One conspicuous sight at the regular Palestine solidarity demonstrations is the contingents of Jews, often with banners proclaiming, “Not in my name” and the like.
This is not a recent development. Anti-Zionism has been a crucial part of the Jewish radical tradition since the late 19th century. Way back in 1886, a Russian Jewish socialist revolutionary called Ilya Rubanovich argued against Jewish settlement in Palestine:
“What is to be done with the Arabs? ... The Arabs have exactly the same historical right and it will be unfortunate for you if ... you make the peaceful Arabs defend their right. They will answer tears with blood.”
Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, argued that nothing could be done about antisemitism, that it was inherent in non-Jews and that Jews must leave their home countries and set up a state of their own. The first Zionist congress in August 1897 represented only a small minority of Jews at the time.
The first organisational opposition to this current, the General Jewish Labour Bund, was set up only two months later in the Russian Empire. The core concept of the Bund was “doykeit”, a Yiddish word meaning “hereness”: it wanted to fight antisemitism in the here and now.
Based in the Yiddish-speaking Jewish working class, the Bund was the first Marxist group in the tsarist empire to create a mass organisation. It played a major role in the Russian revolutionary movement, particularly in the 1905 revolution. After the 1917 revolution, the Bund continued the struggle in independent Poland, including its polemics against Zionism.
Marek Edelman, who participated in the Warsaw ghetto uprising, put it this way: “The Bundists did not wait for the Messiah, nor did they plan to leave for Palestine. They ... fought for a just, socialist Poland, in which each nationality would have its own cultural autonomy, and in which minorities’ rights would be guaranteed”.
The local Zionists had difficulty articulating their politics. In the parliament, for example, when Jewish deputies were speaking, right-wingers would heckle them, yelling: “Go to Palestine”. The problem was that the Zionists were also calling for Jews to go to Palestine.
It’s not surprising that Zionists were often ridiculed, as we can see in a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJZNcUCVXBo">Bundist song</a>:
You want to take us to Jerusalem
So we can die as a nation
We’d rather stay in the diaspora
And fight for our liberation!
By 1939, the Bund was the strongest Jewish political party in Poland, while the Zionist and clerical parties drastically declined. 
After World War Two, the Bund continued to publicly oppose Zionism. 
In April 1948, it warned that partition of Palestine was the “beginning of a new bloody chapter” in Jewish-Arab relations and that “the creation of an independent Jewish State would lead to a new catastrophe”. It said the atmosphere was becoming “more and more favourable for the development of political brigandry, terror, the extremes of home-grown Jewish fascism, nationalism and reactionary tendencies”. How prophetic.
Today, many Jews are breaking with Zionism under pressure of events in Gaza. This has also happened in the past.
For instance, the socialist-Zionist group Hashomer Hatzair (Young Guard) was a youth group in Eastern Europe with 70,000 members in 1939. Its Zionism had a strange mix of political influences including psychoanalysis and even Marxism. 
Tony Cliff, who later became a well-known British socialist, was born in British mandate Palestine. He explained how “the Zionist socialists were trapped ideologically”.
“They believed that ... in the kibbutz we could see the embryo of a future socialist society ... But in the meantime, Arab resistance ... had to be overcome so they collaborated with Zionist moneybags and rich institutions as well as the British army and police. The Zionist socialists held the Communist Manifesto in one hand and a coloniser’s gun in the other.”
Nonetheless, Hashomer Hatzair provided a route towards politicisation and anti-Zionism for many people.
The most famous is probably Abram Leon, who repudiated Zionism and in 1940 became a leader of an underground Trotskyist organisation in occupied Belgium. He was arrested in 1944 and murdered in Auschwitz.
Chanie Rosenberg was another anti-Zionist who started out as a member of Hashomer Hatzair. Born in South Africa, she emigrated to Palestine in 1944 and thought she was living the socialist dream on a kibbutz. But one day she came across some guns used to steal Palestinian land. “At that point, I knew that I had become an anti-Zionist.”
The USA has a significant Jewish anti-Zionist history. During the 1920s and ’30s, the heavily Jewish Communist Party campaigned against Zionism as a component of British imperialism. 
The Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP), established in 1938, was also anti-Zionist. It played an important role among Jews in 1939 when the fascist German American Bund (nothing to do with the Jewish Bund) held a mass rally in New York. 
The SWP called a counter-demonstration, but not one Jewish organisation was prepared to participate. Both Yiddish daily papers called on their readers to stay away. 
The Communist Party also refused to support the demo because they “could not undertake to forcibly prevent such a meeting once the City Administration had allowed it”. And the local Hashomer Hatzair branch also refused, saying “sorry we can’t join you ... Our Zionist policy is to take no part in politics outside Palestine”. 
On the day 50,000 protesters turned up—way beyond anyone’s expectation. Most were Jewish, and many rank-and-file Communists defied their leadership to participate.
Anti-Zionist organisations in Palestine have an important history. First was the Palestine Communist Party (PCP), formed in 1923. 
It had a promising start but quite quickly became politically confused. For instance, it attempted to integrate Arabs into the Zionist labour organisation the Histadrut. But the Histadrut was (and remains today) a conscious tool of the Zionist project in Palestine.
The PCP also had problems with the constant zigs and zags imposed by the Stalinist Comintern, as it switched strategies in the 1930s.
They were first instructed to have a class-based focus on Arab workers and fellaheen (peasants and agricultural labourers) only to suddenly be instructed to give uncritical support for Arab nationalism and the bourgeoisie. Then the Moscow show trials began in the late 1930s, with many of the victims Jewish; most of the PCP leaders were annihilated in the process. So, the PCP failed among both Arabs and Jews, and became increasingly ineffectual and disoriented.
In 1943, the political tensions became too much, and the party split into two separate organisations—one Jewish and one Arab. On Victory in Europe Day in 1945, the Arab organisation marched together with feudal and bourgeois parties, under anti-Zionist slogans. The Jewish party marched under the Zionist flag, with Zionist slogans. In 1947, the Jewish PCP completed its political destruction and endorsed partition.
Meanwhile, the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist League of Palestine (RCL) was set up in the late 1930s. Most of its members were Jewish workers—some were born in Palestine, and some had fled from Germany. There were, however, some Arabs. 
The RCL recognised that unity between Arabs and Jews could come about only “through the abolition of all racist ideology and practice on the part of the Jews”.
The RCL wanted to build a united revolutionary socialist party. But there were major difficulties. For example, when they tried to organise joint trade unions for Arabs and Jews, the British interned them without trial. 
One of those interned was Tony Cliff, at that time still Yigael Gluckstein. Cliff’s family were strongly Zionist. “It took me a few years to make the transition from being an orthodox Zionist to being a semi-Zionist with a pro-Palestinian position and then to making a complete break with Zionism”, Cliff later wrote.
To be a revolutionary socialist operating illegally in Palestine required enormous commitment. With fewer than 30 members, the RCL published two magazines, one in Arabic and one in Hebrew, and put out leaflets. 
Cliff was eventually released from British internment, married Chanie Rosenberg and ended up in the UK, where he was a founding member of the International Socialists, later the Socialist Workers Party.
Another RCL member, Jakob Moneta, arrested by the British at the same time as Cliff, said he “learned that democratic imperialism, in the struggle to preserve its empire, is sometimes no less squeamish than fascism going out to conquer a new empire”.
The RCL was too small to have any significant impact on workers’ struggles. The organisation collapsed after 1948, but individuals including Jakob Taut and Jabra Nicola remained active and provided continuity into the next organisation.
In 1962, a group of ex-members of the Communist Party set up the Israeli Socialist Organisation, usually known by the name of its magazine Matzpen (Compass). 
Most, but not all, members were Jewish. The organisation always remained very small—only a few dozen—but was important. It is historically the only committed anti-Zionist organisation within the state of Israel. Matzpen developed a sophisticated analysis of Zionism that influenced revolutionary socialist groups around the world. 
One of its members, Moishe Machover, moved to the UK in 1968. In a bizarre twist of fate, he was expelled from the UK Labour Party in 2017 for supposed antisemitism—this was the right-wing party machine cracking down on its left opposition.
Unfortunately, the stresses of trying to maintain an organisation like Matzpen are extreme, and the organisation finally ceased to exist in the 1980s. But a large amount of the standard works on Zionism that we use today were produced by or under its influence.
This history of Jewish anti-Zionism also exists in Australia. 
The Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Antisemitism, established in 1942, was non-Zionist rather than anti-Zionist. It had hundreds of members and widespread support, so much so that in 1948 the council became the official public relations representative of the Jewish community. 
But the council’s non-Zionist stance was unsustainable, and it started to lose support. In 1950, a prominent Zionist attacked it, asserting that they “[do] not ‘combat’ but ‘spread’ antisemitism”. Seventy-five years ago, the Zionists were already slandering left-wing Jews just as they do today.
In 1978, a soft Zionist magazine called Paths to Peace
(PTP) applied to join Melbourne community radio station 3CR. But 3CR rejected its application on the grounds that Zionism is racist.
The right-wing publication Bulletin smeared 3CR as terrorist, and PTP and others laid a charge at the Broadcasting Tribunal claiming the pro-Palestine programs were offensive to the Melbourne Jewish community because they were antisemitic. Sound familiar?
3CR organised a “fight back” campaign and mobilised 1,000 people to distribute half a million leaflets throughout Melbourne. 
Jews Against Zionism and Antisemitism (JAZA) was set up in 1979 to help the defence, declaring that they “represent a socialist and internationalist tradition among Jews that is much older and has a much brighter future than political Zionism”. They held forums and demos, including against the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and brought out Matzpen member Ehud Ein-Gil as a speaker.
History matters because the battle for memory is also a battle for the present. The Zionists don’t want us to know about this alternative history.
They don’t want us to know about the committed anti-Zionism of Jews like Marek Edelmann. During the second Palestinian Intifada, Edelman wrote a letter to the Palestinians in which he compared them to the Jewish Fighting Organisation. He addressed it to “commanders of the Palestinian military ... to all the soldiers of the Palestinian fighting organisation”. 
When we loudly proclaim, “Not in our name”, we are following in these footsteps.

Janey Stone

Revolutionary history of Jewish anti-Zionism

This article was first presented as a speech to the Gaza solidarity encampments at La Trobe, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and Queensland universities. 
It’s just fantastic to meet with those protesting in support of Palestine and against the war in Gaza, and particularly so as I am one of those Jews who say, “not in my name”.
A couple of weeks ago, Prof Ghassan Abu-Sitta, a British plastic surgeon, was due to address the French parliament. But when he arrived at the airport in Paris he was stripped of his possessions, taken to a holding cell under guard and then deported. Why did this happen? The German government had banned him from the Shengen Area, a single visa jurisdiction encompassing 29 European nations. It may seem strange that Germany would ban a British citizen from entering France. But Abu-Sitta was about to report on his 43 days spent at hospitals in Gaza last October and November.
A couple of weeks earlier, he was due to speak in Berlin at a congress about Palestine. The German authorities prevented him from entering the country, supposedly because they “could not ensure the safety of the attendees at the conference”. 
First of all, we have the assumption that a Palestinian is automatically a danger to everyone else. But second, we have what actually occurred at the conference. Far from being concerned about the participants’ safety, 2,500 riot police stormed the stage, shut off the electricity, arrested several people—including Jewish organisers of the event—and declared it banned.
The German government makes opposing antisemitism a core political issue, and so it should given its history. But how have they defined antisemitism? As opposition to Israel.
In Germany today, pro-Palestinian demonstrations are almost illegal. Wearing a keffiyeh is banned in some parts of the country. Using the phrase “From the river to the sea” and displaying the Palestinian flag are now crimes for which you can be arrested. One German state requires applicants for citizenship to declare their support for “Israel’s right to exist”. 
Meanwhile, the right organises in Germany with very few restrictions. The government regularly allows far-right, and even openly fascist, gatherings. This is in spite of the fact that more than 90 percent of all antisemitic incidents in Germany are attributable to the far-right. Real antisemitism is growing largely unchecked while governments attack and arrest anti-Zionist Jews all in the name of preventing antisemitism.
The Germans aren’t exceptional here. Governments all around the world push the line that anything hostile to Israel and Zionism is antisemitic. Let’s unpack that.
First, let’s consider what antisemitism is.
Discrimination and violence against Jews are nothing new. But in the past, this was based on Jewishness as a religion. All Jews had to do to escape was to get baptised. When Spain expelled Jews in 1492, those who converted were allowed to stay as long as they abandoned their religious practices. At the time Karl Marx’s father converted around 1816, this was still the case. But by the late nineteenth century, Marx himself, although he was not born Jewish by attitudes at the time, was again considered to be Jewish. What happened in between?
Imperialism took hold during the latter part of the nineteenth century and pseudo-scientific ideas of race were used to justify the subjugation of supposedly inferior populations in the colonies. It’s no accident that around the same time Jews also came to be viewed as a race—that is something biological, something you were born with and could not change. No longer was it considered to be something in your head—your religious belief—which you could alter. The basis of modern antisemitism is hatred of Jews as an inborn condition. 
The actual word “antisemitism” was invented by right-wing German nationalists who set up an organisation called the League of Antisemites in 1879.
Modern antisemitism became a tool in the capitalist divide and rule handbook. The ruling class wanted to get rid of competitors and during the nineteenth century a significant Jewish bourgeoisie arose in Germany. So, antisemitism was partly economic. But Jews in Europe were an easily identifiable community with a different language and customs, and were perfectly placed to be scapegoats for all sorts of issues. For instance, authorities in Tsarist Russia provoked pogroms to divert attention from the real causes of the misery in ordinary people’s lives.
Hostility to Jews in the late nineteenth century was also a product of their association with socialists and the working-class movement. Jews had been prominent in the 1789 French and 1848 European revolutions and in radical organisations such as the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Right wingers who wanted to attack the left often did this by pointing the finger at Jews.
On the other hand, it was the left and working-class movements that took a stand against antisemitism. Socialist parties, anarchists, the Bolsheviks, trade unions and many other working-class and left-wing organisations and independents in Europe and the US all joined in the fight against antisemitism, and against the right and fascism. Donny Gluckstein and I go into this in some detail in our book, The Radical Jewish Tradition: Revolutionaries, resistance fighters and firebrands, and show what nonsense it is to talk about antisemitism being an integral and ingrained feature of radical organisations.
So where does Zionism fit into this understanding of what is antisemitic? 
Theodore Herzl, known as the father of Zionism, proposed his ideas in 1895, and in effect turned the argument about being Jewish as inborn on its head. He argued that non-Jews were inherently antisemitic, that they would always be this way and there was nothing you could do about it. This is a core argument of Zionists to this day. Herzl argued that only the creation of a nation state for Jews could provide safety from antisemitism. Because they wanted to argue for a nation, they needed to argue that they represent all, or at least the vast majority, of Jews. 
The reality is that Jews aren’t a single entity, and in no way do the Zionists represent them all. In fact, regarding Jews as a monolithic entity is typical of antisemites.
Rachel Shapiro, a Jewish anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian activist and granddaughter of a holocaust survivor, points this out:
“This designation of all Jews and all Judaism as a single uniform entity, necessarily speaking the same language (modern Hebrew), holding the same values (Zionism) and sharing an identical culture ... is, in fact, the precise definition of antisemitic, Nazistic ... rhetoric.”
Before World War Two, Zionism was a minority point of view in most Jewish communities. Although it later became much more prominent, it has never represented the entire Jewish community. This has become increasingly obvious as Jews around the world are a major feature of the current opposition to Israel and its genocide in Gaza. On the other hand, many supporters of Zionism in the world today aren’t Jews at all—right-wing Christians in the US are a major support base, and the right-wing antisemitic governments in Hungary and Romania are also important international supporters of the Zionist state. 
Zionism is a modern political ideology, and opposition to Zionism is not an attack on all Jews. Modern antisemitism is socially conditioned anti-Jewish racism. In no way can opposition to Israel and Zionists be designated as antisemitic. 
Equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism weakens the fight against real antisemitism and is really about preventing criticism of Israel. 
Zionists constantly invoke Jewish history as a justification for their support of Israel, so an alternative view of that history becomes very immediate and urgent. Basically, Zionists don’t want their own community to know that there is a history of struggle by Jews outside the Zionist movement.
In our book we talk about the “lachrymose [tearful] conception of Jewish history”. That’s the idea that the main element of Jewish experience has been suffering—it’s always been this way and it can’t be changed. In other words, Jews are eternal victims.
There are three ways to respond to this. First, you can say we can’t do anything about antisemitism, so we withdraw into our own ghettoes, customs and religion. We do nothing and remain victims. 
The second option is to get away from being a victim by joining the perpetrators: become an exploiter and an oppressor yourself, or at least side with those who do.
Zionism is a combination of both these options. They start by saying that we can’t do anything about antisemitism and non-Jews will always be antisemitic. But then they say the way to stop being victims is to take lessons and guidance from the colonialists, the imperialists, the ruling class and even the antisemites. Let’s set up our own state and become just like them.
But there is a third option. In our book, we show that while the oppression and suffering have certainly been there, Jews are not just victims. They have always fought back.
The radical tradition is the history of working-class and socialist Jewish struggle against both oppression and exploitation. It’s the tradition that says we can fight to defend ourselves. The tradition that knows what antisemitism is but doesn’t just accept it as eternal or move to set yourself up as the oppressor of someone else. 
Before World War Two, the majority of Jews were working class and part of a wider struggle alongside their non-Jewish comrades on the left. Fighting oppression and exploitation took numerous political forms, including anarchism, left Zionism, Bundism (the Bund was a Jewish workers’ association) and revolutionary Marxism. 
Jews fought back against pogroms in Tsarist Russia and joined strikes and mass struggles in the UK and the US in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During the Holocaust, despite what is widely said, they didn’t go as sheep to the slaughter. They established underground resistance organisations and led uprisings in ghettos and concentration camps. Throughout, they acted in solidarity with other socialist and working-class movements. Far from the Zionist stereotype of the ultimate victims, Jews were revolutionaries, resistance fighters and firebrands.
This Jewish radical tradition is a history of resistance and the struggle to change the world. A history of people who didn’t just weep and hide away, who refused to be just victims or to join the oppressors. 
This history matters because the battle for memory is also a battle for the present. The Zionists don’t want us to know there is a different answer to antisemitism than the Israeli state. The ruling class doesn’t want us to know there are ways to defeat their divide and rule scapegoating.
But this history doesn’t just belong to Jews. It belongs to all of us—to the participants in the encampments and Palestine solidarity actions everywhere, and to all who are engaged in struggle against the horrors of our society, of oppression and exploitation, and of war. This isn’t an academic or a sectional history but is avowedly partisan, a history to support and inspire struggle.
I want to end with the words of Marek Edelmann, a Bundist and participant in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. After the war, Edelmann returned to Poland and remained a radical all his life. During the second Palestinian Intifada, Edelman wrote a letter to the Palestinians, who he compared to the Jewish Fighting Organisation that had led the Warsaw ghetto uprising. He addressed it to “commanders of the Palestinian military ... to all the soldiers of the Palestinian fighting organisation”.
Just as Edelmann linked the resistance fighters in Warsaw, so do I link the Jewish radical tradition with today’s fight of the Palestinians against expropriation, persecution and genocide. I stand with Palestine. 
Janey Stone is an anti-Zionist Jewish socialist and co-author with Donny Gluckstein of “The Radical Jewish Tradition: Revolutionaries, resistance fighters and firebrands”, which is published by Interventions in Australia.

The radical Jewish tradition—the alternative to Zionism

Tom O’Lincoln, who died on 13 October 2023 aged 76, was a committed Marxist and revolutionary virtually his whole adult life.
Born in Walnut Creek, near San Francisco, Tom became interested in politics during the eventful 1960s. He joined a civil rights picket aged 14 and campaigned to stop right-winger Barry Goldwater’s presidential nomination. The anti-Vietnam War movement awakened more serious political interest. But it was as an exchange student in Germany in 1967-68 that Tom became radicalised. He joined the SDS, the German socialist student organisation, and started to read Marx and Lenin. He protested against the Vietnam War, participated in an attempted blockade of the right-wing Springer Press and saw the first round of the student movement in Paris in February 1968. 
In August 1968, I met Tom completely by chance at a youth hostel in Paris. I will never forget him coming downstairs one morning to say breathlessly, “I’ve just heard on the German news that the Russians have invaded Czechoslovakia”. From the beginning, our relationship was conditioned by the political environment.
By this time, Tom considered himself a Marxist; as he says, he had “crossed a boundary in attitude”. Quite characteristic of his life as a political activist he goes on: “I took [an] interest in listening to political argument and ideas back with me to Berkeley”.
The following year I joined Tom in the US. Tom was looking for a politics that would “make revolution inseparable from democracy”, which he found in the International Socialists in Berkeley, where he was a student. 
This was the major turning point in Tom’s political life. In the Berkeley IS, he became committed to the principles that guided his political activity, his values, his beliefs and his intellectual life until his death. 
Crucial was the concept of socialism from below and an understanding of the central role of the working class, support for movements against oppression, internationalism and the importance of struggle. Tom acted on these principles throughout his life as a rank-and-file trade unionist, as an activist, as a leader in the various forms of the Australian IS, as a supporter of socialists in Indonesia, as a writer, and in all his political positions.
Not long before his death, when asked about the political highlights of his life, Tom responded: “The key experiences share the common element of seeing the process of radicalisation in action. Examples include the actions against the war in Vietnam, the growth of the New Left and later the mobilisations against the Fraser government. For me, what made these so important was that the level of rebellion was high”.
Tom did not look, however, like a typical rebel. Most of his life his hair was relatively short and his glasses made him look rather conservative. He was once able to get out of an attempted bottling of demonstrators by straightening his collar and calling a police officer “sir”! Even with a beard he didn’t look like a rabblerouser. His speaking style was not flamboyant, his voice was not loud and his gestures were restrained. 
<img alt="Tom O'Lincoln" src="https://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/inline-images/img226.jpg" />
This contrasted strongly with the radical content of what he said. In his arguments, Tom pulled no punches. But also in his personal reactions to radical people and events he showed his radicalism. His enthusiasm for the Black Panthers in Berkeley, with their jaunty hairdos and radical stance, was infectious and I sported a Jewish-Afro for a while under this influence. Tom always cheered on striking workers, street protests of the oppressed and national liberation struggles. 
Tom and I came to Australia in November 1971 intending only to stay a couple of years before resuming travel. But again, circumstances intervened that changed the course of our lives and those of many others. At Mayday 1972, we encountered the very small Melbourne-based Marxist Workers Group and started to work to create an organisation which would reflect the politics that we stood for. Although he did travel again, Tom settled permanently in Australia and devoted himself to Australian politics for the rest of his life.
At first, Tom worked as a teacher and later he became a public servant. He also worked for a while as a sheet metal worker, and had stints doing full-time political activity. Wherever he was, Tom followed the news, read widely, talked to people and made friends.
Tom didn’t worry very much about his reputation. In the mid-1970s, he attended a demonstration for what was then called gay rights, wearing a very conspicuous jacket. When his pupils at school recognised him on TV, they asked disingenuously: “Are you a poofter, Mr Lincoln?” Tom just smiled.
Many people have attested to Tom’s lasting intellectual impact on them. For decades, he led reading groups to study Marx’s Capital, gave talks on subjects ranging from political economy to Australian labour history, wrote articles about international and local events and developed position papers on subjects such how we understand the role of Israel. Tom was always ready to discuss politics with people whose political position was different from his own. His patience in explaining issues to new comrades is remembered by many.
Tom said to me that he was not an innovator in terms of Marxism, but rather a populariser. And it is true that he had a special talent for explaining complex material in a very accessible way. A recent example is the translation earlier this year into Korean of a pamphlet he wrote in the 1980s about state capitalism. This piece is exemplary in its clarity, conciseness and purposeful exposition. It is not surprising that a Korean group would find this fairly obscure piece of writing useful today.
<img alt="Korea" src="https://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/inline-images/img138.jpg" />
The ability to present complex ideas to a new audience is no mean talent—it is not “only” being a populariser as it requires a very profound understanding of the material. But I would argue that Tom in fact was a path breaker in his books and not just a populariser. His short history of nineteenth century Australian labour history, United We Stand, was published in 2005. In the preface to the forthcoming new edition, historian Terry Irving comments that Tom was writing from within the working-class movement—“the first book of this kind since Brian Fitzpatrick’s Short History of the Australian Labour Movement (1940) to be able to claim this distinction”.
Tom developed his analysis of Australia as not simply a colony subject to the UK or (later) the US, but as being a “boutique” imperialist power in its own right in the region. He presented this argument in his books The Neighbour From Hell and Australia’s Pacific War. This was also breaking new ground.
Tom had a talent for languages. He spoke German fluently and studied Hegel, Marx and others in the original. He taught himself sufficient Portuguese when we were in Lisbon in 1975 to be able to speak to workers occupying factories. His fluent French proved very useful in Beirut in 1980. Tom had political discussions with workers and leftists in Spanish in Nicaragua and Peru in 1985. At this time, he also was reading in Spanish about the Peruvian Marxist José-Carlos Mariategui.
<img alt="Middle East" src="https://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/inline-images/img131.jpg" />
In the 1990s, Tom studied Indonesian, eventually knowing it sufficiently well to set up Suara Sosialis (Socialist Voice), a six-year-long project to produce Marxist material in Indonesian. He not only read and spoke the language but made a special effort to master colloquial expressions. His knowledge proved useful in June 2001 when the Asia Pacific Solidarity Conference near Jakarta was raided by police. Tom acted as interpreter for many of the foreigners in the group and helped negotiate the release of those arrested.
But it was Tom’s English language skills that influenced so many. From the beginning, Tom taught members to write simple, concise English which set forward Marxist ideas clearly. Editors of the publications from the Battler on were strongly influenced by Tom’s style; I and many others turned to Tom for advice when writing longer articles and even books. His skills as an editor, and his ability to improve a piece by shortening it, have repeatedly been enlightening to me. Tom’s influence lives on today in a wide network of political writing that does not bear his name, but is indebted to his example and guidance.
Tom was not just interested in political writing. His engagement with literature enriched his appreciation of Marxism and political theory, of history and of the world. In an unpublished essay on Faust, he wrote:
“Great literature is valuable even if it’s written by bilious right wingers. A famous example is the work of Balzac ... Engels wrote that he had ‘learned more [from Balzac] than from all the professional historians, economists and statisticians put together’.”
Tom’s political influence on me was profound. I joined with him and others in building political groups in the 1970s and 1980s and remained close to him politically after I ceased to be a member in the early 1990s. We experienced many political highlights together. In Portugal in July 1975, we joined in mass working class demonstrations. Back in Australia later that year, we were part of the protest again the dismissal of the Whitlam government that marched down Bourke Street in Melbourne. 
In the following period, we were together in many actions against Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser. We visited Lebanon, Syria and Israel/Palestine in 1980 together with Mick Armstrong, and in 1985 we travelled through South America and Nicaragua. Tom encouraged and inspired me—he helped me to learn to speak in public, to write about the activities I was involved in, such as women’s liberation, to develop political interests of my own, such as the radical Jewish movement, to write and to be an activist.
<img alt="Tom and Janey Stone" src="https://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/inline-images/img354.jpg" />
In 2012, Tom was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. Sadly, as the disease slowly took hold, he went into care and became unable to write. His last published <a href="https://overland.org.au/2019/07/dementia-is-not-a-democracy-looking-for-freedom-in-an-old-folks-home/">piece</a> was “Dementia is not a democracy: looking for freedom in an old folks’ home”. But he continued his political activity as long as he could—he attended meetings of Socialist Alternative from his aged care facility, he watched the news, he talked about the political situation and enjoyed the new editions of his books. Almost the last thing he said to me just four days before he died was about the war in the Middle East.
Tom was my political mentor virtually all my adult life. He was my partner for nearly twenty years and after that was one of my closest friends. Throughout, I looked to him for guidance and comment in my writing and political activity.
But we were more to each other than comrades. When we parted, we agreed that we would look out for each other and support each other in life. We did that until the very end.
Tom began his political memoirs with a quote from William Faulkner: “The past is not dead. It is not even past”. Although I now say good-bye to Tom, he does not seem really gone. He lives on, not just in me but in the dozens and hundreds of people who learnt from him, cared about him, were politically active with him, read his books, listened to his talks, and are now reading his obituaries. When asked, “Why be a revolutionary socialist today?”, his answer was that it was a life worth living.
His life was truly a life worth living.

Vale Tom O’Lincoln: a life worth living

Cable Street in Stepney looks like any other street in London’s East End. But in October 1936 it was the scene of events that marked a generation. 
In the 1930s, the East End contained nearly half the total Jewish population in Britain. A large proportion were immigrants or the offspring of immigrants. The worst living conditions in the country were in Stepney, with poverty, overcrowding and unemployment stunting people’s lives.
Fascist organisations were set up in all countries in Europe at the time. In the UK, Sir Oswald Mosley formed the British Union of Fascists in 1932. The organisation reached a peak in 1934, when it claimed a membership of 40,000. It started attempting to build a base in the working class. A major prong of this was an anti-Semitic campaign focused on the East End. Mosley linked questions of unemployment, housing and racism in his attempt to influence local workers and gain their support.
From the summer of 1936, the BUF intensified its anti-Semitic campaign, marked by fire bombings and racist abuse as it attacked Jewish premises and assaulted individuals in the street. By the end of September, it was ready for a show of strength and announced a major march planned for 4 October. By marching through Stepney, the fascists hoped to intimidate the organised working class and the Jewish community and swing individual workers to their arguments.
Those who opposed the BUF had just one week to organise. Their efforts led to the mass show of resistance that has become known as the Battle of Cable Street.
The initial response came from a new umbrella organisation, the Jewish People’s Council, which petitioned the government to ban the march. When this didn’t work, a counter-demonstration was called and built by activists from Jewish groups, unions and socialist organisations. Without the extraordinary efforts at this local level, there would have been no resistance to the fascists. Generally, the Communist Party is given the credit for having led the counter-demonstration. But it, along with the leaderships of virtually all the organisations, initially opposed any action.
The Jewish Board of Deputies, for instance, urged Jews to stay away. Already for several years they had established a strategy of ignoring the BUF’s actions. They told Jews not to heckle at Mosley’s meetings. The president of the board said, “The Jewish community, not being a political body as such, should not be dragged into the fight against fascism”. The leadership of the breakaway Labour group, the Independent Labour Party (ILP), also took some time to support the counterdemonstration. 
Mainstream Labour behaved disgracefully. George Lansbury, a Labour Party MP, avoided mentioning anti-Semitism, and called on the home secretary to re-route the BUF march through “less congested” areas. “What I want is to maintain peace and order”, Lansbury said, “and I advise those people who are opposed to fascism to keep away from the demonstration”. 
An editorial in the official labour movement paper, the Daily Herald, called this “sound advice”. It dithered: “Fascist meetings are in themselves dull … The only attraction is the prospect of disturbances. Withdraw that attraction and fascist meetings would die on the organisers’ hands”. The mayor of Stepney appealed to all East Londoners “most earnestly to stay away”.
The Communist Party was for fighting fascists – in Spain. It already had a rally, in solidarity with the anti-fascists fighting Franco in the Spanish Civil War, planned for that day in Trafalgar Square and continued to call on its supporters to join this event. 
Rank and file Communists were appalled by the party line, and lobbied desperately within the party for it to change. They continued to build the counterdemonstration. Only after several days did the CP cancel the Trafalgar Square demonstration and call for mass opposition to the BUF in the East End. The Daily Worker printed a special supplement calling for “the biggest rally against fascism that has yet been seen in Britain”. The party stamped over its earlier posters with the new location.
The anti-fascists didn’t wait for the change in direction by their leadership. Local rank and file leaders and militants from those very same organisations – local Jewish groups and even Zionists, trade unions, Communists, ILP members, socialists, Labour Party members, community activists – worked feverishly to build a mass rally aimed at denying the fascists entry to the East End. The Spanish slogan, “They shall not pass”, had become an English slogan.
The building of the event is fascinating and inspirational to read about. Several people who were teenagers at the time have given their accounts. Max Levitas, a CP member, commented: “In the 1930s, we didn’t have the internet! But we did have street meetings and loudspeaker tours. We leafleted thousands of houses every week”.
Reg Weston, a Communist journalist, described the build-up to the rally:
“This was also a time when few people had telephones or access to them, except by public call boxes. There was no TV. Radio was still almost a novelty. So our communications were through knocks on doors, notes through letter boxes, the post, meetings in the street, or at work, and by word of mouth. A main source of information was the newspaper, and once the CP Daily Worker had come out in support, was read by thousands in the factories and workplaces such as the bus garages and the rail depots.
“On the Sunday morning we took this round the streets of the small, council estates in Southgate. We sold them at almost every other house. Our main propaganda medium then was by chalking slogans on walls and in the roads. There was much less traffic in those days … We chalked thoroughly all the entrances to the great Standard Telephones cable factory in New Southgate where 10,000 went to work every day.”
Up to 300,000 people participated in what was a series of mass demonstrations. With the local population being approximately 60,000, it is clear that many people came from outside the area. They were Jewish, socialists, dock workers, housewives, Catholics – no distinction of work, religion or ethnicity.
“There were so many of us that you couldn’t move. I can remember the elation in the crowd that so many people were there”, Alice Hitchen, a participant, said. “The dockers came from Limehouse and Poplar – to my amazement, because they had a reputation for being anti-Semitic. There were cabinet-makers from Bethnal Green and tailors from Whitechapel. There were so many different accents. Miners came from Wales and communists from all over Britain. ‘They shall not pass’ was on everybody’s lips.”
The fascists had planned four separate marches. But the crowd was so dense that the police, approximately 10,000, had to beat a way through for their march. So the battle was between the anti-fascists and the police.
Earlier in the day, barricades were set up in Cable Street using corrugated iron, barrels, coal, glass and pulled-up paving stones. The streets were strewn with broken glass and marbles as a defence against mounted police charges. Stones and other missiles were thrown and a bag of pepper was burst in front of a policeman’s horse. The anti-fascists chanted slogans and gave clenched-fist salutes from behind the barricades in defiance. There was fierce fighting as the police attempted to clear them.
An attack also came from above as women in houses along the street threw rubbish, rotten vegetables and the contents of chamber pots at the police. One participant recalled:
“[It] was even a surprise to us. All we could attempt to do was organise people who were on the demonstration. Obviously, we made no attempt … to organise people from their homes. It was along Cable Street that from the roofs and the upper floors, people, ordinary housewives, and elderly women too, were throwing down milk bottles and other weapons and all kinds of refuse … onto the police. The Battle of Cable Street is known for this reason. It was there that the police really had to fight for themselves, not for the fascists.”
About 150 people were arrested and there were many injuries. But the crowd refused to give way. Eventually the police realised they could never clear the way and told Mosley to give up.
The anti-fascists then called an impromptu march and celebrated their success until early morning. Although Mosley organised other demonstrations, including in the East End, the BUF declined in influence after Cable Street. Most importantly, it never got a hold in the East End working class.
Most accounts of the Battle of Cable Street focus on the fascists being prevented from marching. This was a great achievement. But listening to the eyewitnesses, you can hear the level of euphoria on the day. “You should have been there to hear the cry, and see people jumping and shouting in joy”, Max Levitas said. “People who had never drunk beer in their lives, drank a glass of beer. We had won.”
“Everyone was cheering”, Alice Hitchen said. “Where I was people were dancing and singing and throwing their arms around one another.”
Another participant, Bill Fishman, related:
“The people up the top of the flats, mainly Irish Catholic women, were throwing rubbish on the police. We were all side by side. I was moved to tears to see bearded Jews and Irish Catholic dockers standing up to stop Mosley. I shall never forget that as long as I live, how working class people could get together to oppose the evil of racism.
“There were parties, there was dancing in the streets. The cafes were full, the pubs were full. And there was a feeling of elation, a feeling of relief, particularly amongst the immigrant Jews.”
This achievement of unity wasn’t just “spontaneous”. First, we must recognise the extraordinary organising effort in the week leading to it by local militants and activists, carried out against the opposition of their bureaucratic leaders. Second, this was not the first time that Jews and others in the East End had united to fight against anti-Semitism and for their rights. The East End had a history of struggle during the 1930s to build upon. So much so that many Jews in the East End already looked to the Communist Party for political leadership.
Going back to earlier periods, there were many examples of mutual support, particularly between Jewish tailors and dockers. During the great dock strike in 1889, there was a call for a general strike. Responding to this, a group of Jewish tailors organised their own stoppage. They held mass meetings that included dockers’ leaders as speakers. The dockers’ strike committee, although short of funds, donated £100 to support the tailors. This was by far the largest single donation the tailors received and it helped them win their strike.
After their victory, the tailors’ union declared its hope that the “grand lesson of solidarity from the dock labourers’ strike” and the other strikes would “mark a new and splendid epoch in the history of labour”.
Later, in April 1912, Jewish tailors held another successful strike. Then the Jewish tailors supported a dockers’ strike, and huge joint meetings of dockers and tailors were held on the Mile End Waste. The Jewish trade unions and the local anarchists organised a support committee, which focused on helping the dockers’ children. During the strike, more than 300 were cared for by Jewish families.
So it is no coincidence that dockers were the militant vanguard of the fight against the fascists in 1936.
When we celebrate the Battle of Cable Street, we are celebrating a long tradition of Jewish radicalism that goes back to the 19th century. London Jews, mostly immigrants from eastern Europe, brought with them a working class tradition of struggle, militant action and socialist ideas. This included united action with non-Jews.
The jubilation of this victory has remained within the memory of the labour movement, not just because they successfully defeated the fascists on one day. With the creation of a united movement of the working class in its broadest sense, together with its allies, the people felt the possibilities and strengths that unity brings. That feeling has been passed down the generations and remains an inspiration to us today.
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First published in Socialist Alternative magazine.

Remembering the battle of Cable Street

Val Macarow, a lifelong activist for many causes, most notably the Movement Against Uranium Mining (MAUM) and the anti-nuclear movement, died on 9 March at the age of 87.
Val’s Jewish grandparents had escaped from pogroms in Russia, and she grew up in a working class family in Carlton. “The women in Val’s family were courageous and strong, and this certainly would have informed her commitment to equality, human rights and the rights of women”, her daughter Keely said.
Val became an activist during the Vietnam War, when she was active in the Congress for International Co-operation and Disarmament and the Moorabbin Peace Group, in the Melbourne suburb where she lived. This set her on a decades-long path of activism in her local area.
When the women’s liberation movement started in the 1970s, she embraced it wholeheartedly.
She was pivotal, along with others, in setting up and running women’s refuges (then called halfway houses) in Caulfield and Albert Park to support and provide temporary housing for women and children escaping violent men. She stood up to the police and men who came to the house, refusing to let them in and ensuring the safety of the women.
Val’s main contribution was to environmental issues, particularly through MAUM during the 1980s.
She played a pivotal role in the Moorabbin MAUM group, which worked with residents and had a very good relationship with several local workplaces. Under MAUM’s influence, metal workers at Johns and Waygood declared that they would refuse to build anything connected with uranium mines in their factory. 
Workers at the Philip Morris tobacco factory were also supporters of the MAUM group, which returned the favour and supported a picket that lasted over Christmas time one year.
Sandra Bloodworth, who worked closely with Val in those years, said: “This was a great example for me as a new socialist activist of how solidarity builds networks and actions”.
Val influenced local resident Noel Toumbourou, who remembers Val telling him why she spent her time working for causes rather than pursuing money: “She realised that capitalism was a flawed system and we were all harming the environment in our pursuit of wealth”.
Val also engaged in many national activities, events and demonstrations to raise awareness of the dangers of Australian uranium in the nuclear cycle. She helped organise and participated in blockades of the Roxby Downs uranium mine in South Australia, and in Melbourne marches against uranium mining.
In more recent years, Val was active in campaigns against GM food and with other grandmothers protesting against the detention of refugees. She was recognised in the media including in local papers and the Age. 
She influenced many people in her own locality, but also internationally as she forged ties and worked with the German Greens, US activist sister Rosalie Bertell and Chinese and Japanese anti-nuclear activists, among others.
Val Macarow was a tireless worker for the rights of people and the environment and a fighter against injustice. It is out of such grassroots activists that socialist movements are created.

Keely Macarow

Vale Val Macarow, a tireless campaigner

Zelda D’Aprano, famous for chaining herself to the railings of the Commonwealth Building in Melbourne in 1969 to demand equal pay for women, died on 21 February, aged 90.
Zelda was born into a working class Jewish family in Carlton in 1928. Following her mother’s example, she became a member of the Communist Party. Initially, she worked in factories and later for the Meat Industry Union.
The meat industry was a test case for the equal pay campaign. She and other unionists were present at the Arbitration Commission ruling that the minimum wage would continue to be set at different rates for men and women.
Four male judges decided not to grant “equal pay for work of equal value” but only “equal pay for equal work” to the few women who did the same work as men in male-dominated occupations. Female-dominated industries such as nursing missed out, and only about 5 percent of women got equal pay.
“There we were, the poor women, all sitting in Court like a lot of cows in the sale yards, while all the men out front presented arguments as to how much we were worth”, Zelda later wrote. “I felt humiliated, belittled and degraded, not for myself but for all women.”
So on 21 October 1969, Zelda chained herself to the railing, until she was removed by police. “We decided I would chain myself [there], because the government should set the example. Private industry won’t do anything if the government won’t.”
Zelda’s action occurred against a background of mass mobilisation. In 1968, there was mass action worldwide. In Australia in 1969, strike action defeated the penal powers used against unions for decades. In this context, it is not so surprising that Zelda chose direct action.
Ten days later, on 31 October, she was joined by Alva Geikie and Thelma Solomon. The three women chained themselves across the doors of the Arbitration Court.
The events drew enormous attention to the campaign, and led to Zelda and others establishing a Women’s Action Committee (WAC) in early 1970, a group very important in the lead-up to the emergence of the women’s liberation movement.
“The type of women’s organisation we envisaged was a militant organisation, for we recognised that women were not going to achieve anything unless they were prepared to fight”, Zelda wrote. “We had passed the stage of caring about a ‘lady-like’ image because women had for too long been polite and lady-like and were still being ignored.”
Over the next few years, there were several highly successful WAC protests. In the “equality ride” on a Melbourne tram in 1970, a group of equal pay campaigners, including Zelda and Bon Hull, refused to pay more than 75 percent of the adult tram fare to protest that working women received 75 percent of male wages.
Zelda never had an easy ride. She was always up front, not afraid of conflict or disagreement, and called a spade a spade. She was a thorn in the side of many people.
Recognising the need for a support group during the chaining action, she asked her trade unionist employers at Trades Hall for some women to take an hour off work to be there. They refused.
When she wrote a private letter to one of the Communist leaders of the union that employed her, complaining about how he had snubbed her and other women during a social occasion, she was fired.
She also attracted the attention of ASIO.
By 1971, the features of the new women’s liberation movement were becoming clear. In May, the first trade union-sponsored community consultation on child care was held. In August, the Women’s Action Committee sponsored a national conference on Women in the Workforce and Trade Unions. There was also a demonstration against the Miss Teenage Quest.
A pro-abortion demonstration in Melbourne in November, a brave action as the word “abortion” was almost taboo, attracted 500 people, a significant achievement. But the Melbourne Herald buried it in an inside paragraph with “Dozens of barefoot women took part in an abortion law reform march in the city today”.
Zelda, Thelma, Alva and Bon all enthusiastically joined the women’s liberation movement. Their presence, and that of other older women from the Communist Party and the trade unions, including my mother Rose Stone, helped ensure that the movement had a close relationship with and understanding of working women.
While we did not always see eye to eye politically, I regard Zelda and this generation of militant women activists as inspiring and admirable. With Zelda’s death we are nearing the end of an era. It is very appropriate that Melbourne Trades Hall flew its flag at half mast.

Vale Zelda D’Aprano, a fighter for women’s liberation

The Western powers lack of interest in refugees from totalitarian regimes is not new.
The period after Hitler came to power in 1933 was marked by increasingly virulent attacks on Jews. In 1938, US president Franklin Roosevelt initiated a conference at Evian-les-Bains, France, supposedly to help Jewish refugees.
At that time about 450,000 Jews out of a total of 950,000 had left Germany. But the conference did nothing. The US delegates offered no place to settle Jews fleeing Hitler and passed the buck to South American states. One by one, the South Americans said no.
The Australian representative disingenuously said: “[A]s we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one”. This was in spite of the ongoing genocide against Aborigines and the White Australia policy.
Roosevelt had ambivalent attitudes toward Jews. Although he had some Jews in his administration, he never made the slightest move in the 1930s to amend the then anti-Semitic immigration laws.
Later, at the January 1943 Casablanca Conference, he referred to what he called the specific and understandable complaints that the Germans made about Jews because of their disproportionate representation in the professions.
The outbreak of war did not change the attitude of the imperialist powers. Information about the systematic killing of Jews was smuggled out via various routes from 1941, but was almost universally disbelieved, ignored or suppressed.
When Jan Karski, a brave Polish resistance fighter, escaped to the West, he brought detailed information about the situation under the Nazi occupation, including the Holocaust. Karski met political leaders, including the UK foreign secretary Anthony Eden and president Roosevelt. None of them took him seriously. Roosevelt reportedly asked about the condition of horses in Poland but did not ask a single question about Jews. Karski concluded that the Jews “were abandoned by all world governments”.
Beginning around March 1943, there were calls for the Allies to bomb the rail lines leading to the Auschwitz death camp. US military chiefs refused, arguing that this would divert resources from the war effort and that the rails were hard to hit.
Undersecretary of war John J. McCloy fretted that such bombings might “provoke more vindictive actions by the Germans” – as if there were any worse fate than the death camps. The tone of Allied refugee policy was set by the US, but Britain followed closely behind, “putting self-interest first”.
Overall, the Western governments displayed a shocking indifference to the fate of the Jews. Many historians have attested to this. US historian Walter Laqueur concludes that, despite knowing about the “final solution” from an early date, the US, the UK and the Soviet Union showed no interest in the fate of the Jews. He argues that not only was no action taken but the information was actively suppressed.
US intelligence, for example, took an interest in the movements of forced labour teams because they were a factor in the German war effort. But according to Holocaust historian Richard Breitman, author of US Intelligence and the Nazis, the CIA’s predecessor organisation, the Office of Strategic Services, “does not seem to have taken much detailed interest in German camps as they concerned the extermination of Jews”.
Michael Neufeld, introducing a collection of essays on prospects for bombing Auschwitz, concludes: “The Holocaust simply was not an important issue on the public or military agenda of World War II”.
Neither the imperialist powers before the war nor the Allies and the official war effort were ever interested in helping Jews.

Not the first time refugees have been demonised by the powerful

International Women’s Day has become mainstream in recent years. But historically it was a socialist event. Clara Zetkin, a leading member of the German Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the early 1900s, argued that the working class would never win its battles without women and raised the issue of special party work among women. Under her leadership, a working women’s movement grew rapidly in Germany, and the female membership of the SPD rose from 10,500 in 1907 to 150,000 in 1913.
Zetkin proposed the establishment of an international working women’s day at the International Socialist Women’s Conference in Copenhagen in August 1910, inspired by US socialists who had held women’s demonstrations and meetings the year before. The slogan for IWD was to be: “The vote for women will unite our strength in the struggle for socialism.”
In 1911, more than a million women and men took up the idea of IWD enthusiastically in rallies and marches, described by the leading Russian Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai as “one seething, trembling sea of women”.
In subsequent years and throughout First World War, IWD continued to provide a focus for activists. What happened in Russia in February 1917 is famous. In spite of all opposition, women in Petrograd chose to protest and strike for “Bread and Peace” on 23 February, and with this sparked the February revolution.
In Australia
The history of IWD in Australia is not so well known.
The first celebrations were organised by the Militant Women’s Group (MWG), set up by the Communist Party following its establishment of a central women’s department in 1927. The group was first established in Sydney and later spread to country NSW, Brisbane and Melbourne. It published a monthly newspaper, Woman Worker.
The MWG organised a rally in the Sydney Domain on 25 March 1928. The demands were an eight-hour day for female shop workers, no piece work, the basic wage for the unemployed and annual holidays on full pay. The Sydney MWG again organised a public meeting for IWD in Belmore Park in 1929 – this time with a focus on support for the wives and families of striking timber workers.
The first Melbourne event occurred in 1931. With the lead banner proclaiming “Long live International Women’s Day”, 50 women led 150 men on a march to the Yarra Bank.
The MWG was the beginning of an important network among women party members and others around them. Here is a quick glimpse of some of the women activists of the day, for whom International Women’s Day was an annual celebration.
Jean Young was involved with the unemployed movement in the early 1930s and a member of the CPA. As a barmaid, she was active in the Liquor Trades Union in Melbourne and became its first elected female organiser. The union executive initially restricted her from organising hotels because they “weren’t suitable places for women to enter”.
Jean managed to convince them to charge women a lower union membership fee because they had lower wages, and to adopt a policy of equal pay. She successfully organised many hotels and restaurants, including the Parliament House refreshment room.
Anna Morgan, an Aboriginal woman, spoke at the 1934 Melbourne IWD rally, where she denounced the “black flag of the Aboriginal Protection Board” and called for legal changes and access to social welfare for Aborigines. Anna was born in 1874 at a mission station in north-west Victoria and became a domestic servant at the age of 11. Her husband’s family had been allocated a farm block at Cumeroogunga on the Murray in 1888, but the Aboriginal Protection Board revoked the agreement in 1907. When Anna and her husband refused to accept this, they were expelled from the station and charged with trespass, lost many possessions and were jailed when they tried to retrieve them.
Gloves and banners
In the late 1930s and the war years, IWD involved a broader range of participants, but it also became more conservative and conventional in its approach. The atmosphere of militancy and direct action waned, and the day was mainly celebrated with luncheons and afternoon teas. Photos of the events in the 1950s and early 1960s show women with gloves, hats and handbags, indistinguishable from apolitical and middle class women of the day.
Nonetheless, many of these same women, led by the Union of Australian Women (UAW), were prepared to carry banners in street demonstrations around such issues as equal pay and peace.
They were also not afraid to combat racism and to support Aborigines. Melva Walsh, from Moe in Victoria’s Gippsland, became UAW vice-president and addressed the IWD gathering in Melbourne in 1967. Longtime member Marj Oke recollected: “Women would say to me: if you want to risk your reputation by belonging to something with blacks in it, go ahead, but I’m not risking mine. In opposing racism you learnt something of its sting.”
The UAW members responded quickly in 1963, when Aborigines in Traralgon were being evicted because people objected to living near them. Marj Oke and a carload of friends went to Traralgon and held a meeting in a hall in that street and were able to prevent the eviction.
Equal pay
By the late 1960s, things were beginning to change. 1968 brought mass action not only in France, but also in many other countries, including Australia. In 1969, major strike action defeated the penal powers that had been used against unions for decades.
In this context, it is not so surprising that Zelda D’Aprano opted for direct action in response to the 1969 Arbitration Commission ruling on equal pay. Zelda was a member of the CPA and worked for the meatworkers’ union in Melbourne. She and other unionists were in the audience when four male judges decided not to grant “equal pay for work of equal value” but only “equal pay for equal work” to the few women who did exactly the same work as men in male-dominated occupations. Female-dominated industries such as nursing missed out, and only 5 percent of women got equal pay. Zelda wrote about her reaction:
“There we were, the poor women, all sitting in Court like a lot of cows in the sale yards, while all the men out front presented arguments as to how much we were worth … I felt humiliated, belittled and degraded, not for myself but for all women.”
On 21 October 1969, Zelda chained herself to the Commonwealth Building in Spring Street, Melbourne. “We decided I would chain myself up against the Commonwealth Government Building doors, because the government should set the example. Private industry won’t do anything if the government won’t.”
Ten days later she was joined by Alva Geikie and Thelma Solomon, and the three women chained themselves across the doors of the Arbitration Court. These events drew enormous attention to the Equal Pay campaign and led to Zelda and others establishing a Women’s Action Committee (WAC) in early 1970.
Women’s liberation 
During 1971 there were more actions, and over this year, the features of the new movement became clear. In May the first trade union-sponsored community consultation on childcare was held. In August, the WAC sponsored a national conference on “Women in the Workforce and Trade Unions”. There was also a demonstration against the Miss Teenage Quest. A pro-abortion demonstration in Melbourne drew significant crowds in November, as did the first childcare demonstration in the city square in the following February.
And then came the first new-wave IWD march, on 11 March 1972.
Throughout Australia, women and men rallied and marched. In all cities, there was a great sense of a new movement and new possibilities. In Melbourne up to 3,000 women marched, including many young women who brought with them a new and less earnest approach. For instance, there was a group of women on bikes with tampons hanging from their hat brims, calling themselves “the menstrual cycles”.
The Sydney rally was advertised with a poster inspired by the image of Angela Davis, a Black revolutionary in the US. The main demands were for equal pay, equal opportunity in work and education, free childcare, free safe contraceptives and safe legal abortion on request.
So the women’s liberation movement took off. In Melbourne, the first Women’s Liberation Movement Centre opened at 16 La Trobe Street. New structures sprang up in every state. IWD became the annual central rally of a dynamic new movement.
From its beginnings in Europe in 1911, IWD has been a day for socialists and activists to celebrate the struggle for women’s liberation. In the words of Alexandra Kollontai:
“Down with the world of property and the power of capital! Away with inequality, lack of rights and the oppression of women – the legacy of the bourgeois world! Forward to the international unity of working women and male workers.”

The radical history of International Women’s Day

The Victorian Trades Hall Council is flying its flag at half-mast. Their epitaph says it all: “Pete Seeger, your work is your monument”. The Facebook site for the 30th anniversary of the British Miners’ strike is overwhelmed by tributes. All around the world, people are mourning the world’s best known folk singer.
Pete Seeger, who died at the age of 94 on 27 January, was an international towering legend in his own lifetime and will live on in the songs he wrote and sang.
Folk music might seem a tame medium in the modern world of rap, metal and hip hop. It might be hard to believe that in past eras, folk singing was seen as subversive. But songs like “Talking Union Blues”, “The Ballad of Joe Hill”, “Which side are you on?” and many, many others stand for a life lived to inspire thousands and millions in struggle and resistance.
	“Now, if you want higher wages let me tell you what to do
	You got to talk to the workers in the shop with you.
	You got to build you a union, got to make it strong,
	But if you all stick together, boys, it won’t be long.
	You get shorter hours, better working conditions...”
Seeger sang about unions and organising, he sang about the bomb, he sang about pollution, he sang about civil rights and the fight against racism, he sang about Vietnam. But he also sang love songs and children’s songs. He sang songs from other languages and cultures. “Wimoweh”, sung by the ensemble the Weavers in the 1950s, was a reworking of an African song. It became a hit and has seen a recent revival in The Lion King.
‘I am not going to answer any questions’
Seeger’s stature in the world of folk music cannot be overstated. But at the same time he was a serious political figure. A member of the American Communist Party in the 1930s and 40s, he later drifted away from the party. But in 1955 he was subpoenaed to testify before the US House Un-American Activities Committee.
Seeger did not respond like everyone else after the 1950 conviction and imprisonment of the Hollywood Ten, and take the 5th amendment (right against self-incrimination). Instead, Seeger took the more political first amendment (right to freedom of speech) and refused to name personal and political associations: “I am not going to answer any questions as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs or my political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs”.
He was convicted of contempt of Congress and blacklisted. As a symbol of defiance, he took his music underground, performed where he could, on picket lines and as part of the civil rights movement. His struggle with authorities lasted 7 years and he nearly went to prison.
'A strong memory of joy'
Pete Seeger was well known to all of us in Australia around the various left movements of the time. In 1961 Melbourne folk musicians had held a benefit concert for him. So you can imagine what excitement his actual appearance here produced when in 1963 he visited.
His single “Little Boxes”, written by Malvina Reynolds about conformity, became number one in the Top 40. But as singer Ken Mansell says, he was not interested in commercial success. “He aimed to reach out and change minds, not his own bank balance.”
Seeger gave a number of concerts, which inspired many Australian performers. His visit to Australia was simultaneously a political and a musical event.
Musician Judy Turner writes about “a strong memory of the joy of seeing him after hearing his records for what seemed like my whole life… it was welcoming to be part of a crowd that believed what we did, as that was so rarely the case”.
What Judy says is crucial. After the isolation of the left during the 50s and the Cold War, listening to and even more importantly singing was a critical part of the creation of the new dynamic mass movements such as the student movement and the anti-war movement.
Seeger had an “absolute rapport with the audience” and to be there was electrifying: In an audience sing-a-long “the engendered feeling was long lasting. Life-long lasting”. In Brisbane the concert was “a revelation” to one participant. My own outstanding memory of the Melbourne concert is Seeger singing “Take this Hammer” (a Black work song) while actually chopping a log of wood on stage.
Between each line he gave a loud grunt simultaneous with the noise of the axe. The song meant to me not just the centuries of slavery in the US and the fight against them, but also the fight of all working and oppressed people.
Seeger said of his visit, “I can never forget it. It was an eye-opener.”
'A sense of belonging, a source of hope'
Seeger was a major contributor to the growth of the folk music movement in the US. It is no coincidence that the revival of folk music was contemporaneous with the growth of mass movements and protest actions. In Australia in the 40s and 50s, a number of people were working to rediscover Australian bush ballads and other traditional musical forms.
The mainstream literary establishment was dominated by England, and it was left to leftists (including many from the Communist Party) to research, publish and perform music and songs sung by ordinary people. At the same time, many people were writing their own songs to express social and political issues of the day, and the “folk” song provided a convenient format.
For instance Helen Palmer wrote the famous song “Ballad of 1891” in 1951, at the time of Menzies’ attempt to outlaw the Communist Party, attacks on the trade union movement and the growing Cold War. When the folk revival of the 60s occurred, the growing mass movements needed songs of inspiration and expression.
Work songs, songs from earlier struggles, songs about everyday life of workers and others in the lower levels of society, new songs of protest – these provided support, a sense of continuity and belonging, a source of hope.
Folk songs provided the ideal vehicle for protest songs and movements. With relatively simple, direct tunes that can be accompanied on easily accessible instruments such as the guitar, the folk style does not require extensive training before a song could be sung. Sung without a loud backing, and in the 1960s usually without amplification, the audience could focus on the lyrics.
But above all, the folk style is participatory. Although many talented performers came out of the folk revival, from the point of view of protest songs, it is not the performer/audience relationship that is important, but the fact that everyone can join in, regardless of musical ability.
No one demonstrates this better than Pete Seeger. As Ken Mansell says:
“Always a crusader for humanist causes rather than a mere entertainer, the power of Seeger’s performance rested on its sincerity and passion. Seeger very rarely performed solo: he invariably obliterated the star-audience duality of Tin Pan Alley. The sound of Seeger rousing others to join him, his high-tenor voice freeing itself to soar above and beyond, became a signature of the optimistic sixties.”
'We shall overcome'
Pete Seeger was responsible for popularising the famous song “We shall overcome”, which subsequently became the anthem of the American Civil Rights Movement, and was sung by Joan Baez and many others. With its powerful tune, and its lyrics focused on hope, protesters around the world found in it inspiration and support. From Ireland to Martin Luther King to India in the 80s, the song has been sung by millions worldwide. Mark Allen remembers:
“In Prague in 1989, during the intense weeks of the Velvet Revolution, hundreds of thousands of people sang this haunting music in unison in Wenceslas Square, both in English and in Czech, with special emphasis on the phrase ‘I do believe.’ This song’s message of hope gave protesters strength to carry on until the powers-that-be themselves finally gave up hope themselves.”
In Australia as it was sung as an anti-war song. We sat for hours at vigils outside the American consulate, singing this song and others. We were moved and inspired. And the words seemed to talk to many of us, not just about the end of the Vietnam War, but also the possibility of building a better world.
	“We shall all be free
	We shall all be free
	We shall all be free someday”
The sixties folk revival is no more. But the songs remain. Pete Seeger was not a revolutionary, but he did remain a left wing radical and never lost hope in that possibility of a better world. The guitar of the great American folk singer Woody Guthrie was labeled “This machine kills fascists”. Pete Seeger’s banjo carried the statement “This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces It to Surrender”. Singing and music have a power that has been recognised in struggle throughout history.
(With thanks to Mark Cryle and Ken Mansell).

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