Jordan Humphreys

A new international political situation

Australian history is riddled with strikes. Here are four that don’t get talked about as often as they should.
Rockchoppers’ strike, 1908
Beneath Sydney lie 27,000 kilometres of sewage and water pipes keeping the metropolis from descending into a pigsty. Few know about the hundreds of workers who hewed the sandstone to build this labyrinthine network. Even fewer know about the heroic struggle they undertook to tame Sydney’s underground concrete jungle.
The dangerous nature of this work meant it attracted only the tough and the desperate. Cutting into the sandstone produced a fine—and deadly—dust that caused silicosis. Explosives produced toxic fumes that caused crippling headaches. Most workers were drawn from the poor Irish community. The morality of the employers was summed up by a contractor’s evidence to a 1901 board of inquiry: “A contractor does not take a job to slaughter men but at the same time he has to make a living like other people”.
In 1908, the Rockchoppers Union formed and quickly recruited almost all 500 people working in the sewage network. A series of strikes on individual jobs followed as the rockchoppers pushed for higher pay, shorter hours and, most importantly, workers’ control over workplace conditions. In October, this erupted into a general strike in the sewers. The Water Board quickly moved to prosecute the strikers under new anti-union legislation.
The rockchoppers felt they had nothing to lose. When strike leaders were hauled before the arbitration court, hundreds of sewer workers surrounded the courthouse shouting, “You’ll have to jail the lot of us!” and then marched to the prison to cheer on their comrades. 
Many were influenced by revolutionary syndicalism, which championed independent working-class activity. Labor politicians were banned from speaking at strike meetings, although independent socialists like Harry Holland were welcomed. The workers requested solidarity from other unions but were deeply suspicious of attempts by the NSW Labor Council to take over and moderate their struggle.
After three weeks, the Water Board surrendered to all their demands. The most astonishing victory was securing the six-hour day, the first of its kind in the country and perhaps the world. 
Read more: <a href="https://ozleft.wordpress.com/2003/10/22/rockchoppers/#chop49">“Job control for workers’ health: the 1908 Sydney rockchoppers’ strike”, Peter Sheldon, Labor History journal</a>.
The Balmain ironworkers’ strike, 1945
Left-wing accounts of strikes in Australia often look favourably on the Communist Party, which was the major force in the unions outside of the Labor Party for much of the twentieth century. 
The Balmain ironworkers’ strike of 1945 shows a different side to the Communists. It took place during the Second World War, which the Communists strongly backed. It was largely a revolt against the Communists’ bureaucratic control over the ironworkers and their attempts to service the war effort by limiting strikes.
While strident anti-war sentiment was isolated, there was a widespread feeling amongst workers that the war effort shouldn’t lead to lower living standards. When the Soviet Union entered the war in June 1941, the Communist Party campaigned to convince workers that more sacrifices must be made to support the war against fascism. For a period, working-class sentiment converged with the Communist Party’s position due to the rapid advance of the Japanese imperial forces. By 1943, however, the Japanese offensive was declining, and war fatigue amongst workers was setting in.
These issues came to a head in Sydney’s Balmain. The Balmain branch of the Federated Ironworkers’ Association of Australia (FIA) was the only one not controlled by the Communists. It organised a motley crew of Old Balmainers, including Labor left socialists, supporters of the ousted Labor Premier Jack Lang, syndicalists and a few Trotskyists. Throughout the war, tensions built up between the Communist leaders of the national Ironworkers and the Balmain branch. 
An unofficial strike of Sydney metalworkers kicked off 1943 when the New Year’s Day public holiday was cancelled. The strike was condemned by the Communists. “[A] day’s production has been lost and the trade union movement has been held up to ridicule for lack of discipline”, argued the Ironworker. “[N]o gain of any form whatsoever will flow from this stoppage.” Much criticism focussed on the Trotskyist Nick Origlass, who had been elected a delegate for the Mort’s Dock boiler shop. 
Further stoppages followed the New Years’ Day strike. Eventually, the federal leadership of the Ironworkers moved to remove the Balmain branch leaders after accusing them of financial irregularities. Hundreds of rank-and-file workers rallied around the local leadership at mass meetings. The Communists won a narrow victory in the branch elections of 1943, although they were accused of stuffing ballots.
With the old Balmain leadership deposed, opposition to the Communists was organised by a small band of Trotskyist agitators led by Origlass, who built a base of support in the metal shops at Mort’s Dock and on Cockatoo Island. 
In March 1945, Origlass was removed from his position as delegate. At a mass meeting to elect new delegates, no-one in the boiler shop nominated, in solidarity with him. The union leaders appointed three new delegates, and the boiler shop workers announced they would stop work unless Origlass was returned. Within two days, most of the ironworkers at Mort’s Dock were on strike. The next union meeting ended in uproar when the chair and 100 supporters of the Communists walked out, declaring the meeting void. Five hundred ironworkers stayed and supported a motion to expand the strike. 
By April, almost 3,000 ironworkers were out on a strike that would last six weeks. By the time the strike ended, not only was Origlass reinstated, but the Communists abandoned Balmain, leaving the opposition in control over the local branch for years to come. 
Read more: <a href="https://ozleft.wordpress.com/2003/08/13/ironworkers/">“The Balmain ironworkers’ strike of 1945”, Daphne Gollan, Labor history journal</a>.
Rubber workers’ strike, 1969 
The jailing of tramway union leader Clarrie O’Shea in May 1969 triggered the largest general strike in postwar Australia. It was a watershed moment that broke the anti-union penal powers and initiated a new strike wave that involved increasing numbers of low-paid and poorly unionised workers.
In October 1969, strikes organised by such workers rocked the rubber industry in South Australia. More than 1,000 workers struck for three weeks in defiance of their employers and the manoeuvres of right-wing trade union leaders. 
These workers were mainly migrants, mostly Greeks, and hundreds were women. A change in the way that wage increases for highly unionised workers flowed on to low-paid workers meant that they were falling far behind. In October 1969, a workplace meeting launched a strike for higher wages. In response, the rubber bosses refused to negotiate with the Miscellaneous Workers’ Union (MWU). Instead, they told the workers to talk to the Chamber of Manufactures. 
“At the second strike meeting a call was made for a march of protest to the Chamber of Manufactures”, reported Tribune, the Communist Party’s newspaper. “Almost to a man [and woman] the workers responded and marched fifteen abreast to the Pirie Street Chamber premises.” Once there, the workers invaded the building and sat in the board room’s red leather chairs waiting for the bosses’ negotiators to arrive—they never did. 
Striking workers, police and scabs regularly confronted one another on picket lines outside the rubber factories. “A driver was told to drive over the bastards”, reported Tribune. The bosses threatened to shut down workplaces across the state, leaving thousands without work. Maintenance crews at Rubber Mills then walked out in solidarity. Notably, migrant workers at Ford Broadmeadows in Victoria, who would stage their own strike in 1973, walked off the job in support of the rubber strike.
At this point, the local Trades and Labour Council—controlled by right-wing unions—moved to take control of the dispute. They organised a meeting in which the MWU had the same number of representatives as smaller right-wing unions and pressured the workers to end their strike and wait for a court ruling. 
Rank-and-file rubber workers resisted this takeover, the Greek workers playing an important role. Many of them were connected to Platon, a Greek workers club led by migrant Communists. Platon had created a εργατική επιτροπή (industrial committee) in 1969 that played a key role in encouraging the strike in the first place. Nick Robakis, one of the strike organisers and a local MWU leader, was a Platon member.
Under the influence of these activists, a stormy strike meeting rejected the Labour Council proposal to return to work by 300 votes to 283. However, the pressure from the bosses, the courts and the Labour Council continued to build. A few days later, another strike meeting reluctantly voted to end the strike.
Despite only a partial win on their demands, the strike left an important legacy. For years afterwards, the rubber industry in South Australia was rocked by protests and strikes led by the workers—men and women, migrants and Australian born—who went through the struggle of 1969.
Read more: <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/237504824">“Profile of a strike” by Hal Alexander, Tribune, December</a> 1969
Warilla teachers’ strike, 1976 
It wasn’t just low-paid migrant workers moving into struggle in the wake of the Clarrie O’Shea strike. There was also a growing movement amongst white-collar workers, many of whom previously considered themselves professionals.
In October 1968, the first ever state-wide strike of NSW teachers took place. Eighty percent of teachers took part, and more than 10,000 attended a mass meeting. This opened the space for strike action at particular schools, the most important of which was the Warilla teachers strike of 1976.
This remains the longest teachers strike in Australian history, lasting 28 days. Warilla High School in the steel town of Wollongong educated many children from poor working-class families. The strike began when the Department of Education transferred a science teacher out of the school and refused to provide funding for a replacement. Seventy-five of the 77 staff walked out in protest on 10 February.
The strike quickly raised the wider issue of inadequate staffing for schools in working-class areas, winning community support. At the time, the NSW South Coast was a radical hub. A left-wing rank-and-file group had won the local union leadership of the BHP steelworks and organised large strikes throughout the 1960s and ’70s. Eighteen thousand steelworkers had launched a strike just days before Warilla. Left-wing activists were influential amongst the dockworkers in Port Kembla and the Illawarra coalminers. The South Coast Labour Council was known for supporting left-wing currents in the region’s trade unions.
On 17 February, a mass meeting of 400 parents and students unanimously endorsed the strike, after a left-wing opposition overthrew the local P&amp;C branch leadership. A series of sympathy strikes by students broke out at the Warrawong, Port Kembla and Berkeley high schools. On 25 February, 300 school students marched through the streets of Wollongong. The cleaners at Warilla high walked out on strike. The waterside workers at Port Kembla held a stop-work to hear from the striking teachers and discussed a sympathy strike. High school teachers in Sydney began a series of rolling solidarity strikes. 
At this point, some of the Warilla teachers were drifting back to work, but 40 voted to continue the strike. Victory came when members of the Firemen and Deckhand’s Union walked off the job, shutting down tugboats at Port Kembla. “Driving down Mt Ousley that night”, recalled South Coast teacher Jim Bradley in an interview with Illawarra Unity, “looking at those boats tied up off the Illawarra coast, we stopped the car and screamed in delight and knew we were close to winning”. The Education Department rapidly gave in to most of the strike’s demands. 
Read more: <a href="https://archivesonline.uow.edu.au/nodes/view/14203#idx124982">“The Warilla High School Strike—a veritable class struggle” by Anthony Ashbolt, </a>Illawarra Unity, July 2006.

Four important strikes that you (probably) don’t know about

Most of us have lived most of our lives under a one-sided class war. 
The billionaires have built fortunes while the poor have been screwed. Governments the world over have bent over backwards to facilitate this. The result has been a world in which the rich stomp over everyone with few repercussions. The apex of this laissez-faire attitude to the abuse of power is Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinians. 
People have rebelled. In the 21st century, we have seen some truly enormous demonstrations: against the Iraq War, the Black Lives Matter movement, the climate strikes and now the global Palestine movement. 
However, a fundamental weakness of these movements has been the lack of action by workers. This is crucial because only the working class has the power to challenge the ruling class’s real source of power—its control over the economy. 
The decline in working-class activity had a devastating impact on the left. The idea that socialism was about building a mass popular movement of ordinary people who could unite and take power into their own hands was forgotten. Many socialists lost confidence that workers would ever move again. This helped open the space for the far right to masquerade as the new champions of the working class.
This is why what has happened in Europe has been so invigorating. 
On 3 October, a nationwide general strike shook Italy. Hundreds of thousands of workers shut down the country, demanding that their government cut all ties with the Israeli government.
This is unprecedented. General strikes aren’t unheard of in Italy, and particular sections of workers have taken strike action against militarism in recent history. But a mass general strike, backed by the mainstream unions, over a political issue like Israel’s war, is a different matter.
This action by workers grew out of the mass movement of blockades and street protests that has intensified in recent weeks. Since then, Madrid metalworkers have moved to take indefinite strike action over the links between their industry and the Israeli military. On 15 October, a massive demonstration is planned in Spain, various trade union federations planning strike action. Hundreds of thousands of Europeans are discussing the need for strike action to support Palestine. 
This marks a huge qualitative step forward both in the struggle to isolate Israel and in regenerating a radical working-class movement that can challenge capitalism. 
The genocide has “produced a new awareness, which took time and energy to take root, a lot of time, probably too much for those who are prisoners in Gaza, but which has distorted Western political coordinates”, argues the editorial of Italian magazine il manifesto. “[M]ultitudes in every corner of the planet are bringing together their apparently particular claims within a global paradigm that has found its own flag.” 
This is a watershed moment that demolishes much of the so-called common-sense thinking about workers and capitalism. 
For decades, it was common to think that the industrial working class didn’t exist any more, that white collar workers were, in the words of philosopher Slavoj Žižek, the “salaried bourgeoisie”, that those who had insecure work were incapable of taking any action and that those workers who had stable employment wouldn’t take action because they were a privileged aristocracy bought off by the ruling class. The workers of the Western world were seen as the beneficiaries of the imperialist machinations of their rulers. Within the Palestine movement, it has been common to condemn them as “settlers”, complicit in the oppression of the Palestinians. 
The general strike in Italy shows what rubbish this all is.
The striking dock workers of Genoa, Livorno, Ravenna, Venice and other cities confirmed that, while automation has reduced the number of workers in these ports, it has not reduced their industrial power. Vast numbers of workers joined the strike from hospitals, schools and universities, confirming that these are central nodes of the modern economy. 
This revealed the latent power that the working class possesses, not just in Italy but around the world. It also reinforces the core arguments that socialists have made for why the working class is the force that can fight for human liberation. 
The working class encompasses everyone forced to sell their ability to work, no matter what that work is or whether the employer is a private businessperson or a government department. 
It is the activity of the working class that moves the gears of capitalism. Workers are concentrated in semi-automated industrial factories, in schools, hospitals and government departments, in the ever-expanding “knowledge” industry of universities, while others are dispersed into millions of smaller businesses, all of which are connected by intricate transportation, energy and communications systems.
Because workers are at the centre of this vast behemoth of global capitalism, they have the potential to understand the way in which the system facilitates genocides and exploitation, and the power to shut it down. After all, workers are not just cogs in the machine. They are humans who are inspired by the determination of others and appalled by moral tragedies like the genocide in Gaza.
We can see this in a direct way when the Genoa dock workers strike to stop their ports from being used to send shipments to Israel, or when Spanish metalworkers demand an inquiry into their industry over fears that European arms production is being used to help Israel. 
The potential for workers’ action against genocide goes beyond those whose work is immediately tied to Israel’s war machine. The general strike also showed how workers have the power to severely disrupt the businesses and governments that depend on their labour.
When workers are passive, the innumerable differences among them make it seem unlikely that they can move into united action. But once they do, it seems so obvious. This is because the action is based on something that really unifies people—their common experience as workers exploited by the capitalist system. 
The Italian events also reveal the dialectical relationship between the power of workers and the activity of other social groups. The general strike would not have occurred without the two years of activity by young people and the Palestine solidarity campaign. There has been an accumulated impact of the involvement of hundreds of thousands of people in protests, despite the ebb and flow of the movement. This has produced the context in which left-wing workers felt more confident to take action, and in which the mainstream trade union leaders couldn’t hold back the tide. 
Italy also shows that to regenerate working-class self-activity, we need a sharp break with the established trade union leaders and the official left parties. 
Some socialists, scarred by the years of isolation, believe that the only way to rebuild working-class politics is by sucking up to union bureaucrats and reformist political parties. Often this is dressed up in talk about “united fronts” or “mass work”.
Yet the Italian general strike was not achieved because Palestine activists pleaded for trade union leaders to do the right thing. After a number of smaller left-wing union federations called for strike action on 22 September, pro-Palestine organisations and left-wing currents within the trade unions mercilessly and savagely criticised the mainstream trade union leaders who tried their hardest to avoid taking action. 
“The people protesting in the square, let’s be clear, literally can’t take it any more”, explained a statement from Unione Sindacale di Base, a left-wing union federation, “but since they have not found any support in the political and trade union world, they have remained silent for a long time, passively suffering the decay of political life, the decline of rights and the worsening of social conditions”.
It was not only the far-right government and the media that fundamentally misunderstood the shift in mass consciousness.
This is being repeated in Spain with the debates over the 15 October day of action. While smaller left-wing and regional union federations have endorsed the general strike call, the main Spanish trade union federations are trying to limit industrial action to only two hours. 
A key factor helping to facilitate action has been the militant activity of young people, particularly students. This has given a huge boost to all of those in the workers’ movement and the left pushing for more serious action against the resistance of the trade union leaders. 
This all has an echo of the past. When the workers’ movement and the radical left have gone forward, it has been in a form of a sharp break from the present and in revolt against established traditions and organisations. It can’t be otherwise. How else can we begin to break up the years of passivity and conservatism?
The events in Italy are exciting, but they also throw down a serious challenge to the left everywhere. 
The space to re-popularise the idea that workers are the agent of social change has grown larger. The actions in Italy didn’t come out of nowhere, and support for Palestine is not the only factor behind it. The cumulative impact of years of inequality, of militarism, of the elitism of the establishment, has shattered people’s confidence in capitalism. There is a strong polarisation across the world between progressive left-wing people who want to free Palestine, reject the far right and abolish the billionaires, and those who look to ultra-reactionary nationalist politics.
The possibilities are most obvious in Europe. Beyond the Palestine issue, there was a massive general strike in Greece in October against changes to the labour laws. France has been rocked by huge days of protests and blockades against its unstable neoliberal government. In Germany, there have been significant demonstrations against the far right.
The growth of left reformist parties is also an indication that a space has opened. La France Insoumise has shifted to the left in recent years and consolidated into the largest radical left party in Europe, with almost 400,000 members. The German Die Linke party has grown from 58,000 to 112,000 this year. Some 800,000 people have signed up for Your Party in Britain.
These are the strongest signs in years that a revival of radical left and working-class politics is possible. The world is rapidly changing. Now is the time to seize the moment.

The revival of the radical left and working-class politics

The legendary Aboriginal activist and Wiradjuri man Ray Peckham, sadly, died on 6 June, aged 96. For decades, Peckham was a leading fighter for the rights of his people and someone who sought to bring the struggle for Aboriginal rights together with the workers’ movement and the socialist left. He started this fight at a time when support for Aboriginal rights was much more marginalised and maligned than it is today.
Peckham was born in Bunyip, Victoria, in 1929, one of the thirteen children of Tom and Linda Peckham. Issues of racism and working-class oppression were deeply intertwined for him from an early age. His father Tom got involved in the Dubbo branch of the Unemployed Workers’ Movement, which was initiated by Communist Party activists in 1931, and convinced them to take up issues of anti-Aboriginal discrimination. In Dubbo, Tom found a community of working-class Aboriginal activists around William Ferguson and his Aborigines’ Progressive Association. This was the community in which Peckham grew up.
In 1950, Peckham moved to Sydney, where he was introduced to the hurly-burly world of strikes, pickets and protests by the veteran activist Pearl Gibbs. Peckham recalled in an interview that Gibbs told him “the first thing we’ve got to do is take you down and introduce you to the Trade and Labour Council in Sussex Street”.
Peckham attracted national attention in 1951 when he was elected as a delegate to the Berlin World Youth Festival along with fellow activist Faith Bandler. Complications arose when Peckham was frustrated in his attempts to get a passport in preparation for the trip. In response, the maritime and seamen’s unions threatened to “tie up every ship that’s important around the shores of Australia”. A few hours later, the government reluctantly released the passport. 
Unbeknownst to them, as Peckham and Bandler boarded the ship to Europe, agents from the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation were covertly filming them. Thus began the extensive security surveillance of Peckham that would ultimately result in one of the largest ASIO files in Australian history.
On his return from Europe, Peckham became more involved in activism. He became a builders’ labourer and joined the Newtown branch of the Communist Party. He enjoyed selling Tribune, the party’s newspaper, and attending the party educational school in Minto. 
Peckham started visiting Aboriginal communities across New South Wales, trying to connect the different campaigns they were involved in and publicise their efforts within trade union and left-wing circles. This was helped by the Builders’ Labourers Federation which, at various points, raised money for Peckham to leave work temporarily.
At the start of 1961, the New South Wales Labor government took court action to have Horace Saunders, an Aboriginal man, evicted from Purfleet Mission Station in Taree. A campaign was launched to defend Saunders, Peckham playing a leading role. He toured the South Coast speaking at workplace meetings of coal miners, steelworkers and wharfies to spread news of the court action. “At every meeting, I was given a very enthusiastic reception”, he recalled in Tribune. “The white workers’ moral and financial support for the struggles of Aboriginal people are becoming a source of strength and courage.” 
Reflecting on the tour later for Tribune, Peckham concluded that the “strength of the working people can help us Aborigines crack through the curse of the colour bar in Australia”. And Peckham wasn’t deluding himself. In May 1961, the courts ruled in favour of Saunders, humiliating the Aborigines Welfare Board and greatly undermining its authority. Peckham said that it “was probably the first time in New South Wales that the Aboriginal people had taken on the Aboriginal Protection Board and won”.
This perspective drove Peckham to campaign throughout rural New South Wales in the early 1960s. He protested alongside the Top Camp Aboriginal community in Moree against their exclusion from the local hospital, raised a fuss when fourteen new homes for the Aboriginal community in Armidale were built next to a rubbish dump, joined a team to investigate the conditions of Aboriginal pea pickers on the South Coast and collected thousands of signatures from unionised workers to help ensure that Aboriginal housing was built in Coonamble and Nambucca Heads in the face of racist opposition. During the 1967 referendum, Peckham again played a prominent role in enlisting support for the Aboriginal cause.
This is just a small sample of the struggles Peckham was involved in during these years. Everywhere he went, he sought to build up local, statewide and national organisations involving Aboriginal people themselves in fighting for their rights, while also building links of these campaigns and groups with the wider workers’ movement and the socialist left to ensure they could bring as much pressure as possible to bear on racist governments and bosses. “In that mounting tide of progressive struggle, the working-class movement”, Peckham reflected in Tribune, “lies the future for the Aboriginal people”. 
Peckham also saw the struggles of Aboriginal people as part of the global fight against injustice. In the 1960s, he spoke at protests against the war in Vietnam, the attacks on democratic rights in the dictatorships of Spain and Greece, the apartheid regime in South Africa and segregation in the United States.
Peckham was nothing short of a working-class Aboriginal hero. The groundbreaking activism he engaged in laid the basis for the land rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s and ’70s, and the decades of anti-racist activism since. 
In 1983, he returned to Dubbo, where he lived for the rest of his long life, working with community organisations. During the last years of his life, he helped organise for a statue of his father’s old friend and activist William Ferguson to be placed in Dubbo’s town centre—a reminder of the struggles of the past and the need to keep fighting into the future.
Rest in power, Ray Peckham.

Ray Peckham, a working-class Aboriginal hero

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.

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, a leader 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. The Instagram post was in response to an Indigenous activist’s speech at the Melbourne protest, welcoming both refugees and migrants to Australia. 
This kind of 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 the recent Instagram post, 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 these 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 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 they argue 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.

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