German politics has shifted strongly to the right following the federal election on 23 February. The conservative Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union alliance will now lead a coalition government, after support plummeted for the parties that formed the previous coalition government. They have vowed to introduce hardline anti-migrant policies, attacks on workers and a massive expansion of the military. Even more menacingly, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) achieved its best result ever, coming in second place with 20.8 percent of the vote.
Since the AfD formed a decade ago, parties from across the political spectrum have insisted they will never work with the far right. The conservatives recently softened this “firewall” by working with the AfD to pass an anti-immigrant bill at the end of January. For years, sections of the conservatives, particularly those in the Christian Social Union in Bavaria, have flirted with the far right, but this was a significant step in normalising the AfD in mainstream politics. The Social Democrats, along with most other political parties, have contributed to this normalisation by drawing on the same anti-migrant rhetoric espoused by the far right. 
The election results reinforce this shift. The conservatives and the AfD hold a clear parliamentary majority. The AfD is campaigning hard for the conservatives to break with the firewall and form a coalition government. The conservatives have ruled this out for now, but there is a very real possibility that it could happen in the years ahead. 
The AfD’s rise is not, however, going unchallenged. Over the last fourteen months, a movement has emerged to resist the far right. Widespread protests broke out in early 2024 after it was revealed that a secret meeting in Potsdam discussed plans for the “remigration”—deportation—of large numbers of migrants and German-born citizens from migrant backgrounds. Alongside the AfD were members of the ultra-right-wing faction of the conservatives.
Protests outside AfD offices grew from the thousands to hundreds of thousands. On 3 February, an estimated 300,000 marched in Berlin alone. By April, the German daily newspaper taz reported that more than 1,800 protests involving around 4 million people had taken place across the country. These protests were the biggest since those opposing the Iraq war in 2003, and among the largest in postwar German history. 
Once the initial wave of protests subsided, left-wing activists continued to organise and mobilise. New organisations emerged, including the Studis gegen Rechts (Students against the Right), and older anti-fascist organisations found new life as thousands of young people got involved. 
Last June, tens of thousands descended on the city of Essen to protest the AfD’s annual conference. Police were drafted from around the country to try to stop the 70,000 protesters from disrupting the event. This year, the conference was moved to the regional town of Riesa, Saxony, to try to avoid demonstrations. Nevertheless, 15,000 protesters travelled there to take a stand against the far right. 
A new wave of protests erupted after the conservatives and the far right teamed up on the anti-migrant bill. Thousands blockaded the offices of the Christian Democratic Union in Berlin. At an AfD event in Freiburg, 25,000 out of a population of 230,000 came out to protest. 
A significant section of people taking part in these protests have gravitated towards the left-wing Die Linke party. In the federal election Die Linke, which had suffered a crisis for several years, revived and won 8.7 percent of the vote. Around 30,000 new members joined the party over the last year, numbers accelerating following the conservative-far right collaboration.
Heidi Reichinnek, one of Die Linke’s parliamentary leaders, stridently attacked the Christian Democrats for “paving the way for the resurgence of fascism” in a video that was viewed more than 30 million times on TikTok. Thousands of new activists joined Die Linke’s campaign in the West Berlin district of Neukölln. They won a landslide victory for Ferat Koçak, a pro-Palestine activist with a Kurdish background. 
Die Linke did particularly well amongst young people, becoming the most popular party for those aged 18 to 24, and securing the votes of more than a third of young women. The party also came first in Berlin. 
It’s positive that the AfD’s high vote isn’t the only story coming out of the election. However, there are significant problems with Die Linke. This is not a new radical party: it has existed since 2007 and is led by veteran moderate reformist politicians. It has participated in coalition state governments in Bremen and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and it led the government in Thuringia for a decade. In these states, it oversaw neoliberal budgets and allowed refugees to be deported. 
While Die Linke positions itself as an activist opposition party, it is also open to forming a future coalition government. There has long been a Zionist wing of Die Linke. and moderate leftists like Reichinnek emphasise that they support Israel’s so-called “right to defend itself”. Last December, Die Linke expelled the pro-Palestine activist Ramsis Kilani for “bringing the party into disrepute”.
This is not a radical anti-capitalist party by any stretch of the imagination. However, despite these serious problems, the electoral support for the left, as well as the activism against the far right, reveals that there is a polarisation to the left in Germany, centred on young people, that cuts against the grain of the overall conservative shift. 
This is vital. The far right is winning ground in country after country. It can be easy to despair in the face of this, particularly when there doesn’t appear to be a spontaneous revolt against Trump and his ilk. As in the past, though, it is the actions of a radical minority that can begin the process of creating the larger left-wing opposition we need. Hopefully, that is what we are seeing amongst young people in Germany.

Jordan Humphreys

The right gains ground in Germany, but not without challenge

In the nearly eighteen months since the defeat of the Indigenous Voice to Parliament proposal, there has been a sharp shift to the right on Indigenous issues in Australia. 
Anti-Aboriginal racism, which had largely been in abeyance since the end of the Howard era, has made an aggressive comeback. Emboldened by the defeat of the Voice proposal, conservative forces have launched numerous attacks on Indigenous rights. In the face of this offensive, the Labor Party has raised the white flag, either joining in on the attacks or offering no resistance to them. 
This racist offensive seeks to undermine the social gains won by Indigenous people and their allies over many decades of campaigning. It also aims to undermine anti-racist attitudes by discrediting or sidelining anti-racist views on Australian history, politics and culture. Any official acknowledgement of the exploitation, dispossession and violence that Indigenous people have been subjected to is being questioned or scrapped. 
This year’s Invasion Day highlighted this shift. For the last ten years, the focus of 26 January activities and discussion has largely been on the day’s significance to Indigenous people and the damage done by European invasion. In 2014, the official Australia Day march in Melbourne was disrupted by anti-racist protesters, and since then Invasion Day protests, rather than flag-waving parades, have gridlocked major cities on the day. In 2018, youth radio station Triple J changed the date of its Hottest 100 countdown as a sign of respect to Indigenous people. Rules for local councils were loosened in 2022, giving them the ability to hold citizenship ceremonies on days other than 26 January without financial penalty, and in 2021, NSW Liberal Premier Gladys Berejiklian even organised an Aboriginal flag waving ceremony with the cringe-worthy opener that we are “all one mob”. For many progressives, and not a few reactionaries, changing the date seemed as inevitable as same-sex marriage. 
This year was very different. “Australia Day is a celebration of the greatest country in the world”, proclaimed Liberal leader Peter Dutton in a social media video in January, “and we shouldn’t be afraid of celebrating it”. Dutton has pledged that, if he is elected, local councils will be forced to hold citizenship ceremonies on Australia Day or suffer cuts in federal funding. The month before, in an act of racist pettiness, Dutton told the media that he will not stand beside Indigenous flags because multiple flags were “dividing our country unnecessarily”. In 2024, Dutton whipped up a hysterical campaign against Woolworths for allegedly not stocking Australia Day merchandise. This year, the supermarket chain made sure to have its shelves stocked to the rafters with obnoxious nationalist merchandise.
Instead of attacking Dutton and denouncing racism, Albanese’s response to all this was to evade and cede ground. He criticised Dutton for focusing on culture war issues rather than the cost of living, but refused to commit to maintaining the current rules for local councils and reiterated his support for celebrating Australia Day on 26 January. 
The unchecked right-wing offensive has shifted attitudes. Support for keeping Australia Day on 26 January has risen from 47 percent to 61 percent in the last two years, according to a Resolve Political Monitor survey. The fact that a majority of younger people still support changing the date is positive, but it also indicates that the shift among the rest of the population is even sharper. 
The racist backlash has also been happening at the state level. The newly elected Country Liberal government in the Northern Territory has announced it is ending the treaty process that started in 2018. The Queensland state government has repealed the Path to Treaty Act and shut down the Truth-telling and Healing Inquiry and the First Nations Treaty Institute. 
Labor state governments have not been much better. After the defeat of the Voice referendum, NSW Premier Chris Minns walked back plans for a state treaty and pushed back proposals for any reconciliation process until after the next state election. The Western Australian Labor government does not support a treaty. Only the South Australian, ACT, Victorian and Tasmanian governments remain committed to any sort of treaty process. 
Treaties, much like the Voice and other largely symbolic gestures like reconciliation, are entirely inadequate responses to the grim reality of Indigenous oppression. More often than not, they provide window dressing for governments more than they help improve Indigenous people’s lives. But the trashing of these forms of recognition has to be understood within the broader context of the racist offensive going on against Indigenous people. The retreat from treaty and reconciliation has gone along with toxic law and order beat-ups aimed at Indigenous youth. 
This has been most striking in the Northern Territory and parts of Queensland. The Country Liberal party won the Northern Territory election last year on the basis of winding back some of the limited reforms to the incarceration of Indigenous youth. The new government has lowered the age of criminal responsibility to 10 years and has reversed the previous government’s decision to ban the use of spit hoods on children. Similarly, the newly elected conservative government in Queensland has had to suspend the state’s Human Rights Act in order to push through a wave of racist laws targeting Indigenous youth, including removing detention as a last resort from police guidelines and introducing mandatory sentencing for 10-year-olds. 
Again, these attacks are not being made only by conservative governments. In Queensland, the previous Labor government suspended the Human Rights Act twice in eighteen months in order to criminalise children who violated bail conditions and to allow children to be jailed in adult watch-houses. Last August, Victorian Premier Jacinta Allen walked back her government’s previous commitment to raising the age of criminal responsibility to 14 by 2027. The NSW Labor government introduced changes to youth bail laws last March that stiffen sentences for even minor crimes and has ruled out any changes to the age of criminal responsibility, which is currently 10 years old. 
In the face of all these attacks, the persistent poverty, discrimination and hardship faced by Indigenous people are intensifying. This year’s Closing the Gap report revealed that rates of suicide, youth and adult incarceration, the removal of children by social services and children development for Indigenous people have all gotten worse. Other targets such as the gap between life expectancy of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people and income inequality have stagnated. Only five of the nineteen Closing the Gap targets are on track to be met by 2031. 
The conservative campaign against Indigenous people aims to put the blame for this on Indigenous people rather than the racist system and its treatment of Indigenous people for more than 200 years, at the same time as it sweeps under the carpet any understanding and awareness of this history. 
What is motivating the conservative right to do this? Part of the explanation is that the Voice defeat demonstrated the potential electoral advantage of drumming up racist sentiment. Albanese’s incompetence in the face of the right’s “No” campaign only reinforced the point. Given the Liberal Party has little else to offer the mass of voters, this is a valuable weapon in its arsenal.
It also has the obvious advantage of potentially being an area in which cuts can be imposed should the Liberals form government, freeing up money for the military, tax cuts and other conservative priorities.
But it also reflects the changing priorities of Australian conservatism. For years, Liberal talking points in election campaigns revolved around vilifying different racial groups, mostly refugees. While Dutton still takes every chance he can to slander asylum seekers as terrorists, the steam around this issue has dissipated due to the barbaric reality of “fortress Australia”, which has largely stopped refugees from arriving here by boat. 
Dutton has also periodically made appeals to broader anti-migrant racism, most notably in regard to the cost of housing and international students. But there is a tension here because large sections of Liberal Party’s base, including both big business and many small businesses, are heavily dependent on high levels of immigration. This dependency is greater than in almost any other advanced economy in the world. So for the right, attacking Indigenous people has all of the benefits, and few of the drawbacks, of attacking migrants and refugees.
Indigenous people do not form an important sector of the workforce for corporate Australia and are severely marginalised from the levers of economic and political power. Under the influence of the resurgence of the far right in Trump’s America and the long history of racist anti-Aboriginal campaigns in Australia, the conservatives can use Indigenous people as a punching bag and demonise them with little immediate blowback. 
Developments since the defeat of the Voice proposal tragically confirm the arguments made in Red Flag at the time of the referendum: that whatever the limitations of the Voice proposal, a defeat for it was going to embolden the racist right and legitimise a new round of attacks on Indigenous people. They also discredit arguments made by the sovereign or “progressive” No campaign at the time. This campaign argued for anti-racists to vote against the Voice on the basis that its defeat 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. 
In a statement on her website after the referendum, independent Senator Lidia Thorpe argued that the “result marks an end to the era of powerless advisory bodies. It is a win for the Blak Sovereign Movement and First Peoples” and that there were many people who “voted no out of love and solidarity with First Peoples fighting for justice”. The Black Peoples Union argued in a social media post that “Yes campaigners are out of touch with reality if they think a No vote is going to embolden racism”. 
In reality, an Accent Research Report found that when No voters were asked about their number one reason for voting No, only 1 percent said because the Voice doesn’t go far enough. The most popular reason No voters rejected the Voice was that it “will divide Australia” (82 percent), the key talking point of the racist right. Nearly one in three No voters agreed it would give Indigenous people “too much power”, which was the more openly racist argument of the far right. Rather than opening up radical new horizons for Indigenous liberation, the No vote resulted in the terrain of politics around Indigenous issues moving sharply to the right. 
In line with much of the rest of the world, Australian capitalism is becoming nastier. There is less official concern to uphold values like multiculturalism and reconciliation and more viciousness towards the oppressed and exploited. Indigenous people are facing the sharp edge of this, but the attacks are coming thick and fast on many fronts: the rising cost of living, the climate crisis and the expanding war machine. 
In order to begin to turn this around, we need to be prepared to stand up and fight racism and conservative reaction wherever they emerge. The grovelling capitulation of the ALP and those influenced by it to this onslaught is contemptible and compounds the problem. We need a political approach to all of this that is not centred on winning parliamentary seats and appealing to any backward sentiment to do it, but on uniting workers and the oppressed in a collective fight for a society of genuine equality and freedom for all.

Racists on the rampage against Indigenous rights

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

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.
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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.

The right gains ground in Germany, but not without challenge

Racists on the rampage against Indigenous rights

Are migrants colonisers?

UK Labour’s victory rests on rocky foundations

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

Capitalism and colonialism today

When workers’ struggles shook the Middle East

The missing socialist movement

Why supporting Indigenous rights means supporting Palestine

Voice defeated, but fight against racism must continue

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