864, Marx and Engels helped form the International Workingmen’s Association. The International, like the Communist League before it, was a formal, membership-based organisation with a constitution, a program, various levels of leadership, regular congresses and publications. It aimed to draw together the various strands of the socialist movement in Europe into a single, cohesive and thus more powerful whole.
Marx and Engels and Co. may well have done this with a little more flair than (unfortunately) many of today’s socialist organisations can muster. The basic principles, however, remain the same. Socialists don’t want just to sit around thinking or talking about changing society; we actually want to change it. And just as in Marx’s day, the main prerequisite for that (beyond the reality of capitalist exploitation that first creates the conditions for working-class resistance) is to bring together a critical mass of like-minded people into an organisation.
Of course, you don’t need to be a Marxist to understand the importance of building political organisations. The Greens, the Labor Party, trade unions, environmental NGOs—all of them put time and resources into recruiting new members and supporters. It’s one of the ABCs of rank-and-file trade unionism, for example, that you should make notes about conversations you have with your co-workers to keep track of issues that come up and individually tailor your recruitment efforts.
The more recruitment is going on among organisations of the left like trade unions, the better. The fewer and smaller we are, the easier it is for the established institutions of capitalist society to govern in the interests of the rich and powerful. Their side is highly organised. In addition to the capitalist state, with its army of bureaucrats, its police and prisons and its many instruments of ideological control (state-funded media, the education system etc.), there’s a mass of industry peak bodies, think tanks, conservative NGOs and so on to help defend the status quo. The more disorganised and atomised our side is, the less potential there is for us to challenge that imposing edifice in any serious way.
Organisations recruit people in ways appropriate to their circumstances. Parties like the Greens can recruit in large part merely through the high profile they have in political life. That doesn’t work so much for revolutionary socialists because, for now at least, we don’t have much of a profile. The pool of people who might be open to getting involved with a revolutionary socialist organisation, with the relatively high level of commitment that entails, is also much smaller than for parties like the Greens. That’s why socialists concentrate our efforts among students (who, historically, <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/the-role-of-students-in-radical-struggles">have played a key role</a> in many radical struggles), participants in protest movements and existing trade union activists. 
Complaining, <a href="https://x.com/hierobadge/status/1842732951420940761">as some do</a>, that it’s inappropriate for socialists to try to meet and recruit people at rallies, whether opposing the genocide in Gaza or around any other issue, ends up just being an argument against socialists recruiting, full stop. Protests attract the most radical and committed layer of people in society, and these are exactly the kind of people socialists want to recruit. We don’t want to do this out of a desire to “profit from the movement” or “impose an outside agenda” or any of the other anti-socialist tropes that come up. We want to do this because—taking the question of Palestine as an example—we think building a bigger socialist movement in Australia and around the world is key to taking on the immensely powerful military, economic and ideological forces standing in the way of Palestinian liberation.
If you oppose socialist politics, and think, for example, that there’s a better way to win Palestinian liberation, then argue, organise and recruit on that basis. If you’re right, then you will hopefully be able to prove it in practice. If, instead of doing that, you just want to complain about socialists recruiting as if it is in itself something reprehensible, then (assuming you’re not actually just a reactionary aiming to defend the existing order from challenge) you’re not damaging just socialists; by casting suspicion on the idea of recruitment and organisation in general, you’re damaging the entire left.

Why socialists recruit

In scenes reminiscent of the <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/7370">S11 blockade of the World Economic Forum</a> (WEF) at Crown Casino 24 years ago to the day, thousands of anti-war and pro-Palestine protesters descended on the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre in Southbank this morning to disrupt the opening day of the Land Forces military expo. 
Land Forces <a href="https://landforces.com.au/">describes itself</a> as a “platform for interaction between defence, industry and government ... to meet, do business and discuss the opportunities and challenges facing the global land defence markets”. It might more accurately be described as a (bacon-wrapped) turducken of state-sponsored violence—a place where corporate, government and military purveyors of mass terror facilitating Israel’s genocide in Gaza can pat each other on the back and celebrate another year of profiting from death. 
The protest was organised by a coalition of groups led by <a href="https://www.instagram.com/studentsforpalestineaus/?hl=en">Students for Palestine</a> and <a href="https://www.instagram.com/disruptwars/?hl=en">Disrupt Wars</a>. “It’s outrageous that eleven months into Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which has killed more than 40,000 people, the Victorian government has welcomed one of the world’s biggest international weapons conferences into the heart of our city, supported by public funds”, Bella Beiraghi, a member of Students for Palestine at the University of Melbourne and co-chair of the rally, told Red Flag.
The protest aimed to cause as much disruption to the opening day of Land Forces as possible. On the other side—determined to ensure everything would run smoothly for the merchants of death assembling for the expo—stood a mass of heavily armed police. As if the 1,000+ Victorian contingent wasn’t enough, additional riot police were <a href="https://x.com/vic_socialists/status/1833377769184702498">seconded from NSW</a>.
As it was 24 years ago on the opening day of the WEF across the road at Crown Casino, so it was again today: a few minor skirmishes between protesters and police were enough to trigger sensationalist media reports and outrage from politicians—the same politicians, notably, who’ve expressed very little, if any, outrage about Israel’s genocide in Gaza—about supposed “protester violence”. 
Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese <a href="https://www.pm.gov.au/media/television-interview-sunrise-28">condemned protesters</a> for “throwing things at police”. Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan implied that protesters threatened community safety. She also called on state Greens MP Gabrielle de Vietri, who missed a session of parliament to attend the protest, to “hand back the keys to her office”. (On the contrary, de Vietri should be commended for attending.)
As was the case at S11, anyone at the protest this morning who saw how things unfolded will tell a very different story to the account given by the media and politicians. Whatever “protester violence” there was paled in comparison to that of the police.
Victorian Treasurer Tim Pallas <a href="https://www.9news.com.au/national/melbourne-anti-war-protest-to-cost-tax-payers-15-million/386b2c74-0c61-4005-932e-a911db5188f7">yesterday revealed</a> that the Labor government was spending $15 million on policing for Land Forces. It’s possible that there were more police around the Exhibition Centre this morning than protesters. In the days leading up to the protest, they had constructed a barricade of steel fencing around the entire perimeter of the venue. Every gap in the barricade was protected by row upon row of heavily armed police. 
Back in the 2000s, police had to make do with batons and horses for brutalising protesters. Of course, as anyone who found themselves in a part of the s11 blockade the police were determined to clear will tell you, they could do more than enough damage just with those instruments at their disposal. 
Today, in addition to the same old batons and horses, they’ve got a whole new arsenal of so-called “less-than-lethal” weapons to play with.
Play with them they did. First came the pepper spray—which <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/judystone/2016/03/16/lethal-in-disguise-the-health-hazards-of-pepper-spray/">has been known to cause</a> loss of consciousness and death in extreme cases. Again and again, police sprayed large quantities of it more or less indiscriminately into the crowd. As the protest went on, the tally of those struck down and in the hands of medics steadily rose. 
Next came flash-bangs and rubber bullets. Red Flag
spoke to Catherine Robertson, a Victorian Socialists <a href="https://victoriansocialists.org.au/candidates/robertson">local council candidate</a> and rally marshal, who said she was attempting to move people away from the danger when she was struck in the wrist by a rubber bullet. Many others were also hit, including some who were already being treated for the effects of pepper spray. 
There is a clear trend of escalating police violence against protesters in Victoria in recent years. However disturbing it is, though, to see people temporarily blinded and coughing up their lungs from pepper spray or wounded by rubber bullets, it’s nothing compared to the horrors the people inside the Land Forces expo are capable of unleashing on the world. 
Amid the chaos of this morning’s protest, Red Flag
spoke to Aran Mylvaganam from the Tamil Refugee Council. “The Land Forces conference”, Aran said, “is exhibiting modern weapons that are going to be used in wars that are killing tens of thousands of people around the world. At the moment, there are millions of people who have been turned into refugees because of these kinds of weapons”.
“As a young kid”, Aran recounted, “I was living in Sri Lanka. I was learning about the modern weapons the Sri Lankan government was receiving from the West ... People in the Global South get used to one weapon, and they learn to survive and hide from these weapons. Then these industries come up with more advanced weapons that make it harder for people to survive conflicts”. 
During the Sri Lankan government’s war on the country’s Tamil minority, Aran says, his school was bombed by Israeli-built Kfir fighter jets. “I lost my brother and many of my other family members and friends, and that’s one of the reasons why I ended up in Australia as a refugee.”
This is the reality that all the outrage about supposed “protester violence” aims to cover up. We live in a world in which it’s “normal” for more than <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/264434/trend-of-global-military-spending/">US$2 trillion to be spent annually</a> on waging or preparing for war—and for companies like those represented at Land Forces to profit handsomely from it. We can see the results of all this spending in things like the genocide inflicted on the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka and, today, on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. 
Heaven help humanity if we allow things to go on like this much longer. If someone wants to piff a water bottle or even some horse shit at some of the human faces of this capitalist death machine, then, frankly, who could blame them?

Thousands protest Land Forces military expo in Melbourne

Australia’s political class is busy transforming the country into a <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/why-the-us-australia-alliance-against-china">base of operations </a>for a possible US war with China. That, you might think, is bad enough. Now Peter Dutton wants—with his nuclear power plan—to throw a significant new bit of (radioactive) “spice” into the mix.
Just imagine. It’s 2040, and China has just launched an invasion of Taiwan. The US declares war, and begins the mobilisation of its own and its allies' forces across the Indo-Pacific region. Tens of thousands of US and Australian military personnel are massed, ready for action, on bases around Australia. British and US nuclear-powered submarines are dispatched from ports in Western Australia and Queensland (parking their submarines in Australian ports being the only part of the AUKUS deal that was actually delivered).
The Chinese military has meticulously prepared for this scenario over many years. It knows its only hope for a quick and relatively casualty-free victory lies in crippling, as much as possible, the other side’s ability to counterattack before it gets started. So at this point the first barrage of Chinese hypersonic missiles rains down. The targets aren’t just military facilities but also critical infrastructure—ports, major highways and bridges, data centres and (of course) power stations.
How would you feel about living next to one of Dutton’s seven planned major nuclear power stations in this situation? You might think an attack like this is unlikely. Surely, even in the event of a major war, the contending powers would stop short of targeting civilian infrastructure in such a destructive way. This belief is, unfortunately, a fantasy. You need only look at what the Israelis have done to Gaza—with the full support of their allies in countries like the US and Australia—to know that in a situation of all-out war, anything and everything would be deemed “fair game”.
<a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/nuclear-arsenal-must-be-on-australia-s-agenda-argues-defence-expert-20190701-p52306.html">Some of Australia’s foreign policy establishment</a> believe that a scenario like this might be avoided if only we take the next step after establishing a nuclear power industry and create our very own nuclear weapons “deterrent”. It’s possible Dutton himself has an eye to taking this path. He’s no doubt aware that the kinds of resources, skills and technology that would be needed to establish a “peaceful” nuclear power industry are exactly the same resources, skills and technology needed to produce nuclear weapons (hence Western hysteria about Iran’s “peaceful” nuclear program).
It’s testament to the level of historical amnesia about the realities of so-called nuclear “deterrence” during the Cold War between the US and Russia that anyone but the most Strangelovian psychopath would think a nuclear-armed Australia is a good idea. A world in which countries like Australia go nuclear, thus further accelerating what is already<a href="https://www.economist.com/international/2023/08/29/a-new-nuclear-arms-race-looms"> a new global arms race,</a> wouldn’t be one in which the populations of the contending powers were somehow rendered safe and secure. It would, rather, be a nightmare of the ever present threat of mutual annihilation in which the best you could hope for, either as a member of the armed forces or as a civilian, was that death would be quick.
I know this, because I’ve lived through it before. I was born on a British military base in West Germany and lived there and on bases in England during the early 1980s peak of Cold War tensions. My dad was in the British air force and was a navigator on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Vulcan">nuclear-armed Vulcan bombers.</a> 
In 1980, the British government <a href="https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1500124311">published a pamphlet titled </a><a href="https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1500124311">Protect and Survive</a>, which contained instructions on “how to make your home and your family as safe as possible under nuclear attack”. This included things like building an “inner refuge” inside your house which “should be thick-lined with dense materials to resist the radiation, and should be built away from the outside walls”. The pamphlet and an associated media campaign were designed to allay public anxiety about the threat of war. Everyone knew, though, that it was just for show. The reality of what would happen in the event of war was more honestly portrayed in the bleak (to say the least) joint Australian and British television drama <a href="https://youtu.be/vgT4Y30DkaA?si=0XVTNyKGOaWdYlfn">Threads</a><a href="https://youtu.be/vgT4Y30DkaA?si=0XVTNyKGOaWdYlfn">.</a>
My dad regularly had to participate in military exercises that simulated what to do when war broke out. This involved getting British bombers in the air fast enough to ensure that any Russian attack could be countered by a large-scale counterattack. There was no real expectation that bomber crews would come back from these missions, nor that there’d be anything much to come back to. 
If ever present feelings of impending violent doom happen to be your thing, then nuclear “deterrence” and the “logic” of mutually assured destruction could really help you flourish. For everyone else, it’s probably better to try to build a world where our collective “safety” isn’t maintained by the threatened use of weapons that could wipe out entire cities in an instant.
Can we assess the merits of nuclear energy in isolation from its possible contribution to a new nuclear arms race that could once again place humanity under imminent threat of civilisation-ending catastrophe? We could, but it would be delusional. 
You can, and nuclear power advocates <a href="https://x.com/GrogsGamut/status/1803270883634716901">like Dutton do</a>, envisage all kinds of new technologies and designs that will supposedly make nuclear entirely risk free. Nuclear power stations could in theory be fuelled by <a href="https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/thorium">thorium</a> instead of uranium, thus ameliorating some of the problems of toxic pollution and waste that beset today’s nuclear power industry. But none of the new, supposedly clean and safe technologies nuclear advocates talk up actually exist today in any form close to implementation. The only path available to a nuclear power enthusiast is the same, dirty, toxic, uranium-fuelled path that’s existed since the dawn of the nuclear era. 
And going down that path will be <a href="https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/uk-s-nuclear-plant-will-cost-nearly-three-times-what-was-estimated-20240620-p5jna1#:~:text=Britain's%20Hinkley%20C%20generator%20in,will%20cost%20about%20$90%20billion.">extremely slow and mind-bogglingly expensive</a>. The new Hinkley C nuclear power station currently being built in Britain has been delayed by more than a decade and is set to cost, by the time it opens in the early 2030s, around $90 billion. For nuclear power actually to make a significant contribution to solving the climate crisis, you’d need to build thousands of new power stations at a cost of many trillions of dollars.
There are better options. 
Renewable energy is <a href="https://reneweconomy.com.au/wind-and-solar-power-half-the-cost-of-coal-and-gas-one-third-the-cost-of-nuclear-says-lazard/#:~:text=In%202024%2C%20Lazard%20finds%20onshore,MWh%2C%20depending%20on%20local%20conditions.">much cheaper to build and operate than nuclear</a>, and it has the added benefit of not putting the world on a path to the apocalypse. There are challenges that have to be addressed, such as the need to build large-scale stores of energy (batteries, pumped hydro, green hydrogen and so on) to make up for the intermittency of renewables like wind and solar. If we’re talking about spending trillions of dollars on new energy infrastructure though, this seems eminently doable. 
Can we head off Australia’s nightmare nuclear future before it really begins? Doing so will take a serious fight. It’s not only Dutton we have to worry about, but the Labor Party that, by signing us up to the AUKUS deal, took the first steps down the nuclear path.

Australia’s dark, twisted nuclear fantasy

Conservatives in Australia and around the world love attacking universities for their supposed “woke” culture and failure to protect free speech. The Coalition government under Scott Morrison was so concerned about the issue that, in 2018, it commissioned a <a href="https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id%3A%22media%2Fpressrel%2F6607701%22">formal inquiry</a> into it. And in the years since, right-wing politicians, commentators, and institutions like the Institute for Public Affairs (IPA) haven’t ceased talking about what they claim is a <a href="https://ipa.org.au/publications-ipa/parliamentary-research-briefs/parliamentary-research-brief-the-free-speech-crisis-in-australian-universities-and-how-to-solve-it">“crisis of free speech”</a> on campuses.
Last year, the IPA released its<a href="https://ipa.org.au/publications-ipa/research-papers/free-speech-on-campus-audit-2023"> Free Speech on Campus Audit 2023</a>. It found (unsurprisingly, given this exercise in propaganda involved little that resembled genuine research) that restrictions on free speech abounded. Among other things, the IPA complained that “freedom of expression is put at risk by university policies which prohibit a wide variety of speech including ‘insulting’, ‘unwelcome’ and ‘offensive comments’”. It also warned against the adoption of free speech codes which “restrict speech deemed ‘unsafe’”. 
Right-wingers are avowed enemies of the notion that students should be protected in any way from ideas or speech they may find offensive or that make them feel unsafe. Given this, you might have expected that when students in the US, Australia and around the world began exercising their right to free speech by protesting in support of the Palestinians, right-wingers would have defended their right to do so—even if some students were upset by it.
And when the university managers attempted to silence the students, as they have so brutally in the US—using violence to repress the students’ political expression—you would have expected right-wingers to be up in arms. Isn’t this precisely the repressive, offense-adverse culture of universities they continually complain about? Isn’t this cancellation at its worst and most violent? 
Apparently not. Instead of celebrating the flourishing of free speech that the campus pro-Palestine encampments represent, the right have been united in their calls for harsh repression by university authorities and, where that fails, the police.
This has been most stark in the US. There, neither liberals nor conservatives have had any qualms about bringing the full force of the law down on the heads of the students. Starting with Columbia University in New York, the site of the first Gaza solidarity encampment, masses of police have been mobilised to smash up protests. As of 9 May, more than 2,000 protesters had been arrested, and many injured.
In Australia too, right-wing politicians like Peter Dutton have pushed universities to crack down on the campus protests. In <a href="https://www.2gb.com/peter-dutton-questions-labor-governments-mixed-responses-to-anti-israel-slogans/">an interview with radio station 2GB </a>on 9 May, Dutton equated Palestine supporters chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” with “what Hitler chanted in the 1930s”, and he has repeatedly <a href="https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/dutton-calls-on-unis-to-shut-down-pro-palestinian-protests-20240502-p5fogj">called on universities and the government</a> to do more to repress the student encampments. 
The Liberals’ education spokesperson Senator Sarah Henderson similarly described the pro-Palestine encampments at universities as “intolerable”. Talking to Sky News on 9 May, she claimed to believe that “free speech and academic freedom are fundamental on university campuses”, but then wheeled out, by way of justification for a crackdown, the completely ludicrous and unfounded claim that other students’ “right to go about [their] studies peacefully” was being threatened. The universities themselves contradict this claim—one of the reasons they have not been able to crack down on the protests is that they do not violate the universities’ codes of conduct, which include prohibitions on violence towards other students. 
Even the erstwhile free speech warriors at the IPA have switched overnight into the pearl-clutching, “call the police” camp. In an 2 May <a href="https://www.afr.com/policy/health-and-education/no-safe-spaces-for-jewish-students-at-universities-20240430-p5fnkg#:~:text=There%20are%20no%20%E2%80%9Csafe%20spaces,but%20this%20time%2C%20it's%20different.">article for the Financial Review</a>, current IPA senior fellow and former executive director John Roskam said it was “wishful thinking” to assert that the Australian Palestine encampments are peaceful, and implied that criminal charges should be laid against students.
This hypocrisy points to the real reason for the right’s claimed concern with “free speech” at universities. It’s not really a concern about “freedom” or “free speech” in general. Instead, it’s exclusively about the ability of the right to effectively promote and propagate its ideas on university campuses, as well as in the mainstream media, schools, churches and all the other places where conservatives are accustomed to having their views predominate.
The right abhors the fact that in the much degraded, but still relatively free atmosphere of intellectual engagement and exchange that exists at universities, progressive and left-wing views tend to prevail, particularly in disciplines like the humanities. It hopes that by constantly complaining about the supposed university “free speech crisis” it will pressure universities to somehow tip the scales of debate to the right, creating a “safe space” for fragile and under-confident right-wingers to speak their minds and counter the hegemony the left enjoys over political life at many campuses. These are the institutions training the future politicians, state administrators, commentators and CEOs, after all—attendees need to be hardened up to run the system, not learning to care about dead Palestinian children.
The right simply cannot tolerate an area of society where their politics aren’t accepted as gospel and challenges to their authority are dismissed as fringe concerns. So when they complain about the stifling of conservative speech on campuses, it’s more a matter of right-wingers feeling resentful that they are isolated and that a large majority of their fellow students are likely to find their views repugnant. This is less a matter of so-called “cancel culture” than one of “cowardice culture” on the part of the right—of being intimidated out of voicing particular opinions by the likely social consequences of doing so.
Seen in this light, the right’s unceremonious junking of its professed commitment to free speech in the context of student pro-Palestine protests makes perfect sense. If your aim isn’t to foster free speech as such, but merely to promote an atmosphere in which right-wing speech can flourish, then the situation on campuses today is dire indeed. Instead of feeling safer and more confident to express their views, supporters of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and other campus right-wingers are running scared. 
What Israel is doing in Gaza is so thoroughly indefensible that there’s no hope of winning anyone much to support them through open debate and discussion. The right can go some way to addressing this problem in broader society via a constant barrage of pro-Israel propaganda from politicians and the media. The brave stand made by students at universities around the world means that there, stronger measures are necessary.

Right-wing hypocrisy on free speech

Israel’s assault on Gaza is one of this century’s greatest atrocities. Given the volume of evidence—broadcast day by unrelenting day on social media as well as via more traditional media outlets such as Al Jazeera—all you really need to understand this is to have a basic level of humanity. But if you would prefer to rely on the judgement of those regarded as experts, those judgements are mounting by the week.
Human Rights Watch (HRW)—an NGO that has been monitoring human rights abuses around the world for more than 30 years—recently <a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/04/04/gaza-israeli-strike-killing-106-civilians-apparent-war-crime">completed an investigation</a> into what, in a crowded field, stands as one of Israel’s most barbaric single actions in its war to date. HRW describes the incident, drawing on accounts from witnesses, as follows: 
“On October 31, 350 or more people were staying at the Engineers’ Building, just south of the Nuseirat refugee camp. At least 150 were seeking shelter after fleeing their homes elsewhere in Gaza. Without warming, at about 2:30pm, four aerial munitions struck the building within about 10 seconds. The building was completely demolished.”
At least 106 civilians, including 54 children, were killed in the attack. This included, according to HRW’s associate crisis and conflict director Gerry Simpson, “children playing football, residents charging phones in the ground-floor grocery store, and displaced families seeking safety”. 
HRW’s investigation “found no evidence of a military target in the vicinity of the building at the time of the Israeli attack, making the strike unlawfully indiscriminate under the laws of war”. It notes, too, that “Israeli authorities have provided no justification for the attack”. To HRW, then, the conclusion is clear: Israel’s strike on the building was a war crime.
The report also makes clear this wasn’t an isolated incident. It refers to data from Airwars, an NGO that tracks the impact of conflicts on civilians, showing that since the beginning of its assault on Gaza, “195 likely attacks by the Israeli military killed from 1 to 9 civilians, 107 attacks killed between 10 and 59, and 4 killed between 60 and 139”.
The scale of the carnage that has been inflicted on the people of Gaza for more than six months is immense. And there’s no doubt further investigation will show what any reasonable observer already knows: it’s not a few incidents here or there that are crimes, but the entire Israeli war.
HRW’s message to Israel’s allies like Australia is simple. They should, it says, “suspend military assistance and arms sales to Israel ... Governments that continue to provide arms to the Israeli government risk complicity in war crimes”.
Western leaders like US President Joe Biden and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese love to pose as champions of human rights. So when a recognised authority on the subject like HRW makes a call like this, you might expect they would take heed.
If you were to judge purely on what they have been saying
in recent weeks, then you might think they had. As Israel’s war has dragged on, its Western backers have been prepared to voice some criticisms. This has particularly been the case since its murder, on 1 April, of seven aid workers—including Australian woman Zomi Frankcom—from World Central Kitchen. 
In a <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/04/02/statement-from-president-joe-biden-on-the-death-of-world-central-kitchen-workers-in-gaza/">statement</a> published the day after that incident, Biden said he was “outraged and heartbroken”. “This conflict”, he went on, “has been one of the worst in recent memory in terms of how many aid workers have been killed” (no word, notably, of who they were killed by). Albanese, for his part, said in a <a href="https://www.pm.gov.au/media/transcript-press-conference-0">press conference</a> on 3 April that Israel’s killing of the aid workers was “completely unacceptable”.
Saying things are “outrageous” and “unacceptable” is one thing. Actually doing anything about it is quite another. Despite mounting pressure, including <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/4/6/us-democrats-urge-biden-to-halt-weapons-transfer-to-israel-amid-gaza-war">from Democratic Party representatives</a> in the US Congress, the Biden administration has so far refused to put any conditions on future military aid to Israel. 
At the time of the 1 April attacks on the World Central Kitchen aid convoy, Biden <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/02/us/politics/biden-israel-weapons-deal.html">was pushing for Congress</a> to approve the sale of up to 50 US-made F-15 fighter jets to Israel in a deal worth more than US$18 billion. Should the deal go ahead, it will come on top of the billions in military aid and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/03/06/us-weapons-israel-gaza/">more than a hundred individual arms sales</a> the US has sent Israel’s way since 7 October. Without continuing US support, Israel’s capacity to carry out war crimes like the one investigated by HRW would be severely limited.
The Australian government doesn’t directly export weapons or provide military aid to Israel like the US does. It’s more than happy, though, for Australian companies to have a foot in the door of the genocide trade. 
Between 2017 and 2023, the government issued 322 export permits for military or “dual use” goods headed for Israel, and figures from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade show $13 million worth of arms and ammunition were exported to Israel by Australian companies in the past five years.
The Australian government also appears to have no qualms about dealing with Israeli corporations directly involved in the Gaza genocide. The missiles that struck the World Central Kitchen aid convoy were fired from a Hermes 450 drone manufactured by Elbit systems—the same Israeli company Australia recently <a href="https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/04/04/zomi-frankcom-elbit-systems-airstrike-drone-900-million/">committed to paying $917 million</a> of taxpayer funds for the supply of components for the Australian Defence Force’s infantry fighting vehicles.
If you stumbled on the scene of a mass shooting, and instead of doing anything to stop it you pulled a gun from your own bag and handed it over to the shooter, you’d be regarded as an accessory to murder. Governments that—despite the mountain of evidence of Israeli war crimes in Gaza—don’t stop providing it with the planes, bombs, guns and ammunition it needs to continue its genocidal massacre should be seen in the same way: not just as risking complicity in war crimes, but as facilitators of them.

Western arms enable Israel’s war crimes

Measured by the sheer volume of stuff produced, capitalism is a very successful system. According to <a href="https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?locations=1W">World Bank data</a>, in 1960 global gross domestic product (GDP)—which measures the monetary value of goods and services sold—was just under US$1.4 trillion. By 2022 it had risen to $101 trillion. The world’s population has increased a lot in that time, but the volume of stuff produced has increased by far more.
How useful are all those products and services?
The overriding goal of production under capitalism is profit, not poverty reduction or human happiness. What determines what is produced, and when, where and how, isn’t a thing’s usefulness—whether it fulfils a genuine need—but how much money it will make for the person selling it. Defenders of capitalism say that this is the most efficient way to organise the economy. But reality tells a different story.
Much of what is produced is, put simply, trash. For some capitalists, this means trash in a very literal sense. Think, for instance, of the vast and ever increasing quantities of unnecessary plastic and other packaging we’re drowning in, only a small fraction of which is recycled. Producing all this rubbish is highly lucrative. The global packaging market <a href="https://spnews.com/worlds-1-17-trillion-packaging-market-set-for-further-growt/">is worth more than US$1 trillion</a> and is growing rapidly.
Another, bigger, section of the capitalist class, while not producing trash in an immediate sense like the plastic peddlers, is nevertheless producing things that will by design become trash a few months or years after being purchased.
As capitalism has developed and grown, so too has the role of built-in obsolescence: purposely making products to not last. The waste of resources and human labour involved is mind-boggling. Take “fast fashion”. In 2018 (the last year the Environmental Protection Agency <a href="https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-and-recycling/textiles-material-specific-data">published data</a>), 11.3 million tonnes of textiles were dumped in landfill in the US alone. In Ghana, <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-08-12/fast-fashion-turning-parts-ghana-into-toxic-landfill/100358702">a centre for the “recycling” of clothing</a> discarded by consumers in the West, locals are forced to live side by side with giant piles of discarded clothes. 
It’s a similar picture with cars, computers and mobile phones. They could be made to last much longer than they do. The economy would be more sustainable, and our lives better, if they were. But this would undercut the capacity of the companies involved to sell ever increasing quantities. Your iPhone must die so that Apple’s profits can live!
Built-in obsolescence should be something that generates widespread rage against the system. The fact that it doesn’t, and that many people—particularly in wealthier countries—think nothing of disposing of clothes they’ve bought after wearing them only a few times, reflects the success of decades of capitalist propaganda geared towards making disposability seem, if not a virtue then at least something that’s entirely normal and unobjectionable. The phenomenon of “fast fashion” is just the tip of a very large iceberg. 
The alienated reality of working-class life is helpful too from the perspective of a capitalist class always on the lookout for ways to sell more stuff. In his 1844 Manuscripts, Karl Marx wrote, “The more the worker spends himself [in labour], the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, the poorer he himself—his inner world—becomes, the less belongs to him as his own”. 
Our working life exhausts our energies and dulls our minds. The consumer culture of capitalism is offered, in a similar way to how religion functions, as a kind of compensation for this loss. If you can just earn enough to buy into the latest clothing trend, upgrade your mobile phone or get a new car, then—so the non-stop bombardment of advertising tells us—all your worries will be washed away and you’ll finally be happy. The daily grind of life in capitalism empties our souls, the better to fill them with trash.
Another side of capitalism’s extraordinary productive capacity is darker still. There is a significant, and growing, section of the capitalist class engaged in producing things of a genuinely high quality and durable nature. The purpose of this class of products, though, isn’t in any way to improve our world, but to destroy it. Some capitalists produce trash. Others produce terror.
According to market research company <a href="https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/global-defense-industry-outlook-153569545.html">MarketsandMarkets</a>, in 2022 the inaptly named global defence industry was worth US$2.2 trillion. It has been enjoying a growth spurt. A powerful section of the global capitalist class is making massive profits supplying all the fighter jets, drones, missiles, ammunition and other weapons required for Israel to inflict mass death and destruction on Gaza and for Russia to do the same in Ukraine. There are even more lucrative opportunities associated with growing tensions between the US and China.
The longer the wars go on, and the greater the level of death and destruction inflicted, the more opportunities for economic growth there will be—for arms companies, at least.
If, instead of capitalism’s profit-driven, trash and terror economy, the immense capacity of global production were directed towards satisfying human needs, we could rid the world of poverty and other major problems virtually overnight. We could produce housing instead of fighter jets and bombs. And we could make public transport networks, renewable energy systems and clothing and other essentials that are built to last instead of wasting trillions on plastic trash, “fast fashion”, built-to-fail devices and the saturation advertising required to convince people they should buy this stuff in ever growing quantities.

Capitalism’s trash and terror economy

The media never tire of wheeling out stories about young people, workers, the unemployed—basically anyone not from the moneyed classes—being lazy, entitled brats who, if not treated with a stern hand by the authorities, will bring society to ruin. 
But when it comes to being lazy and entitled, the rich and powerful are by far the biggest offenders.
The response to the new “right to disconnect” law, which was approved by parliament on 12 February and will come into effect next year, illustrates the point. The law is hardly radical. It merely provides the weakest of backstops for what should already be the norm: that employees don’t have to do work-related things like answer phone calls or emails from their boss outside of the hours they are actually paid for. 
Did this stop the usual suspects from crying blue murder? Of course not. 
Sky News host and Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt was among those <a href="https://www.skynews.com.au/opinion/andrew-bolt/right-to-disconnect-a-perfect-sign-of-australias-decline-andrew-bolt/video/733dd4e922ff23dc6188c41f56510b6d">decrying the new law</a>, which he described as “a perfect sign of Australia’s decline” and a reflection of “this something for nothing culture that we’re developing”. Australian Industry Group chief executive Innes Willox was also put into a spin, threatening, in response to the new law, that businesses “are indicating that flexibilities in workplaces such as leaving early to pick up the kids or going to the dentist will be cut back”. 
If anyone is the lazy, entitled brat in this situation, it’s the boss, not the worker. They’re the ones demanding they get something (someone else’s labour) for nothing. 
It’s like a toddler’s tantrum. The message from Willox is that if you don’t let your boss harangue you at any time of the day or night—whenever the mood strikes them—and do some work for free, you should expect them to stamp their feet, scream and do whatever they can to make your life a misery
It’s been the same, too, with Labor’s proposed changes to the Stage 3 tax cuts. Those in the very top income brackets are now going to get only ten extra lollipops instead of the original twelve, while the extras will be distributed among those on lower incomes, who will now get two or three extra lollipops instead of the original one or none.
This change, while not going nearly far enough, makes things a little fairer. But try telling that to the rich whingers whose large stock of extra lollipops is going to suffer a very slight cut. Taking candy from a baby is easy. Taking candy from the big babies of Australia’s rich and powerful is very hard.
When Labor’s tax changes were announced in January, Liberal Shadow Treasurer Angus Taylor described them as representing a “war on aspiration”. “It’s absolutely extraordinary”, he <a href="https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/politics/coalition-accuses-anthony-albanese-of-declaring-war-on-aspiration-ahead-of-looming-changes-to-stage-three-tax-cuts/news-story/959b4d483b39a51b08d1d05c8e007ae7">told Sky News</a>, “because if you’re not rewarding people for investing, taking risks, building businesses, creating jobs, paying taxes, then they simply won’t do it. This is what Labor doesn’t understand”. 
No doubt Taylor intended this as a defence of the rich. When you unpack it though, it’s not complimentary at all. 
<a href="https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/inequality-on-steroids-as-bottom-90-get-just-7-of-economic-growth-since-2009/">Research released last year</a> by the Australia Institute, a public policy think tank, found that, in the decade from 2009, the top 10 percent of Australian income earners pocketed 93 percent of the wealth created by economic growth. In the years since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, that trend has continued. According to <a href="https://media.oxfam.org.au/2024/01/wealth-of-three-richest-australians-has-doubled-since-2020-as-cost-of-living-pressures-for-many-continue-to-bite-oxfam/">an Oxfam report</a> on global inequality released in January, the total wealth of Australia’s 47 richest billionaires increased by 70 percent, or $120 billion, between 2020 and 2023.
Considering the windfall Australia’s richest have been enjoying, Taylor’s claim that there will be no more incentives for them to work and invest if a few thousand dollars are shaved off their tax cut makes them seem like, well, big babies. If the government dares to stem the flow of wealth and privileges accruing to Australia’s richest people even a little, then you’ll have an almighty tantrum on your hands.
When the topic is big babies, we’d be remiss for not mentioning what in recent Australian history has arguably been the most tanti-prone cohort of all: property investors. No-one is more coddled in Australia today than the 630,000 or so people who,<a href="https://www.afr.com/policy/economy/australia-s-most-prolific-property-investors-are-also-the-best-paid-20220809-p5b8d2"> according to Australian Taxation Office data</a>, own two or more investment properties. Not only do these people receive the entirely unearned windfall flowing from sky high rents and constantly rising house prices, but they are also the beneficiaries of various extremely generous tax concessions. 
According to an analysis by the Parliamentary Budget Office, <a href="https://www.maxchandlermather.com/tax_concessions_to_property_investors_blow_out_to_39_billion">released by the Greens</a> last year, the total cost of property tax deductions and the capital gains tax discount was about $39 billion a year and will total $524 billion over the next decade. 
This is many times more than Labor is planning to spend on the construction of new social housing under the Housing Australia Future Fund. And the bulk of the money is <a href="https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/the-capital-gains-discount-and-negative-gearing-benefit-the-rich-and-destroy-housing-affordability/">flowing to the richest 10 percent</a> of Australians.
Handouts to big babies have helped turn the housing system into a giant money-sucking machine funnelling wealth from the bottom rungs of society to the top—from renters and working-class mortgage holders to property investors and the big banks. 
Heaven forbid that anyone should suggest that this completely unfair system should be changed even a bit. The government must continue to shovel wealth into the gaping maw of the investor class—or else!
Australia’s richest people are by far the country’s biggest whingers. Their extreme sensitivity to the suggestion that not everything should go their way warrants the label conservatives love to apply to supposedly lazy and entitled young people: snowflakes.

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