For left-wing people, it has long been uncontroversial to welcome into Australia refugees and migrants. 
Perhaps not any more. In a recent Instagram post, Keiran Stewart-Assheton, president of the Black People’s Union, an Indigenous activist group, claimed that “economic migrants” (those seeking a better life away from poverty in the underdeveloped world) participate in the colonial occupation of Australia and therefore “reap the fruits of colonialism and imperialism themselves” and are “agents of empire”. 
The post was particularly bizarre, given the context in which it was made. In recent months, refugees have set up protest camps outside government offices in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. The encampments are attempts to highlight the federal government’s inhuman treatment of refugees. Stewart-Assheton’s post was in response to an Indigenous activist’s speech at the Melbourne protest, welcoming both refugees and migrants to Australia. 
Stewart-Assheton’s anti-migrant prejudice is shameful. Indeed, the label “economic migrants” has long been used by the political right to generate hostility toward immigrants and to turn working-class people against each other, distracting them from the crimes of big business and politicians. 
Yet hostility towards so-called settler migrants isn’t a random quirk of the Black People’s Union. It flows from some of the fundamental weaknesses of contemporary “anti-colonial” politics. 
The dominant framework on the left for understanding anti-Aboriginal racism is settler colonial theory, first popularised by the academic Patrick Wolfe. Activists influenced by that framework present the main divide in Australia as being between Indigenous people and a homogeneous “settler” population. Anyone who is not Indigenous—no matter how exploited or oppressed they may be themselves—is considered to be a privileged settler and coloniser reaping the benefits of Aboriginal people’s oppression. 
This idea downplays the fact that the majority of so-called settlers suffer from gross forms of exploitation and oppression. After all, can we really believe that poor migrants working shitty jobs in the outer suburbs of Sydney or Melbourne have more in common with CEOs or politicians than they do with refugees and Aboriginal people, just because they happen to have moved to Australia? 
What utility does the concept of “settler” have when it can be equally applied to Peter Dutton, who calls for people waving Hezbollah flags to be deported from the country, and people of Lebanese heritage who defy the pervasive racism of the politicians and the media—and harassment from the cops and the security services—to protest against Israeli terrorism? By the logic of modern “anti-colonial” politics, whatever the differences between them, both are part of a privileged settler population.
The movement of people worldwide has been a constant feature of human society, particularly in modern times. Some migrants move to flee poverty, only to be met with horrendous racist treatment in their new country—if they are admitted at all under the many migration laws that determine whether or not they will be of use to capitalists. 
Migrants can be horrendously paid and work in precarious workplaces, while their rights as workers are not respected at all. On top of this, they are often used as scapegoats to cover for the failures of the capitalist system. 
For example, in Australia, the Liberals are now blaming the housing crisis on migrants, when it’s the government-designed housing market that has turned shelter into a vehicle for making one section of the (disproportionately Liberal-voting) population incredibly wealthy through perpetual asset-price inflation. 
The housing crisis affects almost all working people, particularly those with lower incomes and families lacking accumulated wealth. Yet supporters of settler colonial theory would have migrants slaving away in shitty jobs and living pay cheque to pay cheque “pay the rent” as though they are no different from Rio Tinto. 
Of course, there have been periods when migration has occurred as a part of brutal processes of colonisation—as in the history of colonial Australia. However, to condemn anyone as an evil settler and coloniser for having left the country in which they were born to go somewhere else that has an indigenous population—that is foolish in the extreme. As in the case of Stewart-Assheton, it can just dovetail with the anti-migrant bile of the racist right. 
The problem isn’t just that it can lead activists to counterpose the interests of refugees and migrants. To follow the logic of the argument would mean condemning the hundreds of millions of workers living in Canada, the US, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand as lackeys of imperialism and capitalism.
In some situations, the strident denunciation of settlers has been used to justify the most reactionary crimes. In Myanmar, Buddhist nationalists have unleashed waves of violence and forced expulsions of Rohingya, who have been categorised as “migrants” rather than native to the country. 
In her book Home Rule, Nandita Sharma shows that conflicts in Africa have often been framed as racialised struggles between supposed “Black African natives” and “light-skinned Arab migrants”. Sharma argues that the infamous 1994 Rwandan genocide had its roots in “the self-identification of Hutus as the National-Natives of Rwanda and the categorization of Tutsis as colonizing Migrants” who had to be violently removed from a country that they apparently did not “belong” to. 
Sinhala chauvinists in Sri Lanka similarly argue that Tamils are basically foreigners, and far-right Hindu nationalists in India want to expel Muslims from the country on similar grounds. 
None of this is to deny the very real oppression suffered by indigenous peoples in many countries around the world, particularly here in Australia. However, when activists and theorists try to set up a world view based on the idea that the whole planet is a struggle between settlers on the one hand and radical indigenous peoples on the other, it can only lead to absurdity. 
Many activists influenced by settler colonial theory would reject Stewart-Assheton’s conclusions. But conceptualising the fundamental divide in the world as a battle between indigenous peoples and settler populations makes it easy to see why people can dismiss the rights of migrants and the struggles of workers.
In many ways, settler colonial theory is a form of indigenous nationalism. Like all forms of nationalist politics, it views the world in a classless and sectional manner. This is clear from Stewart-Assheton and the Black People’s Union argument that the key divide in Australia is not between bosses and workers but between Indigenous people and settlers, and that, therefore, an anti-colonial revolution by Indigenous people (who make up just 3 percent of the population) is supposedly the first step to both Indigenous liberation and socialism. 
It’s on this basis that Stewart-Assheton says that all anti-racist, progressive and working-class struggles should be subordinated to Indigenous struggles (and therefore subordinated to the Black People’s Union) and that any failure to agree with such a program or its theoretical underpinning springs from a settler mindset.
This so-called radical program is incapable of securing either Indigenous liberation or socialism. In the end, all it does is take the focus away from the capitalist class and pit the struggles of oppressed people against each other in an Olympics-style game of identity politics, in which the starting point is figuring out who is most oppressed, rather than thinking about how we can best unite to beat our common enemy—the capitalist ruling class and its repressive state.
Oskar Martin is the Indigenous representative on the Student Council at the University of Melbourne Student Union.
Jordan Humphreys is the author of <a href="https://shop.redflag.org.au/products/indigenous-liberation-and-socialism">Indigenous Liberation &amp; Socialism</a>.

Oskar Martin

Jordan Humphreys

Are migrants colonisers?

The British Labour Party has won the UK general election, securing a large majority of seats and routing the Conservative Party, which ruled the country for the last fourteen years. The Tories, as the conservatives are known, have been reduced to a rump, losing 250 seats, including some that have voted for the party since it was formed in the 1830s.
Labour’s victory was widely predicted. The Conservatives stumbled through years of explosive political controversies, from Boris Johnson’s flouting of pandemic restrictions to party with his rich friends to the meltdown of Liz Truss, who held the prime ministership for just 49 days. The chaos was fuelled by divisions within the party and among its base—between centrist conservatives and a radicalised far right. The results showed the latter’s influence: Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform UK party won more than 14 percent of the vote.
The last fourteen years have been a disaster for workers. In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, the Conservatives slashed government spending, leaving schools and the health system to crumble. Wages stagnated; working-class communities were devastated. Meanwhile, the Conservatives funnelled money to their wealthy mates and the bankers of the City of London. 
As the masses became alienated from the government, the Conservatives moved sharply to the right. They tried to divide the population and give themselves the appearance of popular support. They deported refugees, demonised trans people, condemned the left and riled up their conservative base. Yet while people were turned on each other, they also turned on the Tories, leading to the emergence of various far-right formations and a revolving door of prime ministers.
All of this fed the widespread desire for the Conservatives to suffer a humiliating defeat. Few will mourn the end of Conservative rule in Britain. 
Yet Labour’s victory is far less impressive than it first appears.
Keir Starmer’s Labour comes to power with the lowest primary vote of any party entering or retaining government since 1929. While it will hold 65 percent of the seats in the new parliament, this is almost double its share of the vote, which was less than 34 percent. That’s more than 6 percentage points lower than when Labour lost the 2017 election under the leadership of left-winger Jeremy Corbyn. It is barely higher than the Labour result in 2019—a result considered so terrible that it led to the removal of Corbyn as Labour leader. 
So while voters despised the Conservatives, not many were won to Labour. Some of those deserting the Tories were traditional right-wing voters who instead backed either the centrist Liberal Democrats or Reform UK. 
Substantial numbers of working-class people and young left-wing voters also refused to vote for Labour. In Islington North, Jeremy Corbyn won as an independent, defeating the official Labour candidate by more than 7,000 votes. Pro-Palestinian independent Shockat Adam defeated Labour shadow cabinet minister Jonathan Ashworth in a surprise win. Ashworth’s vote plunged to 13,760, from 33,606 in 2019. 
Another pro-Palestine independent, Adnan Hussain, defeated Labour in Blackburn, an industrial city held by the party for the last 69 years. So too did Iqbal Mohamed in Dewsbury and Batley, and Ayoub Khan in Birmingham Perry Barr. In Ilford North, pro-Palestine independent Leanne Mohamad was just 500 votes behind the Labour candidate. As well, Labour shadow culture minister Thangam Debbonaire lost their seat to the Greens in Bristol Central by more than 10,000 votes. 
Even Labour leader Keir Starmer wasn’t immune to the backlash over his staunch support for Israel’s genocide. Starmer’s vote fell to 18,884, from 36,641 in 2019. Andrew Feinstein, a South African-born anti-Zionist Jewish activist, came second, winning more than 7,000 votes.
Then there were those who voted for no-one. Voter turnout was 60 percent, the second lowest in any general election since the franchise was established in 1928.
Even among those who voted for Labour, there was hardly great enthusiasm for Starmer’s project. The chief data reporter for the Financial Times, John Burn-Murdoch, noted on X that the “lack of enthusiasm for Labour at this election really is striking”, pointing to analysis of a British Election Study poll revealing that “among those who plan to vote Labour ... the party is much less well-liked than in 2019, 2017 or 2015 (no data before that)”. A YouGov poll found that 71 percent of voters felt that the election campaign didn’t address any issues they cared about. 
All of this is understandable when you look at what Starmer’s Labour Party is all about.
“Change begins now”, Starmer said in his victory speech, “and it feels good, I have to be honest, after four and a half years of work changing the party. This is what it is for!” Later, he repeatedly returned to the theme, telling the audience: “The party has changed”, “We will govern as a changed Labour Party”, “The values of this changed Labour Party are the guiding principles of a new government”, “This election could only have been won by a changed Labour Party”.
Starmer was referring to his four-year crusade to destroy the influence of Jeremy Corbyn and shift the party to the right. In this, he has been very successful. At the launch of the party manifesto in June, Starmer argued that Labour should be “pro-business” and “the party of wealth creation”. He rejected the idea that there should be higher taxes on big businesses and argued that significant increases to social services were ruled out because “you cannot play fast and loose with the public finances”.
The British bosses have lapped it up. In May, the Times
newspaper printed a statement by 120 business leaders supporting Starmer’s party. Starmer also received the backing of the majority of the corporate newspapers, including the Murdoch-owned Sun and the voices of the centre-right establishment, the Economist and the Financial Times. 
In response to Conservatives and the far right running a hysterical campaign demonising refugees and migrants, Starmer has made it very clear where his government will stand. “Read my lips—I will bring immigration numbers down”, he told the Sun. “I will control our borders and make sure British businesses are helped to hire Brits first.”
Israel’s war on Gaza only intensified Starmer’s campaign to shift Labour ever further to the right. Speaking to Jewish News shortly after winning the leadership, he said: “I support Zionism without qualification”. On this, he hasn’t disappointed. As Israel launched its horrific assault on Gaza, Starmer told radio host Nick Ferrari that “Israel has the right” to deny electricity to Palestinian civilians. Since then, he has driven out Labour members for supporting Palestine, sacked frontbench MPs for supporting a ceasefire motion and suspended Labour MP Kate Osamor for calling Gaza a genocide. 
No wonder that pro-Palestine candidates were able to bring down some Labour MPs.
Starmer’s Labour comes to power, then, in a fraught context. On the one hand, there is already a substantial minority of left-wingers angry with Labour over its centrist pro-corporate politics and support for Israel. This is bolstered by the fact that the UK has had the biggest rallies in solidarity with Palestine anywhere in the world. On the other hand, the rise of Reform UK shows that a sizeable radicalised right-wing section of society will try to push politics further to the right. 
“What is interesting is there is no enthusiasm for Labour, there is no enthusiasm for Starmer. Half the vote is simply an anti-Conservative vote. This Labour government will be in trouble very, very quickly. And we will now be targeting Labour votes”, Nigel Farage stated ominously after being elected for the first time as a UK MP. 
“Keir Starmer is going to be attacked on all sides; there is not going to be a honeymoon”, Channel 4 News political editor Gary Gibbon argued as the results rolled in. Referring to those seats lost to pro-Palestine independents, Gibbon noted: “It’s almost like mid-term anger but at the very start of a new government”.
Starmer’s huge majority in parliament may give the illusion that he is running an all-powerful government, at least for a period. However, the election results reveal that the social basis for such a government is weak. 
The disappointment of the UK general election is that, despite there being a significant space to the left of the Labour Party, no socialist groups were capable of taking advantage of the situation. Several pro-Palestine independents were elected, but none seem more generally connected to the organised far left, which has declined significantly in size and influence.
Rebuilding the socialist left will be vital if workers in the UK are to fight back against Starmer’s pro-corporate Labour government and the threat of an emboldened right wing.

UK Labour’s victory rests on rocky foundations

Has the political centre held off the far right, or are the fascists surging? 
According to Britain’s Economist magazine, a weekly diary of establishment opinion, the “political centre has been dented but it still holds”. Yet parties of the centre lost to the far right in the continent’s biggest countries. In Germany, the centre-left Social Democratic Party, which leads the ruling coalition federally, came in third place—behind both the right-wing Christian Democrats and the far-right Alternative for Germany. In France, President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist coalition received less than half the vote of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally.
Contrary to the Economist’s take, the results confirm that the overall trajectory of European politics has shifted decisively to the right.
To start with, the political “centre” has become more right wing, more authoritarian, more racist and more anti-worker in recent years. 
When Macron was elected in 2017, he was presented as a liberal statesman who would modernise the country and stop the advance of Le Pen’s fascists. In the seven years since, the French president has ruled by decree, unleashed the riot police on striking workers and protesters, and banned demonstrations in solidarity with Palestine. Despite being a secular liberal, Macron has flirted with conservative Catholic identity politics, telling a conference of bishops in 2018 that striking workers were motivated by an anti-Christian “nihilism”. 
Macron has denounced “Islamo-leftism”, threatened to ban environmental groups that he claims support “violence against property”, made it illegal for French citizens to post social media videos of police, and frozen the bank accounts of pro-Palestine charities. Finally, despite years of protest and strikes, in April 2023 he did what previous centre-left and centre-right governments had failed to do and raised the pension age from 62 to 64. 
Despite all this, or perhaps because of it, Le Pen has continued to grow in popularity. 
When a coalition government of the Social Democratic Party, the Greens and the Free Democratic Party was formed in Germany three years ago, there was hope that it would take the country in a more progressive direction. But in office, the coalition has expanded the German military, increased the number of refugee deportations and positioned the German government as the most hardline supporter of Israel in the world. Faced with a cost-of-living crisis, the German government has ruled out any serious measures to combat poverty. No wonder the Social Democrats were punished by voters.
The decline of the German Greens, who lost nine seats and whose Europe-wide bloc declined, is also notable. 
The centre-right Christian Democrats did well in the European elections, but they have shed what remained of former leader Angela Merkel’s soft conservatism and espoused increasingly far-right-sounding anti-migrant rhetoric. As in many countries, the centre-right in Germany has radicalised in the era of Trump. The latest expression of this is the leader of the Bavarian Social Union, the more right-wing coalition partner of the Christian Democrats, flagging that he is open to working with the Alternative for Germany in the future. 
Across Europe, the centre has driven things further to the right. In February, a meeting of economy ministers passed the New Migration and Asylum Pact, increasing the ability of EU countries to deport refugees and asylum seekers, including children.
Another important expression of the shift to the right is the incorporation of sections of the far right into the centre itself. This is most notable with Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni. After the initial shock of this far-right figure winning government, there has been a substantial softening towards her by the political centre. 
For her part, Meloni has been willing to break with other sections of the far right by stridently supporting NATO, military aid to Ukraine and the project of European political and economic integration. She has formed her own bloc in the European parliament, separate from that of the French far right and hostile to the more openly fascistic parties such as Alternative for Germany. Despite Meloni’s vile views on LGBTI rights, abortion and migration, her distancing efforts led one Guardian columnist to go so far as to ask: “Macron and Meloni appear poles apart—but what if they joined forces to save Europe?”
Sometimes the differentiation of the European far right is presented in a positive light— a sign that sections of the far right are moderating. But current developments should be treated with alarm, not complacency. 
To start with, the public shifts of leaders such as Meloni are an expression of the fact that far-right parties in several countries are within striking distance of forming government. Second, there is more overlap than is commonly thought between the policies of the far right and the centre in Europe. Finally, the space is being opened for even more hardline far-right groups to gain a following—as has occurred with Eric Zemmour in France and the Lega in Italy. It was particularly shocking to see the Alternative for Germany do so well despite becoming more and more openly fascist in recent years. 
The centre has created a Europe of appalling inequalities, rampant racism, violent policing and hard borders ruled over by an extravagantly wealthy elite. This is the not-so-secret key to the rise of the far right. 
European far-right parties drift along with the right-wing flow of European politics and while positioning themselves against the grain of European elites. As they do, the centre squirms and adapts to the far right’s electoral gains and increasingly extreme policies, taking a hard stand against them only on issues such as support for NATO and the European Union, which are core to the interests of the European capitalist class.
Missing is a resurgent socialist left that could fight the centre and expose the fake populism of the far right. This seems further away than ever. Outside of France, the parties of the left went backwards in country after country. Long gone are the days when the threat to the European centre seemed to be Podemos and Syriza, the occupation of city squares and general strikes against austerity. Emblematic in this regard is Die Linke, the German left-wing party, which has fallen apart after years of collaboration with centre parties and a recent split. 
France at least has a more recent history of social protest. The EU election results led to sizeable demonstrations against Le Pen. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of left-wing party France Unbowed, increased his vote and has formed an electoral alliance with the Socialist Party and the Greens to challenge both Macron and Le Pen in the upcoming French elections. But questions abound about the political expediency of an alliance with parties such as the Socialists, which ran a neoliberal centre government that attacked workers and helped Le Pen grow in the first place, let alone the Greens.
Key to breaking the right-wing trajectory of European politics will be a renewal of grassroots struggles by workers, students and the oppressed against not just the far right but the centrist political set-up that has made fascism respectable again.

In Europe, the centre faces a strengthened far right—which it helped create

“A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of settler colonialism.” So opens a recent article by Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese in the Australian magazine Overland. For today’s left, anti-colonialism has become the key framework for understanding many forms of contemporary injustice. The racist oppression of people of colour, migrants and refugees, and Indigenous peoples across the world is all said to be due to both the history of European colonisation and ongoing systems of colonialism.
It is the Israeli state’s brutal treatment of the Palestinians that is at the centre of most contemporary discussions about colonialism and anti-colonialism. And it isn’t hard to see why.
Zionism emerged during the high point of European colonialism and was deeply influenced by it. Israel itself was founded on the dispossession of the Palestinian population and has always sought to ally itself with the imperialist nations of the world. Today, right-wingers and Zionists pump out propaganda trying to defend Israel from the accusations of colonialism. Pro-Israel organisations like the American Jewish Committee have published lengthy articles seeking to rebut the claim that Israel is a settler colony, while the Tory MP Michael Gove denounced the “prevailing intellectual fashion of decolonisation” as antisemitic in a recent speech to the UK parliament.
For many, the politics of anti-colonialism has been a starting point for rejecting the racist lies of capitalist society and supporting the struggles of the oppressed. In this way, it is a positive move away from the limitations of liberal multiculturalism and moderate centrism with their emphasis on gradually reforming capitalism into a supposedly “post-racial”, “colour-blind” society.

However, there are also significant limitations with the contemporary politics of anti-colonialism, even if these problems have nothing to do with what right-wingers are ranting about. Most importantly, it either discounts or heavily distorts the relationship between imperialism and oppression, and abandons any serious understanding of class and capitalism more broadly. This has important implications for developing the kind of organisations and struggles we need to confront successfully oppression in the Middle East and throughout the world.
Take, for instance, the popular idea that the reason Western countries like Australia, the United States, Canada and New Zealand, support Israel is their common heritage as settler colonial states. As Jewish Voice for Peace Deputy Director Cecilie Surasky put it in a talk published on her organisation’s website, “The ‘special relationship’ between Israel and the United States is rooted in our common national narratives and founding mythology”.
But this can’t explain why governments that have suffered from colonialism, such as Modi’s administration in India or the Kenyan government, are such strong supporters of Israel. Conversely, it cannot explain why countries like Indonesia that are currently engaged in colonisation (West Papua) are capable of opposing Israel’s actions, even if only rhetorically.
Even in the cases of the US and Australia, the establishment’s support for Israel has little to do with some shared history of settler colonialism. They support Israel because it is in the interests of their ruling classes to do so. They want to enforce their dominance over the global capitalist system by strengthening their hold over one of the key pillars of Western imperialism in the Middle East. If for some reason it was no longer in their imperialist interests to support Israel, then the ruling classes of the West wouldn’t do so, no matter what shared history they might have. This explains why neither the US nor Australia are particularly supportive of Chinese colonisation of Tibet and Xinjiang.
The idea that Western nations support Israel because of their common colonial history also repeatedly spills over into cultural explanations for imperialist backing of Israel rather than geopolitical ones. Surasky from Jewish Voice for Peace argues that “the root of this special relationship” is “our [own] national narrative” that it is “right to expand onto other people’s land”. “[O]ur resistance must also be at the level of narrative”, Surasky concludes. “All of us in this movement have to decolonize our minds.”
It is true that Western support for Israel isn’t due to the influence of AIPAC. But nor is it simply rooted in “our national narrative and the feelings it engenders”. Narratives can change, and feelings are fickle, but America’s bipartisan support for Israel is grounded in material interests that are yet to be shaken.
The origins of the Israeli state are commonly portrayed by anti-colonial theorists as lying in the Jewish settlers making a pact with the West to serve its interests in the region and in the process transforming themselves into a “white” population. As academic Johannes Becke wrote in a 2018 article for International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, “While American Jews became white by suburbanisation, Israeli Jews did so by colonization”. This is a very reductive understanding of the origins of Israel on a number of levels.
First of all, it obscures the fact that imperialist nations came to support the Zionist state because it was perceived to be in the interests of their ruling classes and states to do so. It wasn’t in the interests of the undifferentiated mass of people living in the Western countries, the vast majority of whom had no say in the matter. 
Secondly, it places the similarities between the colonial ideologies of the Zionists and the West as key to explaining why Western governments supported the creation of Israel. However, the relationship between Western governments and the Zionist movement was complicated and tension-filled, and it evolved over time, undermining the idea that common cultural affinities drove the relationship.
The British government, the key Western player in the region before 1948, was
primarily concerned with entrenching its control over mandate Palestine—not, at least initially, in supporting the narrow goals of the Zionist movement. There was considerable debate within the London colonial elite about the positives and negatives of the Zionist project. These debates were underpinned by discussions about what course would best serve the interests of British imperialism first and foremost. 
While the British were happy to suppress the rights of the Palestinians, they were hesitant for a long time about unconditionally backing the creation of a Jewish state. They preferred to lord over the region themselves and play the Jewish and Arab populations off against each other, even while granting more concessions and privileges to the Jewish settlers. As the Zionist movement emerged as a powerful force, the British government came to endorse this project as seemingly the best way to stabilise Western influence over the Zionists and the region in the upheavals of the postwar world.
The US, which would emerge in the postwar world as the major Western imperialist power, was also ambivalent about Israel for some time. It endorsed the establishment of Israel in 1948 but then opposed the 1956 invasion of Egypt by Israel, Britain and France. There was a strong “Arabist” wing of the US State Department that worried that if the US backed Israel, it would send Arab states into the arms of the Soviet Union. It was only after Israel had proven its military credentials in the 1967 war that American state officials swung around to build the tight alliance with Israel they have today.
It is also important to note that it was not only the traditional imperialist countries of the West that endorsed the establishment of Israel. The Soviet Union was the first country in the world to recognise Israel, and both the USSR and its satellite states in Eastern Europe supported the UN partition plan in 1947. Until the 1950s, the Soviet Union either supported Israel or took a neutral position on conflicts between it and the Arab states. This further complicates the idea that Israel was simply created by the West.
The argument that Jewish settlers transformed themselves into a “white” population and that Israel is an example of white supremacy is also dubious. There are indeed white nationalists like Richard Spencer who champion Israel. There are also certain similarities between how Zionism racialises the Arab world and racism in Western countries. And there is clearly discrimination against Jews from non-white backgrounds in Israel, such as those who arrived from the Middle East, North Africa or Ethiopia.
However, the idea that Jewish settlers—including the many Black and Brown ones—became “white” springs from the illogical underpinnings of identity politics which is deeply embedded within the anti-colonial framework. It flows from the idea that imperialism, racism and colonialism are products of “whiteness” and Western culture, rather than something pursued by capitalist states and nationalist movements regardless of their race or ethnicity.
Are Hindu nationalists in Modi’s India “white” because they organise violent attacks on Muslims and other minorities? Granted, these divisions have historic roots in the imperialist strategies of the old British Raj, but they continue today because of the political dynamics of contemporary Hindu nationalism. 
The reality is that violent oppression is something that all sorts of capitalist states, political parties and movements can participate in. As capitalist development has spread across the world, including into the global South, more and more non-Western countries have become violent and oppressive capitalist states. To explain this by claiming that ruling figures in these societies have become “white” would mean describing large parts of Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa as such.
Most of the current settler colonial projects in the world today are being carried out by “non-white” countries. China’s ongoing push to replace Uyghurs with Han Chinese settlers in Xinjiang, India’s colonisation of Kashmir and the genocide of the Rohingya by the military of Myanmar are just some of the most prominent examples. Most theorists of settler colonialism show little interest in this, presumably because it goes against the thesis that settler colonialism is a product of Western culture, and it cuts against the softness on non-Western governments notable in anti-colonial theory circles.
The anti-colonial framework also downplays how the class divisions within the Palestinian population and the broader Arab world facilitated the rise of the Zionist state. 
Absentee Palestinian landlords sold large tracts of land to the Zionist organisations, helping them gain a substantial foothold in the region. When Palestinian peasants and workers erupted into protest against Zionist attacks, some sections of the Arab elite helped the British crush these movements. Abdullah I, the king of Jordan, for instance, forged an alliance with the Zionists in the 1930s and received money from the Jewish Agency, a branch of the World Zionist Organization. When the revolt of 1936 began, he helped Zionist and British forces isolate and eventually defeat the rebellion. At one point he even tried to encourage Zionist settlement in Jordan, a move blocked by the British government.
Palestinian elites, such as the al-Husayni family, held back the struggles of the Palestinians, instead placing their hopes in negotiations with the British government. This led to a series of tragic defeats for the Palestinians that paved the way for the victory of the Zionist forces in 1948. After the Nakba, Arab ruling classes treated the mass of poor Palestinian refugees disgracefully, shunting them away into refugee camps. It was a different story for the elite of Palestinian society, who quickly carved out a position for themselves within the Arab states as successful business owners and professionals.
Since 1948, class divisions amongst Palestinians have continued to be an important issue. The hundreds of thousands of Palestinians expelled from Palestine were integrated into the class structures within the surrounding Arab states, which if anything exaggerated the already existing class differences among Palestinians. Wealthier Palestinians were more insulated from the worst effects of the expulsion. Many Palestinian merchants, bankers and entrepreneurs already had well-established links with capitalists and markets in Arab countries, and transferred what movable assets they could. They then quickly merged into the broader Arab ruling classes, their sons and daughters marrying the children of the Jordanian, Lebanese and Saudi elites. By the 1960s there were hundreds of Palestinian millionaires throughout the Gulf states. The vast majority of the Palestinian refugee population, however, were former peasants and unskilled workers who were viewed as unwelcome and potentially rebellious visitors by the Arab governments. 
It is these class divisions that lay behind many of the political debates within the Palestinian national movement. The disastrous concept that the Palestinians should look primarily to the Arab states for support didn’t come out of nowhere, but reflected the fact that the upper sections of the Palestinian population were deeply connected materially to the Arab regimes.
Some anti-colonial theorists can acknowledge divisions within national movements, but they see elite layers within nationally oppressed populations as simply sell-outs putting their own narrow interests above those of the national movement as a whole, rather than a class pursuing its own class interests. They also often underestimate the problem of middle-class layers within these movements having different class interests to the mass of workers.
The role that the Palestinian Authority has played in working with the Israeli state to suppress any genuine resistance to Israeli rule is often seen as an example of a small section of elites selling out the nation’s cause. However, in his book Lineages of Revolt, academic Adam Hanieh explains that the actions of the Palestinian Authority are only explicable from an analysis of the class structure of Palestinian society. Since Israel occupied it in 1967, the economy of the West Bank has transformed from a mainly rural one dominated by structures of traditional village life into “an incorporated, dependent, and subordinated appendage of Israeli capitalism”. This shift dispossessed the mass of the Palestinian population of what little land they still controlled and proletarianised it while at the same time there developed “a tiny layer of Palestinian capital that articulates Israeli rule and whose accumulation is dependent on that mediating position”.
The politics of anti-colonialism are not simply ill-thought-out ideas. If taken seriously as a guide to action, they would be disastrous for building a movement that can actually challenge imperialism and capitalism. In South Africa, the theory that Africans suffered from “internal colonisation” was developed by primarily white intellectuals around the South African Communist Party. They used the theory to justify the pro-capitalist strategy of the African National Congress, which sought to narrow the radicalism of African workers around a program to simply replace the racist apartheid regime with a new capitalist government controlled by a Black elite. 
In the US, Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael and political scientist Charles V. Hamilton used the theory that African Americans were a colony within the US to argue for building up a Black political power bloc. This ultimately primarily benefited the layer of Black mayors, congresspeople and police chiefs who were elected to supposedly decolonise urban spaces. 
In Australia, anti-colonial rhetoric is just as often used to argue for more Indigenous-owned businesses, NGOs and government bureaucracies as it is for any genuine struggle against racism, let alone capitalism.
Throughout the 20th century, anti-colonial movements were able to win across Africa, Asia and the Middle East. While socialists celebrate the end of direct colonial rule, we need to be clear that in none of these cases did anti-colonial revolutions lead to societies based on equality and justice. Instead, new capitalist states were created with continued exploitation and oppression.
There are those on the Left who adopt the politics of anti-colonialism but consider themselves to be fighting for something more radical than the examples raised above. But the problem is that the logic of anti-colonial politics inevitably leads towards pro-capitalist so-called solutions to the issues of racism and imperialism. Its very framing reinforces the idea that the key division in the world is different national groups rather than classes, and that the problems of the world are due to things external or secondary to capitalism, rather than the fundamental nature of the system itself.
For instance, in Settler Colonialism: An Introduction, Sai Englert, a socialist writer, argues that one of the benefits of anti-colonial politics is that it can foster “unity across different sections of the Palestinian people”. But unity with whom and on what political basis? Englert discusses many examples of movements against national oppression, including in Palestine, but at no point even acknowledges, let alone discusses, the different class forces within them, opting for uncritical veneration instead.
Many of the people protesting for Palestine today are doing so at least in part because of these anti-colonial ideas, which make sense as a starting point given the weakness of class struggle and the left. But faced with another century of brutal wars and vicious oppression, we need a clear Marxist politics that emphasises the necessity of confronting the underlying structures of capitalism through the immense potential power of the working class.
Jordan Humphreys is the author of “Palestine and the classless politics of settler colonial theory” in the upcoming issue of the Marxist Left Review. He is also the author of Indigenous Liberation and Socialism available through Red Flag books.

Capitalism and colonialism today

As Israel’s latest brutal war against the people of Gaza drags on, the need to challenge the Zionist state and all those who facilitate its genocidal campaign couldn’t be clearer.
For many leftists, the only viable opposition to imperialism in the Middle East appears to be armed groups like Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthi rebels in Yemen, or governments hostile to the West such as Iran and Syria. Workers don’t get a look in.
Yet there is a hidden history of working-class struggle in the region that dates back many decades. These struggles not only challenged the domination of the region by imperialist powers, but also shook the rule of all those who sought to exploit and oppress the masses.
During the 1940s, a powerful workers movement emerged in Egypt. Britain had occupied the country since 1882. After a nationwide revolt in 1919, the British gave formal independence to Egypt, but still retained much control over the country—including the stationing of British troops on the Suez Canal. 
Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman in their study of the Egyptian labour movement, Workers on the Nile, reveal that militant textile workers were the backbone of the movement, particularly those in Shubra al-Khayma, an industrial centre north of Cairo. By 1945, the General Union of Mechanical Textile Workers in Shubra al-Khayma and Cairo had nearly 15,000 members, making it the second largest union in the country. Beinin and Lockman write that the strength of the union was based on an extensive network of workers organised in steward committees and a group of brilliant socialist activists. The textile workers also helped organise other sections of workers across Egypt.
In October 1945, the leaders of the textile workers supported a move to set up the Workers Committee for National Liberation—The Political Organization of the Working Class, which had a weekly socialist newspaper called al-Damir.
Al-Damir championed the struggles of workers and argued that both imperialism and capitalism had to be challenged in Egypt:
“Imperialism ... together with the Egyptian capitalists and landowners plot and plan against the Egyptian people. The people have no other way therefore than to struggle against British imperialism and local capitalist exploitation at the same time if it desires resurrection and liberation.”
In this spirit, al-Damir and the Workers Committee for National Liberation demanded not only an end to British control in Egypt, but also the nationalisation of industry, the breakup of the major companies, a transformation of rural life and the right for workers to fight against economic exploitation.
The Egyptian government was terrified. On 21 October, the prime minister met with them and offered legal protection if they made him the editor of al-Damir! The workers, of course, refused. 
Having failed to coopt the movement, the government moved to crush it. Bosses started a wave of mass sackings aimed at the key activists, and from mid-December the military occupied Shubra al-Khayma. In response, textile workers launched a week-long strike that was brutally repressed, with more than 600 workers arrested. 
Meanwhile, university students had started a protest movement of their own. This began after the revelation that the Egyptian government had sent Britain a memorandum offering to extend and strengthen their military alliance. In February 1946, thousands of students at Cairo University held a conference to denounce the memorandum and the government’s repression of the textile workers. The students were viciously attacked by police, leaving hundreds wounded.
A National Committee of Students and Workers was formed to unite the struggle against the Egyptian government and the British military forces. The committee issued a call for a general strike to begin on 21 February, which was dubbed “evacuation day”, i.e. the day when British troops and their collaborators would be forced to evacuate the country.
The anti-Zionist Jewish Marxist Tony Cliff describes what happened on the day:
“‘Evacuation Day’—about 100,000 workers and students made a strike and demonstration in Cairo. The spirit of the demonstrators was clearly revealed in the fact that none of the traditional parties had any sway over them. When Ahmed Husayn, the leader of the fascist party ‘Misr al-Fatat’ tried to worm his way into the midst of the turbulent masses, he was greeted with cries of ‘Down with Fascism!’ and was forced to retire without speaking. The solidarity of Moslems, Christians and Jews was an oft-repeated slogan throughout the demonstrations. Sudanese students studying in Egypt who called for a common struggle against British imperialism were carried shoulder high.” 
Cliff explains that the National Committee was truly “representative of the masses”. Its “members were chosen in democratic elections from each faculty and trade union” and in “every quarter of Cairo special local quarter committees were also elected” with worker activists in the big foreign companies having a “decisive influence on the direction of the movement”. In Alexandria, Cliff says that anti-Stalinist Trotskyist activists held a majority on the city-wide committee.
The February general strike was followed by another massive strike in March, and strikes and demonstrations continued until the late 1940s. While the Egyptian government was able to cling to power, its legitimacy was fatally undermined, opening the space for nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Free Officers to seize power in 1952. 
Such scenes were repeated in Iraq, which was shaken by huge protests and general strikes that fused anti-colonial and class demands during the 1940s and ’50s. Oil workers played the key role, using their strategic position to shut down an industry that accounted for 61 percent of government revenue. 
As in Egypt, the British granted Iraq nominal independence in 1932, but this was a facade. They retained military forces in the country (including control over the airbases) and pressured the Iraqi government to sign a deal giving them control over oil production until the year 2000.
When the Iraqi government in 1948 began to negotiate a new deal that would continue this arrangement, a protest movement of students, workers and the urban poor erupted—later called al-Wathba (the Leap).
While the imperialist relationship with Britain sparked the uprising, the Palestinian Marxist Hanna Batau argues in his epic The Old Social Classes and New Revolutionary Movements of Iraq that it was also rooted in the “social subsoil of Baghdad” and was a “revolt against hunger and unequal burdens”. 
No wonder then that, when students launched a mass march in Baghdad on 20 January, hundreds of railway workers and many poor people from the urban slums joined the protest. The police tried to break it up and opened fire on the crowd, killing two students. Batau describes what happened next:
“As word of the outrage spread, resentment mounted to a fever heat. Tempestuous protests pervaded the streets. Crowds thick with Communists, and armed with huge canes, clashed with the police, who became much like an aidless flotsam in a wrathful sea. An atmosphere redolent of social revolution enveloped Baghdad.”
The revolt reached a high point on 27 January, when a huge crowd of students and workers attempted to cross the Ma’mum Bridge in Baghdad only to be fired upon by machine guns—between 300 and 400 died. That evening, the Iraqi premier fled the country, a new government was formed, and the negotiations with the British over the deal ended. 
The al-Wathba was suppressed but soon followed by the Intifada (uprising) in 1952. Strikes continued even after a group of nationalist military officers took power in 1958, and Communists could reportedly mobilise over a million workers and students onto the streets.
Similar movements took place across the Middle East during the postwar decades. In Iran, a workers movement emerged in 1942. By 1946, hundreds of thousands of workers were organised in more than 100 unions, and 65,000 oil workers launched a successful three-day strike. Petroleum workers in Bahrain led a series of mass strikes against British rule, culminating in a three-month-long uprising in 1965 that pressured British troops to withdraw in 1968. Similarly, from 1959 to 1963, refinery and dock workers in Aden were the vanguard of a mass movement to drive the British out of South Yemen. Strikes and worker protests were a regular feature of life in Saudi Arabia, Oman and Kuwait during the 1940s and ’50s. 
This history reveals that working-class struggle is not foreign to the Middle East. However, if workers were so keen on challenging imperialism and capitalism during this period, why didn’t worker-led revolutions take place?
The answer to this question can be found in the politics of the various Middle Eastern Communist parties. Communists played a significant role in the emergence and leadership of the workers movements during the postwar years. But they were deeply influenced by Stalinism and took direction from Moscow. The Soviet Union argued that Communists should seek to form alliances with the so-called patriotic capitalists in the Middle East, who supposedly had a common interest with the workers in defeating imperialism. The Egyptian revolutionary socialist Hossam el-Hamalawy argues in an interview with the Left Berlin blog that while the “Communists played a central role in the strikes”, they “were Stalinists who believed in two-Stages theory, which explained that it was not yet time to have a social revolution”. The role of Communists was to mobilise the masses to drive out the imperialists, but not to encourage workers to seize power themselves. 
In Egypt, this meant that Communists softened the strident calls for working-class independence made by the textile workers and al-Damir in order to construct an alliance with other classes. 
When Nasser and the Free Officers seized power in 1952, Communist-led trade unions welcomed them as leaders of the national revolution and called off a general strike of transport workers. Less than a month later, a bitter strike broke out at Kafr al-Dawwar, a textile centre south of Alexandria. After shots were fired between striking workers and managers, the military arrested hundreds of workers, and two union leaders were sentenced to death with the approval of the Free Officers. Beinin and Lockman argue in Workers on the Nile that Communists toned down criticism of the sentences in the vain hope that they could still work for sections of the Free Officers. Instead, Nasser continued his repression of the Communists, even while his government grew closer to the Soviet Union. Eventually, the Communists decided to dissolve their organisation and join Nasser’s Arab Socialist Union party.
This basic story was repeated in country after country. The Iraqi Communists played the key role in defeating British control over their country and yet they let their allies, the nationalist Ba’ath party, take power, due to their belief that the revolution could only be national, not socialist. Then in 1963, the Ba’ath government turned around and crushed the Communists, killing thousands of their members. 
Workers had shown their immense power to shake not only the strength of the imperialist forces, but all those who sought to exploit and oppress the people. But their leaders tied their fate to various middle-class national parties that only wanted capitalism controlled by Arabs rather than by foreigners. As the Marxist historian Anne Alexander has argued in an article about the Iraqi revolution for International Socialism, “despite the deep crisis and eventual collapse of the old order, it was not the working class that benefited”. Instead, the “Communist parties, hamstrung by Stalinist ideas of an alliance with the ‘progressive national bourgeoisie’, tied the fate of the working-class movement to nationalist goals”. 
Since then, Middle Eastern workers have continued to mobilise. Textile workers in Egypt once again played an important role in the Egyptian revolution of 2011 that overthrew the dictator Mubarak. In 2019, teachers in Jordan launched the longest ever public sector strike in that country. Iran has seen years of strikes alongside popular protests against the government.
Socialists look to these movements as the ultimate force that can resist imperialism and capitalism in the region, and we hope for a day when workers’ struggle brings down all the imperialist forces, exploiters and dictators in the Middle East.

When workers’ struggles shook the Middle East

If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution 
By Vincent Bevins; Public Affairs; 352 pages.
--------------------
The 2010s were rocked by mass protest movements across the globe. Millions of people occupied city squares, defied dictators, confronted police and exposed the dramatic inequalities that had been entrenched throughout the world during the neoliberal era.
Yet by the end of the decade, the world was even more unequal, undemocratic and unjust than before. This was the case even in those countries that had seen the biggest protest movements in their history. 
In Egypt, millions came together in Tahir Square to overthrow the regime of Hosni Mubarak. Yet by 2013 a new military government had been established. In Brazil, a huge protest movement against increased transport fares initiated by far-left activists shattered the stability of the Workers’ Party government. Yet the country went on to elect an extreme right-wing president, Jair Bolsonaro, in 2019. 
That year in Chile, an enormous wave of protests, street fighting and strikes took aim at 30 years of neoliberalism by both centre-right and centre-left governments. However, within a few years the newly elected left-wing President Gabriel Boric, a former student activist, was facing a powerful right-wing movement that prevented significant change to Chile’s authoritarian constitution. The list could go on. 
The problem is not just that these movements weren’t able to transform society, nor that they weren’t able to usher in a period of serious advances for the socialist left and the workers’ movement. The problem is that in many cases right-wing or far-right political forces were able to capitalise on the very crisis produced by these protest movements to pursue their own goals. 
Sisi’s Egyptian coup was preceded by huge protests against the Muslim Brotherhood government that had been elected after the fall of Mubarak, protests that were viewed by many as a continuation of those of 2011. Similarly in Brazil, protests emerged in 2015 against the Workers’ Party government, using much of the imagery of an earlier movement against the transport fare increases but now dominated by right-wing activists and focused entirely on removing the centre-left party from office. 
It is this dilemma that is the central theme of Vincent Bevins’ book If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution.
Bevins interviewed hundreds of activists involved in the protests of the 2010s to try to understand what went wrong. “The people who sat down with me did not want to stop their analysis at the recognition that repressive forces were repressive”, he writes. Many of the activists thought that “those kinds of answers were too easy. They wanted to hold themselves to a higher standard”.
The first point that Bevins draws out of his research is that there is no such thing as a political vacuum: “If you blow a hole in the center of the political system, taking power away from those who have it, then someone else is going to enter the empty space and take it”. 
In a situation of rising inequality, political apathy and social instability, the actions of small groups of radicals, sometimes only in the dozens, can intersect with growing discontent and explode onto the streets, drawing in hundreds of thousands and sometimes even millions of people. 
However, “a diffuse group of individuals who come out to the streets for very different reasons cannot simply take power themselves”. As Karl Marx wrote in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: “Those who cannot represent themselves, must be represented”. 
It is precisely in this context that the politics that influenced the protest movements of the decade became a liability. Bevins argues that the common sense of much of the global activist and leftist scene in the early 2000s was dominated by a focus on prefigurative politics that fetishised “leaderless”, “horizontally organised” and “spontaneous” forms of protest. This kind of politics venerated the diffuse nature of the protest movements rather than grappling with their limitations. 
The choice of actions by these movements—the occupation of squares, street fighting, mass assemblies—rather than other actions such as strikes, reflected the fact that they arose after decades of decline and defeat of the workers’ movement and the socialist left throughout the world. As Bevins argues: “It should be obvious that humans do not spontaneously adopt the correct response to a given set of injustices”. 
“If you are a protest movement taking on the most powerful government in the history of Asia”, he notes, referencing the 2019 Hong Kong protests, “you should not pick your strategy based on which post gets the most upvotes on a forum like Redditt. We can be certain that any worthy opponent is not making its decisions that way”. 
What is most interesting about Bevins’ book, though, are the conclusions that many of the activists themselves drew from their own experiences. “I spent years doing interviews, and not one person told me that they had become more horizontalist, or more anarchist, or more in favour of spontaneity and structurelessness”, he writes. “[S]ome people stayed in the same place. But everyone that changed their views on the question of organization moved closer to classically ‘Leninist’ ones.”
“I had a lot of fun on the streets”, Theo, a Hong Kong activist, tells Bevins, “but the decentralized nature of the movement meant that there was no room for discussion about how it should work, or how a coherent strategy could be developed”. 
“After Maidan, I decided I do not believe in self-organization”, explains Artem Tidva, a leftist activist involved in the Ukrainian Maidan protests until they became dominated by right-wing nationalist groups. “I used to be more anarchist. Back then everyone wanted to do an assembly, whenever there was a protest ... But I think any revolution with no organised labor party will just give more power to economic elites who are already very well-organized”. 
Bevins argues that the crimes of Stalinism and the failures of many left-wing parties and governments around the world in the twentieth century led many to reject the need for organisation altogether. “Yes, we have to confront that they have the potential for misuse”, Bevins argues. However, “if your goal is to confront the problem facing humanity, that means a focus on ends, and it means constructing a movement that can stand the test of time, in addition to remaining democratic and accountable”. 
This of course raises the thorny question of what kind of organisation we need, something beyond the scope of this review. But that we need organisation I don’t think can seriously be contested any more. The idea that we should wait around for a spontaneous uprising or limit our organising in the here and now to a small, diffuse, supposedly “non-hierarchical” circle of friends, is utterly irresponsible. And there is a rich history of revolutionaries building socialist organisations in almost every context imaginable: from the most liberal of capitalist democracies to the most authoritarian of dictatorships. 
The 2010s were a decade of radical possibilities and missed opportunities. Those years buried the idea that we live in a stable, safe and equal society, and starkly revealed the crimes of the rich and the powerful. The protests that erupted involved more people than at any other moment in world history and confirmed that people will fight back against the system—and against those who had written off the potential for mass revolt. However, those years also highlighted that the lack of an organised socialist movement undermined what was possible. 
“I heard over and over, across five continents, in the face of obvious setbacks, serious tragedies, and widespread depression, people would tell me: this is just the beginning, we have planted the seed for something bigger”, Bevins writes. “In the long term, these struggles can be part of something greater, and we can come back stronger than ever and win.”
Let us not make the same mistakes in the 2020s, let’s make sure we can come back stronger—and win.

The missing socialist movement

For left-wing people in Australia, support for Aboriginal rights is almost axiomatic—rightfully so in a country where Indigenous people are plagued by over-policing, racist politicians and endemic poverty. But horror at the racism Indigenous people in Australia face shouldn’t stop at the national border, and nor should solidarity. 
Recognition of this fact is increasingly evident in the response to Israel’s war on Gaza. It is reflected in the thousands of anti-racists who have attended protests against the war, as well as the many expressions of solidarity on social media that link the struggle of Indigenous people and the Palestinians. 
But among the self-proclaimed Indigenous rights supporters in the establishment, like Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and most of the Labor cabinet, the opposite is the case. Albanese championed the Voice to Parliament as a way to acknowledge the past injustices suffered by Indigenous people. But he seems to care little about the current injustices happening right now in Palestine. While thousands die from Israel’s bombs in Gaza, Albanese has lined up with the rest of the Western leaders to expound Israel’s “right to defend itself” and give a green light to a possible genocide. 
It is utmost hypocrisy to criticise the long history of genocide, frontier wars and racist discrimination in Australia, while not condemning Israel’s brutal war against the people of Gaza as it unfolds live on our screens. After all, Israel is right now trying to complete the very thing that many rightfully condemn the forerunners of the Australian government for starting in 1788: an ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people from their own land. 
All the horrors that were visited upon the Indigenous people of Australia, including violent attacks by armed soldiers, land dispossession, social segregation and racist demonisation, have been a feature of life for the Palestinians for decades. The Israeli state was created in 1948 out of a genocidal assault that led to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing their homes and the Israeli military seizing most of the historic nation of Palestine. Since then, Israel has constructed an apartheid regime to punish and terrorise the Palestinians who remain. 
Unlike in Australia, the Israeli government was not able to dispossess the Palestinian people entirely in 1948, and nor has it managed to since. In the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinians still retain control over sections of their historic homeland and are fighting politically and militarily to regain their land and establish an independent state.
Many Israeli politicians want to finish what was started in 1948 and drive the rest of the Palestinians from Gaza and possibly even the West Bank. They see the current war as an opportunity to make gains in that regard. As the Israeli MP Ariel Kallner wrote, “Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48”.
This objective is acceptable to the Western powers that back Israel, and for whom Israel represents an important ally and base of operations in a largely hostile geopolitical region. Australia is one of the most craven. 
The establishment in Australia recognises and accepts this fact, at the same time as many in its ranks profess their support for Indigenous people and acknowledge the history of violence, racism and exploitation they have been subjected to. Of course, they don’t do anything to actually help Indigenous people in the here and now, but they are mostly fine with accepting that there was a genocide a long time ago.
It is far easier to condemn the crimes of the past than it is to confront the horrors of the present, especially when your state is one of the beneficiaries of that horror. To stand on the side of the oppressed when the intense propaganda campaign of the oppressors is in full swing is rarely a mainstream or popular exercise. 
Many of those who fought to abolish slavery, criticised South African apartheid or marched for civil rights and democratic reforms were vilified at the time as deluded criminals or mocked as silly utopians by the establishment, even if today they are venerated. 
We can’t wait for history to make its judgement. We have to throw ourselves into the fight for justice today, no matter how controversial that is with the powers that be.
Thousands who know what it means to support Indigenous rights, and who understand what was done to Indigenous people in Australia and why, are joining the rallies against those same crimes being committed against Palestinians. Those who want to bleat on about Indigenous rights only because they think it might be electorally expedient, are cheering on capitalism’s latest genocide. 
PHOTO CREDIT: Matt Hrkac

Why supporting Indigenous rights means supporting Palestine

After waging a campaign of racist lies for the last six months, the No campaign has achieved its goal.
As was widely predicted in the last months, the proposal to establish an Indigenous Voice to Parliament has been defeated. Smashed would be more accurate, the results being even worse than many polls predicted. Not a single state voted in favour of the proposal. 
Unsurprisingly, rural, traditionally right-wing seats voted most strongly for No. But the No vote wasn’t confined to these areas; many traditional Labor seats also voted against the Voice.
The defeat is a significant victory for the racist right wing of Australian politics. They successfully turned what initially seemed to be an uncontroversial bipartisan exercise in symbolism into a purportedly terrifying Trojan horse that would “divide the country”, “undermine democracy” and “re-racialise” the nation.
To achieve this, they mobilised the most significant anti-Indigenous campaign in years, drawing on and amplifying longstanding racist attitudes towards Indigenous people. In the process, they shifted mainstream discussion in a much more openly racist direction. 
It is now more acceptable for right-wing politicians to claim, as Jacinta Price has, that colonisation had only “positive outcomes” for Indigenous people; or that “most Indigenous Australians are doing fine” and those who aren’t need to stop being “angry and aggrieved”—as Warren Mundine did in a Press Club speech; or that supporting Indigenous rights is an “expression of the madness of identity politics”, as Peter Dutton does.
The underlying argument of the No campaign—that Indigenous people do not suffer from racism and so shouldn’t get “special privileges”—has been loudly and proudly asserted on the airwaves, media outlets and Facebook pages of bigots across the country.
After a decade in which there has been a steady increase in support for Indigenous rights, the victory of the 2017 marriage equality plebiscite, the large climate protests of 2019 and last year’s downfall of an extremely unpopular conservative government, this has been a significant win for the conservative right.
In the aftermath of this debacle, we must also look critically at the Yes campaign—and the Voice proposal itself.
The Yes campaign was based on the premise that there would be bipartisan support for such a modest proposal, and that only far-right politicians such as Pauline Hanson would oppose it. When it became obvious that the Liberal Party was going to reject the Voice, the Yes campaign and the Labor Party seemed to hope naively that maybe this would work in their favour—perhaps the Liberal Party would be divided and a hard No stance would leave it isolated from popular opinion.
When this didn’t happen, the Yes campaign floundered, deluding themselves that the polling was wrong or that there would be a last-minute break of undecided voters to the Yes camp.
As support slipped away and the right went on the attack, the Yes campaign and the Labor Party refused to fight back. Marcia Langton, a conservative Indigenous academic who supports the Voice, was viciously attacked in the media for stating the bleeding obvious: that the No campaign was racist. 
Rather than defending her, Labor politicians said that Langton had misspoken because she had been traumatised by racism—in other words, “Don’t listen to her, she’s crazy”. And when a group of left-wing activists protested outside a No event in South Australia, Anthony Albanese and Yes campaign director Dean Parkin condemned the protesters for “nasty behaviour” and undermining respectful debate. 
Every day, a new racist scandal about the No campaign was exposed and, every time, the Yes campaign meekly called for everyone to just get along and be nice. Even as the results came in on referendum night, the more progressive Yes campaigner Thomas Mayo could criticise the No campaign for being dishonest and disgusting, but couldn’t bring himself to call it racist.
Calling out the racism of the Liberal Party and the broader No campaign might not have changed the referendum result. But if you are going to lose, it is better to go down fighting rather than pathetically calling on your supporters not to be nasty to your opponent—particularly when that opponent was unleashing such a vile assault on one of the most oppressed groups in Australian society. At the very least, taking a firm stand would have sent a message to supporters of the Voice of the need to fight against racism, not just meekly endure it. 
It isn’t surprising that the Yes campaign and the Labor government refused to do this. The Labor Party has been up to its neck in racism. It is Labor state governments that are locking up Indigenous kids, undermining land rights to help fossil fuel companies and entrenching economic inequality. Federal Labor is obsessed with symbolism precisely because genuine and meaningful progress for Aboriginal communities would entail a challenge to the ALP’s capitalist friends.
 
The Yes campaign will go down in history, alongside Brexit and Hilary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid, as yet another embarrassing failure of liberal centrist politics.
But the sad reality is that those who will suffer most from this defeat won’t be Labor politicians or Yes23 campaign directors, but ordinary Indigenous people. The unchallenged racism unleashed by the No campaign is a setback that will likely make it harder to fight for Indigenous rights.
Australian politics is in flux. A year and a half into its term, the federal Labor government still retains broad, if shallow, electoral support, which hasn’t yet been particularly affected by the referendum. Labor strategists believed that they could romp home in the next election following a Voice victory, use the momentum to hold another successful referendum on the question of Australia becoming a republic and marginalise the Liberal Party into the 2030s. Those plans have now been dashed, and as the memories of the Morrison years fade, there are forces at work that could undo the Labor government. First and foremost is the cost-of-living crisis, an issue that the No campaign was able to tap into.
The referendum has revealed that, despite modern conservatism being at odds with young voters and those in some traditional right-wing electorates, the Liberal Party remains a significant force in Australian politics. Its decision to campaign hard for a No vote was decisive in tanking the Voice. It can still rely upon its many deep ties with ideologically driven wealthy individuals, the bulk of the socially conservative middle classes and powerful establishment institutions such as the Murdoch media.
Internationally, the Liberal Party is hardly isolated in this regard; centre-right parties have jagged sharply rightwards in recent years in country after country. Just look at Trump’s Republicans or the conservatives in the UK, who in recent weeks have openly embraced conspiracy theories about fifteen-minute cities, condemned migration as an “existential threat” to the British way of life and asked far-right ideologue Nigel Farage to rejoin the party.
There is a very real danger that Australian politics will become dominated by a fight between a weakened neoliberal Labor government and a rabid right-wing opposition.
In moments like this, we can’t slip into despair. We need to build an alternative to the bankrupt politics of the moderate centre—an alternative that takes on, rather than capitulates to, the vicious lies of the right. The Yes campaign’s strategy of lecturing everyone about the need to be polite and moderate has ended in a total failure. They claimed to be savvy political operators but proved themselves to be anything but. And worst of all, they lost without trying to fight the right, without challenging their racist lies, and so have done nothing to galvanise any section of the population in defiance and lay the basis for future anti-racist struggles. 
The struggle for Indigenous justice will continue, but if we are to start to turn the tide against the racists, then we will need to organise a serious anti-racist fight back and draw some sharp lessons from the Yes campaign’s defeat.

Voice defeated, but fight against racism must continue

In a recent National Press Club address, prominent No campaigner Warren Mundine very clearly explained what the campaign against the Voice is all about: a racist pushback against Indigenous people. Mundine wants to convince people that “most Indigenous Australians are doing fine”. He thinks that Indigenous people need to stop being “angry and aggrieved” and “trapped in the past”. Instead, they need to ignore racism and “draw a line in history and move on from a clean slate”.
This is a disgrace. Indigenous people are one of the most oppressed sections of Australian society. They suffer from appalling levels of poverty, poor health, inadequate housing and racist discrimination from employers, police, judges, government officials and politicians. But it is the acceptance of anti-Indigenous racism that is at stake in the referendum. The political right is trying to use the referendum to revive and cement the lie that Indigenous people aren’t really suffering from racism at all.
This is why, even though the Voice would be a powerless advisory body, left-wing people need to vote Yes on 14 October. Otherwise, the racist right will score a significant victory and make the fight for Indigenous rights that much harder. 
Whatever the outcome on 14 October, though, we will need to keep fighting against anti-Indigenous racism. If the No campaign wins, we can’t just throw our hands up in defeat. To do so would simply deepen the demoralisation that both Indigenous and anti-racist non-Indigenous people will undoubtedly feel. 
And even if the Voice were to manage to get over the line, it would do little to ameliorate the litany of racist crimes in our society. It wouldn’t stop the Queensland state government from locking up Indigenous kids and putting them in adult watchhouses. It wouldn’t stop fossil fuel companies and governments from undermining land rights. It wouldn’t compel the government to radically overhaul the way our economy condemns so many Indigenous people to a life of poverty. 
The lack of any pushback against the racist right has exposed the weaknesses of the Yes campaign. When a small group of socialist activists organised a protest against a No campaign event in Adelaide, they were condemned by Anthony Albanese and Dean Parkin, the director of Yes23 for “nasty behaviour” that undermined “respectful debate.” When Marcia Langton was pilloried in the media for rightfully arguing that the arguments of the No campaign are “racist” and “stupid”, Labor and Yes23 refused to defend her. 
Every day, there is a new scandal about the extreme racism in the No campaign, and the response is to lamely call for both sides to calm down, rather than slam the disgusting views of the right. All this does is play into the hands of Peter Dutton and Jacinta Price, who know they are winning without needing to be respectful. 
If we are going to challenge the pervasive anti-Indigenous racism of Australian society, then we are going to need to build an anti-racist movement on a very different basis to the politics of the official Yes campaign and the Labor Party. There is a rich history of anti-racist activism in this country that we can look to for inspiration. 
In the immediate post-war years, there was a wave of action by Indigenous people, and in particular Indigenous workers, against racism and discrimination. In 1946, hundreds of Aboriginal workers in the Pilbara region of Western Australia walked off the stations to protest decades of exploitation. 
Trade unions from across the country supported the Pilbara strike and sent money. In Perth, which was a very racist and insular city, socialist activists hosted popular public meetings to spread awareness of the Pilbara strikers’ demands. The strike was won after three years of determined struggle by the Aboriginal workers, when the Seamen’s Union introduced a ban on wool exports from Western Australia, crippling the industry. 
From 1947 to 1951, Darwin was rocked by a series of strikes by Aboriginal workers, who gained significant support from non-Indigenous workers. Trade unionists and left-wing activists in the North Australian Workers’ Union supported and helped organise the Darwin strikes. 
Support for Aboriginal rights among striking post-war workers wasn’t automatic. Socialist activists, particularly in the Communist Party, had spent a decade arguing that the workers’ movement should do more to support Indigenous people and their struggles against racism. 
Socialists convinced the Sydney Trades and Labour Council to endorse the Day of Mourning and Protest organised by Aboriginal activists in 1938 and managed to get 2,000 workers to attend a protest in Sydney’s Domain in 1934 to protest against police racism in the Northern Territory. Socialists carried out this activity in a time of incredible racism towards Indigenous people. In the post-war years, this activity paid off with greater levels of awareness among workers about the racist treatment of Indigenous people. 
Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, civil rights organisations sprang up, with Communists and left-wing trade unionists often playing a role in their formation and activities. These groups organised protests against racist discrimination towards Indigenous people in rural towns and cities across Australia. Out of these struggles, they also encouraged a layer of Indigenous activists to take a leading role in the fight against racism, such as the Aboriginal Communist Ray Peckham and wharfie Joe McGinness, who became the first Indigenous president of the union’s federal council. 
Building a level of awareness about Indigenous issues among workers was far from easy. Initially, it was only a very small number of highly political working-class activists who could see why standing up to anti-Aboriginal racism was important. Many workers were impacted by the racist ideas promoted at school, in the church and in the newspapers about Indigenous people being an inferior or a dying race. Many others just didn’t care very much about Aboriginal people and didn’t see why they should bother to find out about their particular struggles. Over the years, though, left-wing activists were able to use concrete examples of the racist abuse that Indigenous people suffered to educate broader layers of people about why they should stand up to racism.
This bedrock of anti-racist consciousness that left-wing activists had created meant that when there was a shift to the left in Australian society from the mid-60s onwards, there was a strong basis for support for Indigenous rights. This was then expressed in the popular support for the freedom ride of 1965, and the land rights and Black Power struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. 
Today, we aren’t starting from scratch. Despite the new confidence of the racist right, there is still an established base of anti-racist opinion among a not insignificant section of the Australian population. If we are going to cohere this sentiment into the anti-racist fightback we need, then there are some important lessons that we can learn from the anti-racist campaigns of the post-war years. 
These left-wing activists were clear that Australia is a racist country. “In America they call color prejudice Jim Crow. In Germany Hitler called it the ‘superiority of the Aryan race’”, explained the Communist newspaper Tribune in 1950. “In Australia we pretend it doesn’t exist, but it does exist, and at times takes as filthy and poisonous forms as it ever did under Hitler or in the lynch law Southern US States.” 
These activists understood that Indigenous people aren’t just vaguely disadvantaged; they are racially oppressed.
They also understood that racism wasn’t simply a matter of prejudice. It had economic roots bound up with the whole historical development of Australian society. This was why they thought it was important to tell the truth about the history of violence and dispossession that Indigenous people had suffered since 1788. They often quoted Lenin’s statement that socialists should “react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects” and “generalise all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation”.
The Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists of that period also understood that the most effective way to combat oppression was to build a strong left-wing workers’ movement that rejected the racist lies about Indigenous people and was willing to take action to support their struggles. As the Aboriginal activist Ray Peckham put it: “The strength of the working people can help us ... crack through the curse of the color bar in Australia”. 
Rather than just sinking into despair, we can look to the long history of anti-racist campaigns in Australia for clues to how we can build resistance to racism even in difficult times.

Vote Yes, then build an anti-racist fightback

As the referendum approaches, the key dynamic in the debate is clear. The conservative right views a defeat for the Voice as a chance to strike a devastating blow against support for Indigenous rights among the Australian population. In the process, it is reviving every racist myth in the play book: Indigenous people shouldn’t get “special privileges”; opposing anti-Aboriginal racism is actually “dividing the nation”; and the colonisation of Australia had only a “positive impact”, in the words of Jacinta Price. 
The Voice proposal itself is shallow symbolism, and the campaign to support it by the Labor government, NGOs, prominent Indigenous figures and corporate Australia is undoubtedly moderate and conservative. However, if the No vote wins, it will almost certainly be a step backwards for Indigenous people. The message it will send is that even entirely symbolic gestures to Indigenous rights must be abandoned as too radical. This will likely be a worse situation in which to continue the fight for Indigenous rights than if the Yes vote were to win. 
For the Left, then, the choice, while far from ideal, should be clear. Whatever criticisms of the Voice we have, we need to support a Yes vote. It appears that most left-wing people agree with this proposition, including 77 percent of Greens voters and 57 percent of Labor supporters, according to a September Redbridge poll. A YouGov poll found that 83 percent of Indigenous people support a Yes vote. 
Yet a minority of left-wing people are supporting the “progressive” No campaign. This approach to the referendum will only help the racist right score a victory against Indigenous people. 
Often, the approach is justified on the basis that a big No vote would be a blow to the moderate centrist approach to Indigenous issues advocated by the Labor Party and open the space for more radical perspectives. For example, Ben Abbatangelo, a Gunaikurnai and Wotjobaluk writer and journalist, told the ABC that he thinks the No vote could be a positive moment. “You know, like a bushfire will come through and it’ll ravage the entire scene”, he argued. “But you come back to that site six months later ... and you see that green bursting through.” Similarly, the Black Peoples Union argues: “Not every No is racist, but every Yes is regressive”.
That is fantasy land stuff. A No victory in the referendum would most likely make it harder, not easier, to fight for Indigenous rights. It would embolden every racist in the country and undermine the confidence of those who support Indigenous people. 
Only a tiny number of people will be voting against the Voice on a progressive basis. A Guardian Essential poll in June revealed that, among those opposed to the Voice, 34 percent said that their main objection was that it would “divide Australia”. Another 33 percent believe that it would “give Indigenous Australians rights and privileges that other Australians don’t have”. Twenty-six percent said that a Voice “won’t make a real difference for ordinary Indigenous people”—however, this is a talking point that right-wingers have also taken up, arguing that Indigenous people don’t care about “woke” issues. 
The “progressive” No campaign dangerously downplays the reality of the racist backlash being whipped up by the official No forces. In a statement on its website, the Black Peoples Union argues: “Yes campaigners are out of touch with reality if they think a No vote is going to embolden racism”. 
This flies in the face of the reality of not only what the referendum results are likely to mean, but also of the impact that the right-wing No campaign is already having. Right-wingers have used the racist atmosphere produced by their campaign to push for all sorts of attacks on Indigenous rights. 
In Western Australia, a coalition of right-wing parties backed by the Pastoral and Graziers Association launched a successful racist crusade against the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act, which was quickly repealed by the state Labor government. Meetings of volunteers for the Yes campaign in Casey and Boroondara in Victoria have been disrupted by far-right thugs shouting racist abuse and displaying Nazi symbols. Mainstream discourse is now centred on whether Indigenous people have too many “privileges”, whether the NSW Aboriginal Land Council is secretly plotting to take control over half of Mosman and whether it is unfair and bullying to call right-wingers who hate Indigenous people racist. 
This atmosphere impacts Indigenous people in their everyday lives. Marjorie Anderson, the national manager at 13Yarn, a crisis support line for First Nations Australians, told the BBC that there has been a 106 percent increase in abuse calls in the last four months. Megan Krakouer, a Menang woman who helps run the National Suicide Prevention and Trauma Recovery Project, also reports a spike in racist abuse. 
And this has taken place with no push back at all. There have been no protests against the racism of the No campaign, no serious discussion about it on the left, no sense of outrage and determination not to let the racists wind back the clock on Indigenous issues. This is partially due to the politics of the Yes campaign, which abhors confrontation and controversy. It is focusing its efforts on winning over more moderate conservative voters and doesn’t want to polarise the issue by seriously combating the racism of the No campaign. 
However, the lack of push back against the right is also because the arguments for a “progressive” No have disoriented a section of left-wing people, particularly those involved in activist circles used to going to or organising protests. By failing to understand that the racism of the No campaign is the major dynamic in the referendum, the “progressive” No campaign has seriously misread what is going on. 
It is also far from the case that the “progressive” No campaign has consistently and clearly differentiated itself from the much larger right-wing No campaign. When Peter Dutton started making outlandish claims that the Australian Electoral Commission was plotting to rig the referendum, prominent “progressive” No social media pages, including Treaty before Voice and Aboriginal Tent Embassy, shared posts supporting this far-right conspiracy theory. 
When Senator Lidia Thorpe was trying to get onto the committee to draft the official No case in the referendum pamphlet, rather than denouncing the racist scum involved, she told the ABC: “I’m looking forward to it. We’re going to have to sit in a room with people that we don’t normally get along with, so looking forward to that journey”. 
Conservative lobby group Advance has set up a Facebook page called Not Enough, which promotes paid ads using images and quotes from “progressive” No spokespeople. These paid ads are targeted at young progressive voters in New South Wales and Victoria. While some “progressive” No figures have distanced themselves from these pages, others haven’t. This just aids the right and the far right. 
Thorpe has argued that she is campaigning for a No vote because she doesn’t want Indigenous people to be included in a racist constitution. However, oppressed people have fought to win progressive reforms in constitutions across the world. Was it a mistake for African Americans to abolish slavery through the 13th Amendment to the undoubtedly colonial US constitution? Was the 1967 referendum in Australia a regressive move for Indigenous people because it involved changing the constitution? 
The problem with the Voice is that it doesn’t give Indigenous people greater rights within the constitution, not that it’s some step backwards to be included in it. Thorpe puts forward a treaty as an alternative to the Voice, but a treaty would also involve negotiations with the Australian state, and any deal signed would mean acknowledging the legitimacy of the constitution. The only way to change this situation fundamentally would be through a revolution that overthrows the racist institutions of Australian capitalism.
In reply, supporters of a “progressive” No argue that it is misleading to present the referendum as a vote between a racist No and an anti-racist Yes, and that there are right-wingers with a history of racism supporting the Yes vote, including Liberal politicians and mining bosses. 
It is true that the Yes campaign is hardly some principled anti-racist coalition and includes within its leadership some heinous people. It’s also true that Labor governments, both federal and state, are locking up Indigenous kids and undermining land rights to push through fossil fuel projects. 
But the “progressive” No uses these criticisms of the Voice to argue for a totally passive approach to the racist assaults by the right, one which also doesn’t do anything to challenge the racism of the Labor governments. Lining up with the right to call for a No vote in the referendum doesn’t put Labor under any pressure, it doesn’t expose how it is doing nothing to alleviate the terrible conditions Indigenous people live under, it doesn’t help encourage left-wing Indigenous and non-indigenous people to think they can fight for a better world.
To justify their position, supporters of a “progressive” No have to argue that the Yes vote is as racist, if not more racist, than the No campaign. All this does is cover up the extremely racist nature of the campaigns of the Liberal Party and One Nation. There is no consideration here that, if there is no resistance, the conservative right can push politics in a more racist direction, that the broader political context can aid or hinder the development of anti-racist struggles, that we can build the kinds of movements and organisations we need to fight not just the right and the Labor Party, but also the roots of Indigenous oppression in economic inequality and structural racism. 
If we are going to build the kind of fightback we need against the pervasive anti-Indigenous racism in our society, then the left is going to need radically different politics to that embodied in the “progressive” No campaign.

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