Palestine solidarity activists should stand with the people of Syria against the dictatorship they have just deposed. 
Bashar al-Assad would not have been ousted so quickly by militias without there being mass opposition to his regime. Indeed, in the southern cities of Sweida and Daraa, people rose up to push out state officials without needing the intervention of the northern Islamist fighters. The Syrian military effectively dissolved, its soldiers donning civilian clothes and offering no resistance—Assad had no popular support, even within his own army. Likewise, as rebels approached Damascus, government forces crumbled and withdrew. Assad fled. 
Across Syria, mass celebrations across all religious and ethnic lines flowed into the streets. Yellow flags of the Kurds and multi-coloured Druze flags flew among the green, white and black flags of the 2011 Syrian revolution. Tens of thousands are being released from Assad’s torture dungeons, people are loudly speaking the many words banned by the regime, and statues of the dictator have been torn down by large assemblies of people all over the country. 
Syrian revolution, Assadist brutality
The dictatorship of Bashar, like that of his father Hafez al-Assad, rested on extreme repression. The country was known as the kingdom of silence because of its absence of free speech, its co-option and neutering of all trade unions, and its enormous security state, the heart of which was the network of torture prisons now being prised open by the people. 
When the Syrian masses joined those in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain and across the Arab world rising in a democratic revolution, they were met with massacres. Yet even then, most of Assad’s military defected. Iran’s Islamic Guard and the Lebanese party-militia Hezbollah intervened to rescue the regime, but even they couldn’t crush the popular uprising. In 2015, Russia finally intervened to rescue Assad, barrel bombing entire cities.
Yet, while the country was being bombarded, tens, even hundreds of thousands of people came out into the streets to march with the revolutionary flag during nearly every ceasefire. Some of the local councils, which the revolution had set up, continued. In 2017, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/syrias-last-bastion-of-freedom">activists in the north-western town of Saraqib</a> held Syria’s first genuinely free election since 1954, illustrating the depth of the revolutionary process that had unfolded before Russia and Iran intervened. 
Just last year, after almost everyone had written off the Syrian revolution, hundreds of thousands returned to the streets in more than 55 locations to protest against the regime. In Daraa and Sweida, workers launched general strikes. This context is important for understanding the current moment as part of a mass process rather than solely an Islamist seizure of power.
Assad and the Palestinians
Some in the Palestine movement have denounced the overthrow of Assad, arguing that his regime was a bastion of resistance to Israel. Even if that had been true, Palestine solidarity activists would still have a responsibility to stand with the people against Assad’s dictatorship. 
But Assad has policed the Israeli border for decades, refusing to challenge the occupation of the Golan Heights. “We haven't had a problem with the Assad regime—for 40 years not a single bullet was fired on the Golan Heights”, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2018-07-12/ty-article/netanyahu-israel-has-no-problem-with-assad-agreements-must-be-upheld/0000017f-e1aa-d804-ad7f-f1faccdb0000">told</a> reporters during a 2018 visit to Moscow. Assad also collaborated with the United States, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190518111450/https:/www.opensocietyfoundations.org/reports/globalizing-torture-cia-secret-detention-and-extraordinary-rendition">holding</a> and torturing prisoners for the CIA during its “extraordinary rendition” program after 9/11. 
And Assad has persecuted and repressed Palestinians in Syria. In recent weeks, 67 members of the Al-Qassam brigades were released from Sednaya prison, along with 630 other Palestinians. We can only imagine how many Palestinians are among the bodies uncovered in the prisons, having been tortured to death and dumped in graves. Just days before Assad fled, Palestinians in Raml refugee camp in Latakia held a night-time march to call for his overthrow. This was particularly meaningful: 5,000 Palestinians were <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/aug/15/syria-palestinians-latakia-assault">expelled</a> from the camp in 2011 for joining the revolutionary protests against the dictatorship. 
In fact, many Palestinians participated in and aided the Syrian revolution from 2011 onwards. In 2013, Haitham, a Palestinian revolutionary, <a href="https://souriahouria.com/palestinian-revolutionary-assad-is-no-friend-of-the-palestinians/">told a Tunisian audience</a> that the inhabitants of Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus supported the Syrian uprising by forming committees to organise the intake of Syrians fleeing repression and to smuggle medical supplies to cities held by the revolution. 
“Our first role in the revolution was providing humanitarian and political support to our Syrian brothers and sisters”, he said. The Palestinians in the camp also drove out the Assadists that administered it. 
The so-called Axis of Resistance
Other supporters of Palestine insist that Assad’s rule was a pillar within broader regional Palestinian liberation forces. For example, Ali Abunimah and Asa Winstanley <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/why-israel-thinks-it-won-syria/50205">write in the Electronic Intifada</a>: “Syria was for decades the backbone of the Axis of Resistance to US hegemony and Israeli settler-colonialism”. 
The Iranian and Syrian dictatorships, the centre of the so-called Axis of Resistance, were never going to liberate the Palestinians. The evidence for this is their despotic rule over their “own people”. In the past three years, there have been mass protests and strikes over the Iranian regime’s treatment of women and workers and its massacres of demonstrators. They will never stand for genuine liberation in Palestine precisely because it could inspire workers and the oppressed in Iran to liberate themselves from tyranny. 
Max Blumenthal, an American journalist and founder of the news site Grey Zone, <a href="https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1866724321907052860">declared on X</a> that Netanyahu is the primary winner in Syria, and has repeatedly implied that the rebels are basically Israel’s foot soldiers. Yet Israel has bombed and destroyed arms depots across Syria over the past weeks to keep weapons out of the hands of the rebels. After <a href="https://x.com/netanyahu/status/1865757924594786810">celebrating</a> Assad’s downfall on X, Netanyahu ordered a sustained bombing campaign to neuter the Syrian military, <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/10/middleeast/israel-syria-assad-strikes-intl/index.html">striking the country at least 480 times</a> and reportedly destroying the country’s naval fleet. Israel never felt that threatened by Assad.
Israel has always taken advantage of instability in the Middle East and North Africa to advance its interests and claim territory, just as the United States has long taken advantage of ruptures in that region, the Asia Pacific, Europe and Latin America. When imperialist nations capitalise on political ruptures to advance their interests, we should not blame the actors who created the rupture in the first place or label those actors imperialist pawns.
When Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal and attempted to block the waterway to all Israeli ships in 1956, Israel responded by occupying the Sinai Peninsula—a significant chunk of territory—for five months. Did giving the Israelis both a pretext and an opportunity to take over Egyptian land make Nasser an Israeli stooge or mean that he should never have nationalised the Suez? 
The road ahead
For now, the rebels in Syria have defeated a vile dictatorship that was the enemy of both the Syrian people and the Palestinian liberation movement. Importantly, their offensive unleashed the popular movement again, drawing hundreds of thousands into the streets and squares across the country. Palestine supporters have added reason to watch for mass movements across the Middle East and North Africa: hope for the Palestinians is tied to the success of struggles against dictatorship across the region. Freedom for the Palestinians depends on the Arab working classes defeating their own ruling classes, and on whether they’re organised enough to defeat meddling imperialist powers. 
Yet many factors and actors are arrayed against the Syrian people. 
First, the imperialist powers—Israel, Turkey and the United States—will all attempt to safeguard their own interests, rather than those of the Syrian people. Second, Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which led the insurgency, is an authoritarian Islamist militia with its own agenda. Much of its leadership emerged from Jabhat Fateh al-Sham and Ahrar al-Sham, both of which have played a counter-revolutionary role, pressing back on the popular movement and its attempts to create democratic structures. 
After HTS took power in Idlib in 2017 from the locally run councils created by the revolution, it established a new, authoritarian civilian government called the Syrian Salvation Government. Students protested against its closure of the Free Aleppo University; others protested over issues of democracy and living standards, showing some determination to assert themselves on the new government. 
Much Western criticism of HTS has focused on the group’s reactionary Islamism. But the key challenge now will not be its religiosity, reactionary or otherwise. The group has made clear that it wants Syria to be run like other countries across the MENA region (and, indeed, the world): a top-down, capitalist government overseeing a country in which business owners dominate workers and the oppressed. 
It’s hard to imagine the group governing as brutally as the Assad dynasty. But now that that era is over, a new HTS-led government will be the key obstacle to a just society. Hopefully, the democratic politics of the masses—the opposition to authoritarian rule and religious sectarianism that characterised the revolution—can again come to the fore. It’s also possible that, with Assad gone, there will be more room to reconstruct a political left.
We should not write the revolution out of history or ignore the possibilities offered by the mass participation in the process so far. All the Western liberal media outlets, the regional governments and the imperialists are doing this. Whatever happens, those who stand for liberation must have consistent political principles and highlight the heroic role of the Syrian people in trying to determine their own future.

Jasmine Duff

Those who stand with the Palestinians should celebrate Assad’s fall

The same scene is playing out in more than 70 university campuses across Argentina: students fill gymnasiums, outdoor spaces, lecture theatres and streets. They sit, stand, drape themselves, drink maté, a herbal tea. They’re occupying their universities, and they’re planning a fight. “The students have awoken”, hospital worker and socialist Cesar Latorre told Red Flag via WhatsApp.
In February, far-right President Javier Milei cut university funding by 71 percent. Students responded with mass protests, including a million-strong march in April. In early October, Congress passed a bill to increase funding for state universities and to raise staff salaries to deal with the effects of inflation, which reached an annual rate of 236 percent in August and left many university staff impoverished. Milei threatened to block the bill, so students and staff held another set of nationwide mass rallies to defend it on 2 October. In the early hours of the following day, Milei vetoed the bill.
And so, on 5 October, at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) Philosophy and Letters campus, students crowded around Ari, a young socialist holding a microphone. “They tell us we need to take the money from someone else”, she said. Milei has insisted that if universities want proper funding, Congress will have to take it from other sections of the budget, likely pension or welfare payments.
“If you want to know, in the opinion of the students, and of the teachers, where the money will come from for the increase in the budget for universities”, Ari declared, “we have to take it from the IMF, the church and the multinationals!” The crowd of students and teachers roared.
The occupations began in early October in the Philosophy and Letters faculty and the Psychology faculty of the UBA. The banners hanging from the buildings read, in big black letters, “tomada”, meaning “taken”. It’s more apt than “occupied”, because what the students are doing goes beyond a conventional sit-in. They’ve taken over the running of the faculties, establishing committees to take responsibility for cleaning, security, holding lessons and organising food.
During the day, they bring in supportive teachers to give lessons in the street, blocking off roads with their desks. Staff are allowed to clock in for their shifts (so that they get paid) but are promptly sent home. Senior staff, like the faculty deans, are banned altogether. As it gets dark, crowds move to the thrum of street drums, and barbecue smoke lingers.
When Milei vetoed the bill, students in Buenos Aires convened mass assemblies and debated what to do. They overwhelmingly voted to “take” despite their lack of experience in doing it: the last occupations of this scale happened in 2018. Socialist groups have a significant presence at universities nationwide, leading the argument for occupying alongside independent left-wing students. Now, they’re trying to draw more unaligned students into the committees and leadership of the occupations.
Student unions across Argentina are run by students from right-wing political traditions. In many places, the student union leaders argued against occupations while attempting to portray themselves as oppositional to Milei. Some of these leaders are Peronists, a nationalist political current that dominates the trade unions and ran the government before Milei came to office, presiding over an inflation crisis and austerity for workers.
The most significant political group in the student unions is the Radical Civic Union, a traditional centre-right party. But despite the weight of these groups in official student politics, videos posted online show vote after vote being carried nearly unanimously for occupying, from Buenos Aires to the remote provinces, with glee on the students’ faces and cheers filling the gymnasiums.
Universities are one of Milei’s favourite punching bags for his right-wing culture war rhetoric. In a speech to the World Economic Forum earlier this year, he said that public education is where “leftist educational curricula proliferate, openly anti-capitalist and anti-liberal, in a country where what is needed is more capitalism and more freedom”.
His attack on public education stems partly from his ideological opposition to universities, but more from his desire to slash and burn as many public services as possible—from hospitals to airlines, oil refineries to cinemas. In fact, at the same time as the students were marching in defence of the Congress-approved education bill, Milei was <a href="https://twitter.com/wolfofwallst/status/1841516226272784774">meeting</a>
with Jordan Belfort, the criminal stockbroker turned free market culture warrior whose fall from grace was depicted in the film The Wolf of Wall Street.
Milei has systematically tried to divide the population and turn them against each other to dampen the prospects of a fight against his government. He’s tried to turn workers and middle-class people against the poor by complaining that they don’t work hard enough to deserve welfare benefits.
He has attacked state employees by using the “drain the swamp” rhetoric of former US President Donald Trump, painting public services and those who administer them as a bloated bureaucracy stealing from the country.
When cutting funding to the arts, he painted them as luxuries undeserving of public support. Now, he’s portraying universities as elite institutions that serve “no-one but the children of the rich and those of the upper-middle class”.
It isn’t true. According to economist Daniel Schteingart, Argentina’s university population has <a href="https://twitter.com/danyscht">increased</a>
from just 275,000 in 1970 to nearly 4 million today, and the expansion of higher education has overwhelmingly benefited the working class. For example, at the National University of La Matanza, in the outer suburbs of Buenos Aires, around 80 percent of students are the first generation in their families to attend university, according to the vice-chancellor.
Argentina’s working class remains highly organised compared to most other countries, with a unionisation rate of around 40 percent for formal workers. This, along with a considerable presence of socialists in some important unions, helped to push union officials into calling two general strikes in January and May. Those strikes defeated some of the harshest aspects of Milei’s program, including the privatisation of the state airline and the state oil company.
But since then, the General Confederation of Workers (CGT), Argentina’s main union body, has refused to call a third general strike. The CGT is linked to the centre-right Peronist party. Milei’s draconian attacks on the right to unionise, compulsory union membership and dues, and union control over pension funds threaten the social position of top CGT officials. Yet the CGT officials prefer to negotiate with the government while Milei’s attacks devastate workers’ living standards.
The poverty rate is now at a two-decade high of 53 percent. Substantial public spending cuts have slowed the rate of consumer price inflation but also caused a recession. In addition to Milei’s mass lay-offs in the public sector, there have been huge job cuts in the private sector. Without the call for a third general strike, which could unite the union movement, resistance has become increasingly restricted to the better organised sections of the working class like healthcare workers, public sector employees, teachers and aviation workers.
The failure of the CGT to continue a serious fight has emboldened Milei. He sees an opportunity to privatise industries he failed to sell immediately after taking office. For example, the important victory that the first two general strikes achieved in stopping the privatisation of Aerolineas Argentinas is now at risk of being undone. Aviation workers are well organised and have held several days of strike action, causing major disruption to the economy.
In a significant act of solidarity, the Brazilian aviation workers’ union declared that it would not allow its members to operate domestic Argentine flights. And on 30 October, broader layers of transport workers will hold a 24-hour national strike. This will be supported by a 36-hour national public sector strike scheduled to start the day before and carry over into the next.
There has been an ebb in action since the general strike in May. But the students have provided a new spark to the broader movement and have pulled university workers into the fight. On 21 October, university workers began a 48-hour national strike. Workers in one of the big university unions voted to extend the 48-hour strike to an entire week and said that supporting the student movement was one of the main reasons for extending the strike. And while a recent 24-hour strike was passive and didn’t include a march, the week-long strike will include open, public classes held in the streets.
Student assemblies in the streets outside university buildings will decide the future of the occupations over the coming weeks. Can they sustain the movement into November—and will workers’ strikes spread?

Tom Sullivan

Student occupations bloom across Argentina

For the first month of Israel’s current war on Lebanon, Australian media and politicians were focused not on the thousands killed or the more than a million civilians displaced, but on attacking anti-war demonstrators and denouncing anti-war activists as supporters of terrorism. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton both called for the cancellation of pro-Palestine protests scheduled for 6 and 7 October and railed against the small number of demonstrators who brought Hezbollah flags to protests against Israel’s bombing campaign in Lebanon. 
In a <a href="https://www.pm.gov.au/media/doorstop-interview-melbourne-9">doorstop interview, </a>Albanese said about the protests, “There’s no place for mourning a terrorist leader, and we’re very concerned about some of the terrorist symbols”. Meanwhile, Labor’s home affairs minister, Tony Burke, threatened to cancel the visas of any non-citizens caught waving a Hezbollah flag, and then cancelled the visa of Khaled Beydoun, a law professor from Arizona State University. The reason for the cancellation was a 7 October speech in which Beydoun noted the rise of global solidarity with the Palestinians, saying, “Today is not fully a day of mourning. In many respects, today is also a day that marks considerable celebration, considerable progress, and in some respects, considerable privilege. The level of global literacy around what’s taking place in Palestine has exponentially risen”. Burke and the media smeared Beydoun, disingenuously asserting that he was celebrating Hamas’ 7 October attack. 
Of course, there were no words of condemnation for those cheering on Israel’s murderous attacks on civilians in Lebanon, nor the intensification of genocide taking place in Gaza. The Australian political class dutifully fell in behind Israel’s propaganda machine by crapping on about Israel’s “right to defend itself” and joining in the hysteria about protesters supporting the Lebanese political group Hezbollah.
Hezbollah’s External Security Organisation has been on the Australian government’s list of “terrorist organisations” for some time. In late 2021, the listing was changed from the External Security Organisation to simply Hezbollah, meaning the entire organisation is now considered terrorist. This happened on the watch of then Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton, under pressure from supporters of Israel.
This decision was based on only seven submissions to the parliamentary committee responsible, five of which were from pro-Israel organisations or individuals, including the Zionist Federation of Australia and the Executive Council of Australian Jewry. One of the two individual submissions was from Emmanuele Ottolenghi from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, DC, who wrote an article last year titled “<a href="https://thedispatch.com/article/barbarians-at-the-gate/">Barbarians at the Gate</a>” in which he argued that the notion of Palestinian statehood must be destroyed. “The barbarians must be vanquished”, was his grossly racist conclusion. 
Whatever criticisms leftists can make of it, Hezbollah is not a terrorist organisation. It is a mass Shia political party which holds 13 seats in the Lebanese parliament, and was founded to resist the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The party functions as a second state in the south of the country and in Dahieh, a large area of Beirut. Hezbollah runs a large social welfare apparatus and has interests in numerous businesses, especially construction companies. Its armed wing is the world’s largest non-state military apparatus, and, rather than carrying out terrorist attacks, it uses standard military and guerrilla tactics.
The Australian government’s list of “terrorist acts” Hezbollah has allegedly been <a href="https://www.nationalsecurity.gov.au/what-australia-is-doing/terrorist-organisations/listed-terrorist-organisations/hizballah">responsible</a>
for illustrates this. There are nine, and none involve any confirmed casualties. Three are public threats made by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah against US and Israeli military targets in response to violations of Lebanese airspace and the assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, none of which were carried through. Two involve legal cases brought against individuals in the US, and one involves the provision of support to Palestinian groups. Only one involves an actual act of violence—the firing of a missile at an Israeli tank in September 2019 that Israel says caused no deaths or injuries. 
Even with highly motivated Israel supporters and the resources of Australian intelligence at their disposal, this is the best that Dutton and the Liberal government could come up with. But the fact that the listing was a politically motivated sham doesn’t make it any less effective at smearing, threatening and intimidating opponents of Israel’s atrocities. And it doesn’t prevent someone who is legitimately protesting the invasion of Lebanon—a sovereign country—and who also supports a mainstream Lebanese political party potentially being thrown into jail.
But while it might not be accurately described as terrorist, Hezbollah is nevertheless a reactionary organisation that should be opposed by progressives. It has been part of the neoliberal regime in Lebanon, which has made working-class people pay for the economic crisis the country is facing. It also helped sabotage the investigation into Beirut’s port explosion in 2018. Its military wing played a counter-revolutionary role in the Syrian revolution in alliance with the dictator Bashar al-Assad, and it helped to suppress mass democratic protests across Lebanon in 2019 and 2020. So there are plenty of reasons to oppose Hezbollah, but resistance against Israel is not one of them. Referring to the group as a terrorist organisation just plays into the narrative that Western governments have long attempted to create, in which Middle Eastern and Islamist politics poses a uniquely dangerous threat to those in the West.
Israel, on the other hand, is undeniably a terrorist state. Extreme violence toward, intimidation and massacres of civilians are Israel’s speciality. It has made no secret of its calculated atrocities and the intent behind them in Gaza over the last year. “Nothing happens by accident”, an Israeli military source <a href="https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/?fbclid=IwAR15qSbuTiMzn-2jLLss3na2LPYa8h942dlf6vHctnNTR8yNVaiohIHjJEA">told</a>
Tel Aviv-based +972 Magazine. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed ... Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”
In September, Israel detonated thousands of bombs as part of its efforts to wipe out the entire leadership of Hezbollah, killing and injuring numerous civilians in the process. Israeli forces also assassinated Nasrallah and have killed the two main leaders of Hamas. Assassination of political leaders is against <a href="https://theconversation.com/assassination-is-always-unlawful-regardless-of-who-is-killed-and-on-whose-orders-236004">international law</a> and meets the definition of terrorism. Israel’s terrorist activities have extended to manufacturing fake Australian passports to aid in assassinations of political leaders. But no Australian government officials are threatening supporters of this terrorist regime with deportation or arrest.
Quite the opposite. Those who leave Australia to fight in the Israel Defense Forces have been <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/world/middle-east/we-are-resilient-australian-reservists-called-up-in-israel-join-fight-20231012-p5ebn9.html">celebrated</a>
and <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/australian-fighting-with-idf-killed-in-gaza-20240102-p5eunj.html">mourned</a>
by Australian mainstream media. In December last year, the Australian Centre for International Justice <a href="https://acij.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/2023-12-20-Letter-to-Ausgov-regarding-Australians-in-the-IDF.pdf">quoted</a>
an estimate that 1,000 Australians have recently or are currently serving in the IDF. The government and opposition are not drumming up concern about these activities, nor warning those involved that they may face criminal charges when they return—which, if they are part of the genocide, they should. There is no outrage about them from the political class: no parliamentary tirades, doorstop speeches or livid articles in the mainstream press about what a threat these people are to social cohesion. Taking part in a genocide is acceptable activity to the Australian establishment. Waving a yellow flag is not. 
One Sydney man wrote a <a href="https://www.australianjewishnews.com/a-warriors-commitment-to-country/">piece</a>
in February for the Australian Jewish Times on the months he spent fighting for the IDF in frontline combat in Gaza, in which he claimed to have “eliminated” multiple people referred to as “threats” and “Hamas terrorists”. A photograph attached to the article pictures the man inside a child’s bedroom, kneeling among the cushions in combat gear with another Israeli soldier, both carrying guns. Not only did he kill multiple people in the course of an active genocide, but the man also provided security detail inside Gaza for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for whom the International Criminal Court prosecutor <a href="https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/statement-icc-prosecutor-karim-aa-khan-kc-applications-arrest-warrants-situation-state">filed</a>
a request for an arrest warrant related to crimes against humanity. “The contrast between my recent leisure time on Bondi Beach”, he wrote, “just a few weeks prior, and the responsibility of safeguarding the Prime Minister of Israel was stark and surreal”. More thoroughly legitimate activity in the eyes of the Australian political class.
The government, opposition and mainstream media justify the threats against Hezbollah supporters on the basis that “we don’t want foreign conflicts being brought into Australia”. But it is the Australian government and its slavish support for Israel that import foreign conflicts or, more accurately, make them local conflicts. It is the Australian government’s complicity in genocide that creates the imperative for people who value human rights to raise their voices and protest.
“Not in our name!” was the rallying cry of those who marched against the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. The same applies today. What is happening in Gaza and Lebanon is not a “foreign” conflict. It is an illegal military campaign enabled, funded and armed by the Western powers, including Australia. We have a duty to resist it. And so long as Hezbollah continues to be the main force fighting to repel Israel from Lebanon, people will support it and anti-war activists should defend their right to do so in defiance of racist and politically motivated anti-terror laws.

Terrorism designations are politically motivated

Students are occupying more than 70 different faculties of 30 public universities across Argentina. At least twelve faculties in Buenos Aires, the capital, are tomada (taken). The occupations stretch into remote areas in the far north and south of the country. 
The events mark a new stage in an ongoing fight against far-right President Javier Milei, elected last year promising mass privatisations and budget cuts to pay down government debt owed to the International Monetary Fund, while funnelling money to the rich through tax cuts. 
At the beginning of the year, Milei took a chainsaw to public university spending, cutting funding by 71 percent. This provoked mass protests involving 500,000 students in Buenos Aires and large numbers in the rest of the country. 
Last month, politicians voted to increase university workers’ salaries, the purchasing power of which has been undermined by rampant inflation—consumer prices have increased by more than 200 percent in twelve months. 
When Milei threatened to veto the bill, more than 1 million people marched to fight for its passage. But in early October, the president confirmed he would block it. That sparked a wave of protests and occupations by students across the country. 
Carlos Barros, a student activist at the University of Buenos Aires and a member of the Socialist Workers’ Movement, spoke to Red Flag’s Jasmine Duff about how things look on the ground.
--------------------
Why are students occupying?
Students decided to occupy universities because of the ongoing defunding of public education, which has been taking place for several years by all governments but has reached a new level with Milei’s administration. Universities don’t have sufficient funding to increase the salaries of professors and university staff (which are far behind inflation), or to improve the conditions of the buildings used by students. It could result in the eventual cutting of jobs and closure of universities altogether. 
The occupations started when Milei vetoed a bill to increase the funding for universities. The Congress approved the veto with the complicity of representatives from the Radical Civic Union [a liberal political party] and even some of the Peronists [the main political current in the country, dating from the rule of Juan Perón immediately after World War Two]. 
This enraged students all over the country and led to the calling of assemblies at universities. The first were at the faculty of Philosophy and Letters and the faculty of Psychology of the University of Buenos Aires, where hundreds of the students voted to occupy the faculties. In the following days, the occupations spread to other faculties and to universities in the rest of the country. We are witnessing the rise of a new Argentinean student movement, which many have said has been in decline for years. 
Videos circulating online show students taking mass votes, holding debates inside their faculties, and setting up desks on public roads to hold teach-ins. What’s it like inside a faculty occupation?
Basically, an occupation means that students take control over the university. We undertake all of the tasks of the administration of the university, including cleaning, organising lessons, providing food, security, etc. For each task, there are different commissions that students can join and participate in. 
Regarding security, there are always students at the door to stop the dean and other members of the faculty administration from entering the building. The staff of the faculty are only allowed to enter to clock on, but they cannot perform their usual tasks, since they are being performed by the students. Professors cannot hold lessons inside the building, save for a few exceptions. 
Every day, a soup kitchen provides food for the students at the occupation and people who may need it in the neighbourhood. The soup kitchen is supported through donations. Every night, we do activities to entertain ourselves and strengthen our sense of community. There are film screenings, live music, karaoke, games and obviously lots of political discussion. We’re having a great time. We sleep inside classrooms with sleeping bags or mattresses. It is kind of like camping. 
All lessons that students would normally have inside the faculty building are taken outside to the street. Students bring seats and blackboards outside and block the street. We want to continue studying while also protesting and bringing more visibility to this conflict. All lessons must be held outside, save for the cases where specific elements of a classroom are needed or for exams.
Socialist organisations are prominent in the struggle, but many student unions are run by political tendencies and parties that are part of Milei’s government. What role have these student leaders played in the movement, and what debates are taking place?
We are having many debates with the bureaucratic student union leaders and the grassroots of the students movement about how to advance the struggle for our right to public education. Most student unions are led by Peronists or Radicals. They are political forces of the capitalist regime. As such they try to avoid losing control over the student movement and demobilise it while posing as critical of Milei. 
They call for few or no assemblies at all in some cases, decide things without consulting the students or, worse, negotiate with the university authorities behind the students’ backs. 
The Socialist Workers’ Movement and the left are doing our best to radicalise the student movement, and to bring more independent students to participate in their respective assemblies so they can overcome the bureaucracies. 
We are also campaigning for inter-faculty and inter-university assemblies. And we are coordinating actions with the rest of the working-class sectors so we can all agree on a unified plan of struggle to stop this attack by the government.

Inside Argentina’s university occupations

More than 250 refugees and their supporters chased away 25 neo-Nazis who tried to crash a protest at Melbourne’s Home Affairs Department on 16 August. 
After the Nazis slunk off down an alley, Tamil kids rushed around the demonstration, laughing and shouting. Refugees who came to Australia by boat hugged each other, cheered and shouted: “Refugees are welcome, Nazis are not!” 
The refugees have been camping outside the Home Affairs Department for more than a month, demanding permanent visas. The federal Labor government has left roughly 12,000 refugees in limbo. Most participating in the encampment arrived in Australia by boat before 2013 and have been through a combination of offshore detention, onshore detention and years of living on six-month bridging visas.
Not long after the protest began, members of the National Socialist Network (a Hitler-supporting white supremacist group) arrived in black shirts and combat boots to hold a counter-protest. They carried a banner reading, “Fuck off, we’re full”. They covered their faces with balaclavas and dark sunglasses. 
Refugee organisers, socialists, activists from the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism, unionists from the United Workers Union and Palestine solidarity campaigners established a picket to defend the camp. The crowd outnumbered the Nazis ten to one, filling the footpath and the road, drowning out the Nazis with chants of “Justice for refugees!” 
The Nazis tried to march around the picket to get into the camp, but the protesters cut them off and, keeping together in a large bloc, followed them as they looked for an opening. 
When the Nazis gave up and retreated down a back alley, there was a deafening cheer. It was the perfect picture: a group of supposedly tough guys who dream of driving non-whites out of Australia, forced to back down in the face of a united group of Iranian, Tamil, Afghan, Palestinian and other anti-racist activists. 
“The refugees were determined to chase them away”, Aran Mylvaganam told Red Flag at a Palestine rally the following Sunday, which the refugees led in a march through the city. Mylvaganam is one of the organisers of the encampment, a member of Socialist Alternative and a founder of the Tamil Refugee Council. “After twenty minutes of them throwing racist lines at the protest, they just walked away like cowards. It felt really good.”
Australia’s politicians have done everything in their power to demoralise the 12,000 refugees. Many don’t get access to Medicare, and private health insurance companies won’t give them coverage. Universities will let their children attend only if they pay full fees as international students. 
Many of the refugees involved in the encampment work in factories and recycling plants run by bosses who pay them below the minimum wage and use the threat of deportation to force them to accept deplorable working conditions. 
But when they chased the Nazis away, the atmosphere was anything but demoralised. The thrill of defeating a group of gym-junkie white supremacists kept everyone awake until late into the night, telling stories, joking around, playing chess and organising the next demonstration. 
Kids gathered around a six-week-old puppy to help his owner name him: “Freddo”, for Free Da Refugees. One Tamil refugee commented that sitting at the camp was like being on a train in India: you couldn’t go five minutes without someone offering you ginger tea or a snack. 
“The refugees don’t feel intimidated”, Mylvaganam said. “They’re not worried about the possibility of the Nazis coming back because they can see that they’ve got the community support needed to chase them away again.”

Refugees push back Nazis in Melbourne

Left-wing groups have successfully pushed back against Melbourne City Council attempts to restrict street stalls during the regular Sunday rallies for Palestine. 
In late July, council officers backed by police began harassing stallholders at the pro-Palestine rallies, which have happened every Sunday in the city centre since October last year. The officers were attempting to enforce newly introduced restrictions on where and when stalls could be held and a ban on the use of marquees, the sale of goods and fundraising on city streets. Failure to comply with the new rules attracts heavy fines.
A horde of police traipsed behind council officers at the 3 August rally, helping them enforce the new rules. Before the protest started, 40 police surrounded a Socialist Alternative stall for half an hour. Some stallholders were intimidated into packing up, but others refused to comply with the draconian restrictions. 
Lord Mayor Nicholas Reece, a former adviser to Julia Gillard, current director of enterprise strategy at the University of Melbourne and commentator for Sky News, leads the council. 
After the 3 August rally, Students for Palestine and Free Palestine Naarm Coalition put out a statement calling for groups to defy the restrictions the following Sunday. Eight other organisations and activist collectives signed on. The following Sunday, the number of stalls grew, and the council and the police backed off and let the stalls happen without any interference or repercussions. 
The success of this defiance shows what can be achieved when people refuse to back down when confronted with attacks on civil liberties and democratic rights. If the various stallholders, which included political, religious and community organisations, had complied with the council orders, it would have given the council confidence to introduce further restrictions, and possibly a ban on stalls altogether. And it would have been a concession to the idea that the council and the police have the right to dictate who can use the streets of Melbourne and for what purpose. 
This is not the first hostile move on the part of the authorities against the pro-Palestine rallies. Police previously successfully banned organisers from bringing in the truck that carried the sound system and served as a stage, and police have used pepper spray at other pro-Palestine rallies to discipline the crowd. It’s important to defend all the democratic rights we have so as to better fight the injustices perpetrated by our government and strengthen the organisation of our side.
Street stalls have long been an important way for the left and the oppressed to organise and get their voices heard. Big business and right-wingers have huge institutional weight they can use to spread their ideas. Their representatives, like Rupert Murdoch, own and control newspapers and television channels that reach millions of people. Walking through the Melbourne CBD, it’s impossible to turn your head without seeing glitzy advertisements for billion-dollar corporations like Nike, Adidas and McDonalds. 
Walk into any city cafe and you can pick from a range of right-wing newspapers, mostly owned by people aligned with the Liberal Party or worse. Our phones, laptops and televisions are likewise full of right-wing ideology and corporate advertising. Even the most careful curation of social media can’t escape it. The ideas and propaganda of the businesses and politicians who have all the power are pervasive.
On the other hand, socialists, activists and the oppressed have to scrape together funds to produce leaflets, posters and newspapers if we are to get the word out about our actions and ideas. Street stalls are an important way of reaching potential supporters and those looking for a way to oppose injustice. They are also a democratic space where people can argue their positions, raise funds and promote events. 
Abolishing the right to hold stalls would make the city the exclusive domain of those who can pay for billboards, retail premises and advertising space—and the politicians who decide which political demonstrations are legitimate and which aren’t. Defying the council attacks is about saying the city should be for those wanting to challenge war, racism, inequality and capitalism, not just the wealthy few.

Defiant Palestine activists beat Melbourne City Council attacks

Labor and Liberal politicians, and nearly every major newspaper in the country, are running a smear campaign against the Australian Greens. The party has taken a strong stand against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and the political establishment is therefore determined to punish it.
Foreign Minister Penny Wong and other Labor MPs have blamed the Greens for encouraging a series of actions at and attacks on Labor offices. Wong, during question time in early June, said that the Greens “engage in violent and aggressive protests and incite them”. Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus accused the party of “encouraging really riotous behaviour, sometimes violent behaviour”. 
The Australian
newspaper’s 6 June front page lead was “Party of anti-Semitism”, below which was a picture of Greens leader Adam Bandt. The same day, Liberal leader Peter Dutton said in a radio interview: “People need to have a conversation with their kids and their grandkids, with their next-door neighbours, just about how evil the current Greens party is”. 
Labor’s smears reveal a faux progressive government flustered by the fact that broad left opinion is clearly against Israel’s offensive. Hundreds of thousands have marched against the complicity of Albanese and Wong—their unbreakable bond of solidarity with the apartheid state. 
The Palestine solidarity movement has, for more than 30 weeks, sustained thousands-strong weekly demonstrations in major cities. The protests explicitly call out the Labor government for backing Israel. But the ALP are trying to pretend they’ve done nothing wrong, complaining that they’ve become a target for criticism only because of what they call “misinformation”, which, naturally, they also say is spread by the Greens. 
That so-called misinformation includes Bandt’s entirely correct assertion that Labor awarded a $917 million contract to Israeli arms company Elbit Systems this year, as part of a project to build infantry vehicles for the Australian Army. 
Elbit Systems <a href="https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/04/04/zomi-frankcom-elbit-systems-airstrike-drone-900-million/">manufactured the drone</a> that killed Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom in Gaza in April. In parliament, Bandt questioned Albanese over the deal. He and other Labor politicians performed extensive verbal gymnastics to dodge the question, lying about its content to avoid having to answer. 
Last November, Greens senators walked out of parliament in protest against the Labor government’s complicity in Israel’s violence. Since then, Greens politicians and members have spoken at countless Palestine solidarity rallies around the country and in parliaments have defiantly worn keffiyehs, a symbol of Palestinian resistance. Bandt moved a motion in May that Australia recognise Palestinian statehood, and the house voted not even to discuss it. 
Previously, the Greens had a mixed record on Palestine, and were riven with serious divisions over the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. In 2010, the NSW branch led the Marrickville Council in Sydney’s inner west to pass a motion supporting BDS, a position that members of the Greens’ NSW left such as Lee Rhiannon and David Shoebridge had long held. 
After media backlash and a crackdown by more conservative Greens leaders including Bob Brown and Cate Faehrmann, the branch abandoned support for BDS. The party’s 2010 national conference specifically rejected BDS, and in 2012 then federal leader Christine Milne remarked in the Senate, “The Greens reject the BDS and have never supported it in any way”. 
But last June, the party released a national <a href="https://greens.org.auhttps://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/2023-06/AG%20Pal%20resolution.pdf">position paper</a> on Palestine. It acknowledges that Israel practises apartheid, and backs the BDS movement for the first time. The new position remains somewhat conservative—it supports the so-called two-state solution defined by the borders prior to Israel’s 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. That purported “solution” has for several decades operated as a fig leaf over Israeli expansionism and denies the right of return to Palestinian refugees expelled from their homes in the 1948 Nakba. And it does nothing for the Palestinians living as second-class citizens in the Zionist state. But the broader shift of the party is nevertheless positive. 
The Greens obviously have an agenda to relate to young progressives and Muslim voters. The party wants to pick up traditional Labor seats. But their intransigence on Palestine has had a positive effect on Australian politics. The party has helped to add legitimacy to the movement, given it a voice in parliament and repeatedly brought Palestine back into the news. 
Palestine was an untouchable issue for most Australian progressives until the past few years. It was common to be “progressive except for Palestine”. White progressives in particular capitulated to Islamophobia and wouldn’t stand up to the politically motivated charges of antisemitism levelled against Palestine solidarity activists.
For decades, socialists were one of the only groups in Australia who consistently campaigned for Palestine alongside Arabs and Muslims. One of the main champions of Palestine within the Greens was former Senator Lee Rhiannon, who, unsurprisingly, has a socialist background. 
Now, the tide has turned; large sections of progressive opinion finally support the Palestinian cause. But Australia’s key institutions still use their power and privilege to back Israel, including the Labor and Liberal parties, most of the media and the university bosses. 
So, as the Greens withstand a smear campaign for the crime of opposing the mass slaughter of children, they ought to be defended.

In defence of the Greens

Bassem Tamimi, a prominent leader of the Palestinian resistance in the occupied West Bank, has finally been released from an Israeli military prison after more than seven months in captivity. In a <a href="https://twitter.com/hzomlot?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1799912349811302517%7Ctwgr%5E15e5be6c92e2f02a52e88f88d68dd050e9010033%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&amp;ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newarab.com%2Fnews%2Fpalestinian-activist-bassem-tamimi-freed-israeli-detention">photo posted on X</a> by Palestine’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, Bassem appeared emaciated, his black t-shirt hanging from his body, his arms looking more like a starving child’s than a 57 year-old’s, and his face far narrower than when he was detained.
His freedom should be a source of joy for activists across the world. But the Palestine movement can’t rest until the torturous military prison that housed him, and all those like it, are pulled apart brick by brick.
“I didn’t sleep that night when I saw him. He had a very difficult time and could have died in there”, Waleed, Bassem’s nephew, told Red Flag via a messenger service.
Bassem was arrested on 29 October and placed in administrative detention, giving the Israeli military the ability to hold him for six months without charge. In late April, a new six-month detention order was issued. He was finally released after a judicial review, <a href="https://www.newarab.com/news/palestinian-activist-bassem-tamimi-freed-israeli-detention?amp">according to London-based news site the New Arab</a>. While Bassem was imprisoned, the military refused to list any allegations against him. 
In October 2022, his nephew, 19-year-old Qusay Tamimi, was murdered by Israeli forces in Nabi Saleh. He had been protesting against an Israeli attack in Nablus, which killed five Palestinians and reportedly wounded twenty others. At the time, Bassem told Red Flag:
“The policy of Zionist colonialism is killing, violence and terrorism, in order to break the will of the Palestinian people in the struggle to achieve [our] right to self-determination, to achieve national independence and deliverance from colonialism ... While lighting tires at the entrance to the village, the soldiers from the military tower shot Qusay in the chest with live bullets. 
“He fell to the ground and died in less than twenty minutes. He arrived at the hospital as a martyr. This only proves that brutality and violence of the Zionist occupation are used to suppress any Palestinian movement in fighting for freedom and independence and trying to stop it from spreading to the surrounding Palestinian areas.”
A year after burying Qusay, almost to the day, they came for Bassem—like they have come for thousands of others who stand up for their rights. 
There are currently 3,410 Palestinians held in administrative detention out of a total 9,300 political prisoners in the West Bank, <a href="https://addameer.org/">according to Addameer</a>, a Jerusalem-based prisoner rights organisation. It’s not a stretch to call them hostages, given the arbitrary nature of their detention. <a href="https://www.amnesty.org.au/israel-opt-horrifying-cases-of-torture-and-degrading-treatment-of-palestinian-detainees-amid-spike-in-arbitrary-arrests/">Amnesty International last year noted</a> that there were around 1,300 people in administrative detention at the beginning of October. The human rights group described widespread use of torture by Israeli soldiers and prison guards, including “beating and humiliating Palestinians while detaining them blind-folded, stripped, with their hands tied”.
Bassem’s bravery and determination have kept hope alive in the village of Nabi Saleh, west of Ramallah, for two generations. When soldiers seized one of the village’s water springs in 2009, Bassem organised weekly demonstrations against Israeli theft of Palestinian land. He and other activists formed village committees across the West Bank to coordinate protests and strikes. They linked the local committees together in the semi-formal Popular Struggle Coordination Committee. 
But even when Palestinians engage in peaceful protest, the Israeli military uses terror to try to silence them. Bassem has been arrested more than a dozen times. In 1993, he was tortured so badly by Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security force, that he suffered a haemorrhage and was partially <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2012/02/bassem-tamimi-to-israeli-military-judge-i-do-not-recognize-the-authority-of-the-israeli-occupation/">paralysed for several months</a>. His partner Nariman and their children, including prominent activist Ahed Tamimi, have also been imprisoned many times.
While Bassem Tamimi is now free, it won’t be the last time this family is targeted.
Those of us in Australia and across the world have to follow Bassem’s example and keep marching, picketing and occupying for a free Palestine.

Bassem Tamimi: a hero of the Palestinian resistance

It took working-class revolutions in Russia and Germany to end the First World War after four years in which 45 million people were killed and the lives of hundreds of millions upended.
World War One was the culmination of decades of rivalry between European capitalist states, in particular Britain, France and Germany. In a lecture delivered in May 1917, Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/may/14.htm">argued</a>: “The present war is a continuation of the policy of conquest, of the shooting down of whole nationalities, of unbelievable atrocities committed by the Germans and the British in Africa, and by the British and the Russians in Persia”. 
The European states had competed for markets, trade routes, raw materials and labour—just as the companies within their territories competed for profits. Long before 1914, the year the war broke out, most of the world had been carved up between them.
Britain and France had divided up Africa and most of Asia, soaking the land in blood. Britain’s sprawling empire was economically and militarily superior, but it faced emerging rivals. Germany was the most important of these. Although it had a far smaller colonial footprint, Germany had developed new technical and organisational methods to build its economy, linking businesses into cartels and trusts that allowed for rapid expansion through the pooling of resources. 
Britain used its enormous navy to constrain Germany’s access to overseas markets and colonial possessions. But by 1914, Germany was no longer prepared to tolerate British naval control. Polite negotiations could not overcome the reality: for any European state to continue to expand its power, others had to have theirs reduced. The violence previously inflicted in the colonies was now unleashed in the heart of “civilisation”.
On 28 June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s Habsburg throne, was assassinated by a Serbian nationalist. Austria formally declared war one month later. Within seven days, all of the European powers threw themselves into the war: Russia, France and Great Britain on the Serbian side; Germany in alliance with Austria-Hungary. As the war progressed, more countries joined in. Germany’s alliance, called the Central Powers, invaded Belgium and drew in Ottoman Turkey. Britain, France and Italy became known as the Entente. The war now consumed the world. 
A year into the conflict, Polish-German communist Rosa Luxemburg <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1915/junius/">described</a> in her Junius Pamphlet the evil being wrought by the capitalist war-makers: 
“Business is flourishing upon the ruins. Cities are turned into shambles, whole countries into deserts, villages into cemeteries, whole nations into beggars, churches into stables; popular rights, treaties, alliances, the holiest words and the highest authorities have been torn into scraps ... Shamed, dishonoured, wading in blood and dripping with filth, thus capitalist society stands.”
Peace negotiations wouldn’t end the fighting, nor would anti-war marches alone. Each country’s ruling class had too much to lose: their future position in the geopolitical order, their alliances, their access to the world’s resources, their wealth and status. 
Not even the revolutionary overthrow of the Russian tsar in February 1917 could pull Russia from the war. The new pro-capitalist provisional government, which replaced the monarchy, remained committed to the war even though it ran the risk of another revolution. But the government knew that to withdraw would be to undermine the state’s future.
In the May lecture referred to above, Lenin <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/may/14.htm">argued</a>: 
“The war which the capitalists of all countries are waging cannot be ended without a workers’ revolution against these capitalists ... So long as the government of the capitalists has not been replaced by a government of the revolutionary working class, the government is doomed merely to reiterate: We are heading for disaster.”
Revolutions in Russia and Germany finally ended the war. In October, Russian workers and soldiers, led by the Bolshevik Party, overthrew the provisional government and replaced it with a workers’ government. 
The revolutionaries withdrew Russia from the war, signing a peace treaty with the Central Powers on 3 March 1918. That entailed a sacrifice: allowing annexations and giving away important industrial and farming land, putting the chances of building socialism in Russia in peril. 
But the revolutionaries hoped that this radical act would demonstrate the internationalist spirit of their new state, and encourage the working classes across the world to launch their own revolutions against the war and for socialism. Leon Trotsky summed up the Bolsheviks’ attitude in a February 1918 <a href="https://alphahistory.com/worldwar1/trotsky-speech-brest-litovsk-1918/">speech</a>, delivered shortly before signing the treaty: 
“We are leading our army and our people out of the war, in anticipation of an imminent time when the oppressed peoples of all countries will take their fate into their own hands, in the way that Russian workers have done.”
German workers and soldiers answered the call. Throughout 1918, mass strikes and demonstrations against the war shook the German government. A mass revolutionary movement flowered across Germany in November. Workers created revolutionary councils, inspired by the flowering of democracy in Russia’s new workers’ state. 
Through these councils, they took over the running of their workplaces, then entire cities. Sailors organised mutinies, refusing to launch their battleships against the British fleet. They joined the councils and made joint plans with the workers. Soldiers’ councils took charge of battalions comprising tens of thousands of men. Historian Pierre Broué gives a sweeping account of this revolution in his book The German Revolution, 1917-1923.
Only five days into the revolution, the German government collapsed. A new revolutionary republic was declared on 9 November. Two days later, the European leaders rushed to sign a set of deals to end the war. 
This history should be a clarion call: we need to rebuild socialist parties everywhere that can lead revolutions against the capitalists and end their barbaric wars forever. 
Over the past three years, Europe and the Middle East have again become theatres of major war. Russia’s assault on Ukraine is now in its third year, and Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza. Both of these wars could yet become wider conflicts. An even greater threat looms on the horizon. The United States and China are preparing for a conflict that could again draw in other major powers from across the world. Australia is positioning itself as the key military ally of the United States in Asia. 
As in 1917-18, we will need revolutions to bring a stop to this imperialist madness.

We need a revolution to put an end to today’s wars

A general strike against Argentina’s far-right president, Javier Milei, rocked the country on 24 January, just 45 days into his new government’s term. By mid-morning, the plaza outside the National Congress building in Buenos Aires, the capital, was packed. More than half a million people turned up to protest—striking workers, the unemployed, representatives from neighbourhood assemblies, people mobilised by social justice organisations and left-wing political groups. 
Streets leading to the plaza were packed so tight with people that it was hard to move. Cheering and singing tyre factory workers, throwing water across each other, were half drowned out by drumming and chanting from all different directions of the mobilisation. Amid the chanting, smoke rose from barbecues, carrying the smell of choripán (a type of sausage), schnitzel, bacon and eggs. Vendors hawked Coke bottles carried atop platters balanced on their heads; workers crouched to pour maté, a staple Argentinian tea. 
The country is in crisis, inflation being in triple figures and the country now the largest debtor to the International Monetary Fund. In late December, Milei announced privatisations, closures of government departments, attacks on workers’ rights and crackdowns on civil liberties. He is supported by the Argentine capitalist class and the country’s creditors. 
Previous presidents have attempted to wind back economic, social and democratic rights, but have been stymied by mass opposition. Milei’s attacks are an attempt to settle everything—to do in Argentina what conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher did in Britain in the 1980s: destroy the confidence of the working class and defeat the unions so that the rich can shape the economy and society without opposition. 
On the day of the strike, nothing else was news. After the trains carried the stragglers home before grinding to a halt as the drivers finally got to participate in the shutdown, television screens across the country were filled with commentary. Security Minister Patricia Bullrich insisted that the demonstration was small and insignificant. But according to the main trade union federation, the General Confederation of Workers (CGT), more than 1.5 million participated in protests across the country. 
The strike was a show of force by the diverse social layers that have entered the struggle against the new president. For example, most of the plaza in Buenos Aires was filled by huge contingents of piqueteros—unemployed and precariously employed people who rely on subsidies, including food and social services, distributed through government schemes known as social plans. It’s possible there were equal numbers of piqueteros and organised workers at the strike demonstration in the capital.
Large parts of the country were paralysed by the strike. The nationalised airline, Aerolineas Argentinas, was <a href="https://www.semana.com/mundo/articulo/paro-nacional-en-argentina-vuelos-cancelados-bancos-cerrados-y-una-multitud-frente-al-congreso/202427/">forced to cancel</a> more than 300 flights and reschedule another 26. Banks closed their doors from noon. State department workers had a huge presence, and many teachers and health workers joined the strike. Ford, Toyota and Peugeot car factories were shut. 
Yet there were limitations. It was a huge show of force, but it was also considerably smaller than what the unions have been capable of mobilising in the past. 
The CGT announced the strike a month in advance, and other trade union federations announced that they would join it. But the CGT is highly bureaucratic and run by industrially conservative Peronists. “Peronism” takes its name from Juan Perón, a military officer who governed Argentina several times between 1946 and 1974. Ideologically, Peronism is associated with state intervention into the economy and “national independence”. Politically, it spans the spectrum from the centre right to the centre left. The more left-wing variants add social justice and human rights into the nationalist mix. 
When in government, Perón handed big concessions to the workers’ movement while forcibly taking over the unions, killing and kidnapping left-wing rivals. But two Peronist governments were overthrown by right-wing military dictatorships, which has given Peronism a democratic gloss. Photos of Perón’s wife Evita are everywhere in Argentina, especially in the homes of progressive women. 
Peronism is comparable to Laborism in Australia in that it maintains a tight hold over the union bureaucracy. But there are important differences. While the Labor Party and the European social democratic parties emerged from, or were part of founding, the workers’ movement, Peronism has always been dominated by members of the ruling class.
The Peronist union bureaucracy didn’t do the detailed organising work necessary to convince large sections of workers to participate in the strike. In many places, the CGT mobilised only union delegates rather than the entire workforce. The bureaucracy is afraid of its own working-class base and doesn’t call demonstrations that might get out of its control. It wanted the demonstration on the day of the strike to be weighted towards workplace delegates, who are more loyal to the leadership.
So while the strike and demonstration were big in absolute terms, in relative terms they were still modest—half a million out of a population of 15.6 million in Buenos Aires, for example. 
Argentina has various revolutionary socialist organisations. Their membership numbers are in the thousands, rather than tens or hundreds of thousands, making them substantially weaker than the Peronist machine. But when the groups work together, they have considerable influence and are capable of meaningfully intervening into mass politics. That the general strike was held at all was partially a result of the left’s pressure on the CGT leaders. 
The Socialist Workers’ Movement (MST) is a useful case study. The three main projects of its members before the strike were: convincing as many of their workmates as possible to join the strike, leading mass rank-and-file assemblies and protests of arts sector workers and building a coalition of diverse groups to provide ongoing political leadership in the struggle. 
Mobilising workers for the strike wasn’t straightforward. More than 50 percent of people, including large numbers of workers, voted for Milei in November. Because most of his attacks haven’t been implemented yet, and because the economic crisis long preceded him, many don’t view the new president as a threat to their wellbeing and haven’t broken from him. In the lead-up to 24 January, union delegates from the left put in long, detailed work to convince their workmates to attend. 
“As soon as the strike was announced, we began to hold meetings and tours through the workplace discussing the need to strike”, Cesar Latorre, an MST member and lead delegate at a private hospital, told Red Flag. “In the first weeks, the debates were minor, but as the date approached, the debates became highly politicised.”
Latorre and his delegate team spent hours in each hospital department responding to questions and explaining the purpose of the strike. 
“The first difficulty was the refusal of one sector to mobilise and stop work because the strike was being called by the CGT after a long time of the federation doing nothing. Then there were other workers who supported Milei’s government and said we had to let him govern”, Latorre said. 
Some sections of workers joined the independent contingents, or “columns”, led by the revolutionary socialist parties around the country. In Buenos Aires, many thousands of people joined the left-wing “multi-sectoral” column organised through meetings and assemblies prior to the strike. It was initiated by Syndicalismo Combativo, a forum of union delegates who are members of socialist organisations. It is normal for that group to march together, but at the general strike they were joined by an unusually large number of others. 
Syndicalismo Combativo planning meetings included representatives of social justice organisations, unaligned piqueteros, retirees, neighbourhood assemblies and human rights organisations. 
Days before the strike, a prominent rank-and-file group of arts sector workers, in a mass assembly of more than 600, voted to join the left contingent. Members of the MST led the argument in the assembly. This led to other organisations, including a prominent abortion rights group, announcing they would also join the contingent. Tyre workers voted in assemblies to join it, as did a section of railway workers. Around 3,000 people from various neighbourhood committees met early to join the left column, but couldn’t get through the packed crowd to reach it.
Claudio Mora, an MST member delegate in the National Directive Commission of the tyre factory union, explained to Red Flag during the strike: 
“The strike was voted on in assemblies in each of the factories. Our strike won’t end at the same time as the CGT’s action—we will stay out until tomorrow at six in the morning. We are in the independent column because there is a need for a continuity of the struggle until we defeat Milei’s plans.
“The tyre union is strong, so we have a safeguard in our contracts to protect us from inflation, which means that we don’t lose as much from our salaries as the other workers. But our fundamental task is to be present and to lead, and try to give confidence to all the other sections of workers. That’s partly in terms of economic outcomes, but also in terms of organisation. We want to help encourage other workers to overcome the situation that they are in today, where the union bureaucrats control their workplaces. Instead, we are encouraging new delegates, new internal commissions, a new body of fighters to emerge, who also dedicate themselves, in addition to the union, to politics.”
A new cycle of struggle has begun in Argentina. On 20-21 December, enormous and spontaneous night-long protests shocked the wealthy. After that, however, there were no mass mobilisations until the left and the unions called demonstrations. But neighbourhood assemblies emerged in scattered suburbs of Buenos Aires and other parts of the country. They were much smaller than during the radicalisation of 2001, but undeniably real. The 24 January general strike was led by the union bureaucracy, but it opened a space for rank-and-file assemblies and for debates in some workplaces, into which the socialist organisations intervened. 
Struggles have risen and fallen in the last twenty years all over the world. But without revolutionary parties, even the bravest militants have been confined to a role akin to foam on a raging ocean. In Argentina, the construction of revolutionary socialist organisations is under way. To beat the conservative mass political forces, they will need to grow significantly. But they are of a size that enables them to intervene meaningfully. This makes the situation in Argentina more dynamic and open than in many other parts of the world.

Those who stand with the Palestinians should celebrate Assad’s fall

Student occupations bloom across Argentina

Terrorism designations are politically motivated

Inside Argentina’s university occupations

Refugees push back Nazis in Melbourne

Defiant Palestine activists beat Melbourne City Council attacks

In defence of the Greens

Bassem Tamimi: a hero of the Palestinian resistance

We need a revolution to put an end to today’s wars

The left in Argentina’s general strike

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